Aspects and Impressions

by Edmund Gosse

Unfortunately, the name of this critic is unknown.

But the charm was not to be broken without a violent effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling classes, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolution were more dear than they had ever been, and who pinned their attractive and enthusiastic æsthetic reforms to the voluptuous ecstasy of the Nouvelle Héloïse and the chimerical sentiment of Emile. Already, in The Round Table (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the Confessions as the "most valuable" of all Rousseau's writings; he was presently in his Liber Amoris (1823) to produce the work which of all important books of the English nineteenth century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very careful examination of the works, Hazlitt published his essay On the Character of Rousseau, which was not surpassed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty years afterwards.

Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks, while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did. It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled the towers of the Bastille with the dust," but Hazlitt, an intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission. Hazlitt allows, nevertheless, that the exaggerated hopes founded upon such books as the Contrat Social have been followed by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his inspired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned, with ingratitude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly possible that they ever could be. The writings of Rousseau, he declares, are looked up to with admiration by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolutionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates, through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and always with admiration. He is the most illuminating and the most thoughtful of all his early English critics.

In the summer of 1816 the two young poets of the day who displayed the most extraordinary genius in England, or perhaps in Europe, made acquaintance with one another for the first time, and instantly determined to travel together. They met in Switzerland, intoxicated with the unfamiliar beauty around them, and Byron took the Villa Diodati, close to Geneva, where he and Shelley steeped themselves in the Nouvelle Héloïse under the shadow of Mont Blanc. In June they started together round the lake on a journey, which turned into a pilgrimage. In Shelley's Letters may be read the enthusiastic account of the poets' visit to Meillerie. Shelley refrained from gathering acacia and roses from Gibbon's garden at Lausanne, "fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau, the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in his heart for mortal things." As they sauntered along the shores of the enchanted Leman, the friends "read Julie all day." They lived, with the characters of the great romance, in an endless melancholy transport. Byron's enthusiasm took the form of the famous stanzas in "Childe Harold III," beginning:

Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.

It is a remarkable instance of the complete decline of the prestige of Rousseau in England that Byron's editor of 1899 is astonished that Byron and Shelley "should not only worship at the shrine of Rousseau, but take delight in reverently tracing the footsteps of St. Preux and Julie." He is so completely disconcerted that he can only exclaim, "But to each age its own humour!" The age of 1899 was certainly not in the humour for Rousseau, but it was almost to go beyond the boundaries of reason to denounce, as this editor did, in the face of Byron's raptures, "the unspeakable philanderings" of Rousseau. Such was not the poet's judgment when, in a trance of pleasure, he visited all the scenes of the Nouvelle Héloïse. To Byron the long-drawn loves of St. Preux and of Julie seemed "most passionate, yet not impure," and he vivaciously proclaimed their creator as the one prophet of Ideal Beauty. The five or six stanzas mentioned above are so well-known as to be positively hackneyed. We no longer set on them any very high poetical value; we see that none of them are good as verses, and that some of them are bad. But the whole passage retains its full interest for us. It is a perfectly logical statement of the author's unbounded admiration for Rousseau, and in particular for the "burning page, distempered though it seems," upon which are celebrated the devouring loves of Julie and St. Preux.

Further on, in the same poem, Byron rose to far purer heights of style. The invocation to Clarens, in the texture of which the result of his recent intercourse with Shelley may be plainly perceived, is probably the most impassioned tribute ever paid by one great writer to the literature of another.

All things are here of him; from the black pines,
Which are his shade on high, and the loud roar
Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines
Which slope his green path downward to the shore,
Where the bow'd waters meet him, and adore,
Kissing his feet with murmurs, and the wood,
The covert of old trees, with trunks all hoar,
But light leaves, young as joy, stands where it stood,
Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude.
A populous solitude of bees and birds,
And fairy-form'd and many-colour'd things,
Who worship him with thoughts more sweet than words,
And innocently open their glad wings,
Fearless and full of life.

This was a challenge, addressed by the most powerful poet of the day, and couched in idolatrous language, which it was not possible that those in England who were opposed to the influence of Rousseau could fail to take up. Nor did Byron pause here. Writing from Diodati, July, 1816, his famous Sonnet to Lake Leman, Rousseau's was the first illustrious name he mentioned in the brief roll of "Heirs of Immortality." Enthusiasm for the Nouvelle Héloïse led directly to the composition of The Prisoner of Chillon. Byron discussed and repudiated, with Stendhal in 1817, his mother's old dream that he closely resembled Rousseau. All that prevented his embracing this notion, and insisting on being considered an avatar of the philosopher, was his perception of something turbid in the character of Rousseau, hostile to the fiery ideal of 1816. The English poet preferred to be thought to resemble "an alabaster vase lighted up within." But all his life the memory of Jean Jacques continued to haunt him; he recollected the ranz des vaches when he was writing The Two Foscari (1821) and la pervenche in the fourteenth canto of Don Juan (December, 1823). When Byron died at Missolonghi the latest and the most passionate of Rousseau's English admirers passed away with him.