Jean Jacques Rousseau

Many of the best-known stories of Rousseau's life date from this last time, when he was tolerably accessible to visitors. He finished his Confessions, wrote his Dialogues (the interest of which is not quite equal to the promise of their curious sub-title, Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques), and began his Reveries du pro meneur solitaire, intended as a sequel and complement to the Confessions, and one of the best of all his books. It should be said that besides these, which complete the list of his principal works, he has left a very large number of minor works, the fragments of another opera, Daphnis et Chloe (printed in 178o), and a con siderable correspondence. During this time he lived in the Rue Platiere, which is now named. after him. But his suspicions of secret enemies grew stronger, and at the beginning of 1778 he was glad to accept the offer of M. de Girardin, a rich financier, and occupy a cottage at Ermenonville. The country was beauti ful; but his old terrors revived, and his woes were complicated by the alleged inclination of Therese for one of M. de Girardin's stable-boys. On July 2 he died in a manner which has been much discussed, suspicions of suicide being circulated at the time by Grimm and others, though there is no reason to doubt the original verdict of apoplexy.

His Character and Influence.

There is little doubt that for the last io or 15 years of his life Rousseau was not wholly sane —the combined influence of late and unexpected literary fame and of constant solitude and discomfort acting upon his excitable temperament so as to overthrow the balance, never very stable, of his fine and acute but unrobust intellect. His moral character was undoubtedly weak, but it is fair to remember that but for his astounding Confessions the more disgusting parts of it would not have been known, and that these Confessions were written, if not under hallucination, at any rate in circumstances entitling the self-condemned criminal to the benefit of considerable doubt. If Rousseau had held his tongue, he might have stood lower as a man of letters ; he would pretty certainly have stood higher as a man. He was, moreover, really sinned against, if still more sinning. Like other men of letters of his time he had to submit to some thing like persecution. The conduct of Grimm to him was cer tainly bad; and, though Walpole was not his personal friend, a worse action than his famous letter, considering the well-known idiosyncrasy of the subject, would be difficult to find. Only ex cuses can be made for him; but the excuses for a man born, as Hume after the quarrel said of him, "without a skin" are numer ous and strong.

His peculiar reputation increased after his death, when the paradox of Rousseauism, the belief in the superiority of "the noble savage" to civilized man, became more and more fashion able. The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were far from idolizing him as a revolutionist. His style was taken up by

Bernardin de Saint Pierre and by Chateaubriand. Byron's fervid panegyric enlisted on his side all who admired Byron—that is to say, the majority of the younger men and women of Europe be tween 1820 and 1850—and thus different sides of his tradition were continued for a full century after the publication of his chief books. His religious unorthodoxy was condoned because he never scoffed; his political heresies, after their first effect was over, seemed harmless from the very want of logic and practical spirit in them, while part at least of his literary secret was the common property of almost every one who attempted literature.

In religion Rousseau was undoubtedly what he has been called above—a sentimental deist; but sentimentalism was the essence, deism the accident of his creed. In his time orthodoxy .at once generous and intelligent hardly existed in France. There were ignorant persons who were sincerely orthodox; there were in telligent persons who pretended to be so. But between the time of Massillon and D'Aguesseau and the time of Lamennais and Joseph de Maistre the class of men of whom in England Berkeley, Butler and Johnson were representatives did not exist in France. Little inclined by nature to any but the emotional side of religion, and utterly undisciplined in any other by education, course of life, or the general tendency of public opinion, Rousseau took refuge in the nebulous kind of natural religion which was at once fashion able and convenient.

In politics Rousseau was a sincere and, as far as in him lay, a convinced republican. He had no great tincture of learning, he was by no means a profound logician, and he was impulsive and emotional in the extreme—characteristics which in political mat ters predispose the subject to the preference of equality above all political requisites. He saw that under the French monarchy the actual result was the greatest misery of the greatest number, and he did not look much further. The Contrat social is for the political student one of the most curious and interesting books existing. Historically it is null ; logically it is full of gaping flaws, practically its manipulations of the volonte de tous and the volonte generale are clearly insufficient to obviate anarchy. But its mix ture of real eloquence and apparent cogency is exactly what always carries a multitude with it, if only for a time. Moreover, in some minor branches of politics and economics Rousseau was a real reformer. Visionary as his educational schemes (chiefly promulgated in Emile) are in parts, they are admirable in others, and his protest against mothers refusing to nurse their children hit a blot in French life which is not removed yet, and has always been a source of weakness to the nation.