Rousseau Part 29

[242] Of course no such modification as that proposed by Comte (_Politique Positive_, iv. 421) would come within the scope of the doctrine of the Social Contract. For each of the seventeen Intendances into which Comte divides France, is to be ruled by a chief, "always appointed and removed by the central power." There is no room for the sovereignty of the people here, even in things parochial.

[243] There was one extraordinary instance during the revolution of attempting to make popular government direct on Rousseau's principle, in the scheme (1790) of which Danton was a chief supporter, for reorganising the munic.i.p.al administration of Paris. The a.s.semblies of sections were to sit permanently; their vote was to be taken on current questions; and action was to follow the aggregate of their degrees. See Von Sybel's _Hist. Fr. Rev._ i. 275; M. Louis Blanc's _History_, Bk. III. ch. ii.

[244] This was also Bodin's definition of an aristocratic state; "si minor pars civium caeteris imperat."

[245] _Politics_, III. vi.-vii.

[246] _Esprit des Lois_, II. i. ii.

[247] Rousseau gave the name of _tyrant_ to a usurper of royal authority in a kingdom, and _despot_ to a usurper of the sovereign authority (_i.e._ [Greek: tyrannos] in the Greek sense). The former might govern according to the laws, but the latter placed himself above the laws (_Cont. Soc._, III. x.) This corresponded to Locke's distinction: "As usurpation is the exercise of power which another hath a right to, so tyranny is the exercise of a power beyond right, which n.o.body can have a right to." _Civil Gov._, ch. xviii.

[248] III. iv.

[249] III. vi.

[250] III. v.

[251] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii.

[252] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 197-201.

[253] This is not unlike what Tocqueville says somewhere, that Christianity bids you render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but seems to discourage any inquiry whether Caesar is an usurper or a lawful ruler.

[254] _Cont. Soc._, IV. viii. 203. As we have already seen, he had entreated Voltaire, of all men in the world, to draw up a civil profession of faith. See vol. i. 326.

In the New Helosa (V. v. 117, _n._) Rousseau expresses his opinion that "no true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. _If I were a magistrate, and if the law p.r.o.nounced the penalty of death against atheists, I would begin by burning as such whoever should come to inform against another._"

[255] Plato's _Laws_, Bk. x. 909, etc.

[256] _Areopagitica_, p. 417. (Edit. 1867.)

[257] See a speech of his, which is Rousseau's "civil faith" done into rhetoric, given in M. Louis Blanc's _Hist. de la Rev. Francaise_, Bk.

x. c. xiv.

[258] _Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France_ (1764). Quoted by Rousseau from a ma.n.u.script copy.

[259] _Leviathan_, ch. xliii. 601. Also ch. xlii.

[260] _Cont. Soc._, III. xi. Borrowed from Hobbes, who said, "Magnus ille Leviathan quae civitas appellatur, opificium artis est."

[261] Mackintosh's.

[262] _Cont. Soc._, II. v.

[263] IV. ii.

[264] For instance, _Gouvernement de la Pologne_, ch. xi. p. 305. And _Corr._, v. 180.

[265] _Cont. Soc._, I. viii.

[266] _Cont. Soc._, II. i.

[267] _Ib._, III. x. "Let every individual who may usurp the sovereignty be instantly put to death by free men." Robespierre's _Declaration des droits de l'homme_, -- 27. "When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection becomes for the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties." -- 35.

[268] _Cont. Soc._, III. x.

[269] See May's _Const.i.tutional Hist. of England_, ch. iii; and Lord Stanhope's _Life of Pitt_, vol. ii. ch. xii.

[270] In the 6th book of the _Moral Philosophy_ (1785), ch. iii., and elsewhere. In the preface he refers to the effect which Rousseau's political theory was supposed to have had in the civil convulsions of Geneva, as one of the reasons which encouraged him to publish his own book.

[271] One side of this was the pa.s.sion for geographical exploration which took possession of Europe towards the middle of the eighteenth century. See the _Life of Humboldt_, i. 28, 29. (_Eng. Trans._ by La.s.sell.)

[272] Rousseau's influence on Condorcet is seen in the latter's maxim, which has found such favour in the eyes of socialist writers, that "not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art."

CHAPTER IV.

EMILIUS.

One whose most intense conviction was faith in the goodness of all things and creatures as they are first produced by nature, and so long as they remain unsophisticated by the hand and purpose of man, was in some degree bound to show a way by which this evil process of sophistication might be brought to the lowest possible point, and the best of all natural creatures kept as near as possible to his high original. Rousseau, it is true, held in a sense of his own the doctrine of the fall of man. That doctrine, however, has never made people any more remiss in the search after a virtue, which if they ought to have regarded it as hopeless according to strict logic, is still indispensable in actual life. Rousseau's way of believing that man had fallen was so coloured at once by that expansion of sanguine emotion which marked his century, and by that necessity for repose in idyllic perfection of simplicity which marked his own temperament, that enthusiasm for an imaginary human creature effectually shut out the dogma of his fatal depravation. "How difficult a thing it is,"

Madame d'Epinay once said to him, "to bring up a child." "a.s.suredly it is," answered Rousseau; "because the father and mother are not made by nature to bring it up, nor the child to be brought up."[273] This cynical speech can only have been an accidental outbreak of spleen. It was a contradiction to his one constant opinion that nature is all good and bounteous, and that the inborn capacity of man for reaching true happiness knows no stint.

In writing Emilius, he sat down to consider what man is, and what can be made of him. Here, as in all the rest of his work, he only obeyed the tendencies of his time in choosing a theme. An age touched by the spirit of hope inevitably turns to the young; for with the young lies fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic.

Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and society is the work of man. Yet man, who has engendered this corrupted birth, is good and whole. The strain in the argument may be pardoned for the hopefulness of the conclusion. It brought Rousseau into harmony with the eager effort of the time to pour young character into finer mould, and made him the most powerful agent in giving to such efforts both fervour and elevation. While others were content with the mere enunciation of maxims and precepts, he breathed into them the spirit of life, and enforced them with a vividness of faith that clothed education with the augustness and unction of religion. The training of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.

Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbe de Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme for a treatise on education.[277] Helvetius followed his exploration of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of strangers.

Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the parent as a compet.i.tor with the priestly instructor for influence over the ideas, habits, and affections of his children. The rebellion was aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established system. The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam. The new current flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superst.i.tion. Men at length ventured once more to look at one another with free and generous gaze. The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made plain to scornful eyes. People ceased to see one another as guilty victims cowering under a divine curse. They stood erect in consciousness of manhood. The palsied conception of man, with his large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own wrong-doing,--the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those regions of night, whence the depth of human misery and the obscuration of human intelligence had once permitted its escape, to hang evilly over the western world for a season. So vital a change in the point of view quickly touched the theory and art of the upbringing of the young. Education began to figure less as the suppression of the natural man, than his strengthening and development; less as a process of rooting out tares, more as the grateful tending of shoots abounding in promise of richness. What had been the most drearily mechanical of duties, was transformed into a task that surpa.s.sed all others in interest and hope. If man be born not bad but good, under no curse, but rather the bestower and receiver of many blessings, then the entire atmosphere of young life, in spite of the toil and the peril, is made cheerful with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.

I.

Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade with an open and energetic mind, may here pa.s.s philosophers. Locke was nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.

The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the practical teacher, who is content to a.s.sume good sense in his hearers, and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed, upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.

Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.

There is an immense cla.s.s of natures, and those not the lowest, which the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.

They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal, and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into a.s.sociation with the s.p.a.ciousness and height of spiritual things. To these Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity; it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very eye and centre of moral and social aspirations.

Accordingly Rousseau almost at once begins by elaborating his conception of the kind of human creature which it is worth while to take the trouble to rear, and the only kind which pure nature will help you in perfecting. Hence Emilius, besides being a manual for parents, contains the lines of a moral type of life and character for all others. The old thought of the Discourses revives in full vigour.

The artifices of society, the perverting traditions of use, the feeble maxims of indolence, convention, helpless dependence on the aid or the approval of others, are routed at the first stroke. The old regimen of acc.u.mulated prejudice is replaced, in dealing alike with body and soul, by the new system of liberty and nature. In saying this we have already said that the exaltation of Spartan manners which runs through Rousseau's other writings has vanished, and that every trace of the much-vaunted military and public training has yielded before the attractive thought of tender parents and a wisely ruled home. Public instruction, we learn, can now no longer exist, because there is no longer such a thing as country, and therefore there can no longer be citizens. Only domestic education can now help us to rear the man according to nature,--the man who knows best among us how to bear the mingled good and ill of our life.

The artificial society of the time, with its aspirations after a return to nature, was moved to the most energetic enthusiasm by Rousseau's famous exhortations to mothers to nourish their own little ones. Morelly, as we have seen, had already enjoined the adoption of this practice. So too had Buffon. But Morelly's voice had no resonance, Buffon's reasons were purely physical, and children were still sent out to nurse, until Rousseau's more pa.s.sionate moral entreaties awoke maternal conscience. "Do these tender mothers," he exclaimed, "who, when they have got rid of their infants, surrender themselves gaily to all the diversions of the town, know what sort of usage the child in the village is receiving, fastened in his swaddling band? At the least interruption that comes, they hang him up by a nail like a bundle of rags, and there the poor creature remains thus crucified, while the nurse goes about her affairs. Every child found in this position had a face of purple; as the violent compression of the chest would not allow the blood to circulate, it all went to the head, and the victim was supposed to be very quiet, just because it had not strength enough to cry out."[278] But in Rousseau, as in Beethoven, a harsh and rugged pa.s.sage is nearly always followed by some piece of exquisite and touching melody. The force of these indignant pictures was heightened and relieved by moving appeal to all the tender joys of maternal solicitude, and thoughts of all that this solicitude could do for the happiness of the home, the father, and the young. The attraction of domestic life is p.r.o.nounced the best antidote to the ill living of the time. The bustle of children, which you now think so importunate, gradually becomes delightful; it brings father and mother nearer to one another; and the lively animation of a family added to domestic cares, makes the dearest occupation of the wife, and the sweetest of all his amus.e.m.e.nts to the husband. If women will only once more become mothers again, men will very soon become fathers and husbands.[279]

The physical effect of this was not altogether wholesome. Rousseau's eloquence excited women to an inordinate pitch of enthusiasm for the duty of suckling their infants, but his contemptuous denunciation of the gaieties of Paris could not extinguish the love of amus.e.m.e.nt.