Jean Jacques Rousseau

Julie, ou La Nouvelle Helase, is a novel written in letters de scribing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman. It is too long, the sentiment is overstrained ; but it is full of pathos and knowledge of the human heart. The Contrat social, as its title implies, endeavours to base all government on the consent, direct or implied, of the governed, and indulges in much ingenious argu ment to get rid of the practical inconveniences of the theory. Emile, the second title of which is De l'Education, is much more of a treatise than of a novel.

Exile from France.

Rousseau's reputation was now higher than ever, but the term of the comparative prosperity which he had enjoyed for nearly ten years was at hand. The Contrat social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle lielase was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the "Profession du vicaire Savoyard" in Emile irritated equally the philosophe party and the church. On June II, 1762, Emile was condemned by the parle ment of Paris, and two days previously Madame de Luxembourg and the prince de Conti gave the author information that he would be arrested if he did not fly. They also furnished him with means of flight, and he made for Yverdon in the territory of Berne, whence he transferred himself to Motiers in Neuchatel, which then belonged to Prussia. Frederick II. was not indisposed to protect the persecuted when it cost him nothing and might bring him fame, and in Marshal Keith, the governor of Neuchatel, Rousseau found a true and firm friend. He was, however, unable to be quiet or to practise any of those more or less pious frauds which were customary at the time with the unorthodox. The arch bishop of Paris had published a pastoral against him, and Rous seau did not let the year pass without a Lettre a M. de Beaumont. The council of Geneva had joined in the condemnation of Emile, and Rousseau first solemnly renounced his citizenship, and then, in the Lettres de la montagne (1763), attacked the council and the Genevan constitution unsparingly. All this excited public opinion against him, and his unpopularity is said, on uncertain authority, to have culminated in a nocturnal attack on his house. At any rate he thought he was menaced if he was not, and migrated to the ile St. Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where he once more for a short, and the last, time enjoyed that idyllic existence which he loved. But the Bernese Government ordered him to quit its

territory.

David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in England, and he accepted. He passed through Paris, where his presence was tolerated for a time, and landed in England on Jan. 13, 1766. Therese travelled separately, and was entrusted to the charge of James Boswell, who had already made Rousseau's acquaintance. Here he had once more a chance of settling peaceably. Severe English moralists like Johnson thought but ill of him, but the public generally was not unwilling to testify against French in tolerance, and regarded his sentimentalism with favour. He was lionized in London to his heart's content and discontent, for it may truly be said of Rousseau that he was equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention. When, after not a few displays of his strange humour, he professed himself tired of the capital, Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr. Daven port at Wootton in Derbyshire. Here, though the place was bleak and lonely, he might have been happy enough, and he actually em ployed himself in writing the greater part of his Confessions. But his habit of self-tormenting and tormenting others never left him. His own caprices interposed some delay in the conferring of a pension which George III. was induced to grant him, and he took this as a crime of Hume's. The publication of a spiteful letter (really by Horace Walpole) in the name of the king of Prussia made Rousseau believe that plots of the most terrible kind were on foot against him. Finally he quarrelled with Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own friends and Rousseau's supposed enemies of the philosophe circle to be rascals. He remained, however, at Wootton during the year and through the winter. In May 1767 he fled to France, addressing letters to the lord chancellor and to General Conway, which show an un balanced mind. He was received in France by the marquis de Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), of whom he soon had enough, then by the prince de Conti at Trye. From this place he again fled and wandered about for some time in a wretched fashion, still writing the Confessions, constantly receiving generous help, and always quarrelling with, or at least suspecting, the helpers. In the summer of 177o he returned to Paris, resumed music-copying, and was on the whole happier than he had been since he had to leave Montlouis.