The Eve of the French Revolution Part 16

Love, he says, is physical and moral. The physical side is that general desire which leads to the union of the s.e.xes. The moral side is that which fixes that desire on one exclusive object, or at least that which gives the exclusive desire a greater energy. Now it is easy to see that this moral side of love is a fact.i.tious feeling, born of the usage of society, and vaunted by women with much skill and care in order to establish their empire, and to give dominion to the s.e.x which ought to obey. This feeling is dull in the savage, who has no abstract ideas of regularity or beauty; he is not troubled with imagination, which causes so many woes to civilized man. "Let us conclude that the savage man, wandering in forests, without manufactures, without language, without a home, without war, and without connections, with no need of his kind, and no desire to injure it, perhaps never recognizing one person individually, subject to few pa.s.sions, and sufficient to himself, had only the feeling and the intelligence proper to his state; that he felt only his real needs; he looked only at those things which he thought it was for his interest to see, and his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity. If, by chance, he made some discovery, he could not communicate it, not recognizing even his own children. The art perished with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress; the generations multiplied uselessly; and, as all started from the same point, the centuries went by with all the rudeness of the first age; the species was already old, and man still remained a child."

Inequalities among savage men would be small. Those which are physical are often caused by a hardening or an effeminate life; those of the mind, by education, which not only divides men into the rude and the cultivated, but increases the natural differences which nature has allowed among the latter; for if a giant and a dwarf walk in the same road, every step they take will separate them more widely. And if there are no relations among men, their inequalities will trouble them very little. Where there is no love, what is the use of beauty? What advantage can people who do not speak derive from wit; or those who have no dealings from craft? "I constantly hear it said," cries Rousseau, "that the strong will oppress the weak. But explain to me what is meant by the word "oppression." Some men will rule with violence, others will groan in their service, obeying all their caprices. This is exactly what I observe among us; but I do not see how it could be said of savage men, who could hardly be made to understand the meaning of servitude and domination. One man may well take away the fruit that another has picked, the game he has killed, the cave that was his shelter; but how will he ever succeed in making him obey? And what can be the chains of dependence among men that possess nothing? If I am driven from one tree, I need only go to another; if I am tormented in any place, who will prevent my moving elsewhere? Is there a man so much stronger than I, and moreover so depraved, so lazy, and so fierce as to compel me to provide for his maintenance while he remains idle? He must make up his mind not to lose sight of me for a single moment, to have me tied up with great care while he is asleep, for fear I should escape or kill him; that is to say, he is obliged to expose himself willingly to much greater trouble than that which he wishes to avoid, and than that which he gives me. And after all, if his vigilance is relaxed for a moment, if he turns his head at a sudden noise, I take twenty steps through the forest, my chains are broken, and he never sees me again as long as he lives."

Rousseau recognized that his state of nature was not like anything that had existed on our planet.[Footnote: This concession probably took the form it did, partly to satisfy the censor, or the Academy of Dijon, jealous for Genesis. "Religion commands us to believe that G.o.d himself having removed men from the state of nature, immediately after the creation, they are unequal because he has willed that they should be so." Such remarks as this are common in all the writings of the time, although less so in those of Rousseau than in those of most of his contemporaries. They are evidently intended to satisfy the authorities, and to be simply over looked by the intelligent reader.] But that consideration troubled him not at all. Let us begin, he says, by putting aside all facts; they do not touch the question. This is the constant practice of the philosophers of certain schools, but few of them acknowledge it as frankly as Rousseau. Had the facts of human nature and human history been seriously considered, we should have no Republic of Plato, no Utopia of More; the world would be a very different place from what it is; for these cloudy cities, the laws of whose architecture seem contrary to all the teachings of physics, yet gild with their glory and darken with their shadows the solid temples and streets beneath them.

In the second part of his essay, Rousseau follows the development of human society. "The first man," he says, "who, having enclosed a piece of ground, undertook to say, `This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would not he have spared the human race, who, pulling up the stakes or filling the ditch, should have cried to his fellows, `Beware of listening to that impostor.

You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the land to none.'"

But this benefactor did not make his appearance. Soon all the land was divided among a certain number of occupiers. Those whose weakness or indolence had prevented their getting a share were obliged to sink into slavery, or to rob their richer neighbors. Then followed civil wars, tumult and rapine. At last those who had the land conceived the most deliberate plot that ever entered into the human mind. They persuaded the poorer people to join with them in establishing an a.s.sociation which should defend all its members and ensure to each one the peaceful possession of his property. "Such was the origin of society and laws, which gave new bonds to the weak, new strength to the rich, irrevocably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the laws of property and inequality, turned adroit usurpation into settled right, and, for the profit of a few ambitious men, subjected thenceforth all the human race to labor, servitude, and misery."

But on the whole the stage of development which seemed to Rousseau the happiest was not the state of complete isolation. He supposes that at one time mankind had a.s.sembled in herds, and had made some simple inventions. A rude language had been formed, huts were built. Men had become more fierce and cruel than at first. The condition was intermediate between the indolence of the primitive state, and the petulant activity of self-love now seen in the world. This, he thought, was the stage reached by most savages known to Europeans; it was the most desirable; and he remarks that no savage has yet adopted civilization, whereas many Frenchmen have joined Indian tribes, and taken up a savage mode of life.

In closing the Second Discourse, Rousseau thus sums up his conclusions.

"It follows from this exposition that inequality, being almost nothing in the state of nature, draws its force and growth from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human spirit, and becomes at last stable and legal by the establishment of property and the laws.

It follows also that moral inequality, authorized by positive law only, is contrary to natural law whenever it does not coincide in the same proportion with physical inequality; a distinction which shows sufficiently what should be thought in this respect of the kind of inequality which reigns among all civilized nations, since it is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a child should command an old man, a fool lead a wise man, and a handful of people be glutted with superfluity, while the hungry mult.i.tude is in want of necessaries."

The Discourse on Inequality was sent by Rousseau to Voltaire, and drew forth a characteristic letter from the pontiff of the Philosophers. "I have received, sir, your new book against the human race. I thank you for it. You will please the men to whom you tell disagreeable truths, but you will not correct them. It is impossible to paint in stronger colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and weakness promise themselves so many consolations. No one ever spent so much wit in trying to make us stupid; when we read your book we feel like going on all fours. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the habit, I am conscious that it is impossible for me to take it up again, and I leave this natural att.i.tude to those who are more worthy of it than you and I. Nor can I take ship to go out and join the savages in Canada; first, because the diseases which bear me down oblige me to stay near the greatest physician in Europe, and because I should not find the same relief among the Missouris; secondly, because there is war in those regions, and the example of our nations has made the savages almost as cruel as we are." Voltaire then goes on to complain of his own sufferings as an author, but to vaunt the influence of letters. It is not Petrarch and Boccaccio, he says, that made the wars of Italy; the pleasantries of Marot did not cause the ma.s.sacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day; nor the tragedy of the Cid produce the riots of the Fronde. Great crimes have generally been committed by ignorant great men. It is the insatiable cupidity, the indomitable pride of mankind, which have made this world a vale of tears; from Thamas Kouli-Kan, who could not read, to the custom-house clerk, who only knows how to cipher.

[Footnote: August 30, 1755. Voltaire, lvi. 714.]

This letter is neither very complimentary nor very conclusive in its treatment of Rousseau's position, but it may be said to mark his official reception into the guild of literary men. He was presently engaged in new work. He wrote an article on Political Economy for the great "Encyclopaedia," in which, reversing the teaching of the Second Discourse, he maintains that "it is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizens, and more important in some respects than liberty itself; either because it more closely concerns the preservation of life, or because, property being easier to take away and harder to defend than persons, that should be most respected which is most easily ravished; or again, because property is the true foundation of civil society, and the true guarantee of the engagements of the citizens; for if property did not answer for persons, nothing would be so easy as to elude duties and to laugh at the laws."[Footnote: Rousseau, _Oeuvres_, xii. 41.] And further on, in the same article, he calls property the foundation of the social compact, whose first condition is that every one be maintained in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. We must not wonder at seeing Rousseau thus change sides from day to day. A dreamer and not a philosophic thinker, he perceived some truths and uttered many sophistries, speaking always with the fire of conviction and a fatal eloquence.

It is needless to enter into the detail of Rousseau's life at this time, the time when his most remarkable work was done. Labor was always painful and irritating to him, and it was perhaps the irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted.

His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real persecutions undergone after the publication of _emile_. See his Biographies and _Le Docteur Chatelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau_, Paris, 1890. He was, of course, always eccentric and ill balanced; and was often rendered irritable by a painful disease, caused by a malformation of the bladder. Morley, _Rousseau_, i. 277, etc.

_Oeuvres_, xviii. 155 (_Conf._ Part. ii. liv. viii.).]

Yet he kept on writing with enthusiasm. He speaks of himself as moved in these years by the contemplation of great objects; ridiculously hoping to bring about the triumph of reason and truth over prejudice and lies, and to make men wiser by showing them their true interests. He learned at this time, he says, to meditate profoundly, and for a moment astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and wit, but in which those persons who inhabit ethereal regions joyfully recognized one of their own kind.[Footnote: Rousseau, _Oeuvres_, xx. 275 (II. Dialogue).]

The best known and probably the most important of Rousseau's political writings is the "Contrat Social," or "Social Compact," which followed the Second Discourse after an interval of eight years, thus coming out near the end of the period of its author's greatest literary activity.

In this essay, which is intended to be but a fragment of a larger work on government, Rousseau lays down the conditions which should, as he thinks, govern the lives of men united to form a true state. Indeed, he believes that any government not founded on these principles is illegitimate, resting merely on force and not on right. A nation thus wrongly governed is but an aggregation, not an a.s.sociation. It is without public weal or body politic.

There was nothing original with Rousseau in the idea of a social compact. That idea may be traced in the writings of Plato, who speaks of it as one already familiar. But it did not become a leading doctrine with writers on politics until the publication of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" in 1594. In that book it was contended that there is no escape from the anarchy which exists before the establishment of law, but by men "growing into composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and yielding themselves subject thereunto." Through the seventeenth century the theory grew and flourished. It was treated as the foundation of absolute government by Hobbes, of free government by Locke; it was recognized by Grotius. It received its embodiment in the cabin of the Mayflower, when the Pilgrims did solemnly and mutually, in the presence of G.o.d and one another, covenant and combine themselves together into a civil body politic. By the time of Rousseau the social compact had become one of the commonplaces of political thought.[Footnote: See a history of the social compact in A. Lawrence Lowell, _Essays on Government_. Plato, ii. 229 (_The Republic_, Book ii.). Hooker, i. 241. Hobbes, _Leviathan, pa.s.sim._ Locke, v. 388 (_Of Civil Government_, Section 87). Morion's _New England's Memorial_, 37.] Men recognized, more or less vaguely, that in the case of most countries no definite solemn agreement could actually be shown to have been made, but in their inability to find the record of such a contract writers were willing to a.s.sume one, express or implied. What, then, were the exact conditions of the compact? Rousseau put the question as follows: "To find a form of a.s.sociation which shall protect with all the common strength the person and property of each a.s.sociate, and by which each one, uniting himself to all, may yet obey only himself and remain as free as before." And he undertook to solve the problem by proposing "the total alienation of every a.s.sociate, with all his rights, to the whole community," which he supported by saying that, as every one gave himself up entirely, the condition was equal for all; and that as the condition was equal for all, no one was interested in making it onerous for others.

It will be noticed that there is a variation between the thing sought and the thing found. Rousseau, having promised that each man shall obey only himself, presently puts us off with a condition equal for all. That is to say, instead of liberty we are given equality. The difference is one generally recognized by Anglo-Saxons and often invisible to Continentals. It was seldom seen by Frenchmen in the eighteenth century.

This confusion of thought was a cause of many of the troubles of the French Revolution. We shall see that Rousseau, who had been carried by the love of liberty beyond the verge of the ridiculous in his Discourses, was brought back, in his "Social Compact," by his love of equality, so far as to become the advocate of an intolerable tyranny, yet was quite unaware that he was inconsistent. He composed, in fact, a description of liberty strangely compounded of truth and falsehood. He reckoned that man to be free who was not under the control of any person, but only of the law, and then he provided for the most arbitrary and capricious kind of law-making.

The first task of Rousseau, after settling the conditions of his compact, is to provide a sovereign power in the state. This he finds in the a.s.sociation of the citizens united, as above described, in a body politic. This sovereign cannot be bound by its own actions or resolves, except in case of an agreement with strangers, for none can make a contract with himself. By the original compact the action of the individual citizens as independent agents was exhausted. They can act henceforth only as parts of the whole. There is no contract possible between one or several of them and the community of which they form a part.[Footnote: In an epitome of the _Social Compact_, inserted by Rousseau in the fifth book of _emile_, he thus defines the terms of that compact. "Each of us puts into a common stock his property, his person, his life and all his power, under the supreme direction of the general will, and we receive as a body each member as an indivisible part of the whole." _Oeuvres_, v. 254.] The sovereign must not, however, act directly on individuals, for in so doing it would represent a part only of the community acting on another part, and it would thus lose its moral right. It must act in general matters exclusively, by means of general decrees, which only can properly be called laws. "Now the sovereign, being made up only of the individuals which compose it, has and can have no interest opposed to theirs; therefore the sovereign power need not provide its subject with any guarantee, because it is impossible that the body should wish to injure its members," and as the nature of its action is general and not particular, it cannot injure one individual without doing harm to all the others at the same time. "The sovereign, by the very fact of its existence, is always what it ought to be."

The general will is always right and always tends to public utility, says Rousseau, but it does not follow that the decisions of the people are always equally correct. Man always wills his own good, but does not always see it. The people is never corrupt, but often deceived, and in the latter case only does it seem to will what is evil. If there were no parties in the state, the people, if sufficiently informed, would always vote rightly, for the little differences in private interests would balance each other, and the resulting average would be the general will.

But through parties and a.s.sociations this result is prevented. A nation may change its laws when it pleases, even the best of them; for if it likes to hurt itself, who has the right to say it nay?

Sovereignty is inalienable, for power is transmissible, but not will.

Sovereignty consists essentially in the general will, and the general will cannot be represented. It is the same, or it is other; there is no intermediate point. The deputies of the people cannot be its representatives; they can only be its agents; they can conclude nothing definitely. Any law that the people has not ratified in its a.s.sembly is null; it is not a law. The English nation thinks itself free. It is much mistaken. It is free only during the election of members of Parliament.

As soon as these are elected the nation is enslaved; it is nothing.

Sovereignty is indivisible, its powers being legislative only, and the executive function of the state being but its emanation.

Such being the essential conditions of the social compact, what are the states to which it may be applied? Although Rousseau gives many directions for the government of larger countries, we see that his system is truly applicable only to nations so small that the whole body of voters can be united in one meeting. These popular a.s.semblies, he says, should be held frequently, at times fixed by law and independent of any summons, and also at irregular times when needed. Let no one object that such frequent meetings would take up too much time. He answers that "as soon as the public service ceases to be the princ.i.p.al business of the citizens, and they prefer to serve with their purses rather than with their persons, the state is already near to ruin. If it be necessary to march to battle, they pay soldiers and stay at home; if it be necessary to attend the council, they choose deputies and stay at home. By laziness and money they have at last got troops to enslave their country and representatives to betray her."

The only law that requires unanimity is the social compact itself. When that is once formed, each citizen consents to every law, even to those which are pa.s.sed in spite of him. When a law is proposed in the a.s.sembly of the people, the question is not exactly whether the proposal is approved or rejected, but whether it is in accordance with the general will, which is the will of the people. Every man by his vote declares his opinion on that point, and by counting the votes the declaration of the general will is ascertained. When, therefore, the opinion which is opposed to mine prevails, it proves nothing more than that I was mistaken, and that what I took to be the general will was not so. If my private opinion had carried the day against the general will, I should have done what I did not wish; and then I should not have been free.

It has been said that the sovereign must not act in particular cases. To do so would be to confound law and fact, and the body politic would soon be a prey to violence. It is, therefore, necessary to inst.i.tute an executive branch, which Rousseau calls indifferently _government_ or _prince_, explaining that the latter word may be used collectively. But, differing in this from older writers, he denies that the establishment of an executive power gives rise to any contract between the body of the people and the persons appointed to govern. He considers these persons to be intermediate between the nation considered as sovereign, and the people considered as subject, and to hold but a delegated power. In this opinion, Rousseau has been followed by most liberal governments inst.i.tuted since his day. But he carries this theory much farther than it is safe to do in practice. The sovereign, he says, may at any moment revoke the powers of its agents, and the first act of every public a.s.sembly should be to answer these two questions: first, whether it pleases the sovereign to maintain the present form of government; and second, whether it pleases the people to leave the administration to those persons who now exercise it.

The chapters on the form of government are far less important than those on sovereignty. Rousseau recognized democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy as applicable respectively to small, middle-sized, and large states. He says that democracy is the most difficult form to manage, requiring for its perfect working a state so small that every citizen can know every other personally, and also great simplicity of manners, great equality of ranks and fortunes, and little luxury. This applies, of course, only to democracy in its extreme form, in which the people exercises all the functions of government without delegating any of them. Rousseau's preference was for what he calls aristocracy, a government of the most wise and experienced. The first societies, he says, were thus governed, and the American Indians are so governed still. It is noticeable that the Indians take in the works of Rousseau a place similar to that taken by the Chinese in those of Voltaire; they are distant people, living in an ideal condition. The freedom of the savage, the literary civilization of the Oriental, were held up to admiration by these two writers, diametrically opposed in their way of looking at life, but similar in their utter want of comprehension of all that was not European and contemporary. Next after the government of the sages and the elders Rousseau placed elective government, which, in common with some other abstract writers, he cla.s.ses as aristocratic. An hereditary aristocracy he calls the worst of all governments. He intimated that his remedy for the weakness of small countries, as against foreign enemies, would be found in federation, but he postponed the discussion of this subject to a larger treatise, which was never written.[Footnote: Rousseau has himself given two summaries of the Social Compact; one very short, in the Sixth Letter from the Mountain (_Oeuvres_, vii. 378). This was written after the condemnation of the book by the authorities of Geneva, and he points out in his remonstrance that he has taken Geneva as the model state, in the Social Compact. The other summary, much fuller, is in the fifth book of _emile_ (_Oeuvres_, v. 248). Here we find the following growl at the whole social order: "Nous examinerons si l'on n'a pas fait trop ou trop peu dans l'inst.i.tution sociale. Si les individus soumis aux loix et aux hommes, tandis que les societes gardent entre elles l'independance de la nature, ne restent pas exposes aux maux des deux etats sans en avoir les avantages, et s'il ne vaudrait pas mieux qu'il n'y eut point de societe civile au monde que d'y en avoir plusieurs."]

Rousseau pointed out very forcibly the incompatibility with civil government of a religion depending on a priesthood whose organization extends beyond the territory of the country itself and forms a body politic. Yet he did not propose to apply the only true remedy for this condition of things, which is the complete separation of church and state, combined with liberty of speech both for the clergy and the laity. He recognized as possible only three sorts of religion, of which the first, without temples, altars, or rites, confined inwardly to the worship of G.o.d and externally to the moral duties, was, as he thought, the pure and simple religion of the Gospels, the true theism, and might be called the natural divine law. The next is a national religion, belonging to one country. It has its G.o.ds, its rites, its altars, all within its own land, outside of which everything is infidel, strange, and barbarian. Man's duties extend no farther than the boundaries of his own country. Such were the religions of the early nations. The third kind gives to its votaries two systems of legislation, two chiefs, two homes, makes them submit to contradictory duties, prevents their being at once devout worshipers and good citizens. Such a religion is the Roman Catholic.

The Roman clergy, he says, is united, not by its formal a.s.semblies, but by communion and excommunication, which are its social compact, and by means of which it will always retain the mastery over kings and nations.

All the priests who are in communion are citizens, although at the ends of the earth. This invention is a masterpiece of politics.

On some religion our author believes that the state has a right to insist. There is a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the sovereign may fix, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as principles of sociability. These must be few, simple and clear, and announced without explanation or commentary. The existence of a deity, powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foreseeing, and providing; the life to come, with the happiness of the good and the punishment of the wicked; the sacredness of the Social Compact and of the laws,--these are the positive dogmas. Of things forbidden there should be but one: intolerance. Whosoever says that there is no salvation but in the church should be driven from the state; for such teaching is dangerous to the sovereign, except, indeed, in a theocracy. Any one who does not hold to the simple creed above described may properly be banished, not as impious but as unsociable, incapable of loving justice and the laws sincerely, or of sacrificing his life to his duty. And if any one, after having publicly accepted these dogmas, behaves as if he did not believe them, let him be put to death; he has committed the greatest of crimes; he has lied before the laws.

In the short essay on the Social Compact, Rousseau has brought together, as we have seen, several of the most dangerous errors which have afflicted modern society. The people, according to him, is not only all powerful, but always righteous; sometimes deceived, but never corrupt. Why the whole community should be better or wiser than the best of the persons who compose it; why our errors should balance or counteract each other and our virtues not do so, Rousseau probably never asked himself; or if the question occurred to his mind, he dismissed it with a merely specious answer. There is hardly a limit to the tyranny which he allows to the mult.i.tude. The individual citizen is made free from the interference of a single master only that he may be the more dependent on that corporate despot who is to control his every action and his very thoughts. Manners, customs, above all public opinion, are declared to be the most important of laws. Individuality is, therefore, to be absolutely banished. Nor is security provided for. It is the advantage of a stationary system that a man may know this year what the world will expect of him ten years hence and may lay his plans accordingly. Human laws may sometimes be pardoned for being as inflexible as the laws of physics if they are as surely to be relied on. But Rousseau, while hoping that his state will change very little, carefully reserves for his tyrant the right to be capricious. And lest that right should ever be forgotten he takes care that the whole form of government shall be brought in question at every public meeting. What the mult.i.tude has to-day decided it may reverse to-morrow. The unfortunate citizen is not left even the right to protest. The general will, when once proved by the popular vote, is his own will. The very desires of his heart must loyally follow the changing caprices of his many-headed master.

Yet here as elsewhere Rousseau has joined a n.o.ble conception to a base one. The law, once promulgated by the sovereign power, is to be universal throughout the state and superior to all human rulers. The idea was not novel, but it was well that it should again be distinctly formulated.

It is quite in accordance with the general spirit of the essay that while intolerance is said to be the only religious crime, it is in fact the foundation of the whole ecclesiastical system of the republic.

Whoever dares to say that there is no salvation outside of the church is to be driven from the state. By this means Rousseau would have exiled nearly every Christian of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, whoever doubts the existence of G.o.d, His providence, and His rewards and punishments, is to be treated in the same manner. Some of the Philosophers of the age are thus excluded. Verily, few are the just that remain, and Rousseau is quite right in his opinion that those who distinguish between civil and theological intolerance are mistaken. In his system, at least, the two are closely connected.

CHAPTER XIX.

"LA NOUVELLE HeLOSE" AND "eMILE."

It was not alone by his political writings that Jean Jacques Rousseau exercised a great influence over Europe. Of all his books, the two which are perhaps most famous take the form of loose and disjointed fiction, and deal not with government, but with life, pa.s.sion, society, and education. Yet the characters of "La Nouvelle Helose," and of "emile,"

are not mere frames of scarecrows clothed with abstract qualities and fine sentiments. Saint-Preux, emile and the Tutor, Julie, Sophie, Claire, and Lord Edward Bomston are live persons, whom the reader may like or dislike. In the first three Rousseau would seem to have incorporated himself, and the result is interesting, but repulsive. In Julie we have Jean Jacques' ideal woman, a being of a n.o.ble nature, tinged and defiled with something low and morbid; but Claire and Sophie seem taken only from observation, not introspection, and although far from faultless are often charming.

"La Nouvelle Helose" is a novel written in letters, a form of writing more tedious than any other. But it should be remembered that in the early days of fiction novels were so few that to occupy a long time in the reading was not an impediment to the popularity of one of them. If we may believe Rousseau, the "New Heloisa" produced a great sensation.

All Paris was impatient for its appearance. When at last it was published, men of letters were divided in opinion, but society was unanimous in its praise, and women were so much delighted with it that there were few even of high rank whose conquest the author might not have achieved had he chosen to undertake it. While making due allowance for the morbid vanity of Jean Jacques, we may entirely believe him when he says that the book captivated the reading public. One lady, he tells us, had dressed after supper for the ball at the Opera House, and sat down to read the new novel while waiting for the time to go. At midnight she ordered her carriage, but did not put down the book. The coach came to the door, but she kept on. At two her servants warned her of the hour. She answered that there was no hurry. At four she undressed, and continued to read for the rest of the night. On the first appearance of the story the booksellers used to let out copies at twelve sous the hour.[Footnote: Rousseau, xix. 101 (_Confessions_, liv. xi.).] To-day its charm is gone. Few indeed are the works of pure literature which are read a hundred years after publication, except by the authors of literary histories and the unfortunate pupils of injudicious school-mistresses (and the "New Heloisa" will not form a part of any scheme of female education); but a good style and a true enthusiasm may lighten the task even of these sufferers.

It is a singular fact that in some matters of feeling no age seems so far from our own as that of our great-grandfathers. The lovers of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century appear to us natural and healthy beings. Those of the eighteenth seem sentimental and foolish. In the case of Rousseau's great novel this effect is increased by the morbid strain of the author's mind. With him all pa.s.sion tends to a.s.sume unhealthy shapes, and the very breezes of Lake Leman come laden with close and sickly odors.

It is not worth while to deal here with the story of the "New Heloisa,"--a story of illicit pa.s.sion in the first part; and in the second, of the happy marriage of the heroine to a man who is not her lover. The visit paid by that lover to his old mistress and her husband in their home at Clarens, with all the trials of virtue which it involves, is a disagreeable piece of sentimentality. The members of the trio fall on each other's necks with unpleasant frequency and fervor. But the picture of that home itself, with its well-ordered housekeeping, its liberality and its plainness, is interesting and attractive. "Since the masters of this house have taken it for their dwelling, they have turned to their use all that served only for ornament; it is no longer a house made to be seen, but to be lived in. They have built up the long lines of doors by which rooms opened one out of another, and made new doorways in convenient places; they have cut up rooms that were too large, and improved the arrangement; they have subst.i.tuted simple and convenient furniture for what was old and expensive. Everything is agreeable and smiling, everything breathes abundance and cleanliness; nothing shows costliness or luxury; there is no room where you do not feel yourself in the country and where you do not find all the conveniences of town. The same changes are noticeable outside; the poultry-yard has been enlarged at the expense of the carriage-house. In the place of an old broken-down billiard-table they have built a fine wine-press, and they have got rid of some screeching peac.o.c.ks to make room for a dairy. The kitchen garden was too small for the kitchen; a second one has been made of the parterre, but so neat and so well laid out that thus transformed it is more pleasing to the eye than before. Good espaliers have been subst.i.tuted for the doleful yews that covered the wall. Instead of the useless horse-chestnut tree, young black mulberries are beginning to shade the courtyard, and two rows of walnut trees, running to the road, have been planted in place of the old lindens which bordered the avenue. Everywhere the useful has been subst.i.tuted for the agreeable, and almost everywhere the agreeable has gained by it." The description is masterly, but we cannot quite forgive Rousseau for sacrificing the horse-chestnut and the lindens.[Footnote: Rousseau, ix. 235 (Nouv. Hel. Part. iv. Let. x.).]

But not quite all the land is treated in this utilitarian manner. The heroine has an "Elysium." This place is near the house, but separated from the rest of the grounds by a thick hedge. It is full of native plants forming a deep shade, yet the ground is covered with gra.s.s like velvet, and flowers spring up on all sides. Vines climb from tree to tree, rooted, it may be, in the trunks of the trees themselves. A stream of clear water meanders through the place, sometimes divided into several channels, sometimes united in one, rippling here over a bed of gravel, there reflecting the trees and the sky. A colony of birds, protected from all disturbance, charms the solitude with song. Nature is here encouraged, not thwarted; little is left to the gardener; much to the intelligent and loving care of the mistress.

The account of the garden covers many pages of the "New Heloisa," pages at once eloquent and interesting. Artificial as are many of its details, the letter is a plea for nature against artificiality. The readers in the eighteenth century were charmed, and hastened to imitate Rousseau's heroine. The straight gravel walks, the formal flower-beds, the clipped hedges of old France, became tiresome in the eyes of their possessors. A dreamer had told them that all these things made a very fine place, where the owner would scarcely care to go, and they believed him. The new fashion brought with it a new affectation, perhaps the most offensive of all, the affectation of simplicity. The garden, as truly a product of man's hand and brain as the house or the picture-gallery, was made to mimic the forest, losing, in too many cases, its own peculiar beauty, without gaining the true charm of wild nature. On the other hand, the eyes of Rousseau's admirers were opened to many things not noticed before. The real woods received their appropriate worship. The novel of Jean Jacques combined with the exhortations of the economists to turn the attention of the educated cla.s.ses to rural matters.

The life led by the model couple in the "New Heloisa" is one of humdrum, conscientious respectability. It is a country life, fairly simple and without ostentation; but it is as far removed as possible from all that can be connected with the n.o.ble savage. Julie and Monsieur de Wolmar, her husband, rule their little world strictly and kindly. They try to make life profitable and pleasant to their children and their servants. To the poor they are patronizing and benevolent. Apart from their overflowing sentimentality they are honest, self-sufficient, commonplace people. Rousseau, born in the middle cla.s.s, had a middle-cla.s.s, respectable ideal, lying beside many very different ideals in his ill-ordered brain. And this novel which begins with pa.s.sion ends with something not far removed from priggishness.

It is quite needless to discuss here how much Rousseau owed in his "emile" to the teachings of Locke, of Montaigne, or of others. His ideas, wherever he may have got them, were always sufficiently colored by his own personality. "emile," which has even less structure of fiction than the "New Heloisa," is a treatise on education, or rather on the ideal education, for Rousseau distinctly disclaims the intention of writing a handbook. It is on the whole the most agreeable and the most useful of the works of its author; although not without deplorable marks of his baseness. The book shows an amount of careful observation of children not a little astonishing in a man who sent his own infants to the Foundling lest they should disturb him; it contains remarks about good women equally remarkable in one whose dealings in life were princ.i.p.ally with bad ones.

"All is good coming from the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man;" thus begins "emile." "He makes one land nourish the productions of another, one tree bear another's fruit; he mixes and confounds the climates, the elements, the seasons; he mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave; he overturns, he disfigures everything; he loves deformity and monstrosities; he wants nothing such as nature made it, not even man, who has to be trained for him like a managed horse, trimmed to his fashion, like a tree of his garden."

Ignorance is harmless; error only is pernicious. Men do not go astray on account of the things of which they are ignorant, but of those which they think they know. The time which we spend in learning what others have thought is lost for learning to think ourselves; we have more information and less vigor of mind.

Let us seek out the kind of education proper for the formation of a vigorous and, above all, of an independent man. We will call our pupil emile. The author himself shall be his tutor and shall devote himself exclusively to the education of this single boy. A father, however, is the best of tutors, for zeal is far more valuable in this place than talent. But whoever it be that undertakes the education, he must be always the same and always absolute. If a child ever gets the idea that there are grown people that have no more reason than children, the authority of age is lost, the education has failed.

The position of the tutor is one of the most curious and one of the most mistaken things in "emile." While in many respects the training described in the book would tend to make a manly and independent boy, the pervading presence of the tutor would perhaps undo all the good of the system. It is true that absolute truth is recommended, that "a single lie which the master was shown to have told the pupil would ruin forever the fruit of the education." Yet the tutor is to interfere openly or secretly in every part of emile's life. "It is important that the disciple shall do nothing without the master's knowing and willing it, not even what is wrong; and it is a hundred times better that the governor approve of a fault and be mistaken, than that he should be deceived by his pupil and the fault committed without his knowledge."