Printed byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh
LondonMACMILLAN AND CO.,LimitedNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1905
All rights reserved
First printed in this form 1886Reprinted 1888, 1891, 1896, 1900, 1905
Montmorency—The New Heloïsa.
Conditions preceding the composition of the New Heloïsa1
The Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg2
Rousseau and his patrician acquaintances4
Peaceful life at Montmorency9
Equivocal prudence occasionally shown by Rousseau12
His want of gratitude for commonplace service13
Bad health, and thoughts of suicide16
Episode of Madame Latour de Franqueville17
Relation of the New Heloïsa to Rousseau's general doctrine20
Action of the first part of the story25
Contrasted with contemporary literature25
And with contemporary manners27
Criticism of the language and principal actors28,29
Popularity of the New Heloïsa31
Its reactionary intellectual direction33
Action of the second part35,36
Its influence on Goethe and others38
Distinction between Rousseau and his school40
Singular pictures of domesticity42
Sumptuary details44
The slowness of movement in the work justified46
Exaltation of marriage47
Equalitarian tendencies49
Not inconsistent with social quietism51
Compensation in the political consequences of the triumph of sentiment54
Circumstances of the publication of the New Heloïsa55
Nature of the trade in books57
Malesherbes and the printing of Emilius61
Rousseau's suspicions62
The great struggle of the moment64
Proscription of Emilius67
Flight of the author67
Persecution.
Rousseau's journey from Switzerland69
Absence of vindictiveness70
Arrival at Yverdun72
Repairs to Motiers73
Relations with Frederick the Great74
Life at Motiers77
Lord Marischal79
Voltaire81
Rousseau's letter to the Archbishop of Paris83
Its dialectic86
The ministers of Neuchâtel90
Rousseau's singular costume92
His throng of visitors93
Lewis, prince of Würtemberg95
Gibbon96
Boswell98
Corsican affairs99
The feud at Geneva102
Rousseau renounces his citizenship105
The Letters from the Mountain106
Political side107
Consequent persecution at Motiers107
Flight to the isle of St. Peter108
The fifth of theRêveries109
Proscription by the government of Berne116
Rousseau's singular request116
His renewed flight117
Persuaded to seek shelter in England118
The Social Contract.
Rousseau's reaction against perfectibility119
Abandonment of the position of the Discourses121
Doubtful idea of equality121
The Social Contract, a repudiation of the historic method124
Yet it has glimpses of relativity127
Influence of Greek examples129
And of Geneva131
Impression upon Robespierre and Saint Just132
Rousseau's scheme implied a small territory135
Why the Social Contract made fanatics137
Verbal quality of its propositions138
The doctrine of public safety143
The doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples144
Its early phases144
Its history in the sixteenth century146
Hooker and Grotius148
Locke149
Hobbes151
Central propositions of the Social Contract—1. Origin of society in compact154Different conception held by the Physiocrats1562. Sovereignty of the body thus constituted158Difference from Hobbes and Locke159The root of socialism160Republican phraseology1613. Attributes of sovereignty1624. The law-making power163A contemporary illustration164Hints of confederation1665. Forms of government168Criticism on the common division169Rousseau's preference for elective aristocracy1726. Attitude of the state to religion173Rousseau's view, the climax of a reaction176Its effect at the French Revolution179Its futility180Another method of approaching the philosophy of government—Origin of society not a compact183The true reason of the submission of a minority to a majority184Rousseau fails to touch actual problems186The doctrine of resistance, for instance188Historical illustrations190Historical effect of the Social Contract in France and Germany193Socialist deductions from it194
Emilius.
Rousseau touched by the enthusiasm of his time197
Contemporary excitement as to education, part of the revival of naturalism199
I.—Locke, on education202Difference between him and Rousseau204Exhortations to mothers205Importance of infantile habits208Rousseau's protest against reasoning with children209Criticised209The opposite theory210The idea of property212Artificially contrived incidents214Rousseau's omission of the principle of authority215Connected with his neglect of the faculty of sympathy219II.—Rousseau's ideal of living221The training that follows from it222The duty of knowing a craft223Social conception involved in this moral conception226III.—Three aims before the instructor229Rousseau's omission of training for the social conscience230No contemplation of society as a whole232Personal interest, the foundation of the morality of Emilius233The sphere and definition of the social conscience235IV.—The study of history237Rousseau's notions upon the subject239V.—Ideals of life for women241Rousseau's repudiation of his own principles242His oriental and obscurantist position243Arising from his want of faith in improvement244His reactionary tendencies in this region eventually neutralised248VI.—Sum of the merits of Emilius249Its influence in France and Germany251In England252
The Savoyard Vicar.
Shallow hopes entertained by the dogmatic atheists256
The good side of the religious reaction258
Its preservation of some parts of Christian influence259
Earlier forms of deism260
The deism of the Savoyard Vicar264
The elevation of man, as well as the restoration of a divinity265
A divinity for fair weather268
Religious self-denial269
The Savoyard Vicar's vital omission270
His position towards Christianity272
Its effectiveness as a solvent273
Weakness of the subjective test276
The Savoyard Vicar's deism not compatible with growing intellectual conviction276
The true satisfaction of the religious emotion277
England.
Rousseau's English portrait281
His reception in Paris282
And in London283
Hume's account of him284
Settlement at Wootton286
The quarrel with Hume287
Detail of the charges against Hume287-291
Walpole's pretended letter from Frederick291
Baselessness of the whole delusion292
Hume's conduct in the quarrel293
The war of pamphlets295
Common theory of Rousseau's madness296
Preparatory conditions297
Extension of disorder from the affective life to the intelligence299
The Confessions301
His life at Wootton306
Flight from Derbyshire306
And from England308
The End.
The elder Mirabeau309
Shelters Rousseau at Fleury311
Rousseau at Trye312
In Dauphiny314
Return to Paris314
TheRêveries315
Life in Paris316
Bernardin de St. Pierre's account of him317
An Easter excursion320
Rousseau's unsociality322
Poland and Spain324
Withdrawal to Ermenonville326
His death326
INDEX
Themany conditions of intellectual productiveness are still hidden in such profound obscurity that we are unable to explain why a period of stormy moral agitation seems to be in certain natures the indispensable antecedent of their highest creative effort. Byron is one instance, and Rousseau is another, in which the current of stimulating force made this rapid way from the lower to the higher parts of character, and only expended itself after having traversed the whole range of emotion and faculty, from their meanest, most realistic, most personal forms of exercise, up to the summit of what is lofty and ideal. No man was ever involved in such an odious complication of moral maladies as beset Rousseau in the winter of 1758. Yet within three years of this miserable epoch he had completed not only the New Heloïsa, which is the monument of his fall, but the Social Contract, which was the most influential,and Emilius, which was perhaps the most elevated and spiritual, of all the productions of the prolific genius of France in the eighteenth century. A poor light-hearted Marmontel thought that the secret of Rousseau's success lay in the circumstance that he began to write late, and it is true that no other author, so considerable as Rousseau, waited until the age of fifty for the full vigour of his inspiration. No tale of years, however, could have ripened such fruit without native strength and incommunicable savour. Nor can the mechanical movement of those better ordered characters which keep the balance of the world even, impart to literature that peculiar quality, peculiar but not the finest, that comes from experience of the black unlighted abysses of the soul.
The period of actual production was externally calm. The New Heloïsa was completed in 1759, and published in 1761. The Social Contract was published in the spring of 1762, and Emilius a few weeks later. Throughout this period Rousseau was, for the last time in his life, at peace with most of his fellows. Though he never relented from his antipathy to the Holbachians, for the time it slumbered, until a more real and serious persecution than any which he imputed to them, transformed his antipathy into a gloomy frenzy.
The new friends whom he made at Montmorency were among the greatest people in the kingdom. The Duke of Luxembourg (1702-64) was a marshal of France, and as intimate a friend of the king as the king was capable of having. The Maréchale de[*p.3] Luxembourg (1707-87) had been one of the most beautiful, and continued to be one of the most brilliant leaders of the last aristocratic generation that was destined to sport on the slopes of the volcano. The former seems to have been a loyal and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage. He was a constant guest at their table, where he met the highest personages in France. The marshal did not disdain to pay him visits, or to walk with him, or to discuss his private affairs. Unable as ever to shine in conversation, yet eager to show his great friends that they had to do with no common mortal, Rousseau bethought him of reading the New Heloïsa aloud to them. At ten in the morning he used to wait upon the maréchale, and there by her bedside he read the story of the love, the sin, the repentance of Julie, the distraction of Saint Preux, the wisdom of Wolmar, and the sage friendship of Lord Edward, in tones which enchanted her both with his book and its author for all the rest of the day, as all the women in France were so soon to be enchanted.[1]This, as he expected, amply reconciled her to the uncouthness and clumsiness of his conversation, which was at least as maladroit and as spiritless in the presence of a duchess as it was in presences less imposing.
One side of character is obviously tested by the way in which a man bears himself in his relations with those of greater social consideration. Rousseau was taxed by some of his plebeian enemies with a most unheroic deference to his patrician friends. He had a dog whose name wasDuc. When he came to sit at a duke's table, he changed his dog's name toTurc.[2]Again, one day in a transport of tenderness he embraced the old marshal—the duchess embraced Rousseau ten times a day, for the age was effusive—"Ah, monsieur le maréchal, I used to hate the great before I knew you, and I hate them still more, since you make me feel so strongly how easy it would be for them to have themselves adored."[3]On another occasion he happened to be playing at chess with the Prince of Conti, who had come to visit him in his cottage.[4]In spite of the signs and grimaces of theattendants, he insisted on beating the prince in a couple of games. Then he said with respectful gravity, "Monseigneur, I honour your serene highness too much not to beat you at chess always."[5]A few days after, the vanquished prince sent him a present of game which Rousseau duly accepted. The present was repeated, but this time Rousseau wrote to Madame de Boufflers that he would receive no more, and that he loved the prince's conversation better than his gifts.[6]He admits that this was an ungracious proceeding, and that to refuse game "from a prince of the blood who throws such good feeling into the present, is not so much the delicacy of a proud man bent on preserving his independence, as the rusticity of an unmannerly person who does not know his place."[7]Considering the extreme virulence with which Rousseau always resented gifts even of the most trifling kind from his friends, one may perhaps find some inconsistency in this condemnation of a sort of conduct to which he tenaciously clung on all other occasions. If the fact of the donor being a prince of the blood is allowed to modify the quality of the donation, that is hardly a defensible position in the austere citizen of Geneva. Madame de Boufflers,[8]the intimate friend of our sage Hume, and the yet more intimate friend of the Prince of Conti, gave him a judicious warning when she bade him beware of laying himself open to a charge of affectation, lest it should obscure the brightness of his virtue and so hinder its usefulness. "Fabius and Regulus would have accepted such marks of esteem, without feeling in them any hurt to their disinterestedness and frugality."[9]Perhaps there is a flutter of self-consciousness that is not far removed from this affectation, in the pains which Rousseau takes to tell us that after dining at the castle, he used to return home gleefully to sup with a mason who was his neighbour and his friend.[10]On the whole, however, and so far as we know, Rousseau conducted himself not unworthily with these high people. His letters to them are for the most part marked by self-respect and a moderate graciousness, though now and again he makes rather too much case of the difference of rank, and asserts his independence with something too much of protestation.[11]Their relations with him are a curious sign of the interest which the members of the great world took in the men who were quietly preparing the destruction both of them and their world. The Maréchale de Luxembourg places this squalid dweller in a hovel on her estate in the place of honour at her table, and embraces his Theresa. The Prince of Conti pays visits of courtesy and sends game to a man whom he employs at a few sous an hour to copy manuscript for him. The Countess of Boufflers, in sending him the money, insists that he is to count her his warmest friend.[12]When his dog dies, the countess writes to sympathise with his chagrin, and the prince begs to be allowed to replace it.[13]And when persecution and trouble and infinite confusion came upon him, they all stood as fast by him as their own comfort would allow. Do we not feel that there must have been in the unhappy man, besides all the recorded pettinesses and perversities which revolt us in him, a vein of something which touched men, and made women devoted to him, until he splenetically drove both men and women away from him? With Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, as with the dearer and humbler patroness of his youth, we have now parted company. But they are instantly succeeded by new devotees. And the lovers of Rousseau, in all degrees, were not silly women led captive by idle fancy. Madame de Boufflers was oneof the most distinguished spirits of her time. Her friendship for him was such, that his sensuous vanity made Rousseau against all reason or probability confound it with a warmer form of emotion, and he plumes himself in a manner most displeasing on the victory which he won over his own feelings on the occasion.[14]As a matter of fact he had no feelings to conquer, any more than the supposed object of them ever bore him any ill-will for his indifference, as in his mania of suspicion he afterwards believed.
There was a calm about the too few years he passed at Montmorency, which leaves us in doubt whether this mania would ever have afflicted him, if his natural irritation had not been made intense and irresistible by the cruel distractions that followed the publication of Emilius. He was tolerably content with his present friends. The simplicity of their way of dealing with him contrasted singularly, as he thought, with the never-ending solicitudes, as importunate as they were officious, of the patronising friends whom he had just cast off.[15]Perhaps, too, he was soothed by the companionship of persons whose rank may have flattered his vanity, while unlike Diderot and his old literary friends in Paris, they entered into no competition with him in the peculiar sphere of his own genius. Madame de Boufflers, indeed, wrote a tragedy, but he told her gruffly enough that it was a plagiarism from Southerne's Oroonoko.[16]That Rousseau wasthoroughly capable of this pitiful emotion of sensitive literary jealousy is proved, if by nothing else, by his readiness to suspect that other authors were jealous of him. No one suspects others of a meanness of this kind unless he is capable of it himself. The resounding success which followed the New Heloïsa and Emilius put an end to these apprehensions. It raised him to a pedestal in popular esteem as high as that on which Voltaire stood triumphant. That very success unfortunately brought troubles which destroyed Rousseau's last chance of ending his days in full reasonableness.
Meanwhile he enjoyed his final interval of moderate wholesomeness and peace. He felt his old healthy joy in the green earth. One of the letters commemorates his delight in the great scudding south-west winds of February, soft forerunners of the spring, so sweet to all who live with nature.[17]At the end of his garden was a summer-house, and here even on wintry days he sat composing or copying. It was not music only that he copied. He took a curious pleasure in making transcripts of his romance, and he sold them to the Duchess of Luxembourg and other ladies for some moderate fee.[18]Sometimes he moved from his own lodging to the quarters in the park which his great friends had induced him to accept. "They were charmingly neat; the furniture was of white and blue. It was in this perfumed and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams and choirs of birds ofevery kind, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured round me, that I composed in a continual ecstasy the fifth book of Emilius. With what eagerness did I hasten every morning at sunrise to breathe the balmy air! What good coffee I used to make under the porch in company with my Theresa! The cat and the dog made up the party. That would have sufficed me for all the days of my life, and I should never have known weariness." And so to the assurance, so often repeated under so many different circumstances, that here was a true heaven upon earth, where if fates had only allowed he would have known unbroken innocence and lasting happiness.[19]
Yet he had the wisdom to warn others against attempting a life such as he craved for himself. As on a more memorable occasion, there came to him a young man who would fain have been with him always, and whom he sent away exceeding sorrowful. "The first lesson I should give you would be not to surrender yourself to the taste you say you have for the contemplative life. It is only an indolence of the soul, to be condemned at any age, but especially so at yours. Man is not made to meditate, but to act. Labour therefore in the condition of life in which you have been placed by your family and by providence: that is the first precept of the virtue which you wish to follow. If residence at Paris, joined to the business you have there, seems to you irreconcilable with virtue,do better still, and return to your own province. Go live in the bosom of your family, serve and solace your honest parents. There you will be truly fulfilling the duties that virtue imposes on you."[20]This intermixture of sound sense with unutterable perversities almost suggests a doubt how far the perversities were sincere, until we remember that Rousseau even in the most exalted part of his writings was careful to separate immediate practical maxims from his theoretical principles of social philosophy.[21]
Occasionally his good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France. Rousseau's letter is a masterpiece in the style of Eliphaz the Temanite. Our brethren must surely have given some pretext for the evil treatment to which they were subjected. One who is a Christian must learn to suffer, and every man's conduct ought to conform to his doctrine. Our brethren, moreover, ought to remember that the word of God is express upon the duty of obeying the laws set up by the prince. The writer cannot venture torun any risk by interceding in favour of our brethren with the government. "Every one has his own calling upon the earth; mine is to tell the public harsh but useful truths. I have preached humanity, gentleness, tolerance, so far as it depended upon me; 'tis no fault of mine if the world has not listened. I have made it a rule to keep to general truths; I produce no libels, no satires; I attack no man, but men; not an action, but a vice."[22]The worst of the worthy sort of people, wrote Voltaire, is that they are such cowards: a man groans over a wrong, he holds his tongue, he takes his supper, and he forgets all about it.[23]If Voltaire could not write like Fénelon, at least he could never talk like Tartufe; he responded to no tale of wrong with words about his mission, with strings of antitheses, but always with royal anger and the spring of alert and puissant endeavour. In an hour of oppression one would rather have been the friend of the saviour of the Calas and of Sirven, than of the vindicator of theism.
Rousseau, however, had good sense enough in less equivocal forms than this. For example, in another letter he remonstrates with a correspondent for judging the rich too harshly. "You do not bear in mind that having from their childhood contracted a thousand wants which we are without, then to bring them down to the condition of the poor, would be to make them more miserable than the poor. We should be justtowards all the world, even to those who are not just to us. Ah, if we had the virtues opposed to the vices which we reproach in them, we should soon forget that such people were in the world. One word more. To have any right to despise the rich, we ought ourselves to be prudent and thrifty, so as to have no need of riches."[24]In the observance of this just precept Rousseau was to the end of his life absolutely without fault. No one was more rigorously careful to make his independence sure by the fewness of his wants and by minute financial probity. This firm limitation of his material desires was one cause of his habitual and almost invariable refusal to accept presents, though no doubt another cause was the stubborn and ungracious egoism which made him resent every obligation.
It is worth remembering in illustration of the peculiar susceptibility and softness of his character where women were concerned—it was not quite without exception—that he did not fly into a fit of rage over their gifts, as he did over those of men. He remonstrated, but in gentler key. "What could I do with four pullets?" he wrote to a lady who had presented them to him. "I began by sending two of them to people to whom I am indifferent. That made me think of the difference there is between a present and a testimony of friendship. The first will never find in me anything but a thankless heart; the second.... Ah, if you had only given me news of yourselfwithout sending me anything else, how rich and how grateful you would have made me; instead of that the pullets are eaten, and the best thing I can do is to forget all about them; let us say no more."[25]Rude and repellent as this may seem, and as it is, there is a rough kind of playfulness about it, when compared with the truculence which he was not slow to exhibit to men. If a friend presumed to thank him for any service, he was peremptorily rebuked for his ignorance of the true qualities of friendship, with which thankfulness has no connection. He ostentatiously refused to offer thanks for services himself, even to a woman whom he always treated with so much consideration as the Maréchale de Luxembourg. He once declared boldly that modesty is a false virtue,[26]and though he did not go so far as to make gratitude the subject of a corresponding formula of denunciation, he always implied that this too is really one of the false virtues. He confessed to Malesherbes, without the slightest contrition, that he was ungrateful by nature.[27]To Madame d'Epinay he once went still further, declaring that he found it hard not to hate those who had used him well.[28]Undoubtedly he was right so far as this, that gratitude answering to a spirit of exaction in a benefactor is no merit; a service done in expectation of gratitude is from that fact stripped of the quality which makes gratitude due, and is a mere piece ofegoism in altruistic disguise. Kindness in its genuine forms is a testimony of good feeling, and conventional speech is perhaps a little too hard, as well as too shallow and unreal, in calling the recipient evil names because he is unable to respond to the good feeling. Rousseau protested against a conception of friendship which makes of what ought to be disinterested helpfulness a title to everlasting tribute. His way of expressing this was harsh and unamiable, but it was not without an element of uprightness and veracity. As in his greater themes, so in his paradoxes upon private relations, he hid wholesome ingredients of rebuke to the unquestioning acceptance of common form. "I am well pleased," he said to a friend, "both with thee and thy letters, except the end, where thou say'st thou art more mine than thine own. For there thou liest, and it is not worth while to take the trouble totheeandthoua man as thine intimate, only to tell him untruths."[29]Chesterfield was for people with much self-love of the small sort, probably a more agreeable person to meet than Doctor Johnson, but Johnson was the more wholesome companion for a man.
Occasionally, though not very often, he seems to have let spleen take the place of honest surliness, and so drifted into clumsy and ill-humoured banter, of a sort that gives a dreary shudder to one fresh from Voltaire. "So you have chosen for yourself a tender and virtuous mistress! I am not surprised; allmistresses are that. You have chosen her in Paris! To find a tender and virtuous mistress in Paris is to have not such bad luck. You have made her a promise of marriage? My friend, you have made a blunder; for if you continue to love, the promise is superfluous, and if you do not, then it is no avail. You have signed it with your blood? That is all but tragic; but I don't know that the choice of the ink in which he writes, gives anything to the fidelity of the man who signs."[30]
We can only add that the health in which a man writes may possibly excuse the dismal quality of what he writes, and that Rousseau was now as always the prey of bodily pain which, as he was conscious, made him distraught. "My sufferings are not very excruciating just now," he wrote on a later occasion, "but they are incessant, and I am not out of pain a single moment day or night, and this quite drives me mad. I feel bitterly my wrong conduct and the baseness of my suspicions; but if anything can excuse me, it is my mournful state, my loneliness," and so on.[31]This prolonged physical anguish, which was made more intense towards the end of 1761 by the accidental breaking of a surgical instrument,[32]sometimes so nearly wore his fortitude away as to make him think of suicide.[33]In Lord Edward's famous letter on suicide in the New Heloïsa, while denying in forcible terms the right of ending one's days merely to escape fromintolerable mental distress, he admits that inasmuch as physical disorders only grow incessantly worse, violent and incurable bodily pain may be an excuse for a man making away with himself; he ceases to be a human being before dying, and in putting an end to his life he only completes his release from a body that embarrasses him, and contains his soul no longer.[34]The thought was often present to him in this form. Eighteen months later than our last date, the purpose grew very deliberate under an aggravation of his malady, and he seriously looked upon his own case as falling within the conditions of Lord Edward's exception.[35]It is difficult, in the face of outspoken declarations like these, to know what writers can be thinking of when, with respect to the controversy on the manner of Rousseau's death, they pronounce him incapable of such a dereliction of his own most cherished principles as anything like self-destruction would have been.
As he sat gnawed by pain, with surgical instruments on his table, and sombre thoughts of suicide in his head, the ray of a little episode of romance shone inincongruously upon the scene. Two ladies in Paris, absorbed in the New Heloïsa, like all the women of the time, identified themselves with the Julie and the Claire of the novel that none could resist. They wrote anonymously to the author, claiming their identification with characters fondly supposed to be immortal. "You will know that Julie is not dead, and that she lives to love you; I am not this Julie, you perceive it by my style; I am only her cousin, or rather her friend, as Claire was." The unfortunate Saint Preux responded as gallantly as he could be expected to do in the intervals of surgery. "You do not know that the Saint Preux to whom you write is tormented with a cruel and incurable disorder, and that the very letter he writes to you is often interrupted by distractions of a very different kind."[36]He figures rather uncouthly, but the unknown fair were not at first disabused, and one of them never was. Rousseau was deeply suspicious. He feared to be made the victim of a masculine pleasantry. From women he never feared anything. His letters were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought," he said brutally.[37]The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius.This was too much for the imaginary Claire. "I have given myself three good blows on my breast for the correspondence that I was silly enough to open between you," she wrote to Julie, and she remained implacable. The Julie, on the contrary, was faithful to the end of Rousseau's life. She took his part vehemently in the quarrel with Hume, and wrote in defence of his memory after he was dead. She is the most remarkable of all the instances of that unreasoning passion which the New Heloïsa inflamed in the breasts of the women of that age. Madame Latour pursued Jean Jacques with a devotion that no coldness could repulse. She only saw him three times in all, the first time not until 1766, when he was on his way through Paris to England. The second time, in 1772, she visited him without mentioning her name, and he did not recognise her; she brought him some music to copy, and went away unknown. She made another attempt, announcing herself: he gave her a frosty welcome, and then wrote to her that she was to come no more. With a strange fidelity she bore him no grudge, but cherished his memory and sorrowed over his misfortunes to the day of her death. He was not an idol of very sublime quality, but we may think kindly of the idolatress.[38]Worshippers are everdearer to us than their graven images. Let us turn to the romance which touched women in this way, and helped to give a new spirit to an epoch.
II.
As has been already said, it is the business of criticism to separate what is accidental in form, transitory in manner, and merely local in suggestion, from the general ideas which live under a casual and particular literary robe. And so we have to distinguish the external conditions under which a book like the New Heloïsa is produced, from the living qualities in the author which gave the external conditions their hold upon him, and turned their development in one direction rather than another. We are only encouraging poverty of spirit, when we insist on fixing our eyes on a few of the minutiæ of construction, instead of patiently seizing larger impressions and more durable meanings; when we stop at the fortuitous incidents of composition, instead of advancing to the central elements of the writer's character.
These incidents in the case of the New Heloïsa we know; the sensuous communion with nature in her summer mood in the woods of Montmorency, the long hours and days of solitary expansion, the despairing passion for the too sage Julie of actual experience. But the power of these impressions from without depended on secrets of conformation within. An adult with marked character is, consciously or unconsciously, his own character's victim or sport. It is his whole system of impulses, ideas, pre-occupations, that make those critical situations ready, into which he too hastily supposes that an accident has drawn him. And this inner system not only prepares the situation; it forces his interpretation of the situation. Much of the interest of the New Heloïsa springs from the fact that it was the outcome, in a sense of which the author himself was probably unconscious, of the general doctrine of life and conduct which he only professed to expound in writings of graver pretension. Rousseau generally spoke of his romance in phrases of depreciation, as the monument of a passing weakness. It was in truth as entirely a monument of the strength, no less than the weakness, of his whole scheme, as his weightiest piece. That it was not so deliberately, only added to its effect. The slow and musing air which underlies all the assumption of ardent passion, made a way for the doctrine into sensitive natures, that would have been untouched by the pretended ratiocination of the Discourses, and the didactic manner of the Emilius.
Rousseau's scheme, which we must carefully remember was only present to his own mind in an informal and fragmentary way, may be shortly described as an attempt to rehabilitate human nature in as much of the supposed freshness of primitive times, as the hardened crust of civil institutions and social use might allow. In this survey, however incoherently carried out, the mutual passion of the two sexeswas the very last that was likely to escape Rousseau's attention. Hence it was with this that he began. The Discourses had been an attack upon the general ordering of society, and an exposition of the mischief that society has done to human nature at large. The romance treated one set of emotions in human nature particularly, though it also touches the whole emotional sphere indirectly. And this limitation of the field was accompanied by a total revolution in the method. Polemic was abandoned; the presence of hostility was forgotten in appearance, if not in the heart of the writer; instead of discussion, presentation; instead of abstract analysis of principles, concrete drawing of persons and dramatic delineation of passion. There is, it is true, a monstrous superfluity of ethical exposition of most doubtful value, but then that, as we have already said, was in the manners of the time. All people in those days with any pretensions to use their minds, wrote and talked in a superfine ethical manner, and violently translated the dictates of sensibility into formulas of morality. The important thing to remark is not that this semi-didactic strain is present, but that there is much less of it, and that it takes a far more subordinate place, than the subject and the reigning taste would have led us to expect. It is true, also, that Rousseau declared his intention in the two characters of Julie and of Wolmar, who eventually became Julie's husband, of leading to a reconciliation between the two great opposing parties, the devout and the rationalistic; of teaching them the lesson ofreciprocal esteem, by showing the one that it is possible to believe in a God without being a hypocrite, and the other that it is possible to be an unbeliever without being a scoundrel.[39]This intention, if it was really present to Rousseau's mind while he was writing, and not an afterthought characteristically welcomed for the sake of giving loftiness and gravity to a composition of which he was always a little ashamed, must at any rate have been of a very pale kind. It would hardly have occurred to a critic, unless Rousseau had so emphatically pointed it out, that such a design had presided over the composition, and contemporary readers saw nothing of it. In the first part of the story, which is wholly passionate, it is certainly not visible, and in the second part neither of the two contending factions was likely to learn any lesson with respect to the other. Churchmen would have insisted that Wolmar was really a Christian dressed up as an atheist, and philosophers would hardly have accepted Julie as a type of the too believing people who broke Calas on the wheel, and cut off La Barre's head.