Rousseau Part 23

[89] With one trifling exception, the Letter to Grimm on the Opera of Omphale (1752): _ecrits sur la Musique_, p. 337.

[90] See Barbier's Journal, viii. 45 (Ed. Charpentier, 1857). A succinct contemporary account of the general situation is to be found in D'Alembert's little book, the _Destruction des Jesuites_.

[91] Grimm, for instance: _Corr. Lit._, iii. 117.

[92] _Corr._, ii. 337. June 7, 1672. _Conf._, xi. 152, 162.

[93] _Conf._, xi. 162. The Levite's story is to be read in _Judges_, ch. xix.

CHAPTER II.

PERSECUTION.[94]

Those to whom life consists in the immediate consciousness of their own direct relations with the people and circ.u.mstances that are in close contact with them, find it hard to follow the moods of a man to whom such consciousness is the least part of himself, and such relations the least real part of his life. Rousseau was no sooner in the post-chaise which was bearing him away towards Switzerland, than the troubles of the previous day at once dropped into a pale and distant past, and he returned to a world where was neither parliament, nor decree for burning books, nor any warrant for personal arrest. He took up the thread where hara.s.sing circ.u.mstances had broken it, and again fell musing over the tragic tale of the Levite of Ephraim. His dream absorbed him so entirely as to take specific literary form, and before the journey was at an end he had composed a long impa.s.sioned version of the Bible story. Though it has Rousseau's usual fine sonorousness in a high degree, no man now reads it; the author himself always preserved a certain tenderness for it.[95] The contrast between this singular quietism and the angry stir that marked Voltaire's many flights in post-chaises, points like all else to the profound difference between the pair. Contrast with Voltaire's shrill cries under any personal vexation, this calm utterance:--"Though the consequences of this affair have plunged me into a gulf of woes from which I shall never come up again so long as I live, I bear these gentlemen no grudge. I am aware that their object was not to do me any harm, but only to reach ends of their own. I know that towards me they have neither liking nor hate. I was found in their way, like a pebble that you thrust aside with the foot without even looking at it. They ought not to say they have performed their duty, but that they have done their business."[96] A new note from a persecuted writer.

Rousseau, in spite of the belief which henceforth possessed him that he was the victim of a dark unfathomable plot, and in spite of pa.s.sing outbreaks of gloomy rage, was incapable of steady glowing and active resentments. The world was not real enough to him for this. A throng of phantoms pressed noiselessly before his sight, and dulled all sense of more actual impression. "It is amazing," he wrote, "with what ease I forget past ill, however fresh it may be. In proportion as the antic.i.p.ation of it alarms and confuses me when I see it coming, so the memory of it returns feebly to my mind and dies out the moment after it has arrived. My cruel imagination, which torments itself incessantly in antic.i.p.ating woes that are still unborn, makes a diversion for my memory, and hinders me from recalling those which have gone. I exhaust disaster beforehand. The more I have suffered in foreseeing it, the more easily do I forget it; while on the contrary, being incessantly busy with my past happiness, I recall it and brood and ruminate over it, so as to enjoy it over again whenever I wish."[97] The same turn of humour saved him from vindictiveness. "I concern myself too little with the offence, to feel much concern about the offender. I only think of the hurt that I have received from him, on account of the hurt that he may still do me; and if I were sure he would do me no more, what he had already done would be forgotten straightway." Though he does not carry the a.n.a.lysis any further, we may easily perceive that the same explanation covers what he called his natural ingrat.i.tude. Kindness was not much more vividly understood by him than malice. It was only one form of the troublesome interposition of an outer world in his life; he was fain to hurry back from it to the real world of his dreams. If any man called practical is tempted to despise this dreaming creature, as he fares in his chaise from stage to stage, let him remember that one making that journey through France less than thirty years later might have seen the castles of the great flaring in the destruction of a most righteous vengeance, the great themselves fleeing ign.o.bly from the land to which their selfishness, and heedlessness, and hatred of improvement, and inhuman pride had been a curse, while the legion of toilers with eyes blinded by the oppression of ages were groping with pa.s.sionate uncertain hand for that divine something which they thought of as justice and right. And this was what Rousseau both partially foresaw and helped to prepare,[98] while the common politicians, like Choiseul or D'Aiguillon, played their poor game--the elemental forces rising unseen into tempest around them.

He reached the territory of the canton of Berne, and alighted at the house of an old friend at Yverdun,[99] where native air, the beauty of the spot, and the charms of the season, immediately repaired all weariness and fatigue.[100] Friends at Geneva wrote letters of sincere feeling, joyful that he had not followed the precedent of Socrates too closely by remaining in the power of a government eager to destroy him.[101] A post or two later brought worse news. The Council at Geneva ordered not only Emilius, but the Social Contract also, to be publicly burnt, and issued a warrant of arrest against their author, if he should set foot in the territory of the republic (June 19).[102] Rousseau could hardly believe it possible that the free Government which he had held up to the reverence of Europe, could have condemned him unheard, but he took occasion in a highly characteristic manner to chide severely a friend at Geneva who had publicly taken his part.[103] Within a fortnight this blow was followed by another. His two books were reported to the senate of Berne, and Rousseau was informed by one of the authorities that a notification was on its way admonis.h.i.+ng him to quit the canton within the s.p.a.ce of fifteen days.[104] This stroke he avoided by flight to Motiers, a village in the princ.i.p.ality of Neuchatel (July 10), then part of the dominions of the King of Prussia.[105] Rousseau had some antipathy to Frederick, both because he had beaten the French, whom Rousseau loved, and because his maxims and his conduct alike seemed to trample under foot respect for the natural law and not a few human duties. He had composed a verse to the effect that Frederick thought like a philosopher and acted like a king, philosopher and king notoriously being words of equally evil sense in his dialect. There was also a pa.s.sage in Emilius about Adrastus, King of the Daunians, which was commonly understood to mean Frederick, King of the Prussians. Still Rousseau was acute enough to know that mean pa.s.sions usually only rule the weak, and have little hold over the strong. He boldly wrote both to the king and to Lord Marischal, the governor of the princ.i.p.ality, informing them that he was there, and asking permission to remain in the only asylum left for him upon the earth.[106] He compared himself loftily to Coriola.n.u.s among the Volscians, and wrote to the king in a vein that must have amused the strong man. "I have said much ill of you, perhaps I shall still say more; yet, driven from France, from Geneva, from the canton of Berne, I am come to seek shelter in your states. Perhaps I was wrong in not beginning there; this is eulogy of which you are worthy. Sire, I have deserved no grace from you, and I seek none, but I thought it my duty to inform your majesty that I am in your power, and that I am so of set design. Your majesty will dispose of me as shall seem good to you."[107] Frederick, though no admirer of Rousseau or his writings,[108] readily granted the required permission. He also, says Lord Marischal, "gave me orders to furnish him his small necessaries if he would accept them; and though that king's philosophy be very different from that of Jean Jacques, yet he does not think that a man of an irreproachable life is to be persecuted because his sentiments are singular. He designs to build him a hermitage with a little garden, which I find he will not accept, nor perhaps the rest, which I have not yet offered him."[109] When the offer of the flour, wine, and firewood was at length made in as delicate terms as possible, Rousseau declined the gift on grounds which may raise a smile, but which are not without a rather touching simplicity.[110] "I have enough to live on for two or three years," he said, "but if I were dying of hunger, I would rather in the present condition of your good prince, and not being of any service to him, go and eat gra.s.s and grub up roots, than accept a morsel of bread from him."[111] Hume might well call this a phenomenon in the world of letters, and one very honourable for the person concerned.[112] And we recognise its dignity the more when we contrast it with the baseness of Voltaire, who drew his pension from the King of Prussia while Frederick was in his most urgent straits, and while the poet was sportively exulting to all his correspondents in the malicious expectation that he would one day have to allow the King of Prussia himself a pension.[113] And Rousseau was a poor man, living among the poor and in their style. His annual outlay at this time was covered by the modest sum of sixty louis.[114] What stamps his refusal of Frederick's gifts as true dignity, is the fact that he not only did not refuse money for any work done, but expected and asked for it.

Malesherbes at this very time begged him to collect plants for him.

Joyfully, replied Rousseau, "but as I cannot subsist without the aid of my own labour, I never meant, in spite of the pleasure that it might otherwise have been to me, to offer you the use of my time for nothing."[115] In the same year, we may add, when the tremendous struggle of the Seven Years' War was closing, the philosopher wrote a second terse epistle to the king, and with this their direct communication came to an end. "Sire, you are my protector and my benefactor; I would fain repay you if I can. You wish to give me bread; is there none of your own subjects in want of it? Take that sword away from my sight, it dazzles and pains me. It has done its work only too well; the sceptre is abandoned. Great is the career for kings of your stuff, and you are still far from the term; time presses, you have not a moment to lose. Fathom well your heart, O Frederick! Can you dare to die without having been the greatest of men? Would that I could see Frederick, the just and the redoubtable, covering his states with mult.i.tudes of men to whom he should be a father; then will J.J. Rousseau, the foe of kings, hasten to die at the foot of his throne."[116] Frederick, strong as his interest was in all curious persons who could amuse him, was too busy to answer this, and Rousseau was not yet recognised as Voltaire's rival in power and popularity.

Motiers is one of the half-dozen decent villages standing in the flat bottom of the Val de Travers, a widish valley that lies between the gorges of the Jura and the Lake of Neuchatel, and is famous in our day for its production of absinthe and of asphalt. The flat of the valley, with the Reuss making a bald and colourless way through the midst of it, is nearly treeless, and it is too uniform to be very pleasing. In winter the climate is most rigorous, for the level is high, and the surrounding hills admit the sun's rays late and cut them off early.

Rousseau's description, accurate and recognisable as it is,[117]

strikes an impartial tourist as too favourable. But when a piece of scenery is a home to a man, he has an eye for a thousand outlines, changes of light, soft variations of colour; the landscape lives for him with an unspoken suggestion and intimate a.s.sociation, to all of which the swift pa.s.sing stranger is very cold.

His cottage, which is still shown, was in the midst of the other houses, and his walks, which were at least as important to him as the home in which he dwelt, lay mostly among woody heights with streaming cascades. The country abounded in natural curiosities of a humble sort, and here that interest in plants which had always been strong in him, began to grow into a pa.s.sion. Rousseau had so curious a feeling about them, that when in his botanical expeditions he came across a single flower of its kind, he could never bring himself to pluck it.

His sight, though not good for distant objects, was of the very finest for things held close; his sense of smell was so acute and subtle that, according to a good witness, he might have cla.s.sified plants by odours, if language furnished as many names as nature supplies varieties of fragrance.[118] He insisted in all botanising and other walking excursions on going bareheaded, even in the heat of the dog-days; he declared that the action of the sun did him good. When the days began to turn, the summer was straightway at an end for him: "My imagination," he said, in a phrase which went further through his life than he supposed, "at once brings winter." He hated rain as much as he loved sun, so he must once have lost all the mystic fascination of the green Savoy lakes gleaming luminous through pale showers, and now again must have lost the sombre majesty of the pines of his valley dripping in torn edges of cloud, and all those other sights in landscape that touch subtler parts of us than comforted sense.

One of his favourite journeys was to Colombier, the summer retreat of Lord Marischal. For him he rapidly conceived the same warm friends.h.i.+p which he felt for the Duke of Luxembourg, whom he had just left. And the sagacious, moderate, silent Scot had as warm a liking for the strange refugee who had come to him for shelter, or shall we call it a kind of s.h.a.ggy compa.s.sion, as of a faithful inarticulate creature. His letters, which are numerous enough, abound in expressions of hearty good-will. These, if we reflect on the genuine worth, veracity, penetration, and experience of the old man who wrote them, may fairly be counted the best testimony that remains to the existence of something sterling at the bottom of Rousseau's character.[119] It is here no insincere fine lady of the French court, but a homely and weather-beaten Scotchman, who speaks so often of his refugee's rect.i.tude of heart and true sensibility.[120]

He insisted on being allowed to settle a small sum on Theresa, who had joined Rousseau at Motiers, and in other ways he showed a true solicitude and considerateness both for her and for him.[121] It was his constant dream, that on his return to Scotland, Jean Jacques should accompany him, and that with David Hume, they would make a trio of philosophic hermits; that this was no mere cheery pleasantry is shown by the pains he took in settling the route for the journey.[122]

The plan only fell through in consequence of Frederick's cordial urgency that his friend should end his days with him; he returned to Prussia and lived at Sans Souci until the close, always retaining something of his good-will for "his excellent savage," as he called the author of the Discourses. They had some common antipathies, including the fundamental one of dislike to society, and especially to the society of the people of Neuchatel, the Gascons of Switzerland.

"Rousseau is gay in company," Lord Marischal wrote to Hume, "polite, and what the French call _aimable_, and gains ground daily in the opinion of even the clergy here. His enemies elsewhere continue to persecute him, and he is pestered with anonymous letters."[123]

Some of these were of a humour that disclosed the master hand.

Voltaire had been universally suspected of stirring up the feeling of Geneva against its too famous citizen,[124] though for a man of less energy the affair of the Calas, which he was now in the thick of, might have sufficed. Voltaire's letters at this time show how hard he found it in the case of Rousseau to exercise his usual pity for the unfortunate. He could not forget that the man who was now tasting persecution had barked at philosophers and stage-plays; that he was a false brother, who had fatuously insulted the only men who could take his part; that he was a Judas who had betrayed the sacred cause.[125]

On the whole, however, we ought probably to accept his word, though not very categorically given,[126] that he had nothing to do with the action taken against Rousseau. That action is quite adequately explained, first by the influence of the resident of France at Geneva, which we know to have been exerted against the two fatal books,[127]

and second by the anxiety of the oligarchic party to keep out of their town a man whose democratic tendencies they now knew so well and so justly dreaded.[128] Moultou, a Genevese minister, in the full tide of devotion and enthusiasm for the author of Emilius, met Voltaire at the house of a lady in Geneva. All will turn out well, cried the patriarch; "the syndics will say M. Rousseau, you have done ill to write what you have written; promise for the future to respect the religion of your country. Jean Jacques will promise, and perhaps he will say that the printer took the liberty of adding a sheet or two to his book." "Never," cried the ardent Moultou; "Jean Jacques never puts his name to works to disown them after."[129] Voltaire disowned his own books with intrepid and sustained mendacity, yet he bore no grudge to Moultou for his vehemence. He sent for him shortly afterwards, professed an extreme desire to be reconciled with Rousseau, and would talk of nothing else. "I swear to you," wrote Moultou, "that I could not understand him the least in the world; he is a marvellous actor; I could have sworn that he loved you."[130] And there really was no acting in it. The serious Genevese did not see that he was dealing with "one all fire and fickleness, a child."

Rousseau soon found out that he had excited not only the band of professed unbelievers, but also the tormenting wasps of orthodoxy. The doctors of the Sorbonne, not to be outdone in fervour for truth by the lawyers of the parliament, had condemned Emilius as a matter of course. In the same spirit of generous emulation, Christopher de Beaumont, "by the divine compa.s.sion archbishop of Paris, Duke of Saint Cloud, peer of France, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost," had issued (Aug. 20, 1762) one of those hateful doc.u.ments in which bishops, Catholic and Protestant, have been wont for the last century and a half to hide with swollen bombastic phrase their dead and decomposing ideas. The windy folly of these poor pieces is usually in proportion to the hierarchic rank of those who promulgate them, and an archbishop owes it to himself to blaspheme against reason and freedom in superlatives of malignant unction. Rousseau's reply (Nov. 18, 1762) is a masterpiece of dignity and uprightness. Turning to it from the mandate which was its provocative, we seem to grasp the hand of a man, after being chased by a nightmare of masked figures. Rousseau never showed the substantial quality of his character more surely and unmistakably than in controversy. He had such gravity, such austere self-command, such closeness of grip. Most of us feel pleasure in reading the matchless banter with which Voltaire a.s.sailed his theological enemies. Reading Rousseau's letter to De Beaumont we realise the comparative lowness of the pleasure which Voltaire had given us. We understand how it was that Rousseau made fanatics, while Voltaire only made sceptics. At the very first words, the mitre, the crosier, the ring, fall into the dust; the Archbishop of Paris, the Duke of Saint Cloud, the peer of France, the commander of the Holy Ghost, is restored from the disguises of his enchantment, and becomes a human being. We hear the voice of a man hailing a man. Voltaire often sank to the level of ecclesiastics. Rousseau raised the archbishop to his own level, and with magnanimous courtesy addressed him as an equal. "Why, my lord, have I anything to say to you? What common tongue can we use? How are we to understand one another? And what is there between me and you?" And he persevered in this distant lofty vein, hardly permitting himself a single moment of acerbity. We feel the ever-inspiring breath of seriousness and sincerity. This was because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing; that our pa.s.sage across the world, if very short, is yet too serious to be wasted in frivolous disrespect for ourselves, and angry disrespect for others. All this was actually his mind. And hence the little difficulty he had in keeping his retort to the archbishop, as to his other antagonists, on a worthy level.

Only once or twice does his sense of the reckless injustice with which he had been condemned, and of the persecution which was inflicted on him by one government after another, stir in him a blaze of high remonstrance. "You accuse me of temerity," he cried; "how have I earned such a name, when I only propounded difficulties, and even that with so much reserve; when I only advanced reasons, and even that with so much respect; when I attacked no one, nor even named one? And you, my lord, how do you dare to reproach with temerity a man of whom you speak with such scanty justice and so little decency, with so small respect and so much levity? You call me impious, and of what impiety can you accuse me--me who never spoke of the Supreme Being except to pay him the honour and glory that are his due, nor of man except to persuade all men to love one another? The impious are those who unworthily profane the cause of G.o.d by making it serve the pa.s.sions of men. The impious are those who, daring to pa.s.s for the interpreters of divinity, and judges between it and man, exact for themselves the honours that are due to it only. The impious are those who arrogate to themselves the right of exercising the power of G.o.d upon earth, and insist on opening and shutting the gates of heaven at their own good will and pleasure. The impious are those who have libels read in the church. At this horrible idea my blood is enkindled, and tears of indignation fall from my eyes. Priests of the G.o.d of peace, you shall render an account one day, be very sure, of the use to which you have dared to put his house.... My lord, you have publicly insulted me: you are now convicted of heaping calumny upon me. If you were a private person like myself, so that I could cite you before an equitable tribunal, and we could both appear before it, I with my book, and you with your mandate, a.s.suredly you would be declared guilty; you would be condemned to make reparation as public as the wrong was public. But you belong to a rank that relieves you from the necessity of being just, and I am nothing. Yet you who profess the gospel, you, a prelate appointed to teach others their duty, you know what your own duty is in such a case. Mine I have done: I have nothing more to say to you, and I hold my peace."[131]

The letter was as good in dialectic as it was in moral tone. For this is a little curious, that Rousseau, so diffuse in expounding his opinions, and so unscientific in his method of coming to them, should have been one of the keenest and most trenchant of the controversialists of a very controversial time. Some of his strokes in defence of his first famous a.s.sault on civilisation are as hard, as direct, and as effective as any in the records of polemical literature. We will give one specimen from the letter to the Archbishop of Paris; it has the recommendation of touching an argument that is not yet quite universally recognised for slain. The Savoyard Vicar had dwelt on the difficulty of accepting revelation as the voice of G.o.d, on account of the long distance of time between us, and the questionableness of the supporting testimony. To which the archbishop thus:--"But is there not then an infinity of facts, even earlier than those of the Christian revelation, which it would be absurd to doubt?

By what way other than that of human testimony has our author himself known the Sparta, the Athens, the Rome, whose laws, manners, and heroes he extols with such a.s.surance? How many generations of men between him and the historians who have preserved the memory of these events?" First, says Rousseau in answer, "it is in the order of things that human circ.u.mstances should be attested by human evidence, and they can be attested in no other way. I can only know that Rome and Sparta existed, because contemporaries a.s.sure me that they existed. In such a case this intermediate communication is indispensable. But why is it necessary between G.o.d and me? Is it simple or natural that G.o.d should have gone in search of Moses to speak to Jean Jacques Rousseau?

Second, n.o.body is obliged to believe that Sparta once existed, and n.o.body will be devoured by eternal flames for doubting it. Every fact of which we are not witnesses is only established by moral proofs, and moral proofs have various degrees of strength. Will the divine justice hurl me into h.e.l.l for missing the exact point at which a proof becomes irresistible? If there is in the world an attested story, it is that of vampires; nothing is wanting for judicial proof,--reports and certificates from notables, surgeons, clergy, magistrates. But who believes in vampires, and shall we all be d.a.m.ned for not believing?

Third, _my constant experience and that of all men is stronger in reference to prodigies than the testimony of some men_."

He then strikes home with a parable. The Abbe Paris had died in the odour of Jansenist sanct.i.ty (1727), and extraordinary doings went on at his tomb; the lame walked, men and women sick of the palsy were made whole, and so forth. Suppose, says Rousseau, that an inhabitant of the Rue St. Jacques speaks thus to the Archbishop of Paris, "My lord, I know that you neither believe in the beat.i.tude of St. Jean de Paris, nor in the miracles which G.o.d has been pleased publicly to work upon his tomb in the sight of the most enlightened and most populous city in the world; but I feel bound to testify to you that I have just seen the saint in person raised from the dead in the spot where his bones were laid." The man of the Rue St. Jacques gives all the detail of such a circ.u.mstance that could strike a beholder. "I am persuaded that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a convulsionary, and have seen Saint Paris resuscitated. There is nothing wonderful in that; you have seen so many other wonders!" The man would insist that the miracle had been seen equally by a number of other people, who though Jansenists, it is true, were persons of sound sense, good character, and excellent reputation. Some would send the man to Bedlam, "but you after a grave reprimand, will be content with saying: I know that two or three witnesses, good people and of sound sense, may attest the life or the death of a man, but I do not know how many more are needed to establish the resurrection of a Jansenist.

Until I find that out, go, my son, and try to strengthen your brain: I give you a dispensation from fasting, and here is something for you to make your broth with. That is what you would say, and what any other sensible man would say in your place. Whence I conclude that even according to you and to every other sensible man, the moral proofs which are sufficient to establish facts that are in the order of moral possibilities, are not sufficient to establish facts of another order and purely supernatural."[132]

Perhaps, however, the formal denunciation by the Archbishop of Paris was less vexatious than the swarming of the angrier hive of ministers at his gates. "If I had declared for atheism," he says bitterly, "they would at first have shrieked, but they would soon have left me in peace like the rest. The people of the Lord would not have kept watch over me; everybody would not have thought he was doing me a high favour in not treating me as a person cut off from communion, and I should have been quits with all the world. The holy women in Israel would not have written me anonymous letters, and their charity would not have breathed devout insults. They would not have taken the trouble to a.s.sure me in all humility of heart that I was a castaway, an execrable monster, and that the world would have been well off if some good soul had been at the pains to strangle me in my cradle.

Worthy people on their side would not torment themselves and torment me to bring me back to the way of salvation; they would not charge at me from right and left, nor stifle me under the weight of their sermons, nor force me to bless their zeal while I cursed their importunity, nor to feel with grat.i.tude that they are obeying a call to lay me in my very grave with weariness."[133]

He had done his best to conciliate the good opinion of his vigilant neighbours. Their character for contentious orthodoxy was well known.

It was at Neuchatel that the controversy as to the eternal punishment of the wicked raged with a fury that ended in a civil outbreak. The peace of the town was violently disturbed, ministers were suspended, magistrates were interdicted, life was lost, until at last Frederick promulgated his famous bull:--"Let the parsons who make for themselves a cruel and barbarous G.o.d, be eternally d.a.m.ned as they desire and deserve; and let those parsons who conceive G.o.d gentle and merciful, enjoy the plenitude of his mercy."[134] When Rousseau came within the territory, preparations were made to imitate the action of Paris, Geneva, and Berne. It was only the king's express permission that saved him from a fourth proscription. The minister at Motiers was of the less inhuman stamp, and Rousseau, feeling that he could not, without failing in his engagements and his duty as a citizen, neglect the public profession of the faith to which he had been restored eight years before, attended the religious services with regularity. He even wrote to the pastor a letter in vindication of his book, and protesting the sincerity of his union with the reformed congregation.[135] The result of this was that the pastor came to tell him how great an honour he held it to count such a member in his flock, and how willing he was to admit him without further examination to partake of the communion.[136] Rousseau went to the ceremony with eyes full of tears and a heart swelling with emotion. We may respect his mood as little or as much as we please, but it was certainly more edifying than the sight of Voltaire going through the same rite, merely to hara.s.s a priest and fill a bishop with fury.

In all other respects he lived a harmless life during the three years of his sojourn in the Val de Travers. As he could never endure what he calls the inactive chattering of the parlour--people sitting in front of one another with folded hands and nothing in motion except the tongue--he learnt the art of making laces; he used to carry his pillow about with him, or sat at his own door working like the women of the village, and chatting with the pa.s.sers-by. He made presents of his work to young women about to marry, always on the condition that they should suckle their children when they came to have them. If a little whimsical, it was a harmless and respectable pastime. It is pleasanter to think of a philosopher finding diversion in weaving laces, than of n.o.blemen making it the business of their lives to run after ribands. A society clothed in breeches was incensed about the same time by Rousseau's adoption of the Armenian costume, the vest, the furred bonnet, the caftan, and the girdle. There was nothing very wonderful in this departure from use. An Armenian tailor used often to visit some friends at Montmorency. Rousseau knew him, and reflected that such a dress would be of singular comfort to him in the circ.u.mstances of his bodily disorder.[137] Here was a solid practical reason for what has usually been counted a demonstration of a turned brain.

Rousseau had as good cause for going about in a caftan as Chatham had for coming to the House of Parliament wrapped in flannel. Vanity and a desire to attract notice may, we admit, have had something to do with Rousseau's adoption of an uncommon way of dressing. Shrewd wits like the Duke of Luxembourg and his wife did not suppose that it was so.

We, living a hundred years after, cannot possibly know whether it was so or not, and our estimate of Rousseau's strange character would be very little worth forming, if it only turned on petty singularities of this kind. The foolish, equivocally gifted with the quality of articulate speech, may, if they choose, satisfy their own self-love by reducing all action out of the common course to a series of variations on the same motive in others. Men blessed by the benignity of experience will be thankful not to waste life in guessing evil about unknowable trifles.

During his stay at Motiers Rousseau's time was hardly ever his own.

Visitors of all nations, drawn either by respect for his work or by curiosity to see a man who had been prescribed by so many governments, came to him in throngs. His partisans at Geneva insisted on sending people to convince themselves how good a man they were persecuting. "I had never been free from strangers for six weeks," he writes. "Two days after, I had a Westphalian gentleman and one from Genoa; six days later, two persons from Zurich, who stayed a week; then a Genevese, recovering from an illness, and coming for change of air, fell ill again, and he has only just gone away."[138] One visitor, writing home to his wife of the philosopher to whom he had come on a pilgrimage, describes his manners in terms which perhaps touch us with surprise:--"Thou hast no idea how charming his society is, what true politeness there is in his manners, what a depth of serenity and cheerfulness in his talk. Didst thou not expect quite a different picture, and figure to thyself an eccentric creature, always grave and sometimes even abrupt? Ah, what a mistake! To an expression of great mildness he unites a glance of fire, and eyes of a vivacity the like of which never was seen. When you handle any matter in which he takes an interest, then his eyes, his lips, his hands, everything about him speaks. You would be quite wrong to picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor to exact it."[141] He received hundreds of letters, some seeking an application of his views on education to a special case, others craving further exposition of his religious doctrines. Before he had been at Motiers nine months he had paid ten louis for the postage of letters, which after all contained little more than reproaches, insults, menaces, imbecilities.[142]

Not the least curious of his correspondence at this time is that with the Prince of Wurtemberg, then living near Lausanne.[143] The prince had a little daughter four months old, and he was resolved that her upbringing should be carried on as the author of Emilius might please to direct. Rousseau replied courteously that he did not pretend to direct the education of princes or princesses.[144] His undaunted correspondent sent him full details of his babe's habits and faculties, and continued to do so at short intervals, with the fondness of a young mother or an old nurse. Rousseau was interested, and took some trouble to draw up rules for the child's nurture and admonition. One may smile now and then at the prince's ingenuous zeal, but his fervid respect and devotion for the teacher in whom he thought he had found the wisest man that ever lived, and who had at any rate spoken the word that kindled the love of virtue and truth in him, his eagerness to know what Rousseau thought right, and his equal eagerness in trying to do it, his care to arrange his household in a simple and methodical way to please his master, his discipular patience when Rousseau told him that his verses were poor, or that he was too fond of his wife,--all this is a little uncommon in a prince, and deserves a place among the ample ma.s.s of other evidence of the power which Rousseau's pictures of domestic simplicity and wise and humane education had in the eighteenth century. It gives us a glimpse, close and direct, of the naturalist revival reaching up into high places.

But the trade of philosopher in such times is perhaps an irksome one, and Rousseau was the private victim of his public action. His prince sent mult.i.tudes of Germans to visit the sage, and his letters, endless with their details of the nursery, may well have become a little tedious to a worn-out creature who only wanted to be left alone.[145]

The famous Prince Henry, Frederick's brother, thought a man happy who could have the delight of seeing Rousseau as often as he chose.[146]

People forgot the other side of this delight, and the unlucky philosopher found in a hundred ways alike from enemies and the friends whose curiosity makes them as bad as enemies, that the pedestal of glory partakes of the nature of the pillory or the stocks.

It is interesting to find the famous English names of Gibbon and Boswell in the list of the mult.i.tudes with whom he had to do at this time.[147] The former was now at Lausanne, whither he had just returned from that memorable visit to England which persuaded him that his father would never endure his alliance with the daughter of an obscure Swiss pastor. He had just "yielded to his fate, sighed as a lover, and obeyed as a son." "How sorry I am for our poor Mademoiselle Curchod," writes Moultou to Rousseau; "Gibbon whom she loves, and to whom she has sacrificed, as I know, some excellent matches, has come to Lausanne, but cold, insensible, and as entirely cured of his old pa.s.sion as she is far from cure. She has written me a letter that makes my heart ache." He then entreats Rousseau to use his influence with Gibbon, who is on the point of starting for Motiers, by extolling to him the lady's worth and understanding.[148] "I hope Mr. Gibbon will not come," replied the sage; "his coldness makes me think ill of him. I have been looking over his book again [the _Essai sur l'etude de la litterature_, 1761]; he runs after brilliance too much, and is strained and stilted. Mr. Gibbon is not the man for me, and I do not think he is the man for Mademoiselle Curchod either."[149] Whether Gibbon went or not, we do not know. He knew in after years what had been said of him by Jean Jacques, and protested with mild pomp that this extraordinary man should have been less precipitate in condemning the moral character and the conduct of a stranger.[150]

Boswell, as we know, had left Johnson "rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner" on Harwich beach in 1763, and was now on his travels. Like many of his countrymen, he found his way to Lord Marischal, and here his indomitable pa.s.sion for making the personal acquaintance of any one who was much talked about, naturally led him to seek so singular a character as the man who was now at Motiers.

What Rousseau thought of one who was as singular a character as himself in another direction, we do not know.[151] Lord Marischal warned Rousseau that his visitor is of excellent disposition, but full of visionary ideas, even having seen spirits--a serious proof of unsoundness to a man who had lived in the very positive atmosphere of Frederick's court at Berlin. "I only hope," says the sage Scot, of the Scot who was not sage, "that he may not fall into the hands of people who will turn his head: he was very pleased with the reception you gave him."[152] As it happens, he was the means of sending Boswell to a place where his head was turned, though not very mischievously.

Rousseau was at that time full of Corsican projects, of which this is the proper place for us very briefly to speak.

The prolonged struggles of the natives of Corsica to a.s.sert their independence of the oppressive administration of the Genoese, which had begun in 1729, came to end for a moment in 1755, when Paoli (1726-1807) defeated the Genoese, and proceeded to settle the government of the island. In the Social Contract Rousseau had said, "There is still in Europe one country capable of legislation, and that is the island of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which this brave people has succeeded in recovering and defending its liberty, ent.i.tle it to the good fortune of having some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have a presentiment that this little isle will one day astonish Europe,"[153]--a presentiment that in a sense came true enough long after Rousseau was gone, in a man who was born on the little island seven years later than the publication of this pa.s.sage.

Some of the Corsican leaders were highly flattered, and in August 1764, b.u.t.tafuoco entered into correspondence with Rousseau for the purpose of inducing him to draw up a set of political inst.i.tutions and a code of laws. Paoli himself was too shrewd to have much belief in the application of ideal systems, and we are a.s.sured that he had no intention of making Rousseau the Solon of his island, but only of inducing him to inflame the gallantry of its inhabitants by writing a history of their exploits.[154] Rousseau, however, did not understand the invitation in this narrower sense. He replied that the very idea of such a task as legislation transported his soul, and he entered into it with the liveliest ardour. He resolved to quarter himself with Theresa in a cottage in some lonely district in the island; in a year he would collect the necessary information as to the manners and opinions of the inhabitants, and three years afterwards he would produce a set of inst.i.tutions that should be fit for a free and valorous people.[155] In the midst of this enthusiasm (May 1765) he urged Boswell to visit Corsica, and gave him a letter to Paoli, with results which we know in the shape of an Account of Corsica (1768), and in a feverishness of imagination upon the subject for many a long day afterwards. "Mind your own affairs," at length cried Johnson sternly to him, "and leave the Corsicans to theirs; I wish you would empty your head of Corsica."[156] At the end of 1765, the immortal hero-wors.h.i.+pper on his return expected to come upon his hero at Motiers, but finding that he was in Paris wrote him a wonderful letter in wonderful French. "You will forget all your cares for many an evening, while I tell you what I have seen. I owe you the deepest obligation for sending me to Corsica. The voyage has done me marvellous good. It has made me as if all the lives of Plutarch had sunk into my soul.... I am devoted to the Corsicans heart and soul; if you, ill.u.s.trious Rousseau, the philosopher whom they have chosen to help them by your lights to preserve and enjoy the liberty which they have acquired with so much heroism--if you have cooled towards these gallant islanders, why then I am sorry for you, that is all I can say."[157]

Alas, by this time the gallant islanders had been driven out of Rousseau's mind by personal mishaps. First, Voltaire or some other enemy had spread the rumour that the invitation to become the Lycurgus of Corsica was a practical joke, and Rousseau's suspicious temper found what he took for confirmation of this in some trifling incidents with which we certainly need not concern ourselves.[158] Next, a very real storm had burst upon him which drove him once more to seek a new place of shelter, other than an island occupied by French troops. For France having begun by despatching auxiliaries to the a.s.sistance of the Genoese (1764), ended by buying the island from the Genoese senate, with a sort of equity of redemption (1768)--an iniquitous transaction, as Rousseau justly called it, equally shocking to justice, humanity, reason, and policy.[159] Civilisation would have been saved one of its sorest trials if Genoa could have availed herself of her equity, and so have delivered France from the acquisition of the most terrible citizen that ever scourged a state.[160]

The condemnation of Rousseau by the Council in 1762 had divided Geneva into two camps, and was followed by a prolonged contention between his partisans and his enemies. The root of the contention was political rather than theological. To take Rousseau's side was to protest against the oligarchic authority which had condemned him, and the quarrel about Emilius was only an episode in the long war between the popular and aristocratic parties. This strife, after coming to a height for the first time in 1734, had abated after the pacification of 1738, but the pacification was only effective for a time, and the roots of division were still full of vitality. The lawfulness of the authority and the regularity of the procedure by which Rousseau had been condemned, offered convenient ground for carrying on the dispute, and its warmth was made more intense by the suggestion on the popular side that perhaps the religion of the book which the oligarchs had condemned was more like Christianity than the religion of the oligarchs who condemned it.

Rousseau was too near the scene of the quarrel, too directly involved in its issues, too constantly in contact with the people who were engaged in it, not to feel the angry buzzings very close about his ears. If he had been as collected and as self-possessed as he loved to fancy, they would have gone for very little in the life of the day.

But Rousseau never stood on the heights whence a strong man surveys with clear eye and firm soul the unjust or mean or furious moods of the world. Such achievement is not hard for the creature who is wrapped up in himself; who is careless of the pa.s.sions of men about him, because he thinks they cannot hurt him, and not because he has measured them, and deliberately a.s.signed them a place among the elements in which a man's destiny is cast. It is only hard for one who is penetrated by true interest in the opinion and action of his fellows, thus to keep both sympathy warm and self-sufficience true.

The task was too hard for Rousseau, though his patience under long persecution far surpa.s.sed that of any of the other oppressed teachers of the time. In the spring of 1763 he deliberately renounced in all due forms his rights of burgess-s.h.i.+p and citizens.h.i.+p in the city and republic of Geneva.[161] And at length he broke forth against his Genevese persecutors in the Letters from the Mountain (1764), a long but extremely vigorous and adroit rejoinder to the pleas which his enemies had put forth in Tronchin's Letters from the Country. If any one now cares to satisfy himself how really unjust and illegal the treatment was, which Rousseau received at the hands of the authorities of his native city, he may do so by examining these most forcible letters. The second part of them may interest the student of political history by its account of the working of the inst.i.tutions of the little republic. We seem to be reading over again the history of a Greek city; the growth of a wealthy cla.s.s in face of an increasing number of poor burgesses, the imposition of burdens in unfair proportions upon the metoikoi, the gradual usurpation of legislative and administrative function (including especially the judicial) by the oligarchs, and the twisting of democratic machinery to oligarchic ends; then the growth of staseis or violent factions, followed by metabole or overthrow of the established const.i.tution, ending in foreign intervention. The Four Hundred at Athens would have treated any Social Contract that should have appeared in their day, just as sternly as the Two Hundred or the Twenty-five treated the Social Contract that did appear, and for just the same reasons.

Rousseau proved his case with redundancy of demonstration. A body of burgesses had previously availed themselves (Nov. 1763) of a legal right, and made a technical representation to the Lesser Council that the laws had been broken in his case. The Council in return availed itself of an equally legal right, its _droit negatif_, and declined to entertain the representation, without giving any reasons.

Unfortunately for Rousseau's comfort, the ferment which his new vindication of his cause stirred up, did not end with the condemnation and burning of his manifesto. For the parliament of Paris ordered the Letters from the Mountain to be burned, and the same decree and the same f.a.ggot served for that and for Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (April 1765).[162] It was also burned at the Hague (Jan.

22). An observer by no means friendly to the priests noticed that at Paris it was not the fanatics of orthodoxy, but the encyclopaedists and their flock, who on this occasion raised the storm and set the zeal of the magistrates in motion.[163] The vanity and egoism of rationalistic sects can be as fatal to candour, justice, and compa.s.sion as the intolerant pride of the great churches.

Persecution came nearer to Rousseau and took more inconvenient shapes than this. A terrible libel appeared (Feb. 1765), full of the coa.r.s.est calumnies. Rousseau, stung by their insolence and falseness, sent it to Paris to be published there with a prefatory note, stating that it was by a Genevese pastor whom he named. This landed him in fresh mortification, for the pastor disavowed the libel, Rousseau declined to accept the disavowal, and sensible men were wearied by acrimonious declarations, explanations, protests.[164] Then the clergy of Neuchatel were not able any longer to resist the opportunity of inflicting such torments as they could, upon a heretic whom they might more charitably have left to those ultimate and everlasting torments which were so precious to their religious imagination. They began to press the pastor of the village where Rousseau lived, and with whom he had hitherto been on excellent terms. The pastor, though he had been liberal enough to admit his singular paris.h.i.+oner to the communion, in spite of the Savoyard Vicar, was not courageous enough to resist the bigotry of the professional body to which he belonged. He warned Rousseau not to present himself at the next communion. The philosopher insisted that he had a right to do this, until formally cast out by the consistory. The consistory, composed mainly of a body of peasants entirely bound to their minister in matters of religion, cited him to appear, and answer such questions as might test his loyalty to the faith. Rousseau prepared a most deliberate vindication of all that he had written, which he intended to speak to his rustic judges. The eve of the morning on which he had to appear, he knew his discourse by heart; when morning came he could not repeat two sentences. So he fell back on the instrument over which he had more mastery than he had over tongue or memory, and wrote what he wished to say. The pastor, in whom irritated egoism was probably by this time giving additional heat to professional zeal, was for fulminating a decree of excommunication, but there appears to have been some indirect interference with the proceedings of the consistory by the king's officials at Neuchatel, and the ecclesiastical bolt was held back.[165] Other weapons were not wanting. The pastor proceeded to spread rumours among his flock that Rousseau was a heretic, even an atheist, and most prodigious of all, that he had written a book containing the monstrous doctrine that women have no souls. The pulpit resounded with sermons proving to the honest villagers that antichrist was quartered in their parish in very flesh. The Armenian apparel gave a high degree of plausibleness to such an opinion, and as the wretched man went by the door of his neighbours, he heard cursing and menace, while a hostile pebble now and again whistled past his ear. His botanising expeditions were believed to be devoted to search for noxious herbs, and a man who died in the agonies of nephritic colic, was supposed to have been poisoned by him.[166] If persons went to the post-office for letters for him, they were treated with insult.[167] At length the ferment against him grew hot enough to be serious. A huge block of stone was found placed so as to kill him when he opened his door; and one night an attempt was made to stone him in his house.[168] Popular hate shown with this degree of violence was too much for his fort.i.tude, and after a residence of rather more than three years (September 8-10, 1765), he fled from the inhospitable valley to seek refuge he knew not where.

In his rambles of a previous summer he had seen a little island in the lake of Bienne, which struck his imagination and lived in his memory.

Thither he now, after a moment of hesitation, turned his steps, with something of the same instinct as draws a child towards a beam of the sun. He forgot or was heedless of the circ.u.mstance that the isle of St. Peter lay in the jurisdiction of the canton of Berne, whose government had forbidden him their territory. Strong craving for a little ease in the midst of his wretchedness extinguished thought of jurisdictions and proscriptive decrees.