"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me. The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful majesty of thy greatness."[340]

Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such a book as Helvetius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this free and energetic inner life of the individual which the Savoyard Vicar restored to lawful recognition, and made once more the centre of that imaginative and spiritual existence, without which we live in a universe that has no sun by day nor any stars by night. A writer in whom learning has not extinguished enthusiasm, compares this to the advance made by Descartes, who had given certitude to the soul by turning thought confidently upon itself; and he declares that the Savoyard Vicar is for the emancipation of sentiment what the Discourse upon Method was for the emancipation of the understanding.[341] There is here a certain audacity of panegyric; still the fact that Rousseau chose to link the highest forms of man's ideal life with a fading projection of the lofty image which had been set up in older days, ought not to blind us to the excellent energies which, notwithstanding defect of association, such a vindication of the ideal was certain to quicken. And at least the lines of that high image were nobly traced.

Yet who does not feel that it is a divinity for fair weather? Rousseau, with his fine sense of a proper and artistic setting, imagined the Savoyard Vicar as leading his youthful convert at break of a summer day to the top of a high hill, at whose feet the Po flowed between fertile banks; in the distance the immense chain of the Alps crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun projected long level shadows from the trees, the slopes, the houses, and accented with a thousand lines of light the most magnificent of panoramas.[342] This was the fitting suggestion, so serene, warm, pregnant with power and hope, and half mysterious, of the idea of godhead which the man of peace after an interval of silent contemplation proceeded to expound. Rousseau's sentimental idea at least did not revolt moral sense; it did not afflict the firmness of intelligence; nor did it silence the diviner melodies of the soul. Yet, once more, the heavens in which such a deity dwells are too high, his power is too impalpable, the mysterious air which he has poured around his being is too awful and impenetrable, for the rays from the sun of such majesty to reach more than a few contemplative spirits, and these only in their hours of tranquillity and expansion. The thought is too vague, too far, to bring comfort and refreshment to the mass of travailing men, or to invest duty with the stern ennobling quality of being done, "if I have grace to use it so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."

The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles? Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343] We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of more popular creeds.

Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving and resistless spiritual necessity. He speaks of the good and the wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is without sin among us? Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad man who abuses his freedom. Grace, fate, destiny, force of circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.

Whatever these foundations may be, the theories of grace and fate had at any rate the quality of connecting human conduct with the will of the gods. Rousseau's deism, severing the influence of the Supreme Being upon man, at the very moment when it could have saved him from the guilt that brings misery,—that is at the moment when conduct begins to follow the preponderant motives or the will,—did thus effectually cut off the most admirable and fertile group of our sympathies from all direct connection with religious sentiment. Toiling as manfully as we may through the wilderness of our seventy years, we are to reserve our deepest adoration for the being who has left us there, with no other solace than that he is good and just and all-powerful, and might have given us comfort and guidance if he would. This was virtually the form which Pelagius had tried to impose upon Christianity in the fifth century, and which the souls of men, thirsting for consciousness of an active divine presence, had then under the lead of Augustine so energetically cast away from them. The faith to which they clung while rejecting this great heresy, though just as transcendental, still had the quality of satisfying a spiritual want. It was even more readily to be accepted by the human intelligence, for it endowed the supreme power with the father's excellence of compassion, and presented for our reverence and gratitude and devotion a figure who drew from men the highest love for the God whom they had not seen, along with the warmest pity and love for their brethren whom they had seen.

The Savoyard Vicar's own position to Christianity was one of reverential scepticism. "The holiness of the gospel," he said, "is an argument that speaks to my heart and to which I should even be sorry to find a good answer. Look at the books of the philosophers with all their pomp; how puny they are by the side of that! Is there here the tone of an enthusiast or an ambitious sectary? What gentleness, what purity, in his manners, what touching grace in his teaching, what loftiness in his maxims! Assuredly there was something more than human in such teaching, such a character, such a life, such a death. If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god. Shall we say that the history of the gospels is invented at pleasure? My friend, that is not the fashion of invention; and the facts about Socrates are less attested than the facts about Christ.[345] Yet with all that, this same gospel abounds in things incredible, which are repugnant to reason, and which it is impossible for any sensible man to conceive or admit. What are we to do in the midst of all these contradictions? To be ever modest and circumspect, my son; to respect in silence what one can neither reject nor understand, and to make one's self lowly before the great being who alone knows the truth."[346]

"I regard all particular religions as so many salutary institutions, which prescribe in every country a uniform manner of honouring God by public worship. I believe them all good, so long as men serve God fittingly in them. The essential worship is the worship of the heart. God never rejects this homage, under whatever form it be offered to him. In other days I used to say mass with the levity which in time infects even the gravest things, when we do them too often. Since acquiring my new principles I celebrate it with more veneration; I am overwhelmed by the majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'"[347]

A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety. "Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.

Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing on its efficacy or conclusiveness.

Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by which generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful character,—those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and sovereign pitifulness.

And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau's faith. It rests on a positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it. Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights."[349]

This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism. But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to associate these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,—that imperial conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling harmony of his days.

FOOTNOTES:

[337] See Hallam's Literature of Europe, Pt. I. ch. ii. Sec. 64. Again (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. Sec. 53. See also for mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle's Dictionary, s.v. Viret.

[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.

[339] Emile, IV. 163.

[340] IV. 183-185.

[341] M. Henri Martin's Hist. de France, xvi. 101, where there is an interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar's eloquence into scientific form.

[342] Emile, IV. 135.

[343] Emile, IV. 204.

[344] Emile, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758. Corr., ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, "of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."

[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15, 1769 (Corr., vi. 59, 60), to M——, accompanied by a violent denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of the time.

[346] Emile, IV. 241, 242.

[347] Emile, IV. 243.

[348] IV. 210-236.

[349] Condorcet's Progres de l'Esprit Humain (1794). Oeuv., vi. 276.



CHAPTER VI.

ENGLAND.[350]

There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up for us many a word and passage in Rousseau's life here and elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man's hindrances have sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been with his own passions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with harassing confusion and distress.

Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told the story of Rousseau's persecutions, had proffered his services, and declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer in Neuchatel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau's appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Vasseur, who was declared very homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352] Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be away from it as soon as possible.

In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January 1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a passage that lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully passed the whole night upon deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway's suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension settled on him. The ever illustrious Burke, then just made member of Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by far the most devout."[355]

What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him. "The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that without a better reason than Sultan's impatience it would be ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.

There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with the friendly reception which had been given him, he pronounced London to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals. He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr. Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau's independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no companionship but Theresa's, and with nothing to do but walk when the weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of all the quarrels of illustrious men, but one about which very little needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]

The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D'Alembert were the other partners; and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was established were the following:—

(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D'Alembert. It was really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at Rousseau's cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When Rousseau assured Hume that D'Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the latter to be Rousseau's enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration. Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5) Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau's letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in the course of his dreams, Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau, with extreme vehemence—which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8) Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was seized with remorse, fell upon Hume's neck, embraced him warmly, and, suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents, No, no, David Hume is no traitor, with many protests of affection. The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil voice, Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon cher monsieur![367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways, yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of perfidy?

Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly as a bear.[368]

It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]

With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with gravity is irrational.

If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of letters always does. The governing committee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man can have.

Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer. That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically serviceable.[372]

Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.

The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia. Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.

Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso:—

Dieser Pfad Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebuesch, Durch stille Thaeler fortzuwandern; mehr Und mehr verwoehnt sich das Gemueth und strebt Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt, In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen, So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.

Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.

"He has only felt during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374] A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into finding supports in misconception of circumstances, for a misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man's nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the breach may not, and in Rousseau's case certainly did not, extend along the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau's delusion about Hume's sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for the man's history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.

We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made Rousseau's name renowned and his influence a great force, along with those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself. The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at length passed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau's contemporary, Cowper. This gentle poet's delusions about the wrath of God were equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau's delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked tendencies of the sufferer's sanity.

The desire to protect himself against the defamation of his enemies led him at this time to compose that account of his own life, which is probably the only one of his writings that continues to be generally read. He composed the first part of the Confessions at Wootton, during the autumn and winter of 1766. The idea of giving his memoirs to the public was an old one, originally suggested by one of his publishers. To write memoirs of one's own life was one of the fancies of the time, but like all else, it became in Rousseau's hand something more far-reaching and sincere than a passing fashion. Other people wrote polite histories of their outer lives, amply coloured with romantic decorations. Rousseau with unquailing veracity plunged into the inmost depths, hiding nothing that would be likely to make him either ridiculous or hateful in common opinion, and inventing nothing that could attract much sympathy or much admiration. Though, as has been pointed out already, the Confessions abound in small inaccuracies of date, hardly to be avoided by an oldish man in reference to the facts of his boyhood, whether a Rousseau or a Goethe, and though one or two of the incidents are too deeply coloured with the hues of sentimental reminiscence, and one or two of them are downright impossible, yet when all these deductions have been made, the substantial truthfulness of what remains is made more evident with every addition to our materials for testing them. When all the circumstances of Rousseau's life are weighed, and when full account has been taken of his proved delinquencies, we yet perceive that he was at bottom a character as essentially sincere, truthful, careful of fact and reality, as is consistent with the general empire of sensation over untrained intelligence.[375] As for the egotism of the Confessions, it is hard to see how a man is to tell the story of his own life without egotism. And it may be worth adding that the self-feeling which comes to the surface and asserts itself, is in a great many cases far less vicious and debilitating than the same feeling nursed internally with a troglodytish shyness. But Rousseau's egotism manifested itself perversely. This is true to a certain small extent, and one or two of the disclosures in the Confessions are in very nauseous matter, and are made moreover in a very nauseous manner. There are some vices whose grotesqueness stirs us more deeply than downright atrocities, and we read of certain puerilities avowed by Rousseau, with a livelier impatience than old Benvenuto Cellini quickens in us, when he confesses to a horrible assassination. This morbid form of self-feeling is only less disgusting than the allied form which clothes itself in the phrases of religious exaltation. And there is not much of it. Blot out half a dozen pages from the Confessions, and the egotism is no more perverted than in the confessions of Augustine or of Cardan.

These remarks are not made to extenuate Rousseau's faults, or to raise the popular estimate of his character, but simply in the interests of a greater precision of criticism. In England criticism has nearly always been of the most vulgar superficiality in respect to Rousseau, from the time of Horace Walpole downwards. The Confessions in their least agreeable parts, or rather especially in those parts, are the expression on a new side and in a peculiar way of the same notion of the essential goodness of nature and the importance of understanding nature and restoring its reign, which inspired the Discourses and Emilius. "I would fain show to my fellows," he began, "a man in all the truth of nature," and he cannot be charged with any failure to keep his word. He despised opinion, and hence was careless to observe whether or no this revelation of human nakedness was likely to add to the popular respect for nature and the natural man. After all, considering that literature is for the most part a hollow and pretentious phantasmagoria of mimic figures posing in breeches and peruke, we may try to forgive certain cruel blows to the dignified assumptions, solemn words, and high heels of convention, in one who would not lie, nor dissemble kinship with the four-footed. Intense subjective preoccupations in markedly emotional natures all tend to come to the same end. The distance from Rousseau's odious erotics to the glorified ecstasies of many a poor female saint is not far. In any case, let us know the facts about human nature, and the pathological facts no less than the others. These are the first thing, and the second, and the third also.

The exaltation of the opening page of the Confessions is shocking. No monk nor saint ever wrote anything more revolting in its blasphemous self-feeling. But the exaltation almost instantly became calm, when the course of the story necessarily drew the writer into dealings with objective facts, even muffled as they were by memory and imagination. The broodings over old reminiscence soothed him, the labour of composition occupied him, and he forgot, as the modern reader would never know from internal evidence, that he was preparing a vindication of his life and character against the infamies with which Hume and others were supposed to be industriously blackening them. While he was writing this famous composition, severed by so vast a gulf from the modes of English provincial life, he was on good terms with one or two of the great people in his neighbourhood, and kept up a gracious and social correspondence with them. He was greatly pleased by a compliment that was paid to him by the government, apparently through the interest of General Conway. The duty that had been paid upon certain boxes forwarded to Rousseau from Switzerland was recouped by the treasury,[376] and the arrangements for the annual pension of one hundred pounds were concluded and accepted by him, after he had duly satisfied himself that Hume was not the indirect author of the benefaction.[377] The weather was the worst possible, but whenever it allowed him to go out of doors, he found delight in climbing the heights around him in search of curious mosses; for he had now come to think the discovery of a single new plant a hundred times more useful than to have the whole human race listening to your sermons for half a century.[378] "This indolent and contemplative life that you do not approve," he wrote to the elder Mirabeau, "and for which I pretend to make no excuses, becomes every day more delicious to me: to wander alone among the trees and rocks that surround my dwelling; to muse or rather to extravagate at my ease, and as you say to stand gaping in the air; when my brain gets too hot, to calm it by dissecting some moss or fern; in short, to surrender myself without restraint to my phantasies, which, heaven be thanked, are all under my own control,—all that is for me the height of enjoyment, to which I can imagine nothing superior in this world for a man of my age and in my condition."[379]

This contentment did not last long. The snow kept him indoors. The excitement of composition abated. Theresa harassed him by ignoble quarrels with the women in the kitchen. His delusions returned with greater force than before. He believed that the whole English nation was in a plot against him, that all his letters were opened before reaching London and before leaving it, that all his movements were closely watched, and that he was surrounded by unseen guards to prevent any attempt at escape.[380] At length these delusions got such complete mastery over him, that in a paroxysm of terror he fled away from Wootton, leaving money, papers, and all else behind him. Nothing was heard of him for a fortnight, when Mr. Davenport received a letter from him dated at Spalding in Lincolnshire. Mr. Davenport's conduct throughout was marked by a humanity and patience that do him the highest honour. He confesses himself "quite moved to read poor Rousseau's mournful epistle." "You shall see his letter," he writes to Hume, "the first opportunity; but God help him, I can't for pity give a copy; and 'tis so much mixed with his own poor little private concerns, that it would not be right in me to do it."[381] This is the generosity which makes Hume's impatience and that of his mischievous advisers in Paris appear petty. Rousseau had behaved quite as ill to Mr. Davenport as he had done to Hume, and had received at least equal services from him.[382] The good man at once sent a servant to Spalding in search of his unhappy guest, but Rousseau had again disappeared. The parson of the parish had passed several hours of each day in his company, and had found him cheerful and good-humoured. He had had a blue coat made for himself, and had written a long letter to the lord chancellor, praying him to appoint a guard, at Rousseau's own expense, to escort him in safety out of the kingdom where enemies were plotting against his life.[383] He was next heard of at Dover (May 18), whence he wrote a letter to General Conway, setting forth his delusion in full form.[384] He is the victim of a plot; the conspirators will not allow him to leave the island, lest he should divulge in other countries the outrages to which he has been subjected here; he perceives the sinister manoeuvres that will arrest him if he attempts to put his foot on board ship. But he warns them that his tragical disappearance cannot take place without creating inquiry. Still if General Conway will only let him go, he gives his word of honour that he will not publish a line of the memoirs he has written, nor ever divulge the wrongs which he has suffered in England. "I see my last hour approaching," he concluded; "I am determined, if necessary, to advance to meet it, and to perish or be free; there is no longer any other alternative." On the same evening on which he wrote this letter (about May 20-22), the forlorn creature took boat and landed at Calais, where he seems at once to have recovered his composure and a right mind.

FOOTNOTES:

[350] Jan. 1766—May 1767.

[351] Streckeisen, ii. 275, etc. Corr., iii.

[352] Burton, ii. 299.

[353] The materials for this chapter are taken from Rousseau's Correspondence (vols. iv. and v.), and from Hume's letters to various persons, given in the second volume of Mr. Burton's Life of Hume. Everybody who takes an interest in Rousseau is indebted to Mr. Burton for the ample documents which he has provided. Yet one cannot but regret the satire on Rousseau with which he intersperses them, and which is not always felicitous. For one instance, he implies (p. 295) that Rousseau invented the story given in the Confessions, of Hume's correcting the proofs of Wallace's book against himself. The story may be true or not, but at any rate Rousseau had it very circumstantially from Lord Marischal; see letter from Lord M. to J.J.R., in Streckeisen, ii. 67. Again, such an expression as Rousseau's "occasional attention to small matters" (p. 321) only shows that the writer has not read Rousseau's letters, which are indeed not worth reading, except by those who wish to have a right to speak about Rousseau's character. The numerous pamphlets on the quarrel between Hume and Rousseau, if I may judge from those of them which I have turned over, really shed no light on the matter, though they added much heat. For the journey, see Corr., iv. 307; Burton, ii. 304.

[354] Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. The same passage contains some strong criticism on Rousseau's style.

[355] Burton, 304, 309, 310.

[356] Ib. ii. 309, n.

[357] Mr. Howitt has given an account of Rousseau's quarters at Wootton, in his Visits to Remarkable Places. One or two aged peasants had some confused memory of "old Ross-hall." For Rousseau's own description, see his letters to Mdme. de Luze, May 10, 1766. Corr., iv. 326.

[358] Burton, 313. It has been stated that Rousseau never paid this; at any rate when he fled, he left between thirty and forty pounds in Mr. Davenport's hands. See Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367. Rousseau's accurate probity in affairs of money is absolutely unimpeachable.

[359] Corr. iv. 312. April 9, 1766.

[360] Here is a translation of this rather poor piece of sarcasm:—"My dear Jean Jacques—You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in your writings; France has issued a warrant against you; so do you come to me. I admire your talents; I am amused by your dreamings, though let me tell you they absorb you too much and for too long. You must at length be sober and happy; you have caused enough talk about yourself by oddities which in truth are hardly becoming a really great man. Prove to your enemies that you can now and then have common sense. That will annoy them and do you no harm. My states offer you a peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you will let me. But if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure; and what will certainly never happen to you in respect of your enemies, I will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take a pride in being persecuted. Your good friend, FREDERICK."

[361] Corr., iv. 313, 343, 388, 398.

[362] Ib. 395.

[363] Ib. 389, etc.

[364] Ib. 384.

[365] Ib. 343, 344, 387, etc.

[366] Corr., iv. 346.

[367] Ib. 390. A letter from Hume to Blair, long before the rupture overt, shows the former to have been by no means so phlegmatic on this occasion as he may have seemed. "I hope," he writes, "you have not so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion; I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more affecting." Burton, ii. 315. The great doubters of the eighteenth century could without fear have accepted the test of the ancient saying, that men without tears are worth little.

[368] Bernardin de St. Pierre, Oeuv., xii. 79.

[369] Walpole's Letters, v. 7 (Cunningham's edition). For other letters from the shrewd coxcomb on the same matter, see pp. 23-28. A corroboration of the statement that Hume knew nothing of the letter until he was in England, may be inferred from what he wrote to Madame de Boufflers; Burton, ii. 306, and n. 2.

[370] Bernardin de St. Pierre, Oeuv., xii. 79.

[371] To Adam Smith. Burton, 380.

[372] Burton, 381.

[373] A very common but random opinion traces Rousseau's insanity to certain disagreeable habits avowed in the Confessions. They may have contributed in some small degree to depression of vital energies, though for that matter Rousseau's strength and power of endurance were remarkable to the end. But they certainly did not produce a mental state in the least corresponding to that particular variety of insanity, which possesses definitely marked features.

[374] Burton, ii. 314.

[375] For an instructive and, as it appears to me, a thoroughly trustworthy account of the temper in which the Confessions were written, see the 4th of the Reveries.

[376] Letter to the Duke of Grafton, Feb. 27, 1767. Corr., v. 98: also 118.

[377] Ib. v. 133; also to General Conway (March 26), p. 137, etc.

[378] Corr., v. 37.

[379] Corr., v. 88.

[380] See the letters to Du Peyrou, of the 2d and 4th of April 1767. Corr., v. 140-147.

[381] Davenport to Hume; Burton, 367-371.

[382] J.J.R. to Davenport, Dec. 22, 1766, and April 30, 1767. Corr., v. 66, 152.

[383] Burton, 369, 375.

[384] Corr., v. 153.



CHAPTER VII.

THE END.

Before leaving England, Rousseau had received more than one long and rambling letter from a man who was as unlike the rest of mankind as he was unlike them himself. This was the Marquis of Mirabeau (1715-89), the violent, tyrannical, pedantic, humoristic sire of a more famous son. Perhaps we might say that Mirabeau and Rousseau were the two most singular originals then known to men, and Mirabeau's originality was in some respects the more salient of the two. There is less of the conventional tone of the eighteenth century Frenchman in him than in any other conspicuous man of the time, though like many other headstrong and despotic souls he picked up the current notions of philanthropy and human brotherhood. He really was by very force of temperament that rebel against the narrowness, trimness, and moral formalism of the time which Rousseau only claimed and attempted to be, with the secondary degree of success that follows vehemence without native strength. Mirabeau was a sort of Swift, who had strangely taken up the trade of friendship for man and adopted the phrases of perfectibility; while Rousseau on the other hand was meant for a Fenelon, save that he became possessed of unclean devils.

Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race. Friend of Quesnai and orthodox economist as he was, he delighted in Rousseau's books: "I know no morality that goes deeper than yours; it strikes like a thunderbolt, and advances with the steady assurance of truth, for you are always true, according to your notions for the moment." He wrote to tell him so, but he told him at the same time at great length, and with a caustic humour and incoherency less academic than Rabelaisian, that he had behaved absurdly in his quarrel with Hume. There is nothing more quaint than the appearance of a few of the sacramental phrases of the sect of the economists, floating in the midst of a copious stream of egoistic whimsicalities. He concludes with a diverting enumeration of all his country seats and demesnes, with their respective advantages and disadvantages, and prays Rousseau to take up his residence in whichever of them may please him best.[385]

Immediately on landing at Calais Rousseau informed Mirabeau, and Mirabeau lost no time in conveying him stealthily, for the warrant of the parliament of Paris was still in force, to a house at Fleury. But the Friend of Men, to use his own account of himself, "bore letters as a plum-tree bears plums," and wrote to his guest with strange humoristic volubility and droll imperturbable temper, as one who knew his Jean Jacques. He exhorts him in many sheets to harden himself against excessive sensibility, to be less pusillanimous, to take society more lightly, as his own light estimate of its worth should lead him to do. "No doubt its outside is a shifting surface-picture, nay even ridiculous, if you will; but if the irregular and ceaseless flight of butterflies wearies you in your walk, it is your own fault for looking continuously at what was only made to adorn and vary the scene. But how many social virtues, how much gentleness and considerateness, how many benevolent actions, remain at the bottom of it all."[386] Enormous manifestoes of the doctrine of perfectibility were not in the least degree either soothing or interesting to Rousseau, and the thrusts of shrewd candour at his expense might touch his fancy on a single occasion, but not oftener. Two humorists are seldom successful in amusing one another. Besides, Mirabeau insisted that Jean Jacques should read this or that of his books. Rousseau answered that he would try, but warned him of the folly of it. "I do not engage always to follow what you say, because it has always been painful to me to think, and fatiguing to follow the thoughts of other people, and at present I cannot do so at all."[387] Though they continued to be good friends, Rousseau only remained three or four weeks at Fleury. His old acquaintance at Montmorency, the Prince of Conti, partly perhaps from contrition at the rather unchivalrous fashion in which his great friends had hustled the philosopher away at the time of the decree of the parliament of Paris, offered him refuge at one of his country seats at Trye near Gisors. Here he installed Rousseau under the name of Renou, either to silence the indiscreet curiosity of neighbours, or to gratify a whim of Rousseau himself.

Rousseau remained for a year (June 1767-June 1768), composing the second part of the Confessions, in a condition of extreme mental confusion. Dusky phantoms walked with him once more. He knew the gardener, the servants, the neighbours, all to be in the pay of Hume, and that he was watched day and night with a view to his destruction.[388] He entirely gave up either reading or writing, save a very small number of letters, and he declared that to take up the pen even for these was like lifting a load of iron. The only interest he had was botany, and for this his passion became daily more intense. He appears to have been as contented as a child, so long as he could employ himself in long expeditions in search of new plants, in arranging a herbarium, in watching the growth of the germ of some rare seed which needed careful tending. But the story had once more the same conclusion. He fled from Trye, as he had fled from Wootton. He meant apparently to go to Chamberi, drawn by the deep magnetic force of old memories that seemed long extinct. But at Grenoble on his way thither he encountered a substantial grievance. A man alleged that he had lent Rousseau a few francs seven years previously. He was undoubtedly mistaken, and was fully convicted of his mistake by proper authorities, but Rousseau's correspondents suffered none the less for that. We all know when monomania seizes a man, how adroitly and how eagerly it colours every incident. The mistaken claim was proof demonstrative of that frightful and tenebrous conspiracy, which they might have thought a delusion hitherto, but which, alas, this showed to be only too tragically real; and so on, through many pages of droning wretchedness.[389] Then we find him at Bourgoin, where he spent some months in shabby taverns, and then many months more at Monquin on adjoining uplands.[390] The estrangement from Theresa, of which enough has been said already,[391] was added to his other torments. He resolved, as so many of the self-tortured have done since, to go in search of happiness to the western lands beyond the Atlantic, where the elixir of bliss is thought by the wearied among us to be inexhaustible and assured. Almost in the same page he turns his face eastwards, and dreams of ending his days peacefully among the islands of the Grecian archipelago. Next he gravely, not only designed, but actually took measures, to return to Wootton. All was no more than the momentary incoherent purpose of a sick man's dream, the weary distraction of one who had deliberately devoted himself to isolation from his fellows, without first sitting down carefully to count the cost, or to measure the inner resources which he possessed to meet the deadly strain that isolation puts on every one of a man's mental fibres. Geographical loneliness is to some a condition of their fullest strength, but most of the few who dare to make a moral solitude for themselves, find that they have assuredly not made peace. Such solitude, as South said of the study of the Apocalypse, either finds a man mad, or leaves him so. Not all can play the stoic who will, and it is still more certain that one who like Rousseau has lain down with the doctrine that in all things imaginable it is impossible for him to do at all what he cannot do with pleasure, will end in a condition of profound and hopeless impotence in respect to pleasure itself.

In July 1770, he made his way to Paris, and here he remained eight years longer, not without the introduction of a certain degree of order into his outer life, though the clouds of vague suspicion and distrust, half bitter, half mournful, hung heavily as ever upon his mind. The Dialogues, which he wrote at this period (1775-76) to vindicate his memory from the defamation that was to be launched in a dark torrent upon the world at the moment of his death, could not possibly have been written by a man in his right mind. Yet the best of the Musings, which were written still nearer the end, are masterpieces in the style of contemplative prose. The third, the fifth, the seventh, especially abound in that even, full, mellow gravity of tone which is so rare in literature, because the deep absorption of spirit which is its source is so rare in life. They reveal Rousseau to us with a truth beyond that attained in any of his other pieces—a mournful sombre figure, looming shadowily in the dark glow of sundown among sad and desolate places. There is nothing like them in the French tongue, which is the speech of the clear, the cheerful, or the august among men; nothing like this sonorous plainsong, the strangely melodious expression in the music of prose of a darkened spirit which yet had imaginative visions of beatitude.

* * * * *

It is interesting to look on one or two pictures of the last waste and obscure years of the man, whose words were at this time silently fermenting for good and for evil in many spirits—a Schiller, a Herder, a Jeanne Phlipon, a Robespierre, a Gabriel Mirabeau, and many hundreds of those whose destiny was not to lead, but ingenuously to follow. Rousseau seems to have repulsed nearly all his ancient friends, and to have settled down with dogged resolve to his old trade of copying music. In summer he rose at five, copied music until half-past seven; munched his breakfast, arranging on paper during the process such plants as he had gathered the previous afternoon; then he returned to his work, dined at half-past twelve, and went forth to take coffee at some public place. He would not return from his walk until nightfall, and he retired at half-past ten. The pavements of Paris were hateful to him because they tore his feet, and, said he, with deeply significant antithesis, "I am not afraid of death, but I dread pain." He always found his way as fast as possible to one of the suburbs, and one of his greatest delights was to watch Mont Valerien in the sunset. "Atheists," he said calumniously, "do not love the country; they like the environs of Paris, where you have all the pleasures of the city, good cheer, books, pretty women; but if you take these things away, then they die of weariness." The note of every bird held him attentive, and filled his mind with delicious images. A graceful story is told of two swallows who made a nest in Rousseau's sleeping-room, and hatched the eggs there. "I was no more than a doorkeeper for them," he said, "for I kept opening the window for them every moment. They used to fly with a great stir round my head, until I had fulfilled the duties of the tacit convention between these swallows and me."

In January 1771, Bernardin de St. Pierre, author of the immortal Paul and Virginia (1788), finding himself at the Cape of Good Hope, wrote to a friend in France just previously to his return to Europe, counting among other delights that of seeing two summers in one year.[392] Rousseau happened to see the letter, and expressed a desire to make the acquaintance of a man who in returning home should think of that as one of his chief pleasures. To this we owe the following pictures of an interior from St. Pierre's hand:—

In the month of June in 1772, a friend having offered to take me to see Jean Jacques Rousseau, he brought me to a house in the Rue Platriere, nearly opposite to the Hotel de la Poste. We mounted to the fourth story. We knocked, and Madame Rousseau opened the door. "Come in, gentlemen," she said, "you will find my husband." We passed through a very small antechamber, where the household utensils were neatly arranged, and from that into a room where Jean Jacques was seated in an overcoat and a white cap, busy copying music. He rose with a smiling face, offered us chairs, and resumed his work, at the same time taking a part in conversation. He was thin and of middle height. One shoulder struck me as rather higher than the other ... otherwise he was very well proportioned. He had a brown complexion, some colour on his cheek-bones, a good mouth, a well-made nose, a rounded and lofty brow, and eyes full of fire. The oblique lines falling from the nostrils to the extremity of the lips, and marking a physiognomy, in his case expressed great sensibility and something even painful. One observed in his face three or four of the characteristics of melancholy—the deep receding eyes and the elevation of the eyebrows; you saw profound sadness in the wrinkles of the brow; a keen and even caustic gaiety in a thousand little creases at the corners of the eyes, of which the orbits entirely disappeared when he laughed.... Near him was a spinette on which from time to time he tried an air. Two little beds of blue and white striped calico, a table, and a few chairs, made the stock of his furniture. On the walls hung a plan of the forest and park of Montmorency, where he had once lived, and an engraving of the King of England, his old benefactor. His wife was sitting mending linen; a canary sang in a cage hung from the ceiling; sparrows came for crumbs on to the sills of the windows, which on the side of the street were open; while in the window of the antechamber we noticed boxes and pots filled with such plants as it pleases nature to sow. There was in the whole effect of his little establishment an air of cleanness, peace, and simplicity, which was delightful.

A few days after, Rousseau returned the visit. "He wore a round wig, well powdered and curled, carrying a hat under his arm, and in a full suit of nankeen. His whole exterior was modest, but extremely neat." He expressed his passion for good coffee, saying that this and ice were the only two luxuries for which he cared. St. Pierre happened to have brought some from the Isle of Bourbon, so on the following day he rashly sent Rousseau a small packet, which at first produced a polite letter of thanks; but the day after the letter of thanks came one of harsh protest against the ignominy of receiving presents which could not be returned, and bidding the unfortunate donor to choose between taking his coffee back or never seeing his new friend again. A fair bargain was ultimately arranged, St. Pierre receiving in exchange for his coffee some curious root or other, and a book on ichthyology. Immediately afterwards he went to dine with his sage. He arrived at eleven in the forenoon, and they conversed until half-past twelve.

Then his wife laid the cloth. He took a bottle of wine, and as he put it on the table, asked whether we should have enough, or if I was fond of drinking. "How many are there of us," said I. "Three," he said; "you, my wife, and myself." "Well," I went on, "when I drink wine and am alone, I drink a good half-bottle, and I drink a trifle more when I am with friends." "In that case," he answered, "we shall not have enough; I must go down into the cellar." He brought up a second bottle. His wife served two dishes, one of small tarts, and another which was covered. He said, showing me the first, "That is your dish and the other is mine." "I don't eat much pastry," I said, "but I hope to be allowed to taste what you have got." "Oh, they are both common," he replied; "but most people don't care for this. 'Tis a Swiss dish; a compound of lard, mutton, vegetables, and chestnuts." It was excellent. After these two dishes, we had slices of beef in salad; then biscuits and cheese; after which his wife served the coffee.

* * * * *

One morning when I was at his house, I saw various domestics either coming for rolls of music, or bringing them to him to copy. He received them standing and uncovered. He said to some, "The price is so much," and received the money; to others, "How soon must I return my copy?" "My mistress would like to have it back in a fortnight." "Oh, that's out of the question: I have work, I can't do it in less than three weeks." I inquired why he did not take his talents to better market. "Ah," he answered, "there are two Rousseaus in the world; one rich, or who might have been if he had chosen; a man capricious, singular, fantastic; this is the Rousseau of the public; the other is obliged to work for his living, the Rousseau whom you see."[393]

They often took long rambles together, and all proceeded most harmoniously, unless St. Pierre offered to pay for such refreshment as they might take, when a furious explosion was sure to follow. Here is one more picture, without explosion.

An Easter Monday Excursion to Mont Valerien.

We made an appointment at a cafe in the Champs Elysees. In the morning we took some chocolate. The wind was westerly, and the air fresh. The sun was surrounded by white clouds, spread in masses over an azure sky. Reaching the Bois de Boulogne by eight o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work botanising. As he collected his little harvest, we kept walking along. We had gone through part of the wood, when in the midst of the solitude we perceived two young girls, one of whom was arranging the other's hair.—[Reminded them of some verses of Virgil.]....

Arrived on the edge of the river, we crossed the ferry with a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont Valerien. We climbed an extremely stiff slope, and were hardly on the top before hunger overtook us and we began to think of dining. Rousseau then led the way towards a hermitage, where he knew we could make sure of hospitality. The brother who opened to us, conducted us to the chapel, where they were reciting the litanies of providence, which are extremely beautiful.... When we had prayed, Jean Jacques said to me with genuine feeling: "Now I feel what is said in the gospel, 'Where several of you are gathered together in my name, there will I be in the midst of them.' There is a sentiment of peace and comfort here that penetrates the soul." I replied, "If Fenelon were alive, you would be a Catholic." "Ah," said he, the tears in his eyes, "if Fenelon were alive, I would seek to be his lackey."

Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated ourselves during the reading. The subject was the injustice of the complainings of man: God has brought him from nothing, he oweth him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau said to me in a voice of deep emotion: "Ah, how happy is the man who can believe...." We walked about for some time in the cloister and the gardens. They command an immense prospect. Paris in the distance reared her towers all covered with light, and made a crown to the far-spreading landscape. The brightness of the view contrasted with the great leaden clouds that rolled after one another from the west, and seemed to fill the valley.... In the afternoon rain came on, as we approached the Porte Maillot. We took shelter along with a crowd of other holiday folk under some chestnut-trees whose leaves were coming out. One of the waiters of a tavern perceiving Jean Jacques, rushed to him full of joy, exclaiming, "What, is it you, mon bonhomme? Why, it is a whole age since we have seen you." Rousseau replied cheerfully, "'Tis because my wife has been ill, and I myself have been out of sorts." "Mon pauvre bonhomme," replied the lad, "you must not stop here; come in, come in, and I will find room for you." He hurried us along to a room upstairs, where in spite of the crowd he procured for us chairs and a table, and bread and wine. I said to Jean Jacques, "He seems very familiar with you." He answered, "Yes, we have known one another some years. We used to come here in fine weather, my wife and I, to eat a cutlet of an evening."[394]

Things did not continue to go thus smoothly. One day St. Pierre went to see him, and was received without a word, and with stiff and gloomy mien. He tried to talk, but only got monosyllables; he took up a book, and this drew a sarcasm which sent him forth from the room. For more than two months they did not meet. At length they had an accidental encounter at a street corner. Rousseau accosted St. Pierre, and with a gradually warming sensibility proceeded thus: "There are days when I want to be alone and crave privacy. I come back from my solitary expeditions so calm and contented. There I have not been wanting to anybody, nor has anybody been wanting to me," and so on.[395] He expressed this humour more pointedly on some other occasion, when he said that there were times in which he fled from the eyes of men as from Parthian arrows. As one said who knew from experience, the fate of his most intimate friend depended on a word or a gesture.[396] Another of them declared that he knew Rousseau's style of discarding a friend by letter so thoroughly, that he felt confident he could supply Rousseau's place in case of illness or absence.[397] In much of this we suspect that the quarrel was perfectly justified. Sociality meant a futile display before unworthy and condescending curiosity. "It is not I whom they care for," he very truly said, "but public opinion and talk about me, without a thought of what real worth I may have." Hence his steadfast refusal to go out to dine or sup. The mere impertinence of the desire to see him was illustrated by some coxcombs who insisted with a famous actress of his acquaintance, that she should invite the strange philosopher to meet them. She was aware that no known force would persuade Rousseau to come, so she dressed up her tailor as philosopher, bade him keep a silent tongue, and vanish suddenly without a word of farewell. The tailor was long philosophically silent, and by the time that wine had loosened his tongue, the rest of the company were too far gone to perceive that the supposed Rousseau was chattering vulgar nonsense.[398] We can believe that with admirers of this stamp Rousseau was well pleased to let tailors or others stand in his place. There were some, however, of a different sort, who flitted across his sight and then either vanished of their own accord, or were silently dismissed, from Madame de Genlis up to Gretry and Gluck. With Gluck he seems to have quarrelled for setting his music to French words, when he must have known that Italian was the only tongue fit for music.[399] Yet it was remarked that no one ever heard him speak ill of others. His enemies, the figures of his delusion, were vaguely denounced in many dronings, but they remained in dark shadow and were unnamed. When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the capital (1778), some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau harshly checked the detractor. It is true that in 1770-71 he gave to some few of his acquaintances one or more readings of the Confessions, although they contained much painful matter for many people still living, among the rest for Madame d'Epinay. She wrote justifiably enough to the lieutenant of police, praying that all such readings might be prohibited, and it is believed that they were so prohibited.[400]