Rousseau Part 31

VI.

Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New Helosa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task.

It cleared away the acc.u.mulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the subst.i.tution of growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter.

Still there was also an immense quant.i.ty of educational books and pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of revolutionary t.i.tans: the other generation not less hardy in science.

It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampere, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]

In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension and more intelligent exact.i.tude to their application. Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The worship of Rousseau penetrated all cla.s.ses, and touched every degree of intelligence.[332]

In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as G.o.dwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the materialistic school.

In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that democratic tendency in education, which political and other circ.u.mstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fenelon, busy themselves about the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of circ.u.mstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly.

Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor self-sufficing.

Voltaire p.r.o.nounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pa.s.s to that eloquent doc.u.ment which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of nature--a doc.u.ment most hyperbolically counted by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of sentiment, as the n.o.blest monument of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[273] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.

[274] _Lettres a mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_ (1783).

[275] _Lettres Peruviennes._

[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.

[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.

[278] _Emile_, I. 27.

[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)

[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.

[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.

[282] _Emile_, II. 141.

[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.

[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.

[285] III. 358, etc.

[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.

[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. -- 54.

[288] _Emile_, II. 163.

[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Reveries_, 309).

[290] _Emile_, I. 23.

[291] II. 109.

[292] II. 111.

[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.

[294] II. 121.

[295] II. 143.

[296] _Emile_, III. 382.

[297] II. 227.

[298] IV. 10.

[299] _Emile_, III. 394.

[300] V. 199.

[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in _Candide_.

[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable pa.s.sage, as far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter elsewhere."

[303] _Emile_, V. 220.

[304] IV. 85.

[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments, that the Republic has no need of chemists.

[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784 to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government, enjoy in their general ma.s.s an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing, they have divided their nation into two cla.s.ses, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe."

Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.

[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the first days (_e.g._ -- xix. "Tous naissent egaux," etc., -- xxi., etc.) The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.

[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.

[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.

[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.

[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.

[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.