ROUSSEAU.*

IT is, or at least used to be, required of all candidates for licence to the Ministry in the Kirk of Scotland that they should, along with other proofs of due qualification, "offer up" an extempore prayer in the Divinity Hall of their University, in presence of a Professor of Theology and of their fellow-students. And it is re- ported that one aspirant to the sacred calling thus began his un- premeditated address to the Supreme Power:—" 0 Thou all-seeing Being, look not upon us, as we are in ourselves, for we appear before Thee in all our original nudity !" Rousseau had no touch of the puritanic consciousness so naively expressed by the Scotch student touching the spiritual unclothedness of human existence. Het gloried in his original nudity. In his drunken pathology he

* Rousseau. By John Morley. London: Chapman and Hall. 1873.

was Noah and Ham in one. You cannot read some bits of his Con- fessions without feeling that you must be "unclean until the evening,"—separated from the congregation of all healthy thoughts and spiritual aspirations.

A sensualist impure and simple, a liar, a slanderer, a cheat, a hypocrite, a restless vagabond, living in scandalous relations with one personage for some years, and then quasi-marrying another, mean every way, under an assumed name, while the five children of this alliance were relegated duly to the tender mercies of a Foundling Hospital ; such is the portrait which Rousseau has left.

of himself, and which Mr. John Morley has reproduced with scrupulous fidelity in the two volumes before us. It has to be remembered, however, that this very " wild " Rousseau—to use Byron's vague epithet—is the earthy and animal man as he

appears under the solar microscope of his Confessions, of which not even the first instalment was published until three years after his death. And we question very much whether any of his friends,

French or English,—excepting, perhaps, Grimm and Diderot—had during his lifetime the slightest impression that the moody, sus- picious, lachrymose, irascible, solitude-loving personage, who had quarrelled with thern all in turn, had such a grim satyr gory to. tell ; or whether even he, notwithstanding his now world-famous Appeal to the judgment of the Almighty, in the posthumous

publication, would have felt it prudent or consistent to expose ha Lady Gadiva fashion the still surviving author of Emile, the reforming pedagogue of his age, the vindicator of the divine bene-

ficence against Voltaire in the controversy which arose concerning the Lisbon earthquake, the sentimental prophet of the theistic reaction against the scornful atheism of the Parisian speculators,.

the ultra - Palmerstonian assertor of the natural goodness.

of all children, to the gaze of his contemporaries. No.

doubt two or three unhappy women had no reason to look on. Rousseau as a saint. The lady, for instance, about whom and Rousseau's daily salutations to her, Byron writes such magnilo- quent, hectic sentiment, could only regard him as a dastardly delirious slave of passion, ludicrous in his imbecility ; but, on the other hand, St. Lambert, the "elective affinity" of the married. lady in question—Madame D'Hondetot—instead of being jealous of Rousseau's intimacy with his friend, was, it seems, only afraid. that the moral recluse was preaching to his partner in impure relations, like a second John the Baptist ! Again, Hume, who.

brought him over to England, after he had been banished from his native city, Geneva,—the conservative instincts of priest and presbyter and senator alike being roused to anathema, to the pro- scription of his person, and the conflagration of his books, by the Deism of Emilius, and the revolutionary doctrine of the inalienable

sovereignty of the people, in the Social Contract,—thus writes of him :— " He has an excellent, warm heart, and his conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like inspiration ; I love him much, and hope that I have some place in his affections. Ho is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited, warm-hearted man as ever I knew in my life. He is also, to all appearance, very sociable. The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to Calais without a. quarrel, but I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friend- ship and esteem. I believe one great source of our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case with any of them. They, are also displeased with him, because they think he overabounds in religion, and it is, indeed, remarkable that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted is by far the most devout."

St. Pierre, again—the author of Paul and Virginia—gives us a

quite charming idyll of Rousseau's last days in Paris,—of his simple tastes, his frugal, temperate habits, his industry in adding to his very slender domestic exchequer by copying music, his scrupulosity in all money concerns, and his proud disdain of gifts. He little dreamed, apparently, that the very homely madame was scarcely Rousseau's lawful wife, and that their five children, as we have said, were as far sundered from the care of their parents as if they had been transplanted to the other side of the moon. But here is the record of a morning pilgrimage to Mont Valerien, an eminence so. famous during the late war :—

" We made an appointment at a café in the Champs Elysees. In the. morning we took some chocolate, and reaching the Bois de Boulogne by 8 o'clock, Jean Jacques set to work botanising (and an enthusiastic' and accomplished botanist he was). Arrived at the edge of the river,. we crossed the ferry with a number of people whom devotion was taking to Mont Valerien. After climbing an uncommonly stiff slope, we began to think of dining, and Rousseau led the way towards a hermitage where he knew we could make sure of hospitality. The brother whe opened to us conducted us to the chapel, where they wore reciting the litanies of Providence, which are exceedingly beautiful. When we had. prayed, Jean Jacques said to me, with genuine feeling, 'Now I feel what is said in the Gospel, Where several of you are gathered together in my name, there will I* be in the midst of them. There is a sentiment of

peace and comfort here that penetrates the replied, If Fenelon, were alive, you would be a Catholic.'—' Ah ! said he, with tears in his.

eyes, 'if Rnelon were alive, I would seek to be his lackey, that I might Isle of Dogs being the result of a social contract. Nevertheless, the English Revolution was the assertion of the sovereignty of England itself,—of the sovereignty of the English law-loving and law-abiding people as proclaimed by Locke, against the autocracy of the head of the Leviathan People as set forth by Hobbes. Rousseau, it is true, was an absolute Hobbist in his conception of the relation of religion to the State. He would, for instance, have sentenced that great defender of the faith of Englishmen in ever- lasting damnation, James Grant, or the editor of the Record, to penal servitude for life, or capital punishment, for dissidence from Lord Westbury's famous verdict on "the hope" of many English clergymen. Our own journal would have fared very badly at his hands, and he would have denounced the modern apostle of sweet- ness and light as a profane person, like Esau, a very "root of bitterness." Robespierre—" the sea-green Methodist of Carlyle" —was drunk with Rousseau, and Rousseau's pallid and, as it proved, spectral deism, raised over the flood to supreme power for the nonce, sent to the guillotine Chaumette and Clootz for preaching their nonconforming doctrines of atheism. All this is too verifiable to need any further comments from us. But the French Revolution had not yet written the apocalypse of Jean Jacques in letters of fire and blood on the social edifice, and the typical Conser- vative of a century ago might hail the Rousseau of the Social Con- tract and the author of Emilius as a desirable and potent auxiliary. The supremacy of the State Religion was the comfortable port- wine creed in the ascendant ; the Dissenters were genuine "out- siders," and the Roman Catholics were under civil ban. Then it has to be remembered that, putting together the various elements of the teaching of the New Heloisa, of Emillus, and of the Social Contract, we find in them these remarkable conceptions,—the sovereignty of law,—though, as Mr. Morley is careful to remark, and the remark bears upon the whole of Rousseau's life, as well as his didactics, he never associates law with the authority of a Commandment ; the sacredness of property,—the first lesson, by the by, communicated to the young Emilius ; the sweetness of domestic life,—repulsive though the earlier and later surroundings of the New Heloisa be ; the claims of childhood to the discipline of truth, reverence, and justice ; the beneficence and benevolence of the Supreme Being,—though Rousseau finds "the wicked very troublesome," and as Mr. Morley wholesomely observes, Rousseau's deism is of a very self-complacent character, and much more akin to the indifferentism of Pelagius than to "the pitifulness of Christianity," advocated, up to certain limits, by Augustine ; the sublime character of Jesus, whose death was that of a God, while that of Socrates was only the death of a sage ; and then directly, or by implication (at least, many Frenchmen confessed the obligation France owed to the author of the Social Contract), we have the creation or resuscitation of the sentiments of Patriotism, Citizen-

become his valet de chambre.' Presently we were introduced into the refectory; we seated ourselves during the reading; the subject was the injustice of the complainings of men : God (here, by the way, a capital (**) has brought him from nothing, ho owed him nothing. After the reading, Rousseau said to me, with a voice of deep emotion, 'Al! how happy is the man who can believe.'"

After the publication of the New Heloisa, adoring females threw themselves at his feet with a devotion as absolute as ever charac- terised any hieropathic devotee towards her Evangelical teacher ; and the Prince of Wiirtemburg was so inebriated—shall we say— with the Pecksniff didactics on education in the Emilius, that he implored the author to take the sole direction of the upbringing -of his daughter, who at the time had only been visible on board our planet for four months.

These and not a few others are considerable testimonies to the moral impression which this " wild " genius had produced. Then it has to be added, when he came to England, this son of a -Genevan watchmaker, who had been apprentice to an engraver and run away from his master, who had been received a homeless wanderer into the Roman Church at Turin, who had been a clerk, and even common waiting-man, was welcomed by the Upper Ten with an enthusiasm which can only be paralleled at present by the demonstration which the Claimant in the Tichborne Case has ,called forth at the East of London. A Royal pension, to boot, was only a small recognition of the claims which this man bad, at all events to the sympathy and admiration, if not to the moral gratitude of the world.

What, we must now ask, had Rousseau done, in order to arouse such implacable resentments, on the one hand, and such spring-tide tipilowing admiration on the other ? If you consult Voltaire's letter, for instance, in acknowledging the receipt of the "Discourse -on Inequality," which is deliciously witty and clever, you might be led to think that Jean Jacques was only a vague dreamer, at whom

it was becoming to poke as much fun as you could command.

Voltaire thus writes :—" I have received your new book against the -human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used with the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in read- -ing your book, to get down on all-fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel, unhappily, the responsibility of resuming it. Nor can I embark in search of the savages of Canada, because the maladies to which I am con-

siemned render a European surgeon necessary to me ; because war is going on in these regions, and because the example of our.

=actions has made the savages nearly as bad as ourselves ; so con- tent myself with being a peaceable sage, in the solitude I have chosen near your native place." No doubt, however, Rousseau's was the slow, self-kindling, brooding spirit, which, communicating

its fervour to the great sea of French society, upheaved its mighty waters with such terrible wave-force that Church and Throne, and the whole organisation of centuries, were overwhelmed by their stormful assault. According to Rousseau, the first man was, and

all savage men after him are, of the heavens, heavenly. Society bad enslaved man, letters had corrupted him. Relationship had made him a slave. "The three R's" had ruined his morality. -Civilisation and culture, between them, had wrought the decline and fall of the man after God's own heart, i.e., the savage pure and simple! Socialism in all its shades, until it emerges into red- handed communism, must claim its paternity from the man who wrote—and whose writings, even when they rouse us to disgust, or the legitimate swearing which is said to put an end to all strife, -have always the daemonisch quality of directness and clear imagina- tion—that "he who first enclosed a piece of land, and called it "nine, was the founder of civil society. How many wars, massacres, and miseries would have been spared, had some one levelled the boundary, filled up the ditch, and said to his fellows, Beware of the impostor ; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the earth to none ! "

This Rousseau's dream became a terrible reality, but not till several years after his own fitful, fever-life had suddenly closed, not

without suspicion of his own hands having wrought the end, in 1778. And before he found an asylum in England, in 1776, he had in

-the regard of many of the Respectablcs entirely made amends for

his savage paradoxes by the doctrine of the Social Contract, grotesque and unscientific as the leading idea in the treatise is. Just think for a moment of the condition of Whitechapel, Wapping, and the

* Mr. Morley should have waved the red flag hero, and cautioned his readers :against the capital offence of supposing that in adopting the barbarous usage of the big"!' in this place, he was forgetting that in speaking in the third person -of the Founder of Christianity, the first syllable of his name could only be appro- priately printed under the modest claim to self assertion contained in the French je. Of course, Mr. Morley would at once admit that when rendered into French, Abe words "I and my Father are one," do not involve any special egoism in Him whom he is condescending enough to call "the sublime mystic of the Galilean hills."

ship, and Fraternity. Schiller says, " Rousseau converted Christians into men." Well, making all deductions, and there must be many, from the moral and philosophic, not to say Christian, stand-points, in the estimate of Rousseau's writings published during his life, still here was a sort of morbid prophet in his way, with thoughts that breathed and words which burned. He might have left us, according to the regard with which England hailed the living man, only a legacy of seminal• principles, amid which the winnowing fan of time and experience would have duly severed—as is the law—the wheat from the chaff. But instead of this literary bequest, he has elected to reveal himself to us as one of the most pitifully self-indulgent, craven, unclean, if not, as one calls him, the most malignant—notwithstanding his few acts of not very striking considerateness for the vanity of other people, that is all—of any who have ever worn the human form. What are we to say to this? No words of ours could possibly reveal a more righteous moral indignation against many of the outrageous passages in Rousseau's Confessions than we find excited by some of the opinions regarding them expressed by Mr. Morley. We might safely venture to affirm that throughout the whole of these two erudite and in many ways masterly volumes the virility of the author's intellect—bating his proclivity for little j's and c's, already commented on in these columns—is not more conspicuously present than the vulgarity of some of his ethical judgments.

Mr. Morley, however, is very irate with Rousseau because of his Deistic, reactionary sentiments,—he almost, to use his own pet epithet, "denigrates" him. This able biographer, it must also be added, is very hostile to the Christian faith, while he would apparently cherish as an everlasting possession the fruits of that faith, especially its reverence and charity. We are not going to hold any argument now on these high matters with Mr. Morley. But taking for granted the vast difference between ourselves and:Mr. Morley, we return to the question of Rousseau's Confessions, and for answer, we can only write, protesting very decidedly against our biographer's tone, either that a remorse which preyed on him for his whole life, making him gloomy, suspicious, unsocial, and at times superstitiously religious, as in the throwing of the stone at the tree to find out whether he was going to be saved or damned, demanded of him to make a clean breast to the world,—or that a vicious complacency in the evil of which be had not repented, and a cynical doubt of the struggling purity of other men, must have seduced him into the portraiture of a life which could only inspire the good with sorrow, and impure natures with thelfeeling that morality is a dream of individuals corrupted by society.