Rousseau Part 11

[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.

[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mem._, ii.

115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the doc.u.ments in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.

[249] _Mem._, ii. 116.

[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.

[251] _Corr._, i. 245.

[252] _Phaedrus_, 230.

[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.

CHAPTER VII.

THE HERMITAGE.

It would have been a strange anachronism if the decade of the Encyclopaedia and the Seven Years' War had reproduced one of those scenes which are as still resting-places amid the ceaseless forward tramp of humanity, where some holy man turned away from the world, and with adorable seriousness sought communion with the divine in mortification of flesh and solitude of spirit. Those were the retreats of firm hope and beatified faith. The hope and faith of the eighteenth century were centred in action, not in contemplation, and the few solitaries of that epoch, as well as of another nearer to our own, fled away from the impotence of their own will, rather than into the haven of satisfied conviction and clear-eyed acceptance. Only one of them--Wordsworth, the poetic hermit of our lakes--impresses us in any degree like one of the great individualities of the ages when men not only craved for the unseen, but felt the closeness of its presence over their heads and about their feet. The modern anchorite goes forth in the spirit of the preacher who declared all the things that are under the sun to be vanity, not in the transport of the saint who knew all the things that are under the sun to be no more than the shadow of a dream in the light of a celestial brightness to come.

Rousseau's mood, deeply tinged as it was by bitterness against society and circ.u.mstance, still contained a strong positive element in his native exultation in all natural objects and processes, which did not leave him vacantly brooding over the evil of the world he had quitted.

The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the general tide of desire flowed more fully within him. To be surrounded with the simplicity of rural life was with him not only a stimulus, but an essential condition to free intellectual energy. Many a time, he says, when making excursions into the country with great people, "I was so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as in pa.s.sing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows."[254] He was no anchorite proper, one weary of the world and waiting for the end, but a man with a strong dislike for one kind of life and a keen liking for another kind. He thought he was now about to reproduce the old days of the Charmettes, true to his inveterate error that one may efface years and accurately replace a past. He forgot that instead of the once vivacious and tender benefactress who was now waiting for slow death in her hovel, his house-mates would be a poor dull drudge and her vile mother. He forgot, too, that since those days the various processes of intellectual life had expanded within him, and produced a busy fermentation which makes a man's surroundings very critical. Finally, he forgot that in proportion as a man suffers the smooth course of his thought to depend on anything external, whether on the greenness of the field or the gaiety of the street or the constancy of friends, so comes he nearer to chance of making s.h.i.+pwreck. Hence his tragedy, though the very root of the tragedy lay deeper,--in temperament.

I.

Rousseau's impatience drove him into the country almost before the walls of his little house were dry (April 9, 1756). "Although it was cold, and snow still lay upon the ground, the earth began to show signs of life; violets and primroses were to be seen; the buds on the trees were beginning to shoot; and the very night of my arrival was marked by the first song of the nightingale. I heard it close to my window in a wood that touched the house. After a light sleep I awoke, forgetting that I was transplanted; I thought myself still in the Rue de Grenelle, when in an instant the warbling of the birds made me thrill with delight. My very first care was to surrender myself to the impression of the rustic objects about me. Instead of beginning by arranging things inside my quarters, I first set about planning my walks, and there was not a path nor a copse nor a grove round my cottage which I had not found out before the end of the next day. The place, which was lonely rather than wild, transported me in fancy to the end of the world, and no one could ever have dreamed that we were only four leagues from Paris."[255]

This rural delirium, as he justly calls it, lasted for some days, at the end of which he began seriously to apply himself to work. But work was too soon broken off by a mood of vehement exaltation, produced by the stimulus given to all his senses by the new world of delight in which he found himself. This exaltation was in a different direction from that which had seized him half a dozen years before, when he had discarded the usage and costume of politer society, and had begun to conceive an angry contempt for the manners, prejudices, and maxims of his time.

Restoration to a more purely sensuous atmosphere softened this austerity. No longer having the vices of a great city before his eyes, he no longer cherished the wrath which they had inspired in him. "When I did not see men, I ceased to despise them; and when I had not the bad before my eyes, I ceased to hate them. My heart, little made as it is for hate, now did no more than deplore their wretchedness, and made no distinction between their wretchedness and their badness. This state, so much more mild, if much less sublime, soon dulled the glowing enthusiasm that had long transported me."[256] That is to say, his nature remained for a moment not exalted but fairly balanced. It was only for a moment.

And in studying the movements of impulse and reflection in him at this critical time of his life, we are hurried rapidly from phase to phase.

Once more we are watching a man who lived without either intellectual or spiritual direction, swayed by a reminiscence, a pa.s.sing mood, a personality accidentally encountered, by anything except permanent aim and fixed objects, and who would at any time have surrendered the most deliberately pondered scheme of persistent effort to the fascination of a cottage slumbering in a bounteous landscape. Hence there could be no normally composed state for him; the first soothing effect of the rich life of forest and garden on a nature exasperated by the life of the town pa.s.sed away, and became transformed into an exaltation that swept the stoic into s.p.a.ce, leaving sensuousness to sovereign and uncontrolled triumph, until the delight turned to its inevitable ashes and bitterness.

At first all was pure and delicious. In after times when pain made him gloomily measure the length of the night, and when fever prevented him from having a moment of sleep, he used to try to still his suffering by recollection of the days that he had pa.s.sed in the woods of Montmorency, with his dog, the birds, the deer, for his companions. "As I got up with the sun to watch his rising from my garden, if I saw the day was going to be fine, my first wish was that neither letters nor visits might come to disturb its charm. After having given the morning to divers tasks which I fulfilled with all the more pleasure that I could put them off to another time if I chose, I hastened to eat my dinner, so as to escape from the importunate and make myself a longer afternoon. Before one o'clock, even on days of fiercest heat, I used to start in the blaze of the sun, along with my faithful Achates, hurrying my steps lest some one should lay hold of me before I could get away. But when I had once pa.s.sed a certain corner, with what beating of the heart, with what radiant joy, did I begin to breathe freely, as I felt myself safe and my own master for the rest of the day! Then with easier pace I went in search of some wild and desert spot in the forest, where there was nothing to show the hand of man, or to speak of servitude and domination; some refuge where I could fancy myself its discoverer, and where no inopportune third person came to interfere between nature and me. She seemed to spread out before my eyes a magnificence that was always new. The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather struck my eyes with a glorious splendour that went to my very heart; the majesty of the trees that covered me with their shadow, the delicacy of the shrubs that surrounded me, the astonis.h.i.+ng variety of gra.s.ses and flowers that I trod under foot, kept my mind in a continual alternation of attention and delight.... My imagination did not leave the earth thus superbly arrayed without inhabitants. I formed a charming society, of which I did not feel myself unworthy; I made a golden age to please my own fancy, and filling up these fair days with all those scenes of my life that had left sweet memories behind, and all that my heart could yet desire or hope in scenes to come, I waxed tender even to shedding tears over the true pleasures of humanity, pleasures so delicious, so pure, and henceforth so far from the reach of men. Ah, if in such moments any ideas of Paris, of the age, of my little aureole as author, came to trouble my dreams, with what disdain did I drive them out, to deliver myself without distraction to the exquisite sentiments of which I was so full. Yet in the midst of it all, the nothingness of my chimeras sometimes broke sadly upon my mind. Even if every dream had suddenly been transformed into reality, it would not have been enough; I should have dreamed, imagined, yearned still." Alas, this deep insatiableness of sense, the dreary vacuity of soul that follows fulness of animal delight, the restless exactingness of undirected imagination, was never recognised by Rousseau distinctly enough to modify either his conduct or his theory of life. He filled up the void for a short s.p.a.ce by that sovereign aspiration, which changed the dead bones of old theology into the living figure of a new faith. "From the surface of the earth I raised my ideas to all the existences in nature, to the universal system of things, to the incomprehensible Being who embraces all. Then with mind lost in that immensity, I did not think, I did not reason, I did not philosophise; with a sort of pleasure I felt overwhelmed by the weight of the universe, I surrendered myself to the ravis.h.i.+ng confusion of these vast ideas. I loved to lose myself in imagination in immeasurable s.p.a.ce; within the limits of real existences my heart was too tightly compressed; in the universe I was stifled; I would fain have launched myself into the infinite. I believe that if I had unveiled all the mysteries of nature, I should have found myself in a less delicious situation than that bewildering ecstasy to which my mind so unreservedly delivered itself, and which sometimes transported me until I cried out, 'O mighty Being! O mighty Being!' without power of any other word or thought."[257]

It is not wholly insignificant that though he could thus expand his soul with ejaculatory delight in something supreme, he could not endure the sight of one of his fellow-creatures. "If my gaiety lasted the whole night, that showed that I had pa.s.sed the day alone; I was very different after I had seen people, for I was rarely content with others and never with myself. Then in the evening I was sure to be in taciturn or scolding humour." It is not in every condition that effervescent pa.s.sion for ideal forms of the religious imagination a.s.sists sympathy with the real beings who surround us. And to this let us add that there are natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely a.s.sociated with the ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to this cla.s.s, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one side of an ideal exaltation, which stirred the depths of his spirit with a force as genuine as that which is kindled in natures of another type by sympathy with the real and concrete, with the daily walk and conversation and actual doings and sufferings of the men and women whom we know. The fermentation which followed his arrival at the Hermitage, in its first form produced a number of literary schemes. The idea of the Political Inst.i.tutions, first conceived at Venice, pressed upon his meditations. He had been earnestly requested to compose a treatise on education. Besides this, his thoughts wandered confusedly round the notion of a treatise to be called Sensitive Morality, or the Materialism of the Sage, the object of which was to examine the influence of external agencies, such as light, darkness, sound, seasons, food, noise, silence, motion, rest, on our corporeal machine, and thus indirectly upon the soul also. By knowing these and acquiring the art of modifying them according to our individual needs, we should become surer of ourselves and fix a deeper constancy in our lives. An external system of treatment would thus be established, which would place and keep the soul in the condition most favourable to virtue.[258] Though the treatise was never completed, and the sketch never saw the light, we perceive at least that Rousseau would have made the means of access to character wide enough, and the material influences that impress it and produce its caprices, mult.i.tudinous enough, instead of limiting them with the medical specialist to one or two organs, and one or two of the conditions that affect them. Nor, on the other hand, do the words in which he sketches his project in the least justify the attribution to him of the doctrine of the absolute power of the physical const.i.tution over the moral habits, whether that doctrine would be a credit or a discredit to his philosophical thoroughness of perception. No one denies the influence of external conditions on the moral habits, and Rousseau says no more than that he proposed to consider the extent and the modifiableness of this influence. It was not then deemed essential for a spiritualist thinker to ignore physical organisation.

A third undertaking of a more substantial sort was to arrange and edit the papers and printed works of the Abbe de Saint Pierre (1658-1743), confided to him through the agency of Saint Lambert, and partly also of Madame Dupin, the warm friend of that singular and good man.[259] This task involved reading, considering, and picking extracts from twenty-three diffuse and chaotic volumes, full of prolixity and repet.i.tion. Rousseau, dreamer as he was, yet had quite keenness of perception enough to discern the weakness of a dreamer of another sort; and he soon found out that the Abbe de Saint Pierre's views were impracticable, in consequence of the author's fixed idea that men are guided rather by their lights than by their pa.s.sions. In fact, Saint Pierre was penetrated with the eighteenth-century faith to a peculiar degree. As with Condorcet afterwards, he was led by his admiration for the extent of modern knowledge to adopt the principle that perfected reason is capable of being made the base of all inst.i.tutions, and would speedily terminate all the great abuses of the world. "He went wrong,"

says Rousseau, "not merely in having no other pa.s.sion but that of reason, but by insisting on making all men like himself, instead of taking them as they are and as they will continue to be." The critic's own error in later days was not very different from this, save that it applied to the medium in which men live, rather than to themselves, by refusing to take complex societies as they are, even as starting-points for higher attempts at organisation. Rousseau had occasionally seen the old man, and he preserved the greatest veneration for his memory, speaking of him as the honour of his age and race, with a fulness of enthusiasm very unusual towards men, though common enough towards inanimate nature. The sincerity of this respect, however, could not make the twenty-three volumes which the good man had written, either fewer in number or lighter in contents, and after dealing as well as he could with two important parts of Saint Pierre's works, he threw up the task.[260] It must not be supposed that Rousseau would allow that fatigue or tedium had anything to do with a resolve which really needed no better justification. As we have seen before, he had amazing skill in finding a certain ingeniously contrived largeness for his motives. Saint Pierre's writings were full of observations on the government of France, some of them remarkably bold in their criticism, but he had not been punished for them because the ministers always looked upon him as a kind of preacher rather than a genuine politician, and he was allowed to say what he pleased, because it was observed that no one listened to what he said. Besides, he was a Frenchman, and Rousseau was not, and hence the latter, in publis.h.i.+ng Saint Pierre's strictures on French affairs, was exposing himself to a sharp question why he meddled with a country that did not concern him. "It surprised me," says Rousseau, "that the reflection had not occurred to me earlier," but this coincidence of the discovery that the work was imprudent, with the discovery that he was weary of it, will surprise n.o.body versed in study of a man who lives in his sensations, and yet has vanity enough to dislike to admit it.

The short remarks which Rousseau appended to his abridgment of Saint Pierre's essays on Perpetual Peace, and on a Polysynodia, or Plurality of Councils, are extremely shrewd and pointed, and would suffice to show us, if there were nothing else to do so, the right kind of answer to make to the more harmful dreams of the Social Contract. Saint Pierre's fault is said, with entire truth, to be a failure to make his views relative to men, to times, to circ.u.mstances; and there is something that startles us when we think whose words we are reading, in the declaration that, "whether an existing government be still that of old times, or whether it have insensibly undergone a change of nature, it is equally imprudent to touch it: if it is the same, it must be respected, and if it has degenerated, that is due to the force of time and circ.u.mstance, and human sagacity is powerless." Rousseau points to France, asking his readers to judge the peril of once moving by an election the enormous ma.s.ses comprising the French monarchy; and in another place, after a wise general remark on the futility of political machinery without men of a certain character, he ill.u.s.trates it by this scornful question: When you see all Paris in a ferment about the rank of a dancer or a wit, and the affairs of the academy or the opera making everybody forget the interest of the ruler and the glory of the nation, what can you hope from bringing political affairs close to such a people, and removing them from the court to the town?[261] Indeed, there is perhaps not one of these pages which Burke might not well have owned.[262]

A violent and prolonged crisis followed this not entirely unsuccessful effort after sober and laborious meditation. Rousseau was now to find that if society has its perils, so too has solitude, and that if there is evil in frivolous complaisance for the puppet-work of a world that is only a little serious, so there is evil in a pa.s.sionate tenderness for phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those who care to speak of human nature should have an opportunity of knowing its less glorious parts. They may be presumed to exist, though in less violent degree, in many people whom we meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that no educating care nor envelope of circ.u.mstance had ever hardened against her intoxication. Most of us are protected against this subtle debauch of sensuous egoism by a cool organisation, while even those who are born with senses and appet.i.tes of great strength and keenness, are guarded by acc.u.mulated discipline of all kinds from without, especially by the necessity for active industry which brings the most exaggerated native sensibility into balance. It is the constant and rigorous social parade which keeps the eager regiment of the senses from making furious rout. Rousseau had just repudiated all social obligation, and he had never gone through external discipline. He was at an age when pa.s.sion that has never been broken in has the beak of the bald vulture, tearing and gnawing a man; but its first approach is in fair shapes.

Wandering and dreaming "in the sweetest season of the year, in the month of June, under the fresh groves, with the song of the nightingale and the soft murmuring of the brooks in his ear," he began to wonder restlessly why he had never tasted in their plenitude the vivid sentiments which he was conscious of possessing in reserve, or any of that intoxicating delight which he felt potentially existent in his soul. Why had he been created with faculties so exquisite, to be left thus unused and unfruitful? The feeling of his own quality, with this of a certain injustice and waste superadded, brought warm tears which he loved to let flow. Visions of the past, from girl playmates of his youth down to the Venetian courtesan, thronged in fluttering tumult into his brain. He saw himself surrounded by a seraglio of houris whom he had known, until his blood was all aflame and his head in a whirl. His imagination was kindled into deadly activity. "The impossibility of reaching to the real beings plunged me into the land of chimera; and seeing nothing actual that rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world, which my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings after my heart's desire. In my continual ecstasies, I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures, as heavenly for their virtues as their beauties; sure, tender, faithful friends, such as I never found in our nether world. I had such a pa.s.sion for haunting this empyrean with all its charming objects, that I pa.s.sed hours and days in it without counting them as they went by; and losing recollection of everything else, I had hardly swallowed a morsel in hot haste, before I began to burn to run off in search of my beloved groves.

If, when I was ready to start for the enchanted world, I saw unhappy mortals coming to detain me on the dull earth, I could neither moderate nor hide my spleen, and, no longer master over myself, I used to give them greeting so rough that it might well be called brutal."[263]

This terrific malady was something of a very different kind from the tranquil sensuousness of the days in Savoy, when the blood was young, and life was not complicated with memories, and the sweet freshness of nature made existence enough. Then his supreme expansion had been attended with a kind of divine repose, and had found edifying voice in devout acknowledgment in the exhilaration of the morning air of the goodness and bounty of a beneficent master. In this later and more pitiable time the beneficent master hid himself, and creation was only not a blank because it was veiled by troops of sirens not in the flesh.

Nature without the a.s.sociation of some living human object, like Madame de Warens, was a poison to Rousseau, until the advancing years which slowly brought decay of sensual force thus brought the antidote. At our present point we see one stricken with an ugly disease. It was almost mercy when he was laid up with a sharp attack of the more painful, but far less absorbing and frightful disorder, to which Rousseau was subject all his life long. It gave pause to what he misnames his angelic loves.

"Besides that one can hardly think of love when suffering anguish, my imagination, which is animated by the country and under the trees, languishes and dies in a room and under roof-beams." This interval he employed with some magnanimity, in vindicating the ways and economy of Providence, in the letter to Voltaire which we shall presently examine.

The moment he could get out of doors again into the forest, the transport returned, but this time accompanied with an active effort in the creative faculties of his mind to bring the natural relief to these over-wrought paroxysms of sensual imagination. He soothed his emotions by a.s.sociating them with the life of personages whom he invented, and by introducing into them that play and movement and changing relation which prevented them from bringing his days to an end in malodorous fever. The egoism of persistent invention and composition was at least better than the egoism of mere unreflecting ecstasy in the charm of natural objects, and took off something from the violent excess of sensuous force. His thought became absorbed in two female figures, one dark and the other fair, one sage and the other yielding, one gentle and the other quick, a.n.a.logous in character but different, not handsome but animated by cheerfulness and feeling. To one of these he gave a lover, to whom the other was a tender friend. He planted them all, after much deliberation and some changes, on the sh.o.r.es of his beloved lake at Vevay, the spot where his benefactress was born, and which he always thought the richest and loveliest in all Europe.

This vicarious or reflected egoism, accompanied as it was by a certain amount of productive energy, seemed to mark a return to a sort of moral convalescence. He walked about the groves with pencil and tablets, a.s.signing this or that thought or expression to one or other of the three companions of his fancy. When the bad weather set in, and he was confined to the house (the winter of 1756-7), he tried to resume his ordinary indoor labour, the copying of music and the compilation of his Musical Dictionary. To his amazement he found that this was no longer possible. The fever of that literary composition of which he had always such dread had strong possession of him. He could see nothing on any side but the three figures and the objects about them made beautiful by his imagination. Though he tried hard to dismiss them, his resistance was vain, and he set himself to bringing some order into his thoughts "so as to produce a kind of romance." We have a glimpse of his mental state in the odd detail, that he could not bear to write his romance on anything but the very finest paper with gilt edges; that the powder with which he dried the ink was of azure and sparkling silver; and that he tied up the quires with delicate blue riband.[264] The distance from all this to the state of nature is obviously very great indeed. It must not be supposed that he forgot his older part as Cato, Brutus, and the other Plutarchians. "My great embarra.s.sment," he says honestly, "was that I should belie myself so clearly and thoroughly. After the severe principles I had just been laying down with so much bustle, after the austere maxims I had preached so energetically, after so many biting invectives against the effeminate books that breathed love and soft delights, could anything be imagined more shocking, more unlooked-for, than to see me inscribe myself with my own hand among the very authors on whose books I had heaped this harsh censure? I felt this inconsequence in all its force, I taxed myself with it, I blushed over it, and was overcome with mortification; but nothing could restore me to reason."[265] He adds that perhaps on the whole the composition of the New Helosa was turning his madness to the best account. That may be true, but does not all this make the bitter denunciation, in the Letter to D'Alembert, of love and of all who make its representation a considerable element in literature or the drama, at the very time when he was composing one of the most dangerously attractive romances of his century, a rather indecent piece of invective? We may forgive inconsistency when it is only between two of a man's theories, or two self-concerning parts of his conduct, but hardly when it takes the form of reviling in others what the reviler indulgently permits to himself.

We are more edified by the energy with which Rousseau refused connivance with the public outrages on morality perpetrated by a patron. M.

d'Epinay went to pay him a visit at the Hermitage, taking with him two ladies with whom his relations were less than equivocal, and for whom among other things he had given Rousseau music to copy. "They were curious to see the eccentric man," as M. d'Epinay afterwards told his scandalised wife, for it was in the manners of the day on no account to parade even the most notorious of these unblessed connections. "He was walking in front of the door; he saw me first; he advanced cap in hand; he saw the ladies; he saluted us, put on his cap, turned his back, and stalked off as fast as he could. Can anything be more mad?"[266] In the miserable and intricate tangle of falsity, weakness, sensuality, and quarrel, which make up this chapter in Rousseau's life, we are glad of even one trait of masculine robustness. We should perhaps be still more glad if the unwedded Theresa were not visible in the background of this scene of high morals.

II.

The New Helosa was not to be completed without a further extension of morbid experience of a still more burning kind than the sufferings of compressed pa.s.sion. The feverish torment of mere visions of the air swarming impalpable in all his veins, was replaced when the earth again began to live and the sap to stir in plants, by the more concentred fire of a consuming pa.s.sion for one who was no dryad nor figure of a dream.

In the spring of 1757 he received a visit from Madame d'Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Madame d'Epinay.[267] Her husband had gone to the war (we are in the year of Rossbach), and so had her lover, Saint Lambert, whose pa.s.sion had been so fatal to Voltaire's Marquise du Chatelet eight years before. She rode over in man's guise to the Hermitage from a house not very far off, where she was to pa.s.s her retreat during the absence of her two natural protectors. Rousseau had seen her before on various occasions; she had been to the Hermitage the previous year, and had partaken of its host's homely fare.[268] But the time was not ripe; the force of a temptation is not from without but within. Much, too, depended with our hermit on the temperature; one who would have been a very ordinary mortal to him in cold and rain, might grow to Aphrodite herself in days when the sun shone hot and the air was aromatic. His fancy was suddenly struck with the romantic guise of the female cavalier, and this was the first onset of a veritable intoxication, which many men have felt, but which no man before or since ever invited the world to hear the story of. He may truly say that after the first interview with her in this disastrous spring, he was as one who had thirstily drained a poisoned bowl. A sort of palsy struck him. He lay weeping in his bed at night, and on days when he did not see the sorceress he wept in the woods.[269] He talked to himself for hours, and was of a black humour to his house-mates. When approaching the object of this deadly fascination, his whole organisation seemed to be dissolved.

He walked in a dream that filled him with a sense of sickly torture, commixed with sicklier delight.

People speak with precisely marked division of mind and body, of will, emotion, understanding; the division is good in logic, but its convenient lines are lost to us as we watch a being with soul all blurred, body all shaken, unstrung, poisoned, by erotic mania, rising in slow clouds of mephitic steam from suddenly heated stagnancies of the blood, and turning the reality of conduct and duty into distant unmeaning shadows. If such a disease were the furious mood of the brute in spring-time, it would be less dreadful, but shame and remorse in the ever-struggling reason of man or woman in the grip of the foul thing, produces an aggravation of frenzy that makes the mental healer tremble.

Add to all this lurking elements of hollow rage that his pa.s.sion was not returned; of stealthy jealousy of the younger man whose place he could not take, and who was his friend besides; of suspicion that he was a little despised for his weakness by the very object of it, who saw that his hairs were sprinkled with gray,--and the whole offers a scene of moral humiliation that half sickens, half appals, and we turn away with dismay as from a vision of the horrid loves of heavy-eyed and scaly shapes that haunted the warm primeval ooze.

Madame d'Houdetot, the unwilling enchantress bearing in an unconscious hand the cup of defilement, was not strikingly singular either in physical or mental attraction. She was now seven-and-twenty. Small-pox, the terrible plague of the country, had pitted her face and given a yellowish tinge to her complexion; her features were clumsy and her brow low; she was short-sighted, and in old age at any rate was afflicted by an excessive squint. This homeliness was redeemed by a gentle and caressing expression, and by a sincerity, a gaiety of heart, and free sprightliness of manner, that no trouble could restrain. Her figure was very slight, and there was in all her movements at once awkwardness and grace. She was natural and simple, and had a fairly good judgment of a modest kind, in spite of the wild sallies in which her spirits sometimes found vent. Capable of chagrin, she was never prevented by it from yielding to any impulse of mirth. "She weeps with the best faith in the world, and breaks out laughing at the same moment; never was anybody so happily born," says her much less amiable sister-in-law.[270] Her husband was indifferent to her. He preserved an attachment to a lady whom he knew before his marriage, whose society he never ceased to frequent, and who finally died in his arms in 1793. Madame d'Houdetot found consolation in the friends.h.i.+p of Saint Lambert. "We both of us,"

said her husband, "both Madame d'Houdetot and I, had a vocation for fidelity, only there was a mis-arrangement." She occasionally composed verses of more than ordinary point, but she had good sense enough not to write them down, nor to set up on the strength of them for poetess and wit.[271] Her talk in her later years, and she lived down to the year of Leipsic, preserved the pointed sententiousness of earlier time. One day, for instance, in the era of the Directory, a conversation was going on as to the various merits and defects of women; she heard much, and then with her accustomed suavity of voice contributed this light summary:--"Without women, the life of man would be without aid at the beginning, without pleasure in the middle, and without solace at the end."[272]

We may be sure that it was not her power of saying things of this sort that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness, frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the story of her pa.s.sion for Saint Lambert, and a certain contagious force produced in him a thrill which he never felt with any one else before or after. Thus, as he says, there was equally love on both sides, though it was not reciprocal. "We were both of us intoxicated with pa.s.sion, she for her lover, I for her; our sighs and sweet tears mingled. Tender confidants, each of the other, our sentiments were of such close kin that it was impossible for them not to mix; and still she never forgot her duty for a moment, while for myself, I protest, I swear, that if sometimes drawn astray by my senses, still"--still he was a paragon of virtue, subject to rather new definition. We can appreciate the author of the New Helosa; we can appreciate the author of Emilius; but this strained attempt to confound those two very different persons by combining tearful erotics with high ethics, is an exhibition of self-delusion that the most patient a.n.a.lyst of human nature might well find hard to suffer. "The duty of privation exalted my soul. The glory of all the virtues adorned the idol of my heart in my sight; to soil its divine image would have been to annihilate it," and so forth.[273]

Moon-lighted landscape gave a background for the sentimentalist's picture, and dim groves, murmuring cascades, and the soft rustle of the night air, made up a scene which became for its chief actor "an immortal memory of innocence and delight." "It was in this grove, seated with her on a gra.s.sy bank, under an acacia heavy with flowers, that I found expression for the emotions of my heart in words that were worthy of them. 'Twas the first and single time of my life; but I was sublime, if you can use the word of all the tender and seductive things that the most glowing love can bring into the heart of a man. What intoxicating tears I shed at her knees, what floods she shed in spite of herself! At length in an involuntary transport, she cried out, 'Never was man so tender, never did man love as you do! But your friend Saint Lambert hears us, and my heart cannot love twice.'"[274] Happily, as we learn from another source, a breath of wholesome life from without brought the transcendental to grotesque end. In the climax of tears and protestations, an honest waggoner at the other side of the park wall, urging on a lagging beast launched a round and far-sounding oath out into the silent night. Madame d'Houdetot answered with a lively continuous peal of young laughter, while an angry chill brought back the discomfited lover from an ecstasy that was very full of peril.[275]

Rousseau wrote in the New Helosa very sagely that you should grant to the senses nothing when you mean to refuse them anything. He admits that the saying was falsified by his relations with Madame d'Houdetot.

Clearly the credit of this happy falsification was due to her rather than to himself. What her feelings were, it is not very easy to see.

Honest pity seems to have been the strongest of them. She was idle and unoccupied, and idleness leaves the soul open for much stray generosity of emotion, even towards an importunate lover. She thought him mad, and she wrote to Saint Lambert to say so. "His madness must be very strong,"

said Saint Lambert, "since she can perceive it."[276]

Character is ceaselessly marching, even when we seem to have sunk into a fixed and stagnant mood. The man is awakened from his dream of pa.s.sion by inexorable event; he finds the house of the soul not swept and garnished for a new life, but possessed by demons who have entered unseen. In short, such profound disorder of spirit, though in its first stage marked by ravis.h.i.+ng delirium, never escapes a bitter sequel. When a man lets his soul be swept away from the narrow track of conduct appointed by his relations with others, still the reality of such relations survives. He may retreat to rural lodges; that will not save him either from his own pa.s.sion, or from some degree of that kins.h.i.+p with others which instantly creates right and wrong like a wall of bra.s.s around him. Let it be observed that the natures of finest stuff suffer most from these forced reactions, and it was just because Rousseau had innate moral sensitiveness, and a man like Diderot was without it, that the first felt his fall so profoundly, while the second was unconscious of having fallen at all.

One day in July Rousseau went to pay his accustomed visit. He found Madame d'Houdetot dejected, and with the flush of recent weeping on her cheeks. A bird of the air had carried the matter. As usual, the matter was carried wrongly, and apparently all that Saint Lambert suspected was that Rousseau's high principles had persuaded Madame d'Houdetot of the viciousness of her relations with her lover.[277] "They have played us an evil turn," cried Madame d'Houdetot; "they have been unjust to me, but that is no matter. Either let us break off at once, or be what you ought to be."[278] This was Rousseau's first taste of the ashes of shame into which the lusciousness of such forbidden fruit, plucked at the expense of others, is ever apt to be transformed. Mortification of the considerable spiritual pride that was yet alive after this lapse, was a strong element in the sum of his emotion, and it was pointed by the reflection which stung him so incessantly, that his monitress was younger than himself. He could never master his own contempt for the gallantry of grizzled locks.[279] His austerer self might at any rate have been consoled by knowing that this scene was the beginning of the end, though the end came without any seeking on his part and without violence. To his amazement, one day Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot came to the Hermitage, asking him to give them dinner, and much to the credit of human nature's elasticity, the three pa.s.sed a delightful afternoon. The wronged lover was friendly, though a little stiff, and he pa.s.sed occasional slights which Rousseau would surely not have forgiven, if he had not been disarmed by consciousness of guilt. He fell asleep, as we can well imagine that he might do, while Rousseau read aloud his very inadequate justification of Providence against Voltaire.[280]

In time he returned to the army, and Rousseau began to cure himself of his mad pa.s.sion. His method, however, was not unsuspicious, for it involved the perilous a.s.sistance of Madame d'Houdetot. Fortunately her loyalty and good sense forced a more resolute mode upon him. He found, or thought he found her distracted, emharra.s.sed, indifferent. In despair at not being allowed to heal his pa.s.sionate malady in his own fas.h.i.+on, he did the most singular thing that he could have done under the circ.u.mstances. He wrote to Saint Lambert.[281] His letter is a prodigy of plausible duplicity, though Rousseau in some of his mental states had so little sense of the difference between the actual and the imaginary, and was moreover so swiftly borne away on a flood of fine phrases, that it is hard to decide how far this was voluntary, and how far he was his own dupe. Voluntary or not, it is detestable. We pa.s.s the false whine about "being abandoned by all that was dear to him," as if he had not deliberately quitted Paris against the remonstrance of every friend he had; about his being "solitary and sad," as if he was not ready at this very time to curse any one who intruded on his solitude, and hindered him of a single half-hour in the desert spots that he adored.

Remembering the scenes in moon-lighted groves and elsewhere, we read this:--"Whence comes her coldness to me? Is it possible that you can have suspected me of wronging you with her, and of turning perfidious in consequence of an unseasonably rigorous virtue? A pa.s.sage in one of your letters shows a glimpse of some such suspicion. No, no, Saint Lambert, the breast of J.J. Rousseau never held the heart of a traitor, and I should despise myself more than you suppose, if I had ever tried to rob you of her heart.... Can you suspect that her friends.h.i.+p for me may hurt her love for you? Surely natures endowed with sensibility are open to all sorts of affections, and no sentiment can spring up in them which does not turn to the advantage of the dominant pa.s.sion. Where is the lover who does not wax the more tender as he talks to his friend of her whom he loves? And is it not sweeter for you in your banishment that there should be some sympathetic creature to whom your mistress loves to talk of you, and who loves to hear?"

Let us turn to another side of his correspondence. The way in which the sympathetic creature in the present case loved to hear his friend's mistress talk of him, is interestingly shown in one or two pa.s.sages from a letter to her; as when he cries, "Ah, how proud would even thy lover himself be of thy constancy, if he only knew how much it has surmounted.... I appeal to your sincerity. You, the witness and the cause of this delirium, these tears, these ravis.h.i.+ng ecstasies, these transports which were never made for mortal, say, have I ever tasted your favours in such a way that I deserve to lose them?... Never once did my ardent desires nor my tender supplications dare to solicit supreme happiness, without my feeling stopped by the inner cries of a sorrow-stricken soul.... O Sophie, after moments so sweet, the idea of eternal privation is too frightful for one who groans that he cannot identify himself with thee. What, are thy tender eyes never again to be lowered with a delicious modesty, intoxicating me with pleasure? What, are my burning lips never again to lay my very soul on thy heart along with my kisses? What, may I never more feel that heavenly shudder, that rapid and devouring fire, swifter than lightning?"[282].... We see a sympathetic creature a.s.suredly, and listen to the voice of a nature endowed with sensibility even more than enough, but with decency, loyalty, above all with self-knowledge, far less than enough.

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 germ of 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 pa.s.sed 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 the consequences, 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 pa.s.sion for her somehow became known to all the world; it reached the ears of Saint Lambert, and was the cause of a pa.s.sing 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.