Rousseau Part 4

[73] _Ib._

[74] _Conf._, v. 315, 316.

[75] _Ib._ iv. 276. _Nouv. Hel._, II. xiv. 381, etc.

[76] He refers to the ill-health of his youth, _Conf._, vii. 32, and describes an ominous head seizure while at Chamberi, _Ib._ vi. 396.

[77] Rousseau's description of Les Charmettes is at the end of the fifth book. The present proprietor keeps the house arranged as it used to be, and has gathered one or two memorials of its famous tenant, including his poor _clavecin_ and his watch. In an outside wall, Herault de Sech.e.l.les, when Commissioner from the Convention in the department of Mont Blanc, inserted a little white stone with two most lapidary stanzas inscribed upon it, about _genie, solitude, fierte, gloire, verite, envie_, and the like.

[78] _Reveries_, x. 336 (1778).

[79] _Conf._, vi. 393.

[80] _Conf._, vi. 412.

[81] _Mem. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, i. 394. (M. Boiteau's edition: Charpentier. 1865.)

[82] _Conf._, vi. 399.

[83] _Ib._ vi. 424. Goethe made a similar experiment; see Mr. Lewes's _Life_, p. 126.

[84] Bernardin de Saint Pierre tells us this. _Oeuvres_ (Ed. 1818), xii. 70, etc.

[85] _Conf._, iv. 297. See also the description of the scenery of the Valais, in the _Nouv. Hel._, Pt. I. Let. xxiii.

[86] George Sand in _Mademoiselle la Quintinie_ (p. 27), a book containing some peculiarly subtle appreciations of the Savoy landscape.

[87] _Conf._, iv. 298.

[88] _Conf._, vi. 416, 422, etc.; iii. 164; iii. 203; v. 347; v. 383, 384. Also vii. 53.

[89] _Conf._, v. 313, 367; iv. 293; ix. 353. Also _Mem. de Mdme.

d'Epinay_, ii. 151.

[90] _Ib._ iii. 192, 193.

[91] _Conf._, iv. 301; iii. 195.

[92] _Conf._, v. 372, 373. The mistaken date a.s.signed to the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick is one of many instances how little we can trust the Confessions for minute accuracy, though their substantial veracity is confirmed by all the collateral evidence that we have.

[93] _Ib._ iii. 188. For his debt in the way of education to Madame de Warens, see also _Ib._ vii. 46.

[94] _Conf._, vi. 409.

[95] _Ib._ vi. 413. He adds a suspicious-looking "_et cetera_."

[96] _Conf._, vi. 414

[97] _Conf._, iv. 295. See also v. 346.

[98] _Corr._, 1736, pp. 26, 27.

[99] _Conf._, iv. 271, where he says further that he never found enough attraction in French poetry to make him think of pursuing it.

[100] The first part of the Confessions was written in Wootton in Derbyshire, in the winter of 1766-1767.

[101] _Conf._, vi. 422.

[102] _Corr._, i. 43, 46, 62, etc.

[103] Musset-Pathay, i. 23, _n._

CHAPTER IV.

THERESA LE Va.s.sEUR.

Men like Rousseau, who are most heedless in letting their delight perish, are as often as not most loth to bury what they have slain, or even to perceive that life has gone out of it. The sight of simple hearts trying to coax back a little warm breath of former days into a present that is stiff and cold with indifference, is touching enough.

But there is a certain grossness around the circ.u.mstances in which Rousseau now and too often found himself, that makes us watch his embarra.s.sment with some composure. One cannot easily think of him as a simple heart, and we feel perhaps as much relief as he, when he resolves after making all due efforts to thrust out the intruder and bring Madame de Warens over from theories which had become too practical to be interesting, to leave Les Charmettes and accept a tutorship at Lyons.

His new patron was a De Mably, elder brother of the philosophic abbe of the same name (1709-85), and of the still more notable Condillac (1714-80).

The future author of the most influential treatise on education that has ever been written, was not successful in the practical and far more arduous side of that master art.[104] We have seen how little training he had ever given himself in the cardinal virtues of collectedness and self-control, and we know this to be the indispensable quality in all who have to shape young minds for a humane life. So long as all went well, he was an angel, but when things went wrong, he is willing to confess that he was a devil. When his two pupils could not understand him, he became frantic; when they showed wilfulness or any other part of the disagreeable materials out of which, along with the rest, human excellence has to be ingeniously and painfully manufactured, he was ready to kill them. This, as he justly admits, was not the way to render them either well learned or sage. The moral education of the teacher himself was hardly complete, for he describes how he used to steal his employer's wine, and the exquisite draughts which he enjoyed in the secrecy of his own room, with a piece of cake in one hand and some dear romance in the other. We should forgive greedy pilferings of this kind more easily if Rousseau had forgotten them more speedily. These are surely offences for which the best expiation is oblivion in a throng of worthier memories.

It is easy to understand how often Rousseau's mind turned from the deadly drudgery of his present employment to the beat.i.tude of former days. "What rendered my present condition insupportable was the recollection of my beloved Charmettes, of my garden, my trees, my fountain, my orchard, and above all of her for whom I felt myself born and who gave life to it all. As I thought of her, of our pleasures, our guileless days, I was seized by a tightness in my heart, a stopping of my breath, which robbed me of all spirit."[105] For years to come this was a kind of far-off accompaniment, thrumming melodiously in his ears under all the discords of a miserable life. He made another effort to quicken the dead. Throwing up his office with his usual prompt.i.tude in escaping from the irksome, after a residence of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740--spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had become for the moment the centre of the universe.[106]

It was not yet, however, destined to be a centre for him. His plan of musical notation was examined by a learned committee of the Academy, no member of whom was instructed in the musical art. Rousseau, dumb, inarticulate, and unready as usual, was amazed at the ease with which his critics by the free use of sounding phrases demolished arguments and objections which he perceived that they did not at all understand. His experience on this occasion suggested to him the most just reflection, how even without breadth of intelligence, the profound knowledge of any one thing is preferable in forming a judgment about it, to all possible enlightenment conferred by the cultivation of the sciences, without study of the special matter in question. It astonished him that all these learned men, who knew so many things, could yet be so ignorant that a man should only pretend to be a judge in his own craft.[107]

His musical path to glory and riches thus blocked up, he surrendered himself not to despair but to complete idleness and peace of mind. He had a few coins left, and these prevented him from thinking of a future.

He was presented to one or two great ladies, and with the blundering gallantry habitual to him he wrote a letter to one of the greatest of them, declaring his pa.s.sion for her. Madame Dupin was the daughter of one, and the wife of another, of the richest men in France, and the attentions of a man whose acquaintance Madame Beuzenval had begun by inviting him to dine in the servants' hall, were not pleasing to her.[108] She forgave the impertinence eventually, and her stepson, M.

Francueil, was Rousseau's patron for some years.[109] On the whole, however, in spite of his own account of his social inept.i.tude, there cannot have been anything so repulsive in his manners as this account would lead us to think. There is no grave anachronism in introducing here the impression which he made on two fine ladies not many years after this. "He pays compliments, yet he is not polite, or at least he is without the air of politeness. He seems to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easily seen that he is infinitely intelligent. He has a brown complexion, while eyes that overflow with fire give animation to his expression. When he has spoken and you look at him, he appears comely; but when you try to recall him, his image is always extremely plain. They say that he has bad health, and endures agony which from some motive of vanity he most carefully conceals. It is this, I fancy, which gives him from time to time an air of sullenness."[110] The other lady, who saw him at the same time, speaks of "the poor devil of an author, who's as poor as Job for you, but with wit and vanity enough for four.... They say his history is as queer as his person, and that is saying a good deal.... Madame Maupeou and I tried to guess what it was. 'In spite of his face,' said she (for it is certain he is uncommonly plain), 'his eyes tell that love plays a great part in his romance.' 'No,' said I, 'his nose tells me that it is vanity.' 'Well then, 'tis both one and the other.'"[111]

One of his patronesses took some trouble to procure him the post of secretary to the French amba.s.sador at Venice, and in the spring of 1743 our much-wandering man started once more in quest of meat and raiment in the famous city of the Adriatic. This was one of those steps of which there are not a few in a man's life, that seem at the moment to rank foremost in the short line of decisive acts, and then are presently seen not to have been decisive at all, but mere interruptions conducting nowhither. In truth the critical moments with us are mostly as points in slumber. Even if the ancient oracles of the G.o.ds were to regain their speech once more on the earth, men would usually go to consult them on days when the answer would have least significance, and could guide them least far. That one of the most heedless vagrants in Europe, and as it happened one of the men of most extraordinary genius also, should have got a footing in the train of the amba.s.sador of a great government, would naturally seem to him and others as chance's one critical stroke in his life. In reality it was nothing. The Count of Montaigu, his master, was one of the worst characters with whom Rousseau could for his own profit have been brought into contact. In his professional quality he was not far from imbecile. The folly and weakness of the government at Versailles during the reign of Lewis XV., and its indifference to competence in every department except perhaps partially in the fisc, was fairly ill.u.s.trated in its absurd representative at Venice. The secretary, whose renown has preserved his master's name, has recorded more amply than enough the grounds of quarrel between them. Rousseau is for once eager to a.s.sert his own efficiency, and declares that he rendered many important services for which he was repaid with ingrat.i.tude and persecution.[112] One would be glad to know what the Count of Montaigu's version of matters was, for in truth Rousseau's conduct in previous posts makes us wonder how it was that he who had hitherto always been unfaithful over few things, suddenly touched perfection when he became lord over many.

There is other testimony, however, to the amba.s.sador's morbid quality, of which, after that general imbecility which was too common a thing among men in office to be remarkable, avarice was the most striking trait. For instance, careful observation had persuaded him that three shoes are equivalent to two pairs, because there is always one of a pair which is more worn than its fellow; and hence he habitually ordered his shoes in threes.[113] It was natural enough that such a master and such a secretary should quarrel over perquisites. That slightly cringing quality which we have noticed on one or two occasions in Rousseau's hungry youthful time, had been hardened out of him by circ.u.mstance or the strengthening of inborn fibre. He would now neither dine in a servants' hall because a fine lady forgot what was due to a musician, nor share his fees with a great amba.s.sador who forgot what was due to himself. These sordid disputes are of no interest now to anybody, and we need only say that after a period of eighteen months pa.s.sed in uncongenial company, Rousseau parted from his count in extreme dudgeon, and the diplomatic career which he had promised to himself came to the same close as various other careers had already done.

He returned to Paris towards the end of 1744, burning with indignation at the unjust treatment which he believed himself to have suffered, and laying memorial after memorial before the minister at home. He a.s.sures us that it was the justice and the futility of his complaints, that left in his soul the germ of exasperation against preposterous civil inst.i.tutions, "in which the true common weal and real justice are always sacrificed to some seeming order or other, which is in fact destructive of all order, and only adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong."[114]

One or two pictures connected with the Venetian episode remain in the memory of the reader of the Confessions, and among them perhaps with most people is that of the quarantine at Genoa in Rousseau's voyage to his new post. The travellers had the choice of remaining on board the felucca, or pa.s.sing the time in an unfurnished lazaretto. This, we may notice in pa.s.sing, was his first view of the sea; he makes no mention of the fact, nor does the sight or thought of the sea appear to have left the least mark in any line of his writings. He always disliked it, and thought of it with melancholy. Rousseau, as we may suppose, found the want of s.p.a.ce and air in the boat the most intolerable of evils, and preferred to go alone to the lazaretto, though it had neither window-sashes nor tables nor chairs nor bed, nor even a truss of straw to lie down upon. He was locked up and had the whole barrack to himself.

"I manufactured," he says, "a good bed out of my coats and shirts, sheets out of towels which I st.i.tched together, a pillow out of my old cloak rolled up. I made myself a seat of one trunk placed flat, and a table of the other. I got out some paper and my writing-desk, and arranged some dozen books that I had by way of library. In short I made myself so comfortable, that, with the exception of curtains and windows, I was nearly as well off in this absolutely naked lazaretto as in my lodgings in Paris. My meals were served with much pomp; two grenadiers, with bayonets at their musket-ends, escorted them; the staircase was my dining-room, the landing did for table and the lower step for a seat, and when my dinner was served, they rang a little bell as they withdrew, to warn me to seat myself at table. Between my meals, when I was neither writing nor reading, nor busy with my furnishing, I went for a walk in the Protestant graveyard, or mounted into a lantern which looked out on to the port, and whence I could see the ships sailing in and out. I pa.s.sed a fortnight in this way, and I could have spent the whole three weeks of the quarantine without feeling an instant's weariness."[115]

These are the occasions when we catch glimpses of the true Rousseau; but his residence in Venice was on the whole one of his few really sociable periods. He made friends and kept them, and there was even a certain gaiety in his life. He used to tell people their fortunes in a way that an earlier century would have counted unholy.[116] He rarely sought pleasure in those of her haunts for which the Queen of the Adriatic had a guilty renown, but he has left one singular anecdote, showing the degree to which profound sensibility is capable of doing the moralist's work in a man, and how a stroke of sympathetic imagination may keep one from sin more effectually than an ethical precept.[117] It is pleasanter to think of him as working at the formation of that musical taste which ten years afterwards led him to amaze the Parisians by proving that French melody was a hollow idea born of national self-delusion. A Venetian experiment, whose evidence in the special controversy is less weighty perhaps than Rousseau supposed, was among the facts which persuaded him that Italian is the language of music. An Armenian who had never heard any music was invited to listen first of all to a French monologue, and then to an air of Galuppi's. Rousseau observed in the Armenian more surprise than pleasure during the performance of the French piece. The first notes of the Italian were no sooner struck, than his eyes and whole expression softened; he was enchanted, surrendered his whole soul to the ravishing impressions of the music, and could never again be induced to listen to the performance of any French air.[118]

More important than this was the circ.u.mstance that the sight of the defects of the government of the Venetian Republic first drew his mind to political speculation, and suggested to him the composition of a book that was to be called Inst.i.tutions Politiques.[119] The work, as thus designed and named, was never written, but the idea of it, after many years of meditation, ripened first in the Discourse on Inequality, and then in the Social Contract.

If Rousseau's departure for Venice was a wholly insignificant element in his life, his return from it was almost immediately followed by an event which counted for nothing at the moment, which his friends by and by came to regard as the fatal and irretrievable disaster of his life, but which he persistently described as the only real consolation that heaven permitted him to taste in his misery, and the only one that enabled him to bear his many sore burdens.[120]