The Eve of the French Revolution Part 17

Let the tutor, therefore, be the pupil's confidant, even; if necessary, his companion in vice. You must be a man to speak strongly to the human heart. The tutor is constantly deceiving emile, and some of his tricks are so transparent that it is wonderful that Rousseau could have expected the simplest of boys to be taken in by them. Here is an instance.

The object is to show emile the origin of property, and to give him the first idea of its obligations. "The child, living in the country, will have got some notion of field-work; for that he will need only eyes and leisure, and both of these he will have. It belongs to every age, and especially to his, to wish to create, to imitate, to produce, to show signs of power and activity. He will not twice have seen a garden dug, vegetables sown, sprouting and growing, before he will want to be gardening too.

"On the principles heretofore established, I do not oppose his desire; on the contrary, I favor it, I share his taste, I work with him, not for his pleasure, but for mine; at least he thinks so; I become his under-gardener; as his arms are not strong yet, I dig the earth for him; he takes possession of it by planting a bean; and surely that possession is more sacred and worthy of respect than that which Nunes Balbao took of South America, in the name of the king of Spain, by planting his standard on the sh.o.r.es of the South Sea.

"We come every day to water the beans, we see them sprout with ecstasies of joy. I increase that joy by telling him, `This belongs to you;' and by explaining to him this term, `to belong,' I make him feel that he has spent here his time, his labor, his pains, his very person; that in this earth there is something of himself, which he can claim against every one, as he could draw his arm from the hand of a man who should try to hold it in spite of him.

"One fine day he comes out eagerly, with his watering-pot in his hand.

Oh horrible sight! Oh grief! All the beans are torn up, all the ground is turned over; you could not recognize the very place. `Oh, what has become of my labor, my work, the sweet fruit of my care and of my sweat?

Who has robbed me of my property? Who has taken my beans?' His young heart rises; the first feeling of injustice comes to pour its sad bitterness into it; tears flow in streams; the desolate child fills the air with groans and cries. I share his pain, his indignation; we seek, we inquire, we examine. At last we discover that the gardener has done the deed; we summon him.

"But here we are very far out of our reckoning. The gardener, learning of what we complain, begins to complain louder than we. `What!

gentlemen; it is you that have thus spoiled my work! I had sown in that place some Maltese melons, whose seed had been given me as a treasure, and which I hoped to serve up to you for a feast when they were ripe; but now, to plant your miserable beans, you have destroyed my melons after they had sprouted, and I can never replace them. You have done me an irreparable injury, and you have deprived yourselves of the pleasure of eating delicious melons.'

"Jean Jacques. Excuse us, my poor Robert. You had put there your labor and your pains. I see that we were wrong to spoil your work; we will get you some more Maltese seed, and we will dig no more in the ground, without knowing if some one has not set his hand to it before us.

"Robert. Well, gentlemen, at that rate you may take your rest, for there is very little wild land left. I work on what my father improved; everybody does the same by his own, and all the land you see has long been occupied.

"emile. In that case, Robert, is melon seed often lost?

"Robert. I beg your pardon, my young sir; little gentlemen do not often come along who are so thoughtless as you. No one touches his neighbor's garden; each man respects the work of others, so that his own may be safe.

"emile. But I have no garden.

"Robert. What difference does that make to me? If you spoil mine, I will no longer let you walk in it; for, you see, I do not want to lose my labor.

"Jean Jacques. Could we not make an arrangement with our good Robert?

Let him grant my young friend and me a corner of his garden to cultivate, on condition that he shall have half the produce.

"Robert. I grant it without conditions. But remember that I shall go and dig up your beans if you touch my melons."

It is perhaps wrong to hold Rousseau in any part of his writings to any approach to consistency. We have seen some of the mistakes in emile's education. Let us look at some of its strong points. Yet we shall find the tares so thoroughly mixed with the wheat that to separate them entirely may be impossible. Rousseau insists that from the earliest infancy the child's body shall be free. The swaddling bands, common all over the continent in the last century, in which the poor little being was bound and bundled so that he could not move hand or foot, were to be absolutely discontinued. The child, nursed if possible by its own mother, was to have free limbs. It was to be brought up in the country, and as it grew older was to run about bareheaded and barefoot. Too much clothing, thought Rousseau, makes the body tender; and he seems to have carried the theory unreasonably far.

Cleanliness and cold baths were recommended to a generation singularly in need of them. emile was brought up to enjoy fresh air, perhaps to be almost a slave to the need of it. He was given plenty of sleep, but his bed was hard, his food coa.r.s.e. Everything was done to make him strong, hardy, and active.

"The only habit which the child should be allowed to form is that of forming none." He should not use one hand more than the other; he should not be accustomed to want to eat or to sleep at the same hours every day, nor should he fear to be alone. He should be gradually taught not to be afraid of masks, to overcome his fright at firearms. He should be helped in all that is really useful, but not encouraged to indulge vain fancies. Children should be given as much real liberty as possible, and as little dominion over others as may be. They should do as much as possible by themselves, and ask as little as they can of others. "The only person who does his own will is he who does not need, in doing it, to put another's arms at the end of his own; whence it follows that the first of all good things is not authority, but liberty."

emile's desire to learn is to be excited. He is to see the reason for the steps he takes. The talent of teaching is that of making the pupil pleased with the instruction. Something must be left to the boy's own mind and reflection. He is not to be given much to read. For a long time, let "Robinson Crusoe" be his only book. But emile shall learn a trade, a good mechanical trade, which is always needed, in which there is always employment. He shall also learn to draw; less for the art itself than to make his eye accurate and his hand obedient; for in general it is less important for him to know this or that than to acquire the clearness of sense and the good habit of body which the various studies give.

Having brought up emile to manhood, it becomes necessary to provide him with a wife. Here the tutor is still active, and prepares the meeting with Sophie which emile takes for accidental. It is needless to remark again on the young man's gullibility. He is Rousseau's creature, and fashioned as his maker pleases. Nothing is more disturbing than to submit the dreams of such a man as Jean Jacques to the unsympathetic rules of common sense. Our concern is with the effect they produced on the minds of other people, who undertook in some measure to live them out. Let us then pause over some of the considerations suggested by the necessity of admitting into the scheme of education a being so disturbing as a woman.

Rousseau saw more, I think, than most persons who have undertaken to deal with the subject in a reforming spirit, what is the true and proper relation between the s.e.xes. While boys are to exercise the manly trades that require physical strength, he would leave to women the lighter employments, and more especially those connected with dress and its materials. It is the usual mistake of those who in our day set themselves up as champions of woman, to seek to make the s.e.xes not coordinate and mutually helpful, but identical and competing. "It is perhaps one of the marvels of nature," says Rousseau, "to have made two beings so similar while forming them so differently."[Footnote: _Oeuvres_, v. 5 (_emile_, liv. v.). Compare viii. 203 (_Nouv. Hel._ Letter). "A perfect man and a perfect woman should not resemble each other any more in their souls than in their faces."]

On the whole, Sophie is a more attractive person than emile; perhaps because she has been brought up by her mother, and not given over in her babyhood to the vigilance of Jean Jacques. The artistic quality of the author's mind has obliged him to make his heroine more true to nature than his theories have allowed him to make his hero. And his theories about girls are quite as good and quite as different from the fashionable practice of his day as those about boys. It is curious how his ideas approach the American customs. A certain coquetry, he says, is allowable in marriageable girls; amus.e.m.e.nt is their princ.i.p.al business. Married women have the cares of home to occupy them, and have no longer to seek husbands. Rousseau would let the girls appear in public, would take them to b.a.l.l.s, entertainments, the theatre. Sophie is not only more vivacious than emile, she has also more self-control than he; who, in spite of his virile education, is entirely overcome when the ever-meddling tutor insists on two years of travel for his pupil, in order that the young people may grow older and that emile may learn to master his pa.s.sions. The day of parting arrives, and emile, in true eighteenth century style, utters shrieks, sheds torrents of tears on the hands of Sophie's father, of her mother, of the heroine herself, embraces with sobs all the servants of the family, and repeats the same things a thousand times with a disorder which, even to Jean Jacques's rudimentary sense of humor, would be laughable under circ.u.mstances less desperate. Sophie, on the other hand is quiet, pale and sad, without tears, insensible to the cries and caresses of her lover.

It is in "emile" that Rousseau gives the most elaborate expression of his religious opinions, putting them in the mouth of a poor curate in Savoy.[Footnote: The pa.s.sage is known as "Profession de Foi du Vicaire savoyard" and is found in the fourth book of _emile_, _Oeuvres_, iv.

136-254.] The pupil has been kept ignorant of all religion to the age of eighteen, "for if he learns it earlier than he should, he runs the risk of never knowing it." Without stopping to consider the dangers of this course, let us see what answer Rousseau gives to the greatest questions that perplex mankind. We may expect much sublime feeling, some moral perversion, little logical thought.

The Roman Church, he says, by calling on us to believe too much, may prevent our believing anything. We know not where to stop. But doubt on matters so important to us is a state unbearable to the human mind. It decides one way or another in spite of itself, and prefers to make a mistake rather than to believe nothing.

Motion can originate only in will. "I believe, then, that a will moves the universe and animates nature."... "How does a will produce a physical and corporeal action? I do not know, but I feel within myself that it does produce it. I will to act, and I act; I wish to move my body, and my body moves; but that an inanimate body in repose should move itself, or should produce motion, is incomprehensible and without example."... "If matter moved shows me will, matter moved according to certain laws shows me intelligence; this is my second article of faith."

We see that the universe has a plan, although we do not see to what it tends. I cannot believe that dead matter has produced living and feeling beings, that blind chance has produced intelligent beings, that what does not think has produced what thinks. "Whether matter is eternal or created, whether or not there is a pa.s.sive principle, it is certain that all is one and proclaims a single intelligence; for I see nothing which is not ordered in the same system, and which does not concur to the same end, namely, the preservation of the whole in the established order.

This Being who wills and who can, this Being active in Himself, this Being, whatever he may be, who moves the universe and orders all things, I call G.o.d. I attach to this name the ideas of intelligence, power and will, which I have united to form the conception, and that of goodness which is their necessary consequence; but I know no better the Being to whom I have given it; He hides Himself alike from my senses and my understanding; the more I think of it, the more I am confused; I know very certainly that He exists and that He exists by himself; I know that my existence is subordinated to His, and that all things that I know of are in the same case. I perceive G.o.d everywhere in His works; I feel Him in myself, I see Him about me; but as soon as I want to contemplate Him in Himself, as soon as I want to seek where He is, what He is, what is His substance, He escapes from me, and my troubled spirit perceives nothing more."

Having considered the attributes of G.o.d, the Savoyard curate turns to himself. He finds that he can observe and govern other creatures; whence he infers that they may all be made for him. But mankind differs from all other things in nature by being inharmonious, disorderly, and miserable. Man has in himself two distinct principles, one of which lifts him to the study of eternal truth, to the love of justice and moral beauty; the other enslaves him under the rule of the senses, and the pa.s.sions which are their servants. "No! "cries the curate, "man is not one; I will, and I will not; I feel myself at once enslaved, and free; I see good, I love it, and I do evil; I am active when I listen to reason, pa.s.sive when my pa.s.sions carry me away; my worst torture, when I fail, is to feel that I could have resisted."

Man is free in his actions, and, therefore, animated by an immaterial substance. This is the third article of the curate's faith. Conscience is the voice of the soul; the pa.s.sions are the voices of the body.

Immortality of the soul is a pleasing doctrine and there is nothing to contradict it. "When, delivered from the illusions caused by the body and the senses, we shall enjoy the contemplation of the Supreme Being, and of the eternal truths whose source He is, when the beauty of order shall strike all the powers of our soul, and we shall be solely occupied in comparing what we have done with what we ought to have done, then will the voice of conscience resume its force and its empire; then will the pure bliss which is born of self-content, and the bitter regret for self-debas.e.m.e.nt, distinguish by inexhaustible feelings the fate which each man will have prepared for himself. Ask me not, O my good friend, if there will be other sources of happiness and of misery; I do not know, and the one I imagine is enough to console me for this life and to make me hope for another. I do not say that the good will be rewarded; for what other reward can await an excellent being than to live in accordance with his nature; but I say that they will be happy, because the Author of their being, the Author of all justice, having made them to feel, has not made them to suffer; and because, not having abused their liberty on the earth, they have not changed their destiny by their own fault; yet they have suffered in this life, and so they will have it made up to them in another. This feeling is less founded on the merit of man than on the notion of goodness which seems to me inseparable from the divine essence. I only suppose the laws of order to be observed, and G.o.d consistent with Himself."[Footnote: "Non pas pour nous, non pas pour nous, Seigneur, Mais pour ton nom, mais pour ton propre honneur, O Dieu! fais nous revivre! Ps. 115." (Rousseau's note).]

"Neither ask me if the torments of the wicked will be eternal, and whether it is consistent with the goodness of the Author of their being to condemn them to suffer forever; I do not know that either, and have not the vain curiosity to examine useless questions. What matters it to me what becomes of the wicked? I take little interest in their fate.

Nevertheless I find it hard to believe that they are condemned to endless torments. If Supreme Justice avenges itself, it avenges itself in this life. You and your errors, O nations, are its ministers! It employs the ills which you make to punish the crimes which brought them about. It is in your insatiable hearts, gnawed with envy, avarice, and ambition, that the avenging pa.s.sions punish your crimes, in the midst of your false prosperity. What need to seek h.e.l.l in the other life? It is already here, in the hearts of the wicked."

Revelation is unnecessary. Miracles need proof more than they give it.

As soon as the nations undertook to make G.o.d speak, each made Him speak in its own way. If men had listened only to what He says in their hearts, there had been but one religion upon earth. "I meditate on the order of the universe, not to explain it by vain systems, but to admire it unceasingly, to adore the wise Author who is felt in it. I converse with Him, I let His divine essence penetrate all my faculties, I tenderly remember His benefits, I bless Him for His gifts; but I do not pray to Him. What should I ask Him? That He should change the course of things on my account; that He should perform miracles in my favor? I, who should love more than all things the order established by His wisdom, and maintained by His Providence, should I wish to see that order interfered with for me? No, that rash prayer would deserve to be punished rather than to be answered. Nor do I ask Him for the power to do good; why ask Him for what He has given me? Has He not given me a conscience to love the good; reason, to know it; liberty, to choose it?

If I do evil, I have no excuse; I do it because I will; to ask him to change my will is to ask of Him what He demands of me; it is wanting Him to do my work, and let me take the reward; not to be content with my state is to want to be a man no longer, it is to want things otherwise than they are, it is to want disorder and evil. Source of justice and truth, clement and kind G.o.d! in my trust in Thee the supreme wish of my heart is that Thy will may be done. In uniting mine to it, I do what thou doest, I acquiesce in Thy goodness; I seem to share beforehand the supreme felicity which is its price."

This appears to have been Rousseau's deliberate opinion on the subject of prayer. He has, however, expressed in the "New Heloisa" quite another view, which is found in a letter from Julie to Saint-Preux, and is inserted princ.i.p.ally, perhaps, to give the latter an opportunity to answer it. Yet Rousseau, as we have often seen, although unable to understand that any one could honestly differ from himself, was quite capable of holding conflicting opinions. And the value of any one of his sayings is not much diminished by the fact that it is contradicted in the next chapter. "You have religion," says Julie,[Footnote: _Nouvelle Helose_, Part. vi. Let. vi. (_Oeuvres_, x. 261).]

"but I am afraid that you do not get from it all the advantage which it offers in the conduct of life, and that philosophical pride may disdain the simplicity of the Christian. I have seen you hold opinions on prayer which are not to my taste. According to you, this act of humility is fruitless for us; and G.o.d, having given us, in our consciences, all that can lead us to good, afterwards leaves us to ourselves and allows our liberty to act. That is not, as you know, the doctrine of Saint Paul, nor that which is professed in our church. We are free, it is true, but we are ignorant, weak, inclined to evil. And whence should light and strength come to us, if not from Him who is their source? And why should we obtain them, if we do not deign to ask for them? Beware, my friend, lest to your sublime conceptions of the Great Being, human pride join low ideas, which belong but to mankind; as if the means which relieve our weakness were suitable to divine Power, and as if, like us, It required art to generalize things, so as to treat them more easily! It seems, to listen to you, that this Power would be embarra.s.sed should It watch over every individual; you fear that a divided and continual attention might fatigue It, and you think it much finer that It should do everything by general laws, doubtless because they cost It less care.

O great philosophers! How much G.o.d is obliged to you for your easy methods and for sparing Him work."

Enough has been said of the theism of Rousseau to show its great difference from that of Voltaire and of his followers. His att.i.tude toward them is not unlike that of Socrates toward the Sophists. Indeed, Jean Jacques, by whomever inspired, is far more of a prophet than of a philosopher. He speaks by an authority which he feels to be above argument. In opposition to Locke and to all his school, he dares to believe in innate ideas, although he calls them feelings.[Footnote: "When, first occupied with the object, we think of ourselves only by reflection, it is an idea; on the other hand, when the impression received excites our first attention and we think only by reflection on the object which causes it, it is a sensation." _Oeuvres_, iv. 195 _n_. (_emile_, liv. iv.).] These innate ideas are love of self, fear of pain, horror of death, the desire for well-being.

Conscience may well be one of them.

"My son," cries the Savoyard curate, "keep your soul always in a state to desire that there may be a G.o.d, and you will never doubt it.

Moreover, whatever course you may adopt, consider that the true duties of religion are independent of the inst.i.tutions of men; that a just heart is the true temple of Divinity; that in all countries and all sects, to love G.o.d above all things, and your neighbor as yourself, is the sum of the law; that no religion dispenses with the moral duties; that these are the only duties really essential; that the inward worship is the first of these duties, and that without faith no true virtue exists.

"Flee from those who, under the pretense of explaining nature, sow desolating doctrines in the hearts of men, and whose apparent skepticism is a hundred times more affirmative and more dogmatic than the decided tone of their adversaries."

At the time when "emile" was written, Jean Jacques had quarreled personally with most of his old a.s.sociates of the Philosophic school.

Diderot, D'Alembert, Grimm, and their master, Voltaire,--Rousseau had some real or fancied grievance against them all. But the difference between him and them was intrinsic, not accidental. By nature and training they belonged to the rather thin rationalism of the eighteenth century; a rationalism which was so eager to believe nothing not acquired through the senses that it preferred to leave half the phenomena of life not only unaccounted for but unconsidered, because to account for them by its own methods was difficult, if not impossible.

Rousseau, at least, contemplated the whole of human nature, its affections, aspirations, and pa.s.sions, as well as its observations and reflections, and this was the secret of his influence over men.

CHAPTER XX.

THE PAMPHLETS.

The reign of Louis XVI. was a time of great and rapid change. The old order was pa.s.sing away, and the Revolution was taking place both in manners and laws, for fifteen years before the a.s.sembling of the Estates General. In the previous reigns the rich middle cla.s.s had approached social equality with the n.o.bles; and the sons of great families had consented to repair their broken fortunes by marrying the daughters of financiers;--"manuring their land," they called it.

Next a new set of persons claimed a place in the social scale. The men of letters were courted even by courtiers. The doctrines of the Philosophers had fairly entered the public mind. The n.o.bility and the middle cla.s.s, with such of the poor as could read and think, had been deeply impressed by Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists. All men had not been affected in the same way. Some were blind followers of these leaders, eager to push the doctrines of the school to the last possible results, partisans of Helvetius and Holbach. These were the most logical. Beside them came the sentimentalists, the worshipers of Rousseau. They were not a whit less dogmatic than the others, but their dogmatism took more fanciful and less consistent forms. They believed in their ideal republics or their social compacts with a religious faith.

Some of them were ready to persecute others and to die themselves for their chimeras, and subsequently proved it. And in not a few minds the teachings of Holbach and those of Rousseau were more or less confused, and co-existed with a lingering belief in the church and her doctrines.

People still went to ma.s.s from habit, from education, from an uneasy feeling that it was a good thing to do; doubting all the while with Voltaire, dreaming with Rousseau, wondering what might be coming, believing that the world was speedily to be improved, having no very definite idea as to how the improvement was to be brought about, but trusting vaguely to the enlightenment of the age, which was taken for granted.

For this reign of the last absolute king of France was a time of hope and of belief in human perfectibility. One after another, the schemers had come forward with their plans for regenerating society. There were the economists, ready to swear that the world, and especially France, would be rich, if free trade were adopted, and the taxes were laid--they could not quite agree how. There were the army reformers, burning to introduce Prussian discipline; if only you could reconcile blows and good feeling. There were people calling for Equality, and for government by the most enlightened; quite unaware that their demands were inconsistent. There were the philanthropists, perhaps the most genuine of all the reformers, working at the hospitals and prisons, and reducing in no small measure the sum of misery in France.[Footnote: Among other instances of this spirit of hopefulness, notice those volumes of the _Encyclopedie Methodique_ which were published as early as 1789.

They are largely devoted to telling how things ought to be. See also the correspondence of Lafayette, who was thoroughly steeped in the spirit of this time. The feeling of hope was not the only feeling, there was despondency also. But we must be careful not to be deceived by the tone of many people who wrote long afterward, when they had undergone the shock of the great Revolution. In the study of this period, more perhaps than in that of any other, it is important to distinguish between contemporary evidence and the evidence of contemporaries given subsequently.]

These changes in men's minds began to bear fruit in action. The attempted reforms of Turgot, of Necker, of the Notables; the abolition of the _corvee_, of monopolies in trade, of judicial torture, the establishment of provincial a.s.semblies, the civil rights given to Protestants, have been mentioned already. These things were done in a weak and inconsistent manner because of the character of the king, who was drawn in one direction by his courtiers and in another by his conscience, and satisfied neither.