Rousseau Part 13

[280] _Conf._, ix. 337.

[281] _Corr._, i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.

[282] To Madame d'Houdetot. _Corr._, i. 376-387. June 1757.

[283] Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenb.u.t.tel, Oct. 11, 1757.

Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.

[284] These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume (pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps the one best worth turning to.

[285] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768. _Conf._, x. 15.

[286] _Ib._ x. 22.

[287] _Ib._ x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.

[288] _Conf._, x. 24.

[289] To Madame d'Epinay, 1757. _Corr._, i. 362, 353. See also _Conf._, ix. 307.

[290] One of the most unflinching in this kind is an _Essai sur la vie et le caractere de J.J. Rousseau_, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.

[291] _Corr._, i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182

[292] D'Epinay, ii. 173.

[293] _Conf._, ix. 325.

[294] _Ib._, ix. 334.

[295] _Mem._, ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the winter of 1756-1757.

[296] The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul's _Mem. de Diderot, _p. 61.

[297] _Conf._, ix. 245, 246.

[298] Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326. _Conf._, x.

17.

[299] _Mem._, ii. 318.

[300] _Conf._, ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (_Mem._, ii. 326), writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account for this. The same circ.u.mstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (_Rev.

des Deux Mondes_, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints (_Causeries_, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.

[301] For Shakespeare, see _Corr. Lit._, iv. 143, etc.

[302] D'Epinay, ii. 188.

[303] D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul's _Mem. de Diderot_, p. 61.

[304] _Mem._ ii. 128.

[305] P. 258. See also p. 146.

[306] Pp. 282, 336, etc.

[307] _Corr._, i. 386. June 1757.

[308] _Conf._, ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible version, a.s.signing all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, see _Mem._, ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i.

418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's injustice.

[309] _Conf._, ix. 372.

[310] _Corr._, i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.

[311] Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay's _Mem._ ii. 386. Nov. 3, 1757.

[312] D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.

[313] _Corr._, i. 425. Nov. 8. _Ib._ 426.

[314] Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.

[315] _Ib._ 387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St.

Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might equally well have been sent for as many sous.

[316] The sources of all this are in the following places. _Corr._, i.

416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12. _Conf._, ix. 377. _Corr._, i. 427. Nov. 23. _Conf._, ix. 381. Dec. 1. _Ib._, ix. 383. Dec. 17.

[317] Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot's _Oeuv._, xix.

446. See also 449 and 210.

CHAPTER VIII.

MUSIC.

Simplification has already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the c.u.mbrousness of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction, towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for the great.

The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the n.o.ble severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by birth, found his first appreciation in a public that had been trained by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest produced in France. Gretri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck.

"I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical superlative," Gretri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth, which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318] These words express sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without pa.s.sion or subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation of _Orfeo_ and _Alceste_.

In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. A violent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State.

The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any work containing the d.a.m.nable doctrine and position that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.[319] His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its princ.i.p.al characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its p.r.o.nunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it beautiful.[320]

The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and "other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its influence.