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Rousseau; Volumes 1 and 2, a non-fiction book by John Morley |
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Volume 1 - Chapter 2. Youth |
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_ VOLUME I CHAPTER II. YOUTH Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712. He was of old French stock. His ancestors had removed from Paris to the famous city of refuge as far back as 1529, a little while before Farel came thither to establish the principles of the Reformation, and seven years before the first visit of the more extraordinary man who made Geneva the mother city of a new interpretation of Christianity, as Rome was the mother city of the old. Three generations in a direct line separated Jean Jacques from Didier Rousseau, the son of a Paris bookseller, and the first emigrant.[1] Thus Protestant tradition in the Rousseau family dates from the appearance of Protestantism in Europe, and seems to have exerted the same kind of influence upon them as it did, in conjunction with the rest of the surrounding circumstances, upon the other citizens of the ideal state of the Reformation. It is computed by the historians that out of three thousand families who composed the population of Geneva towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were hardly fifty who before the Reformation had acquired the position of burgess-ship. The curious set of conditions which thus planted a colony of foreigners in the midst of a free polity, with a new doctrine and newer discipline, introduced into Europe a fresh type of character and manners. People declared they could recognise in the men of Geneva neither French vivacity, nor Italian subtlety and clearness, nor Swiss gravity. They had a zeal for religion, a vigorous energy in government, a passion for freedom, a devotion to ingenious industries, which marked them with a stamp unlike that of any other community.[2] Towards the close of the seventeenth century some of the old austerity and rudeness was sensibly modified under the influence of the great neighbouring monarchy. One striking illustration of this tendency was the rapid decline of the Savoyard patois in popular use. The movement had not gone far enough when Rousseau was born, to take away from the manners and spirit of his country their special quality and individual note. The mother of Jean Jacques, who seems to have been a simple, cheerful, and tender woman, was the daughter of a Genevan minister; her maiden name, Bernard. The birth of her son was fatal to her, and the most touching and pathetic of all the many shapes of death was the fit beginning of a life preappointed to nearly unlifting cloud. "I cost my mother her life," he wrote, "and my birth was the first of my woes."[3] Destiny thus touches us with magical finger, long before consciousness awakens to the forces that have been set to work in our personality, launching us into the universe with country, forefathers, and physical predispositions, all fixed without choice of ours. Rousseau was born dying, and though he survived this first crisis by the affectionate care of one of his father's sisters, yet his constitution remained infirm and disordered. Inborn tendencies, as we perceive on every side, are far from having unlimited irresistible mastery, if they meet early encounter from some wise and patient external will. The father of Rousseau was unfortunately cast in the same mould as his mother, and the child's own morbid sensibility was stimulated and deepened by the excessive sensibility of his first companion. Isaac Rousseau, in many of his traits, was a reversion to an old French type. In all the Genevese there was an underlying tendency of this kind. "Under a phlegmatic and cool air," wrote Rousseau, when warning his countrymen against the inflammatory effects of the drama, "the Genevese hide an ardent and sensitive character, that is more easily moved than controlled."[4] And some of the episodes in their history during the eighteenth century might be taken for scenes from the turbulent dramas of Paris. But Isaac Rousseau's restlessness, his eager emotion, his quick and punctilious sense of personal dignity, his heedlessness of ordered affairs, were not common in Geneva, fortunately for the stability of her society and the prosperity of her citizens. This disorder of spirit descended in modified form to the son; it was inevitable that he should be indirectly affected by it. Before he was seven years old he had learnt from his father to indulge a passion for the reading of romances. The child and the man passed whole nights in a fictitious world, reading to one another in turn, absorbed by vivid interest in imaginary situations, until the morning note of the birds recalled them to a sense of the conditions of more actual life, and made the elder cry out in confusion that he was the more childish of the two. The effect of this was to raise passion to a premature exaltation in the young brain. "I had no idea of real things," he said, "though all the sentiments were already familiar to me. Nothing had come to me by conception, everything by sensation. These confused emotions, striking me one after another, did not warp a reason that I did not yet possess, but they gradually shaped in me a reason of another cast and temper, and gave me bizarre and romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the objective world, which is the master-key and prime law of sanity. In time the library of romances came to an end (1719), and Jean Jacques and his father fell back on the more solid and moderated fiction of history and biography. The romances had been the possession of the mother; the more serious books were inherited from the old minister, her father. Such books as Nani's History of Venice, and Le Sueur's History of the Church and the Empire, made less impression on the young Rousseau than the admirable Plutarch; and he used to read to his father during the hours of work, and read over again to himself during all hours, those stories of free and indomitable souls which are so proper to kindle the glow of generous fire. Plutarch was dear to him to the end of his life; he read him in the late days when he had almost ceased to read, and he always declared Plutarch to be nearly the only author to whom he had never gone without profit."[6] "I think I see my father now," he wrote when he had begun to make his mark in Paris, "living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the sublimest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, lying before him along with the tools of his craft. I see at his side a cherished son receiving instruction from the best of fathers, alas, with but too little fruit."[7] This did little to implant the needed impressions of the actual world. Rousseau's first training continued to be in an excessive degree the exact reverse of our common method; this stirs the imagination too little, and shuts the young too narrowly within the strait pen of present and visible reality. The reader of Plutarch at the age of ten actually conceived himself a Greek or a Roman, and became the personage whose strokes of constancy and intrepidity transported him with sympathetic ecstasy, made his eyes sparkle, and raised his voice to heroic pitch. Listeners were even alarmed one day as he told the tale of Scaevola at table, to see him imitatively thrust forth his arm over a hot chafing-dish.[8] Rousseau had one brother, on whom the spirit of the father came down in ample measure, just as the sensibility of the mother descended upon Jean Jacques. He passed through a boyhood of revolt, and finally ran away into Germany, where he was lost from sight and knowledge of his kinsmen for ever. Jean Jacques was thus left virtually an only child,[9] and he commemorates the homely tenderness and care with which his early years were surrounded. Except in the hours which he passed in reading by the side of his father, he was always with his aunt, in the self-satisfying curiosity of childhood watching her at work with the needle and busy about affairs of the house, or else listening to her with contented interest, as she sang the simple airs of the common people. The impression of this kind and cheerful figure was stamped on his memory to the end; her tone of voice, her dress, the quaint fashion of her hair. The constant recollection of her shows, among many other signs, how he cherished that conception of the true unity of a man's life, which places it in a closely-linked chain of active memories, and which most of us lose in wasteful dispersion of sentiment and poor fragmentariness of days. When the years came in which he might well say, I have no pleasure in them, and after a manhood of distress and suspicion and diseased sorrows had come to dim those blameless times, he could still often surprise himself unconsciously humming the tune of one of his aunt's old songs, with many tears in his eyes.[10] This affectionate schooling came suddenly to an end. Isaac Rousseau in the course of a quarrel in which he had involved himself, believed that he saw unfairness in the operation of the law, for the offender had kinsfolk in the Great Council. He resolved to leave his country rather than give way, in circumstances which compromised his personal honour and the free justice of the republic. So his house was broken up, and his son was sent to school at the neighbouring village of Bossey (1722), under the care of a minister, "there to learn along with Latin all the medley of sorry stuff with which, under the name of education, they accompany Latin."[11] Rousseau tells us nothing of the course of his intellectual instruction here, but he marks his two years' sojourn under the roof of M. Lambercier by two forward steps in that fateful acquaintance with good and evil, which is so much more important than literary knowledge. Upon one of these fruits of the tree of nascent experience, men usually keep strict silence. Rousseau is the only person that ever lived who proclaimed to the whole world as a part of his own biography the ignoble circumstances of the birth of sensuality in boyhood. Nobody else ever asked us to listen while he told of the playmate with which unwarned youth takes its heedless pleasure, which waxes and strengthens with years, until the man suddenly awakens to find the playmate grown into a master, grotesque and foul, whose unclean grip is not to be shaken off, and who poisons the air with the goatish fume of the satyr. It is on this side that the unspoken plays so decisive a part, that most of the spoken seems but as dust in the balance; it is here that the flesh spreads gross clouds over the firmament of the spirit. Thinking of it, we flee from talk about the high matters of will and conscience, of purity of heart and the diviner mind, and hurry to the physician. Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer forces. Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if it did not hide such terrible power. With a moral courage, that it needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold, ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be silent, in the present most unwelcome instance. As it is, we perhaps do best in chronicling the fact and passing on. The harmless young are allowed to play without monition or watching among the deep open graves of temperament; and Rousseau, telling the tale of his inmost experience, unlike the physician and the moralist who love decorous surfaces of things, did not spare himself nor others a glimpse of the ignominies to which the body condemns its high tenant, the soul.[12] The second piece of experience which he acquired at Bossey was the knowledge of injustice and wrongful suffering as things actual and existent. Circumstances brought him under suspicion of having broken the teeth of a comb which did not belong to him. He was innocent, and not even the most terrible punishment could wring from him an untrue confession of guilt. The root of his constancy was not in an abhorrence of falsehood, which is exceptional in youth, and for which he takes no credit, but in a furious and invincible resentment against the violent pressure that was unjustly put upon him. "Picture a character, timid and docile in ordinary life, but ardent, impetuous, indomitable in its passions; a child always governed by the voice of reason, always treated with equity, gentleness, and consideration, who had not even the idea of injustice, and who for the first time experiences an injustice so terrible, from the very people whom he most cherishes and respects! What a confusion of ideas, what disorder of sentiments, what revolution in heart, in brain, in every part of his moral and intellectual being!" He had not learnt, any more than other children, either to put himself in the place of his elders, or to consider the strength of the apparent case against him. All that he felt was the rigour of a frightful chastisement for an offence of which he was innocent. And the association of ideas was permanent. "This first sentiment of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved in my soul, that all the ideas relating to it bring my first emotion back to me; and this sentiment, though only relative to myself in its origin, has taken such consistency, and become so disengaged from all personal interest, that my heart is inflamed at the sight or story of any wrongful action, just as much as if its effect fell on my own person. When I read of the cruelties of some ferocious tyrant, or the subtle atrocities of some villain of a priest, I would fain start on the instant to poniard such wretches, though I were to perish a hundred times for the deed.... This movement may be natural to me, and I believe it is so; but the profound recollection of the first injustice I suffered was too long and too fast bound up with it, not to have strengthened it enormously."[13] To men who belong to the silent and phlegmatic races like our own, all this may possibly strike on the ear like a false or strained note. Yet a tranquil appeal to the real history of one's own strongest impressions may disclose their roots in facts of childish experience, which remoteness of time has gradually emptied of the burning colour they once had. This childish discovery of the existence in his own world of that injustice which he had only seen through a glass very darkly in the imaginary world of his reading, was for Rousseau the angry dismissal from the primitive Eden, which in one shape and at one time or another overtakes all men. "Here," he says, "was the term of the serenity of my childish days. From this moment I ceased to enjoy a pure happiness, and I feel even at this day that the reminiscence of the delights of my infancy here comes to an end.... Even the country lost in our eyes that charm of sweetness and simplicity which goes to the heart; it seemed sombre and deserted, and was as if covered by a veil, hiding its beauties from our sight. We no longer tended our little gardens, our plants, our flowers. We went no more lightly to scratch the earth, shouting for joy as we discovered the germ of the seed we had sown." Whatever may be the degree of literal truth in the Confessions, the whole course of Rousseau's life forbids us to pass this passionate description by as overcharged or exaggerated. We are conscious in it of a constitutional infirmity. We perceive an absence of healthy power of reaction against moral shock. Such shocks are experienced in many unavoidable forms by all save the dullest natures, when they first come into contact with the sharp tooth of outer circumstance. Indeed, a man must be either miraculously happy in his experiences, or exceptionally obtuse in observing and feeling, or else be the creature of base and cynical ideals, if life does not to the end continue to bring many a repetition of that first day of incredulous bewilderment. But the urgent demands for material activity quickly recall the mass of men to normal relations with their fellows and the outer world. A vehement objective temperament, like Voltaire's, is instantly roused by one of these penetrative stimuli into angry and tenacious resistance. A proud and collected soul, like Goethe's, loftily follows its own inner aims, without taking any heed of the perturbations that arise from want of self-collection in a world still spelling its rudiments. A sensitive and depressed spirit, like Rousseau's or Cowper's, finds itself without any of these reacting kinds of force, and the first stroke of cruelty or oppression is the going out of a divine light. Leaving Bossey, Rousseau returned to Geneva, and passed two or three years with his uncle, losing his time for the most part, but learning something of drawing and something of Euclid, for the former of which he showed special inclination.[14] It was a question whether he was to be made a watchmaker, a lawyer, or a minister. His own preference, as his after-life might have led us to suppose, was in favour of the last of the three; "for I thought it a fine thing," he says, "to preach." The uncle was a man of pleasure, and as often happens in such circumstances, his love of pleasure had the effect of turning his wife into a pietist. Their son was Rousseau's constant comrade. "Our friendship filled our hearts so amply, that if we were only together, the simplest amusements were a delight." They made kites, cages, bows and arrows, drums, houses; they spoiled the tools of their grandfather, in trying to make watches like him. In the same cheerful imitative spirit, which is the main feature in childhood when it is not disturbed by excess of literary teaching, after Geneva had been visited by an Italian showman with a troop of marionettes, they made puppets and composed comedies for them; and when one day the uncle read aloud an elegant sermon, they abandoned their comedies, and turned with blithe energy to exhortation. They had glimpses of the rougher side of life in the biting mockeries of some schoolboys of the neighbourhood. These ended in appeal to the god of youthful war, who pronounced so plainly for the bigger battalions, that the release of their enemies from school was the signal for the quick retreat of our pair within doors. All this is an old story in every biography written or unwritten. It seldom fails to touch us, either in the way of sympathetic reminiscence, or if life should have gone somewhat too hardly with a man, then in the way of irony, which is not less real and poetic than the eironeia of a Greek dramatist, for being concerned with more unheroic creatures. And this rough play of the streets always seemed to Rousseau a manlier schooling than the effeminate tendencies which he thought he noticed in Genevese youth in after years. "In my time," he says admiringly, "children were brought up in rustic fashion and had no complexion to keep.... Timid and modest before the old, they were bold, haughty, combative among themselves; they had no curled locks to be careful of; they defied one another at wrestling, running, boxing. They returned home sweating, out of breath, torn; they were true blackguards, if you will, but they made men who have zeal in their heart to serve their country and blood to shed for her. May we be able to say as much one day of our fine little gentlemen, and may these men at fifteen not turn out children at thirty."[15] Two incidents of this period remain to us, described in Rousseau's own words, and as they reveal a certain sweetness in which his life unhappily did not afterwards greatly abound, it may help our equitable balance of impressions about him to reproduce them. Every Sunday he used to spend the day at Paquis at Mr. Fazy's, who had married one of his aunts, and who carried on the production of printed calicoes. "One day I was in the drying-room, watching the rollers of the hot press; their brightness pleased my eye; I was tempted to lay my fingers on them, and I was moving them up and down with much satisfaction along the smooth cylinder, when young Fazy placed himself in the wheel and gave it a half-quarter turn so adroitly, that I had just the ends of my two longest fingers caught, but this was enough to crush the tips and tear the nails. I raised a piercing cry; Fazy instantly turned back the wheel, and the blood gushed from my fingers. In the extremity of consternation he hastened to me, embraced me, and besought me to cease my cries, or he would be undone. In the height of my own pain, I was touched by his; I instantly fell silent, we ran to the pond, where he helped me to wash my fingers and to staunch the blood with moss. He entreated me with tears not to accuse him; I promised him that I would not, and I kept my word so well that twenty years after no one knew the origin of the scar. I was kept in bed for more than three weeks, and for more than two months was unable to use my hand. But I persisted that a large stone had fallen and crushed my fingers."[16] The other story is of the same tenour, though there is a new touch of sensibility in its concluding words. "I was playing at ball at Plain Palais, with one of my comrades named Plince. We began to quarrel over the game; we fought, and in the fight he dealt me on my bare head a stroke so well directed, that with a stronger arm it would have dashed my brains out. I fell to the ground, and there never was agitation like that of this poor lad, as he saw the blood in my hair. He thought he had killed me. He threw himself upon me, and clasped me eagerly in his arms, while his tears poured down his cheeks, and he uttered shrill cries. I returned his embrace with all my force, weeping like him, in a state of confused emotion which was not without a kind of sweetness. Then he tried to stop the blood which kept flowing, and seeing that our two handkerchiefs were not enough, he dragged me off to his mother's; she had a small garden hard by. The good woman nearly fell sick at sight of me in this condition; she kept strength enough to dress my wound, and after bathing it well, she applied flower-de-luce macerated in brandy, an excellent remedy much used in our country. Her tears and those of her son, went to my very heart, so that I looked upon them for a long while as my mother and my brother."[17] If it were enough that our early instincts should be thus amiable and easy, then doubtless the dismal sloughs in which men and women lie floundering would occupy a very much more insignificant space in the field of human experience. The problem, as we know, lies in the discipline of this primitive goodness. For character in a state of society is not a tree that grows into uprightness by the law of its own strength, though an adorable instance here and there of rectitude and moral loveliness that seem intuitive may sometimes tempt us into a moment's belief in a contrary doctrine. In Rousseau's case this serious problem was never solved; there was no deliberate preparation of his impulses, prepossessions, notions; no foresight on the part of elders, and no gradual acclimatisation of a sensitive and ardent nature in the fixed principles which are essential to right conduct in the frigid zone of our relations with other people. It was one of the most elementary of Rousseau's many perverse and mischievous contentions, that it is their education by the older which ruins or wastes the abundant capacity for virtue that subsists naturally in the young. His mind seems never to have sought much more deeply for proof of this, than the fact that he himself was innocent and happy so long as he was allowed to follow without disturbance the easy simple proclivities of his own temperament. Circumstances were not indulgent enough to leave the experiment to complete itself within these very rudimentary conditions. Rousseau had been surrounded, as he is always careful to protest, with a religious atmosphere. His father, though a man of pleasure, was possessed also not only of probity but of religion as well. His three aunts were all in their degrees gracious and devout. M. Lambercier at Bossey, "although Churchman and preacher," was still a sincere believer and nearly as good in act as in word. His inculcation of religion was so hearty, so discreet, so reasonable, that his pupils, far from being wearied by the sermon, never came away without being touched inwardly and stirred to make virtuous resolutions. With his Aunt Bernard devotion was rather more tiresome, because she made a business of it.[18] It would be a distinct error to suppose that all this counted for nothing, for let us remember that we are now engaged with the youth of the one great religious writer of France in the eighteenth century. When after many years Rousseau's character hardened, the influences which had surrounded his boyhood came out in their full force and the historian of opinion soon notices in his spirit and work a something which had no counterpart in the spirit and work of men who had been trained in Jesuit colleges. At the first outset, however, every trace of religious sentiment was obliterated from sight, and he was left unprotected against the shocks of the world and the flesh. At the age of eleven Jean Jacques was sent into a notary's office, but that respectable calling struck him in the same repulsive and insufferable way in which it has struck many other boys of genius in all countries. Contrary to the usual rule, he did not rebel, but was ignominiously dismissed by his master[19] for dulness and inaptitude; his fellow-clerks pronounced him stupid and incompetent past hope. He was next apprenticed to an engraver,[20] a rough and violent man, who seems to have instantly plunged the boy into a demoralised stupefaction. The reality of contact with this coarse nature benumbed as by touch of torpedo the whole being of a youth who had hitherto lived on pure sensations and among those ideas which are nearest to sensations. There were no longer heroic Romans in Rousseau's universe. "The vilest tastes, the meanest bits of rascality, succeeded to my simple amusements, without even leaving the least idea behind. I must, in spite of the worthiest education, have had a strong tendency to degenerate." The truth was that he had never had any education in its veritable sense, as the process, on its negative side, of counteracting the inborn. There are two kinds, or perhaps we should more correctly say two degrees, of the constitution in which the reflective part is weak. There are the men who live on sensation, but who do so lustily, with a certain fulness of blood and active energy of muscle. There are others who do so passively, not searching for excitement, but acquiescing. The former by their sheer force and plenitude of vitality may, even in a world where reflection is a first condition, still go far. The latter succumb, and as reflection does nothing for them, and as their sensations in such a world bring them few blandishments, they are tolerably early surrounded with a self-diffusing atmosphere of misery. Rousseau had none of this energy which makes oppression bracing. For a time he sank. It would be a mistake to let the story of the Confessions carry us into exaggerations. The brutality of his master and the harshness of his life led him to nothing very criminal, but only to wrong acts which are despicable by their meanness, rather than in any sense atrocious. He told lies as readily as the truth. He pilfered things to eat. He cunningly found a means of opening his master's private cabinet, and of using his master's best instruments by stealth. He wasted his time in idle and capricious tasks. When the man, with all the ravity of an adult moralist, describes these misdeeds of the boy, they assume a certain ugliness of mien, and excites a strong disgust which, when the misdeeds themselves are before us in actual life, we experience in a far more considerate form. The effect of calm, retrospective avowal is to create a kind of feeling which is essentially unlike our feeling at what is actually avowed. Still it is clear that his unlucky career as apprentice brought out in Rousseau slyness, greediness, slovenliness, untruthfulness, and the whole ragged regiment of the squalider vices. The evil of his temperament now and always was of the dull smouldering kind, seldom breaking out into active flame. There is a certain sordidness in the scene. You may complain that the details which Rousseau gives of his youthful days are insipid. Yet such things are the web and stuff of life, and these days of transition from childhood to full manhood in every case mark a crisis. These insipidities test the education of home and family, and they presage definitely what is to come. The roots of character, good or bad, are shown for this short space, and they remain unchanged, though most people learn from their fellows the decent and useful art of covering them over with a little dust, in the shape of accepted phrases and routine customs and a silence which is not oblivion. After a time the character of Jean Jacques was absolutely broken down. He says little of the blows with which his offences were punished by his master, but he says enough to enable us to discern that they were terrible to him. This cowardice, if we choose to give the name to an overmastering physical horror, at length brought his apprentice days to an end. He was now in his sixteenth year. He was dragged by his comrades into sports for which he had little inclination, though he admits that once engaged in them he displayed an impetuosity that carried him beyond the others. Such pastimes naturally led them beyond the city walls, and on two occasions Rousseau found the gates closed on his return. His master when he presented himself in the morning gave him such greeting as we may imagine, and held out things beyond imagining as penalty for a second sin in this kind. The occasion came, as, alas, it nearly always does. "Half a league from the town," says Rousseau, "I hear the retreat sounded, and redouble my pace; I hear the drum beat, and run at the top of my speed: I arrive out of breath, bathed in sweat; my heart beats violently, I see from a distance the soldiers at their post, and call out with choking voice. It was too late. Twenty paces from the outpost sentinel, I saw the first bridge rising. I shuddered, as I watched those terrible horns, sinister and fatal augury of the inevitable lot which that moment was opening for me."[21] In manhood when we have the resource of our own will to fall back upon, we underestimate the unsurpassed horror and anguish of such moments as this in youth, when we know only the will of others, and that this will is inexorable against us. Rousseau dared not expose himself to the fulfilment of his master's menace, and he ran away (1728). But for this, wrote the unhappy man long years after, "I should have passed, in the bosom of my religion, of my native land, of my family, and my friends, a mild and peaceful life, such as my character required, in the uniformity of work which suited my taste, and of a society after my heart. I should have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good craftsman, good man in all. I should have been happy in my condition, perhaps I might have honoured it; and after living a life obscure and simple, but even and gentle, I should have died peacefully in the midst of my own people. Soon forgotten, I should at any rate have been regretted as long as any memory of me was left."[22] As a man knows nothing about the secrets of his own individual organisation, this illusory mapping out of a supposed Possible need seldom be suspected of the smallest insincerity. The poor madman who declares that he is a king kept out of his rights only moves our pity, and we perhaps owe pity no less to those in all the various stages of aberration uncertificated by surgeons, down to the very edge of most respectable sanity, who accuse the injustice of men of keeping them out of this or that kingdom, of which in truth their own composition finally disinherited them at the moment when they were conceived in a mother's womb. The first of the famous Five Propositions of Jansen, which were a stumbling-block to popes and to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century foolishness, put this clear and permanent truth into a mystic and perishable formula, to the effect that there are some commandments of God which righteous and good men are absolutely unable to obey, though ever so disposed to do them, and God does not give them so much grace that they are able to observe them. If Rousseau's sensations in the evening were those of terror, the day and its prospect of boundless adventures soon turned them into entire delight. The whole world was before him, and all the old conceptions of romance were instantly revived by the supposed nearness of their realisation. He roamed for two or three days among the villages in the neighbourhood of Geneva, finding such hospitality as he needed in the cottages of friendly peasants. Before long his wanderings brought him to the end of the territory of the little republic. Here he found himself in the domain of Savoy, where dukes and lords had for ages been the traditional foes of the freedom and the faith of Geneva, Rousseau came to the village of Confignon, and the name of the priest of Confignon recalled one of the most embittered incidents of the old feud. This feud had come to take new forms; instead of midnight expeditions to scale the city walls, the descendants of the Savoyard marauders of the sixteenth century were now intent with equivocal good will on rescuing the souls of the descendants of their old enemies from deadly heresy. At this time a systematic struggle was going on between the priests of Savoy and the ministers of Geneva, the former using every effort to procure the conversion of any Protestant on whom they could lay hands.[23] As it happened, the priest of Confignon was one of the most active in this good work.[24] He made the young Rousseau welcome, spoke to him of the heresies of Geneva and of the authority of the holy Church, and gave him some dinner. He could hardly have had a more easy convert, for the nature with which he had to deal was now swept and garnished, ready for the entrance of all devils or gods. The dinner went for much. "I was too good a guest," writes Rousseau in one of his few passages of humour, "to be a good theologian, and his Frangi wine, which struck me as excellent, was such a triumphant argument on his side, that I should have blushed to oppose so capital a host."[25] So it was agreed that he should be put in a way to be further instructed of these matters. We may accept Rousseau's assurance that he was not exactly a hypocrite in this rapid complaisance. He admits that any one who should have seen the artifices to which he resorted, might have thought him very false. But, he argues, "flattery, or rather concession, is not always a vice; it is oftener a virtue, especially in the young. The kindness with which a man receives us, attaches us to him; it is not to make a fool of him that we give way, but to avoid displeasing him, and not to return him evil for good." He never really meant to change his religion; his fault was like the coquetting of decent women, who sometimes, to gain their ends, without permitting anything or promising anything, lead men to hope more than they mean to hold good.[26] Thereupon follow some austere reflections on the priest, who ought to have sent him back to his friends; and there are strictures even upon the ministers of all dogmatic religions, in which the essential thing is not to do but to believe; their priests therefore, provided that they can convert a man to their faith, are wholly indifferent alike as to his worth and his worldly interests. All this is most just; the occasion for such a strain of remark, though so apposite on one side, is hardly well chosen to impress us. We wonder, as we watch the boy complacently hoodwinking his entertainer, what has become of the Roman severity of a few months back. This nervous eagerness to please, however, was the complementary element of a character of vague ambition, and it was backed by a stealthy consciousness of intellectual superiority, which perhaps did something, though poorly enough, to make such ignominy less deeply degrading. The die was cast. M. Pontverre despatched his brand plucked from the burning to a certain Madame de Warens, a lady living at Annecy, and counted zealous for the cause of the Church. In an interview whose minutest circumstances remained for ever stamped in his mind (March 21, 1728), Rousseau exchanged his first words with this singular personage, whose name and character he has covered with doubtful renown. He expected to find some gray and wrinkled woman, saving a little remnant of days in good works. Instead of this, there turned round upon him a person not more than eight-and-twenty years old, with gentle caressing air, a fascinating smile, a tender eye. Madame de Warens read the letters he brought, and entertained their bearer cheerfully. It was decided after consultation that the heretic should be sent to a monastery at Turin, where he might be brought over in form to the true Church. At the monastery not only would the spiritual question of faith and the soul be dealt with, but at the same time the material problem of shelter and subsistence for the body would be solved likewise. Elated with vanity at the thought of seeing before any of his comrades the great land of promise beyond the mountains, heedless of those whom he had left, and heedless of the future before him and the object which he was about, the young outcast made his journey over the Alps in all possible lightness of heart. "Seeing country is an allurement which hardly any Genevese can ever resist. Everything that met my eye seemed the guarantee of my approaching happiness. In the houses I imagined rustic festivals; in the fields, joyful sports; along the streams, bathing and fishing; on the trees, delicious fruits; under their shade, voluptuous interviews; on the mountains, pails of milk and cream, a charming idleness, peace, simplicity, the delight of going forward without knowing whither."[27] He might justly choose out this interval as more perfectly free from care or anxiety than any other of his life. It was the first of the too rare occasions when his usually passive sensuousness was stung by novelty and hope into an active energy. The seven or eight days of the journey came to an end, and the youth found himself at Turin without money or clothes, an inmate of a dreary monastery, among some of the very basest and foulest of mankind, who pass their time in going from one monastery to another through Spain and Italy, professing themselves Jews or Moors for the sake of being supported while the process of their conversion was going slowly forward. At the Hospice of the Catechumens the work of his conversion was begun in such earnest as the insincerity of at least one of the parties to it might allow. It is needless to enter into the circumstances of Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism. The mischievous zeal for theological proselytising has led to thousands of such hollow and degrading performances, but it may safely be said that none of them was ever hollower than this. Rousseau avows that he had been brought up in the heartiest abhorrence of the older church, and that he never lost this abhorrence. He fully explains that he accepted the arguments with which he was not very energetically plied, simply because he could not bear the idea of returning to Geneva, and he saw no other way out of his present destitute condition. "I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was about to do, was at the bottom the action of a bandit." "The sophism which destroyed me," he says in one of those eloquent pieces of moralising, which bring ignoble action into a relief that exaggerates our condemnation, "is that of most men, who complain of lack of strength when it is already too late for them to use it. It is only through our own fault that virtue costs us anything; if we could be always sage, we should rarely feel the need of being virtuous. But inclinations that might be easily overcome, drag us on without resistance; we yield to light temptations of which we despise the hazard. Insensibly we fall into perilous situations, against which we could easily have shielded ourselves, but from which we can afterwards only make a way out by heroic efforts that stupefy us, and so we sink into the abyss, crying aloud to God, Why hast thou made me so weak? But in spite of ourselves, God gives answer to our conscience, 'I made thee too weak to come out from the pit, because I made thee strong enough to avoid falling into it.'"[28] So the hopeful convert did fall in, not as happens to the pious soul "too hot for certainties in this our life," to find rest in liberty of private judgment and an open Bible, but simply as a means of getting food, clothing, and shelter.[29] The boy was clever enough to make some show of resistance, and he turned to good use for this purpose the knowledge of Church history and the great Reformation controversy which he had picked up at M. Lambercier's. He was careful not to carry things too far, and exactly nine days after his admission into the Hospice, he "abjured the errors of the sect."[30] Two days after that he was publicly received into the kindly bosom of the true Church with all solemnity, to the high edification of the devout of Turin, who marked their interest in the regenerate soul by contributions to the extent of twenty francs in small money. With that sum and formal good wishes the fathers of the Hospice of the Catechumens thrust him out of their doors into the broad world. The youth who had begun the day with dreams of palaces, found himself at night sleeping in a den where he paid a halfpenny for the privilege of resting in the same room with the rude woman who kept the house, her husband, her five or six children, and various other lodgers. This rough awakening produced no consciousness of hardship in a nature which, beneath all fantastic dreams, always remained true to its first sympathy with the homely lives of the poor. The woman of the house swore like a carter, and was always dishevelled and disorderly: this did not prevent Rousseau from recognising her kindness of heart and her staunch readiness to befriend. He passed his days in wandering about the streets of Turin, seeing the wonders of a capital, and expecting some adventure that should raise him to unknown heights. He went regularly to mass, watched the pomp of the court, and counted upon stirring a passion in the breast of a princess. A more important circumstance was the effect of the mass in awakening in his own breast his latent passion for music; a passion so strong that the poorest instrument, if it were only in tune, never failed to give him the liveliest pleasure. The king of Sardinia was believed to have the best performers in Europe; less than that was enough to quicken the musical susceptibility which is perhaps an invariable element in the most completely sensuous natures. When the end of the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we need hardly ask for any other cause than a shopkeeper's reasonable objection to vagabonds. The next step of this youth, who was always dreaming of the love of princesses, was to accept with just thankfulness the position of lackey or footboy in the household of a widow. With Madame de Vercellis he passed three months, and at the end of that time she died. His stay here was marked by an incident that has filled many pages with stormful discussion. When Madame de Vercellis died, a piece of old rose-coloured ribbon was missing; Rousseau had stolen it, and it was found in his possession. They asked him whence he had taken it. He replied that it had been given to him by Marion, a young and comely maid in the house. In her presence and before the whole household he repeated his false story, and clung to it with a bitter effrontery that we may well call diabolic, remembering how the nervous terror of punishment and exposure sinks the angel in man. Our phrase, want of moral courage, really denotes in the young an excruciating physical struggle, often so keen that the victim clutches after liberation with the spontaneous tenacity and cruelty of a creature wrecked in mastering waters. Undisciplined sensations constitute egoism in the most ruthless of its shapes, and at this epoch, owing either to the brutalities which surrounded his apprentice life at Geneva, or to that rapid tendency towards degeneration which he suspected in his own character, Rousseau was the slave of sensations which stained his days with baseness. "Never," he says, in his account of this hateful action, "was wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it is contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on to the first object that presented itself. When I saw her appear my heart was torn, but the presence of so many people was too strong for my remorse. I feared punishment very little; I only feared disgrace, but I feared that more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I would fain have buried myself in the depths of the earth; invincible shame prevailed over all, shame alone caused my effrontery, and the more criminal I became, the more intrepid was I made by the fright of confessing it. I could see nothing but the horror of being recognised and declared publicly to my face a thief, liar, and traducer."[32] When he says that he feared punishment little, his analysis of his mind is most likely wrong, for nothing is clearer than that a dread of punishment in any physical form was a peculiarly strong feeling with him at this time. However that may have been, the same over-excited imagination which put every sense on the alarm and led him into so abominable a misdemeanour, brought its own penalties. It led him to conceive a long train of ruin as having befallen Marion in consequence of his calumny against her, and this dreadful thought haunted him to the end of his life. In the long sleepless nights he thought he saw the unhappy girl coming to reproach him with a crime that seemed as fresh to him as if it had been perpetrated the day before.[33] Thus the same brooding memory which brought back to him the sweet pain of his gentle kinswoman's household melody, preserved the darker side of his history with equal fidelity and no less perfect continuousness. Rousseau expresses a hope and belief that this burning remorse would serve as expiation for his fault; as if expiation for the destruction of another soul could be anything but a fine name for self-absolution. We may, however, charitably and reasonably think that the possible consequences of his fault to the unfortunate Marion were not actual, but were as much a hallucination as the midnight visits of her reproachful spirit. Indeed, we are hardly condoning evil, in suggesting that the whole story from its beginning is marked with exaggeration, and that we who have our own lives to lead shall find little help in criticising at further length the exact heinousness of the ignoble falsehood of a boy who happened to grow up into a man of genius.[34] After an interval of six weeks, which were passed in the garret or cellar of his rough patroness with kind heart and ungentle tongue, Rousseau again found himself a lackey in the house of a Piedmontese person of quality. This new master, the Count of Gouvon, treated him with a certain unusual considerateness, which may perhaps make us doubt the narrative. His son condescended to teach the youth Latin, and Rousseau presumed to entertain a passion for one of the daughters of the house, to whom he paid silent homage in the odd shape of attending to her wants at table with special solicitude. In this situation he had, or at least he supposed that he had, an excellent chance of ultimate advancement. But advancement here or elsewhere means a measure of stability, and Rousseau's temperament in his youth was the archtype of the mutable. An old comrade from Geneva visited him,[35] and as almost any incident is stimulating enough to fire the restlessness of imaginative youth, the gratitude which he professed to the Count of Gouvon and his family, the prudence with which he marked his prospects, the industry with which he profited by opportunity, all faded quickly into mere dead and disembodied names of virtues. His imagination again went over the journey across the mountains; the fields, the woods, the streams, began to absorb his whole life. He recalled with delicious satisfaction how charming the journey had seemed to him, and thought how far more charming it would be in the society of a comrade of his own age and taste, without duty, or constraint, or obligation to go or stay other than as it might please them. "It would be madness to sacrifice such a piece of good fortune to projects of ambition, which were slow, difficult, doubtful of execution, and which, even if they should one day be realised, were not with all their glory worth a quarter of an hour of true pleasure and freedom in youth."[36] On these high principles he neglected his duties so recklessly that he was dismissed from his situation, and he and his comrade began their homeward wanderings with more than apostolic heedlessness as to what they should eat or wherewithal they should be clothed. They had a toy fountain; they hoped that in return for the amusement to be conferred by this wonder they should receive all that they might need. Their hopes were not fulfilled. The exhibition of the toy fountain did not excuse them from their reckoning. Before long it was accidentally broken, and to their secret satisfaction, for it had lost its novelty. Their naked, vagrancy was thus undisguised. They made their way by some means or other across the mountains, and their enjoyment of vagabondage was undisturbed by any thought of a future. "To understand my delirium at this moment," Rousseau says, in words which shed much light on darker parts of his history than fits of vagrancy, "it is necessary to know to what a degree my heart is subject to get aflame with the smallest things, and with what force it plunges into the imagination of the object that attracts it, vain as that object may be. The most grotesque, the most childish, the maddest schemes come to caress my favourite idea, and to show me the reasonableness of surrendering myself to it."[37] It was this deep internal vehemence which distinguished Rousseau all through his life from the commonplace type of social revolter. A vagrant sensuous temperament, strangely compounded with Genevese austerity; an ardent and fantastic imagination, incongruously shot with threads of firm reason; too little conscience and too much; a monstrous and diseased love of self, intertwined with a sincere compassion and keen interest for the great fellowship of his brothers; a wild dreaming of dreams that were made to look like sanity by the close and specious connection between conclusions and premisses, though the premisses happened to have the fault of being profoundly unreal:--this was the type of character that lay unfolded in the youth who, towards the autumn of 1729, reached Annecy, penniless and ragged, throwing himself once more on the charity of the patroness who had given him shelter eighteen months before. Few figures in the world at that time were less likely to conciliate the favour or excite the interest of an observer, who had not studied the hidden convolutions of human character deeply enough to know that a boy of eighteen may be sly, sensual, restless, dreamy, and yet have it in him to say things one day which may help to plunge a world into conflagration. FOOTNOTES:
(Musset-Pathay, ii. 283.) [2] Picot's Hist. de Geneve, iii. 114. [3] Conf., i. 7. [4] Lettre a D'Alembert, p. 187. Also Nouv. Hel., VI. v. 239. [5] Conf., i. 9. Also Second Letter to M. de Malesherbes, p. 356. [6] Reveries, iv. p. 189. "My master and counsellor, Plutarch," he says, when he lends a volume to Madame d'Epinay in 1756. Corr., i. 265. [7] Dedication of the Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inegalite, p. 201. (June, 1754.) [8] Conf., i. 1. [9] Ib, i. 12. [10] The tenacity of this grateful recollection is shown in letters to her (Madame Gonceru)--one in 1754 (Corr., i. 204), another as late as 1770 (vi. 129), and a third in 1762 (Oeuvr. et Corr. Ined., 392). [11] Conf., i. 17-32. [12] See also Conf., i. 43; iii. 185; vii. 73; xii. 188, n. 2. [13] Conf., i. 27-31. [14] Conf., i. 38-47. [15] Lettre a D'Alembert (1758), 178, 179. [16] Reveries, iv. 211, 212. [17] Conf. 212, 213. [18] Conf., ii. 102, 103. [19] M. Masseron. [20] M. Ducommun. [21] Conf., i. 69. [22] Conf., i. 72. [23] J. Gaberel's Histoire de l'Eglise de Geneve (Geneva, 1853-62), vol. iii. p. 285. [24] There is a minute in the register of the company of ministers, to the effect that the Sieur de Pontverre "is attracting many young men from this town, and changing their religion, and that the public ought to be warned." (Gaberel, iii. 224.) [25] Conf., ii. 76. [26] Conf., ii. 77. [27] Conf., ii. 90-97. [28] Conf., ii. 107 [29] See Emile, iv. 124, 125, where the youth who was born a Calvinist, finding himself a stranger in a strange land, without resource, "changed his religion to get bread." [30] In the Confessions (ii. 115) he has grace enough to make the period a month; but the extract from the register of his baptism (Gaberel's Hist. de l'Eglise de Geneve, iii. 224), which has been recently published, shows that this is untrue: "Jean Jacques Rousseau, de Geneve (Calviniste), entre a l'hospice a l'age de 16 ans, le 12 avril, 1728. Abjura les erreurs de la secte le 21; et le 23 du meme mois lui fut administre le saint bapteme, ayant pour parrain le sieur Andre Ferrero et pour marraine Francoise Christine Rora (ou Rovea)." A little further on (p. 119) he speaks of having been shut up "for two months," but this is not true even on his own showing. [31] Madame Basile. Conf., ii. 121-135. [32] Conf. ii. ad finem. [33] Conf., ii. 144. [34] Another version of the story mentioned by Musset-Pathay (i. 7) makes the object of the theft a diamond, but there is really no evidence in the matter beyond that given by Rousseau himself. [35] Bacle, by name. [36] Conf., iii. 168. [37] Conf., iii. 170. A slightly idealised account of the situation is given in Emile, Bk. iv. 125. _ |
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