ROUSSEAU'S CONFESSIONS. Jean Jacques Rousseau. For us, who lived among scientific ideas familiarly applied, the name of Rousseau has lost its power to shock. Most of us have forgotten that to the eyes of the 18th century mankind appeared in the image of his maker, without body, parts or passions, and that to Rousseau belonged the discovery of man as he really is, with his structure as an animal, with his power as an idealist, with his limi-• tations as a machine. The must, therefore, be read, first of all in order that we may appreciate the effect of this discovery
a society whose view of its own members ad tended, until Rousseau appeared, to be dis torted and sentimental. Secondly, it should be read because this presentation of a human being who felt himself to be different from other men became the starting-point for our own understanding of such human beings, and our belief in educating each according to his individual need. Lastly, it must be read because every . school child in America owes much of the intelligent care of his training to the works of that unhappy, morbidly hypersensitive, little thief and coward of a Jean-Jacques. The serv ice of truth is the service of God, and thus the impression which these often ugly made on thoughtful people was almost a religious impression. George Eliot, for ex ample, speaks of their effect on herself as crucial. Anyone who looks into the depths of his own nature, as Rousseau did, may see the same scurry of ill-formed wishes seeking cover in darkness, and tremble to think how close he is to the brute. But this book is not only a record of morbid feelings: it is also an ao couut of a man's struggle with social injustice, told with emotional power, with a feeling for beauty and for nature, which heightened his style above the great accents of his time. This struggle continues; it has changed and is yet changing the face of the world. Rousseau has taught us all to feel sympathy for the individual who needs special training. The facts he gave about himself have become the classic material of modern educators. He describes an early life spent in miserable servitude to unworthy masters, lacking in health, self-confidence, equal friendships or steadfast purpose. The son of ,a Swiss watch-maker, he drifted about from situation to situation, never ;secure in his patron's favor, and sick with rage at owing each advance in life to some base caprice or to his own servile weakness. His intense ego .tism became his only refuge, while faith in his own powers ultimately raised him above his vices. None of his critics has been more -severe than he; and he knew that there was nothing in his circumstances to help him over come his nervous tension, his irritable sensitive ness. All these things he set down with close
detail and unexampled beauty of language, de scribing the play of life upon his nerves and imagination, his conflicts, his errors, his rise to literary power. Although no translation of the exists which does it full justice, yet no book has had more influence on English literature, and its value deepens with the advance of psychology. Surely, it was his own individual struggle which lent such poig nant emotion to that famous sentence of the Social Contract —'Man is born free, yet every where he is in chains.* It was his personal experience of that civilisation which he felt was wrongly leading men away from nature, which caused his books to become the inspira tion and his voice the trumpet call of modern democracy. We of to-day must, therefore, feel that Rousseau's delight in the beauty and dignity of Nature, his faith in the essential beauty and dignity of human life, draw him closer to us and serve to outweigh the dark and morbid moments of his narrative. Much of the smiling and liberal aspect which life to-day wears for any am bitious youth has been gained for him by the work of this unhappy man, who never relin quished or denied an ideal because he often fell so pitifully short of it. With a lacquey's vices and from a lacquey's condition, he yet man aged to raise himself to a throne in the king dom of ideas. Because he lived, the life of the young is happier than it was, and this fact should give pause to those who are shocked by his candor. Lord Morley is one of these, and Mr. Birrell thinks the (Confessions> ought never to have been written, 'but written they were,* he adds, 'and read they always will be. To say that a book will always be read seems to us a high form of praise; but surely the j (Confessionsl need no justification. When we turn to the history of our own country, we hear the voice of Rousseau urging on the founders of the Republic: and it has even been said that Rousseau, by inspiring Jefferson is the real author of the Declaration of Independence. The life, by himself, of one whose ideas yet live in that Declaration and in the schools of the world, is full of interest, an interest height ened because we now believe, with Jean-Jacques, that each of us is 'different,* and that those of us who are healthy, vigorous, living in the
may be benefited by knowledge of the ethers, who —generally through no fault of their own — are frail, abnormal, living under the shadow of mental or moral infirmity.