One more touch completes the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so attached to the sinful pair that he half forgives them. "Do not suppose," he says, with superlative gravity, "that you have seduced me by your reasons; I see in them the goodness of your heart, not your justification. I cannot help blaming your connection: you can hardly approve it yourself; and so long as you both of you continue dear to me, I will never leave you in careless security as to the innocence of your state. Yet love such as yours deserves considerateness.... I feel respect for a union so tender, and cannot bring myself to attempt to lead it to virtue along the path of despair" (p. 401).
Ignorance of the facts of the case hindered Saint Lambert from appreciating the strange irony of a man protesting about leading to virtue along the path of despair a poor woman whom he had done as much as he could to lead to vice along the path of highly stimulated sense. Saint Lambert was as much a sentimentalist as Rousseau was, but he had a certain manliness, acquired by long contact with men, which his correspondent only felt in moods of severe exaltation. Saint Lambert took all the blame on himself. He had desired that his mistress and his friend should love one another; then he thought he saw some coolness in his mistress, and he set the change down to his friend, though not on the true grounds. "Do not suppose that I thought you perfidious or a traitor; I knew the austerity of your principles; people had spoken to me of it; and she herself did so with a respect that love found hard to bear." In short, he had suspected Rousseau of nothing worse than being over-virtuous, and trying in the interest of virtue to break off a connection sanctioned by contemporary manners, but not by law or religion. If Madame d'Houdetot had changed, it was not that she had ceased to honour her good friend, but only that her lover might be spared a certain chagrin, from suspecting the excess of scrupulosity and conscience in so austere an adviser.[283]
It is well known how effectively one with a germof good principle in him is braced by being thought better than he is. With this letter in his hands and its words in his mind, Rousseau strode off for his last interview with Madame d'Houdetot. Had Saint Lambert, he says, been less wise, less generous, less worthy, I should have been a lost man. As it was, he passed four or five hours with her in a delicious calm, infinitely more delightful than the accesses of burning fever which had seized him before. They formed the project of a close companionship of three, including the absent lover; and they counted on the project coming more true than such designs usually do, "since all the feelings that can unite sensitive and upright hearts formed the foundation of it, and we three united talents enough as well as knowledge enough to suffice to ourselves, without need of aid or supplement from others." What happened was this. Madame d'Houdetot for the next three or four months, which were among the most bitter in Rousseau's life, for then the bitterness which became chronic was new and therefore harder to be borne, wrote him the wisest, most affectionate, and most considerate letters that a sincere and sensible woman ever wrote to the most petulant, suspicious, perverse, and irrestrainable of men. For patience and exquisite sweetness of friendship some of these letters are matchless, and we can only conjecture the wearing querulousness of the letters to which they were replies. If through no fault of her own she had been the occasion of the monstrous delirium of which he never shook off theconsequences, at least this good soul did all that wise counsel and grave tenderness could do, to bring him out of the black slough of suspicion and despair into which he was plunged.[284]In the beginning of 1758 there was a change. Rousseau's passion for her somehow became known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a passing disturbance between him and his mistress. Saint Lambert throughout acted like a man who is thoroughly master of himself. At first, we learn, he ceased for a moment to see in Rousseau the virtue which he sought in him, and which he was persuaded that he found in him. "Since then, however," wrote Madame d'Houdetot, "he pities you more for your weakness than he reproaches you, and we are both of us far from joining the people who wish to blacken your character; we have and always shall have the courage to speak of you with esteem."[285]They saw one another a few times, and on one occasion the Count and Countess d'Houdetot, Saint Lambert, and Rousseau all sat at table together, happily without breach of the peace.[286]One curious thing about this meeting was that it took place some three weeks after Rousseau and Saint Lambert had interchanged letters on the subject of the quarrel with Diderot, in which each promised the other contemptuous oblivion.[287]Perpetuity of hate is as hard as perpetuity of love for our poor short-spanned characters, and at length the three who were once to have lived together in self-sufficing union, and then in their next mood to have forgotten one another instantly and for ever, held to neither of the extremes, but settled down into an easier middle path of indifferent good-will. The conduct of all three, said the most famous of them, may serve for an example of the way in which sensible people separate, when it no longer suits them to see one another.[288]It is at least certain that in them Rousseau lost two of the most unimpeachably good friends that he ever possessed.
The egoistic character that loves to brood and hates to act, is big with catastrophe. We have now to see how the inevitable law accomplished itself in the case of Rousseau. In many this brooding egoism produces a silent and melancholy insanity; with him it was developed into something of acridly corrosive quality. One of the agents in this disastrous process was the wearing torture of one of the most painful of disorders. This disorder, arising from an internal malformation, harassed him from his infancy to the day of his death. Our fatuous persistency in reducing man to the spiritual, blinds the biographer to the circumstance that the history of a life is the history ofa body no less than that of a soul. Many a piece of conduct that divides the world into two factions of moral assailants and moral vindicators, provoking a thousand ingenuities of ethical or psychological analysis, ought really to have been nothing more than an item in a page of a pathologist's case-book. We are not to suspend our judgment on action; right and wrong can depend on no man's malformations. In trying to know the actor, it is otherwise; here it is folly to underestimate the physical antecedents of mental phenomena. In firm and lofty character, pain is mastered; in a character so little endowed with cool tenacious strength as Rousseau's, pain such as he endured was enough to account, not for his unsociality, which flowed from temperament, but for the bitter, irritable, and suspicious form which this unsociality now first assumed. Rousseau was never a saintly nature, but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot—a tale of labyrinthine nightmares—let us remember that we may even to this point explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many sane people very uncomfortable.
His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions make him forget it for the rest of the day; but thereis nothing to distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend, who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation, public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension. Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290]Diderot said well, "Too manyhonest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."
The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once struck him, as he did into the Encyclopædia. We have already seen how warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension. Then he scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit. With still more seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa's aged mother. This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter letters were interchanged,[291]those of Diderot being pronounced by a person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292]Yet there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidenceupon the same sentiments in him. But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in everlastingly thwarting my tastes, my inclinations, my ways of living, everything that concerned myself only; revolted at seeing a younger man than myself insist with all his might on governing me like a child; chilled by his readiness in giving his promise and his negligence in keeping it; tired of so many appointments which he made and broke, and of his fancy for repairing them by new ones to be broken in their turn; provoked at waiting for him to no purpose three or four times a month on days which he had fixed, and of dining alone in the evening, after going on as far as St. Denis to meet him and waiting for him all day,—I had my heart already full of a multitude of grievances."[293]This irritation subsided in presence of the storms that now rose up against Diderot. He was in the thick of the dangerous and mortifying distractions stirred up by the foes of the Encyclopædia. Rousseau in friendly sympathy went to see him; they embraced, and old wrongs were forgotten until new arose.[294]
There is a less rose-coloured account than this. Madame d'Epinay assigns two motives to Rousseau: a desire to find an excuse for going to Paris, in order to avoid seeing Saint Lambert; secondly, a wish to hear Diderot's opinion of the two first parts of the New Heloïsa. She says that he wanted to borrow a portfolio in which to carry the manuscripts to Paris;Rousseau says that they had already been in Diderot's possession for six months.[295]As her letters containing this very circumstantial story were written at the moment, it is difficult to uphold the Confessions as valid authority against them. Thirdly, Rousseau told her that he had not taken his manuscripts to Paris (p. 302), whereas Grimm writing a few days later (p. 309) mentions that he has received a letter from Diderot, to the effect that Rousseau's visit had no other object than the revision of these manuscripts. The scene is characteristic. "Rousseau kept him pitilessly at work from Saturday at ten o'clock in the morning till eleven at night on Monday, hardly giving him time to eat and drink. The revision at an end, Diderot chats with him about a plan he has in his head, and begs Rousseau to help him in contriving some incident which he cannot yet arrange to his taste. 'It is too difficult,' replies the hermit coldly, 'it is late, and I am not used to sitting up. Good night; I am off at six in the morning, and 'tis time for bed.' He rises from his chair, goes to bed, and leaves Diderot petrified at his behaviour. The day of his departure, Diderot's wife saw that her husband was in bad spirits, and asked the reason. 'It is that man's want of delicacy,' he replied, 'which afflicts me; he makes me work like a slave, but I should never have found that out, if he had not so drilyrefused to take an interest in me for a quarter of an hour.' 'You are surprised at that,' his wife answered; 'do you not know him? He is devoured with envy; he goes wild with rage when anything fine appears that is not his own. You will see him one day commit some great crime rather than let himself be ignored. I declare I would not swear that he will not join the ranks of the Jesuits, and undertake their vindication.'"
Of course we cannot be sure that Grimm did not manipulate these letters long after the event, but there is nothing in Rousseau's history to make us perfectly sure that he was incapable either of telling a falsehood to Madame d'Epinay, or of being shamelessly selfish in respect of Diderot. I see no reason to refuse substantial credit to Grimm's account, and the points of coincidence between that and the Confessions make its truth probable.[296]
Rousseau's relations with Madame d'Epinay were more complex, and his sentiments towards her underwent many changes. There was a prevalent opinion that he was her lover, for which no real foundation seems to have existed.[297]Those who disbelieved that he had reached this distinction, yet made sure that he had a passion for her, which may or may not have been true.[298]Madame d'Epinay herself was vain enough to be willing that this should be generally accepted, and it is certain that she showed a friendship for him which, considering the manners of the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in the park. When Saint Lambert first became uneasy as to the relations between Rousseau and his mistress, and wrote to her to say that he was so, Rousseau instantly suspected that Madame d'Epinay had been his informant. Theresa confirmed the suspicion by tales of baskets and drawers ransacked by Madame d'Epinay in search of Madame d'Houdetot's letters to him. Whether these tales were true or not, we can never know; we can only say that Madame d'Epinay was probably not incapable of these meannesses, and that there is no reason to suppose that she took the pains to write directly to Saint Lambert a piece of news which she was writing to Grimm, knowing that he was then in communication with Saint Lambert. She herself suspected that Theresa had written to Saint Lambert,[299]but it may be doubted whether Theresa's imagination could have risen to such featas writing to a marquis, and a marquis in what would have seemed to her to be remote and inaccessible parts of the earth. All this, however, has become ghostly for us; a puzzle that can never be found out, nor be worth finding out. Rousseau was persuaded that Madame d'Epinay was his betrayer, and was seized by one of his blackest and most stormful moods. In reply to an affectionate letter from her, inquiring why she had not seen him for so long, he wrote thus: "I can say nothing to you yet. I wait until I am better informed, and this I shall be sooner or later. Meanwhile, be certain that accused innocence will find a champion ardent enough to make calumniators repent, whoever they may be." It is rather curious that so strange a missive as this, instead of provoking Madame d'Epinay to anger, was answered by a warmer and more affectionate letter than the first. To this Rousseau replied with increased vehemence, charged with dark and mysteriously worded suspicion. Still Madame d'Epinay remained willing to receive him. He began to repent of his imprudent haste, because it would certainly end by compromising Madame d'Houdetot, and because, moreover, he had no proof after all that his suspicions had any foundation. He went instantly to the house of Madame d'Epinay; at his approach she threw herself on his neck and melted into tears. This unexpected reception from so old a friend moved him extremely; he too wept abundantly. She showed no curiosity as to the precise nature ofhis suspicions or their origin, and the quarrel came to an end.[300]
Grimm's turn followed. Though they had been friends for many years, there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,—sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly upright. He was a German (born at Ratisbon), and in Paris was first a reader to the Duke of Saxe Gotha, with very scanty salary. He made his way, partly through the friendship of Rousseau, into the society of the Parisian men of letters, rapidly acquired a perfect mastery of the French language, and with the inspiring help of Diderot, became an excellent critic. After being secretary to sundry high people, he became the literary correspondent of various German sovereigns, keeping them informed of whatwas happening in the world of art and letters, just as an ambassador keeps his government informed of what happens in politics. The sobriety, impartiality, and discrimination of his criticism make one think highly of his literary judgment; he had the courage, or shall we say he preserved enough of the German, to defend both Homer and Shakespeare against the unhappy strictures of Voltaire.[301]This is not all, however; his criticism is conceived in a tone which impresses us with the writer's integrity. And to this internal evidence we have to add the external corroboration that in the latter part of his life he filled various official posts, which implied a peculiar confidence in his probity on the part of those who appointed him. At the present moment (1756-57), he was acting as secretary to Marshal d'Estrées, commander of the French army in Westphalia at the outset of the Seven Years' War. He was an able and helpful man, in spite of his having a rough manner, powdering his face, and being so monstrously scented as to earn the name of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he didnot believe in the metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay, the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302]He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social crookedness.
It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her mother and her by Grimm andDiderot of some sixteen pounds a year.[303]Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy. That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his imagination.[304]"He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305]More than once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure solitude.[306]Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion, against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural shrewdness. But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm's harsh judgment, without the addition of any sinister sentiment. He was perfectly right in suspecting Rousseau of want of loyalty toMadame d'Epinay, for we find our hermit writing to her in strains of perfect intimacy, while he was writing of her to Madame d'Houdetot as "your unworthy sister."[307]On the other hand, while Madame d'Epinay was overwhelming him with caressing phrases, she was at the same moment describing him to Grimm as a master of impertinence and intractableness. As usual where there is radical incompatibility of character, an attempted reconciliation between Grimm and Rousseau (some time in the early part of October 1757) had only made the thinly veiled antipathy more resolute. Rousseau excused himself for wrongs of which in his heart he never thought himself guilty. Grimm replied by a discourse on the virtues of friendship and his own special aptitude for practising them. He then conceded to the impetuous penitent the kiss of peace, in a slight embrace which was like the accolade given by a monarch to new knights.[308]The whole scene is ignoble. We seem to be watching an unclean cauldron, with Theresa's mother, a cringing and babbling crone, standing witch-like over it and infusing suspicion, falsehood, and malice. When minds are thus surcharged, any accident suffices torelease the evil creatures that lurk in an irritated imagination.
One day towards the end of the autumn of 1757, Rousseau learned to his unbounded surprise that Madame d'Epinay had been seized with some strange disorder, which made it advisable that she should start without any delay for Geneva, there to place herself under the care of Tronchin, who was at that time the most famous doctor in Europe. His surprise was greatly increased by the expectation which he found among his friends that he would show his gratitude for her many kindnesses to him, by offering to bear her company on her journey, and during her stay in a town which was strange to her and thoroughly familiar to him. It was to no purpose that he protested how unfit was one invalid to be the nurse of another; and how great an incumbrance a man would be in a coach in the bad season, when for many days he was absolutely unable to leave his chamber without danger. Diderot, with his usual eagerness to guide a friend's course, wrote him a letter urging that his many obligations, and even his grievances in respect of Madame d'Epinay, bound him to accompany her, as he would thus repay the one and console himself for the other. "She is going into a country where she will be like one fallen from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and distraction. As for winter, are you worse now than you were a month back, or than you will be at the opening of the spring? For me, I confess that if I could not bear the coach, Iwould take a staff and follow her on foot."[309]Rousseau trembled with fury, and as soon as the transport was over, he wrote an indignant reply, in which he more or less politely bade the panurgic one to attend to his own affairs, and hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him. Next he wrote to Grimm himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment. By this time he had found out the secret of Madame d'Epinay's supposed illness and her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share which Grimm had in it. This, however, does not make many passages of his letter any the less ungracious or unseemly. "If Madame d'Epinay has shown friend' ship to me, I have shown more to her.... As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks for any that people may burden me with by force. Madame d'Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for that she had kept me. After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must now make another to gratitude. A man must be poor, must be without a servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character, before he can know what it is for me to live in another person's house. For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion, andincessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay, rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]
The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly unable to understand thata cold and reserved German might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in which this barbarous man had plunged me"—that is after eight or ten days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct application for one.[311]It was short and extremely pointed, not complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation; so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of your conduct from my mind."[312]A flash of manly anger like this is very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in the same key. Hewrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in. I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313]And so on, raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314]He was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his poverty.[315]To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the wrongs he had doneme." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm: "Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought to do so, I am astonished that your friends could detain you. For me, I don't consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]
We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder andwith his eyes all aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and hell."[317]And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard desperate gaze of a lost spirit.
FOOTNOTES:
[254]Conf., ix. 247.
[255]Conf., ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (Mém., ii. 132) has given an account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the Hermitage—of which nothing now stands—along with the rest of the estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers by Robespierre, and afterwards by Grétry the composer, who paid 10,000 livres for it.
[256]Conf., ix. 255.
[257]Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.
[258]Conf., ix. 239.
[259]Conf., ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.
[260]The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia, together with Rousseau's judgments on them, are found at the end of the volume containing the Social Contract. The first, but without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau's permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his journal only.Conf., xi. 107.Corr., ii. 110, 128.
[261]P. 485.
[262]For a sympathetic account of the Abbé de Saint Pierre's life and speculations, see M. Léonce de Lavergne'sEconomistes français du 18ième siècle(Paris: 1870). Also Comte'sLettres à M. Valat, p. 73.
[263]Conf., ix. 270-274.
[264]Conf., ix. 289.
[265]Ib.ix. 286.
[266]D'Epinay, ii. 153.
[267]Madame d'Houdetot, (b.1730—d.1813) was the daughter of M. de Bellegarde, the father of Madame d'Epinay's husband. Her marriage with the Count d'Houdetot, of high Norman stock, took place in 1748. The circumstances of the marriage, which help to explain the lax view of the vows common among the great people of the time, are given with perhaps a shade too much dramatic colouring in Madame d'Epinay'sMém., i 101.
[268]Conf., ix. 281.
[269]D'Epinay, ii. 246.
[270]D'Epinay, ii. 269.
[271]Musset-Pathay has collected two or three trifles of her composition, ii. 136-138. Heal so quotes Madame d'Allard's account of her, pp. 140, 141.
[272]Quoted by M. Girardin,Rev. des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1853, p. 1080.
[273]Conf., ix. 304.
[274]Ib.ix. 305. Slightly modified version inCorr., i. 377.
[275]M. Boiteau's note to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 273.
[276]Grimm, to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 305.
[277]This is shown partly by Saint Lambert's letter to Rousseau, to which we come presently, and partly by a letter of Madame d'Houdetot to Rousseau in May, 1758 (Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 411-413), where she distinctly says that she concealed his mad passion for her from Saint Lambert, who first heard of it in common conversation.
[278]Conf., ix. 311.
[279]Besides the many hints of reference to this in the Confessions, see the phrenetic Letters to Sarah, printed in theMélanges, pp. 347-360.
[280]Conf., ix. 337.
[281]Corr., i. 398. Sept. 4, 1757.
[282]To Madame d'Houdetot.Corr., i. 376-387. June 1757.
[283]Saint Lambert to Rousseau, from Wolfenbuttel, Oct. 11, 1757. Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 415.
[284]These letters are given in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's first volume (pp. 354-414). The thirty-second of them (Jan. 10, 1758) is perhaps the one best worth turning to.
[285]Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 412. May 6, 1768.Conf., x. 15.
[286]Ib.x. 22.
[287]Ib.x. 18. Streckeisen, i. 422.
[288]Conf., x. 24.
[289]To Madame d'Epinay, 1757.Corr., i. 362, 353. See alsoConf., ix. 307.
[290]One of the most unflinching in this kind is anEssai sur la vie et le caractère de J.J. Rousseau, by G.H. Morin (Paris: 1851): the laborious production of a bitter advocate, who accepts the Confessions, Dialogues, Letters, etc., with the reverence due to verbal inspiration, and writes of everybody who offended his hero, quite in the vein of Marat towards aristocrats.
[291]Corr., i. 327-335. D'Epinay, ii. 165-182
[292]D'Epinay, ii. 173.
[293]Conf., ix. 325.
[294]Ib., ix. 334.
[295]Mém., ii. 297. She also places the date many mouths later than Rousseau, and detaches the reconciliation from the quarrel in the winter of 1756-1757.
[296]The same story is referred to in Madame de Vandeul'sMém. de Diderot,p. 61.
[297]Conf., ix. 245, 246.
[298]Grimm to Madame d'Epinay, ii. 259, 269, 313, 326.Conf., x. 17.
[299]Mém., ii. 318.
[300]Conf., ix. 322. Madame d'Epinay (Mém., ii. 326), writing to Grimm, gives a much colder and stiffer colour to the scene of reconciliation, but the nature of her relations with him would account for this. The same circumstance, as M. Girardin has pointed out (Rev. des Deux Mondes, Sept. 1853), would explain the discrepancy between her letters as given in the Confessions, and the copies of them sent to Grimm, and printed in her Memoirs. M. Sainte Beuve, who is never perfectly master of himself in dealing with the chiefs of the revolutionary schools, as might indeed have been expected in a writer with his predilections for the seventeenth century, rashly hints (Causeries, vii. 301) that Rousseau was the falsifier. The publication from the autograph originals sets this at rest.
[301]For Shakespeare, seeCorr. Lit., iv. 143, etc.
[302]D'Epinay, ii. 188.
[303]D'Epinay, ii. 150. Also Vandeul'sMém. de Diderot, p. 61.
[304]Mém.ii. 128.
[305]P. 258. See also p. 146.
[306]Pp. 282, 336, etc.
[307]Corr., i. 386. June 1757.
[308]Conf., ix. 355. For Madame d'Epinay's equally credible version, assigning all the stiffness and arrogance to Rousseau, seeMém., ii. 355-358. Saint Lambert refers to the momentary reconciliation in his letter to Rousseau of Nov. 21 (Streckeisen, i. 418), repeating what he had said before (p. 417), that Grimm always spoke of Mm in amicable terms, though complaining of Rousseau's injustice.
[309]Conf., ix. 372.
[310]Corr., i. 404-416. Oct 19, 1757.
[311]Grimm to Diderot, in Madame d'Epinay'sMém.ii. 386. Nov. 3, 1757.
[312]D'Epinay, ii. 387. Nov. 3.
[313]Corr., i. 425. Nov. 8.Ib.426.
[314]Streckeisen-Moultou, i. 381-383.
[315]Ib.387. Many years after, Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (Oeuv., xii. 57) that one of the reasons which made him leave the Hermitage was the indiscretion of friends who insisted on sending him letters by some conveyance that cost 4 francs, when it might equally well have been sent for as many sous.
[316]The sources of all this are in the following places.Corr., i. 416. Oct. 29. Streckeisen, i. 349. Nov. 12.Conf., ix. 377.Corr., i. 427. Nov. 23.Conf., ix. 381. Dec. 1.Ib., ix. 383. Dec. 17.
[317]Diderot to Grimm; D'Epinay, ii. 397. Diderot'sOeuv., xix. 446. See also 449 and 210.
Simplificationhas already been used by us as the key-word to Rousseau's aims and influence. The scheme of musical notation with which he came to try his fortune in Paris in 1741, his published vindication of it, and his musical compositions afterwards all fall under this term. Each of them was a plea for the extrication of the simple from the cumbrousness of elaborated pedantry, and for a return to nature from the unmeaning devices of false art. And all tended alike in the popular direction, towards the extension of enjoyment among the common people, and the glorification of their simple lives and moods, in the art designed for the great.
The Village Soothsayer was one of the group of works which marked a revolution in the history of French music, by putting an end to the tyrannical tradition of Lulli and Rameau, and preparing the way through a middle stage of freshness, simplicity, naturalism, up to the noble severity of Gluck (1714-1787). This great composer, though a Bohemian by birth, found his first appreciation in a public thathad been trained by the Italian pastoral operas, of which Rousseau's was one of the earliest produced in France. Grétri, the Fleming (1741-1813), who had a hearty admiration for Jean Jacques, and out of a sentiment of piety lived for a time in his Hermitage, came in point of musical excellence between the group of Rousseau, Philidor, Duni, and the rest, and Gluck. "I have not produced exaltation in people's heads by tragical superlative," Grétri said, "but I have revealed the accent of truth, which I have impressed deeper in men's hearts."[318]These words express sufficiently the kind of influence which Rousseau also had. Crude as the music sounds to us who are accustomed to more sumptuous schools, we can still hear in it the note which would strike a generation weary of Rameau. It was the expression in one way of the same mood which in another way revolted against paint, false hair, and preposterous costume as of savages grown opulent. Such music seems without passion or subtlety or depth or magnificence. Thus it had hardly any higher than a negative merit, but it was the necessary preparation for the acceptance of a more positive style, that should replace both the elaborate false art of the older French composers and the too colourless realism of the pastoral comic opera, by the austere loveliness and elevation ofOrfeoandAlceste.
In 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and performed at the Opera a number of pieces by Pergolese, and other composers of their country. Aviolent war arose, which agitated Paris far more intensely than the defeat of Rossbach and the loss of Canada did afterwards. The quarrel between the Parliament and the Clergy was at its height. The Parliament had just been exiled, and the gravest confusion threatened the State. The operatic quarrel turned the excitement of the capital into another channel. Things went so far that the censor was entreated to prohibit the printing of any work containing the damnable doctrine and position that Italian music is good. Rousseau took part enthusiastically with the Italians.[319]His Letter on French Music (1753) proved to the great fury of the people concerned, that the French had no national music, and that it would be so much the worse for them if they ever had any. Their language, so proper to be the organ of truth and reason, was radically unfit either for poetry or music. All national music must derive its principal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet, sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowelsare full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it beautiful.[320]
The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and "other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321]The last phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism—shows that even a man who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not escape its influence.
Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the impossibility of setting melodyto French words on the part of a writer who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and demolished the pretensions of French music with great sounding strokes as of an axe.[322]Rousseau expected to be assassinated, and gravely assures us that there was a plot to that effect, as well as a design to put him in the Bastille. This we may fairly surmise to have been a fiction of his own imagination, and the only real punishment that overtook him was the loss of his right to free admission to the Opera. After what he had said of the intolerable horrors of French music, the directors of the theatre can hardly be accused of vindictiveness in releasing him from them.[323]Some twenty years after (1774), when Paris was torn asunder by the violence of the two great factions of the Gluckists and Piccinists, Rousseau retracted his opinion as to the impossibility of wedding melody to French words.[324]He went as often as he could to hear the works both of Grétri and Gluck, andOrfeodelighted him, while theFausse magieof the former moved him to say to the composer, "Your music stirs sweet sensations to which I thought my heart had long been closed."[325]This being so, and life being as brief as art is long, we need not further examine the controversy. It may be worth adding that Rousseau wrote some of the articles on music for the Encyclopædia, and that in 1767 he published a not inconsiderable Musical Dictionary of his own.
His scheme of a new musical notation and the principles on which he defended it are worth attention, because some of the ideas are now accepted as the base of a well-known and growing system of musical instruction. The aim of the scheme, let us say to begin with, was at once practical and popular; to reduce the difficulty of learning music to the lowest possible point, and so to bring the most delightful of the arts within the reach of the largest possible number of people. Hence, although he maintains the fitness of his scheme for instrumental as well as vocalperformances, it is clearly the latter which he has most at heart, evidently for the reason that this is the kind of music most accessible to the thousands, and it was always the thousands of whom Rousseau thought. This is the true distinction of music, it is for the people; and the best musical notation is that which best enables persons to sing at sight. The difficulty of the old notation had come practically before him as a teacher. The quantity of details which the pupil was forced to commit to memory before being able to sing from the open book, struck him then as the chief obstacle to anything like facility in performance, and without some of this facility he rightly felt that music must remain a luxury for the few. So genuine was his interest in the matter, that he was not very careful to fight for the originality of his own scheme. Our present musical signs, he said, are so imperfect and so inconvenient that it is no wonder that several persons have tried to re-cast or amend them; nor is it any wonder that some of them should have hit upon the same device in selecting the signs most natural and proper, such as numerical figures. As much, however, depends on the way of dealing with these figures, as with their adoption, and here he submitted that his own plan was as novel as it was advantageous.[326]Thus we have to bear in mind that Rousseau's scheme was above all things a practical device, contrived for making the teaching and the learning of musical elements an easier process.[327]
The chief element of the project consists in the substitution of a relative series of notes or symbols in place of an absolute series. In the common notation any given note, say the A of the treble clef, is uniformly represented by the same symbol, namely, the position of second space in the clef, whatever key it may belong to. Rousseau, insisting on the varying quality impressed on any tone of a given pitch by the key-note of the scale to which it belongs, protested against the same name being given to the tone, however the quality of it might vary. Thus Re or D, which is the second tone in the key of C, ought, according to him, to have a different name when found as the fifth in the key of G, and in every case the name should at once indicate the interval of a tone from its key-note. His mode of effecting this change is as follows. The namesut, re, and the rest, are kept for the fixed order of the tones, C, D, E, and the rest. The key of a piece is shown by prefixing one of these symbols, and this determines the absolute quality of the melody as to pitch. That settled, every tone is expressed by a number bearing a relation to the key-note. This tonic note is represented by one, the other six tones of the scale are expressed by the numbers from two to seven. In the popular TonicSol-Fa notation, which corresponds so closely to Rousseau's in principle, the key-note is always styled Do, and the other symbols,mi,la, and the rest, indicate at once the relative position of these tones in their particular key or scale. Here the old names were preserved as being easily sung; Rousseau selected numbers because he supposed that they best expressed the generation of the sounds.[328]
Rousseau attempted to find a theoretic base for this symbolic establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329]but his knowledge of the order was faulty. He was perhaps groping after the idea by which Professor Helmholtz has accounted for the various mental effects of the several intervals in a key—namely, the degree of natural affinity, measured by means of the upper tones, existing between the given tone and its tonic. Apart from this, however, the practical value of his ideas in instruction in singing is clearly shown by the circumstance that at any given time many thousands of young children are now being taught to read melody in the Sol-Fa notation in a few weeks. This shows how right Rousseau was in continually declaring the ease of hitting a particular tone, when the relative position of the tone in respect to the key-note is clearly manifested. A singer in trying to hit the tone is compelled to measure the intervalbetween it and the preceding tone, and the simplest and easiest mode of doing this is to associate every tone with the tonics, thus constituting it a term of a relation with this fundamental tone.