The period of Rousseau's life in which that lady was the ruling influence lasted ten or twelve years. The situation was one from which any man of manly instincts would have shrunk, a condition of dependence on a mistress, and on a mistress who made no pretense of fidelity. In a desultory way Rousseau learned something of music at this time, and made some long journeys on foot, one of them taking him as far as Paris. This man, morally of soft fibre, was able to endure and enjoy moderate physical hardship; and from early education felt most at home in simple houses and amid rude surroundings. At last, disgusted with the appearance of a new rival in Madame de Warens's changeable household, Rousseau left that lady and drifted off to Lyons; then, after once trying the experiment of returning to his mistress and finding it a failure, to Paris.
For more than eight years after his final separation from Madame de Warens, Rousseau did nothing to make any one suppose him to be a man of genius. He obtained and threw up the position of secretary to the French ambassador at Venice; he supported himself as a musician and as a private secretary; he lived from hand to mouth, having as a companion one Therese Levasseur, a grotesquely illiterate maid servant, picked up at an inn. Their five children he successively took to the Foundling, losing sight of them forever. To the mother he was faithful for the most part, although not without some amorous wanderings, for many years.
Up to 1749, then, when Rousseau was thirty-seven years old, he had published nothing of importance. He had, however, some acquaintance with literary men, being known merely as one of those adventurers without any settled means of existence, who may always be found in cities, and with whom Paris at this time appears to have been over-furnished. In features he was plain, in manners awkward; much given to making compliments to women, but generally displeasing to them, although at times interesting when roused to excitement. The Swiss Jean Jacques had little of the sparkling wit which the Frenchmen of his day rated very high, but he had much subtlety of observation and many ideas. He constantly applauded himself in his writings on being sensible rather than witty. In fact he was neither, but very ingenious and eloquent. In character he was self-indulgent but not luxurious, sensitive, vain, and sentimental. To this man,—if we may believe his own account, and I think in the main we may do so,—there came by a sudden flash an idea which altered his whole life, and which has materially affected millions of lives since he died. The idea was an evil seed, and it found an evil soil to grow in.
The summer of 1749 was a hot one. Diderot, just rising into notice as a man of letters, had been imprisoned in the Castle of Vincennes, for his "Letter on the Blind," and his friends were allowed to come and see him. Rousseau used to visit him every other afternoon, walking the four or five miles which lie between the centre of Paris and the castle. The trees along the road were trimmed after the dreary French fashion, and gave little shade. From time to time Rousseau would stop, lie down on the grass and rest, and he had got into the habit of taking a book or a newspaper in his pocket. It was in this way that his eye happened to fall on a paragraph in the "Mercure de France," announcing that the Academy of Dijon would give a prize the next year for the best essay on the following subject: "Whether the Progress of the Arts and Sciences has tended to corrupt or to improve Morals."
From that moment, according to Rousseau, a complete change came over him. Struck with sudden giddiness, he was like a drunken man. His heart palpitated and he could hardly walk or draw breath. Throwing himself at the foot of a tree, he spent half an hour in such agitation that when he arose he found the whole front of his waistcoat wet with tears, although he had not known that he was shedding any. Thus did his great theory of the degeneracy of man under civilization burst upon him.[Footnote: Rousseau, xviii. 135 (Confessions, Part. ii. liv. viii); xix. 358 (Seconde Lettre à M. de Malesherbes). Exaggerated as the above story probably is, we may reasonably believe that it comes nearer the truth than that told by Diderot in after years, when he and Rousseau had quarreled. In that version, Rousseau, desiring to compete for the prize, consulted Diderot as to which side he should take, and was advised to assume that which other people would avoid. Diderot, Oeuvres, xi. 148. Rousseau's thoughts had been wandering into subjects akin to that of the prize essay before he had seen the announcement in the Mercure de France. Musset-Pathay, ii. 363. Moreover, if Rousseau was imaginative, and not always to be believed about facts, Diderot was a tremendous liar.]
The very question asked by the academy suggests the possibility of an answer unfavorable to civilization, but Rousseau's treatment of it was such as to form the beginning of an epoch in the history of thought. It is under the rough coat of the laborer, he says, and not under the tinsel of the courtier, that strength and vigor of body will be found. Before art had shaped our manners, they were rustic but natural, and men's actions freely expressed their feelings. Human nature was no better, at bottom, than now, but men were safer because they could more easily read each other's minds, and thus they avoided many vices. The advance of civilization brings increase of corruption. Constantinople, where learning was preserved during the dark ages, was full of murder, debauchery, and crime. Contrast with its inhabitants those primitive nations which have been kept from the contagion of vain knowledge: the early Persians, the Germans described by Tacitus, the modern Swiss, the American Indians, whose simple institutions Montaigne prefers to all the laws of Plato. These nations know well that in other lands idle men spend their time in disputing about vice and virtue, but they have considered the morals of these argumentative persons and have learned to despise their doctrine.
"Astronomy is born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, and lying; geometry of avarice; physics of a vain curiosity; all, and morals themselves, of human pride. The arts and sciences, therefore, owe their birth in our vices; we should have less doubt of the advantage to be derived from them if they sprang from our virtues." … "Answer me, illustrious philosophers, you from whom we know why bodies attract each other in a vacuum; what are the relations of areas traversed in equal times in the revolutions of the planets; what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection and reflection; how man sees all things in God; how the soul and body correspond without communication, as two clocks would do; what stars maybe inhabited; what insects reproduce their kind in extraordinary ways,—tell me, I say, you to whom we owe so much sublime knowledge—if you had taught us none of these things, should we be less numerous, less well-governed, less redoubtable, less flourishing, or more perverse?"
This is the theme of the First Discourse, a theme most congenial to the nature of Rousseau. His ill-health, his dreamy habit of mind, his vanity, all made him long for a state of things as different as possible from that about him.
"Among us," he says, "it is true that Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock; but he would have drunk from a more bitter cup of insulting mockery and of contempt a hundred times worse than death." Such sensitiveness as this belongs to Rousseau himself. With what disdain would the healthy-minded Socrates have laughed at the suggestion that he was troubled by the contempt or the mockery of those about him. How gayly would he have turned the weapons of the mockers on themselves. Rousseau had neither the sense of humor nor the joy of living, which added so much to the greatness of the Atheman. His theories are especially pleasing to the disappointed and the weak, and therein lies their danger; for they tend, not to manly effort, for the improvement of individual circumstances or of mankind, but to vain dreaming of impossible ideals. There is a luxury that softens, but there is also a luxury that causes labor. A nation without astronomy, or geography, or physics, is generally less numerous, less redoubtable, less flourishing, and sometimes less well governed than a civilized nation. It is true that in the arts and sciences, in the deeds and in the condition of men, there is an admixture of what is base; but there is no baser nor more dangerous habit of mind than that which for every action seeks out the worst motive, for every state the most selfish reason.[Footnote: Long after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau insisted that he had never intended to plunge civilized states into barbarism, but only to arrest the decay of primitive ones, and perhaps to retard that of the more advanced, by changing their ideals. Oeuvres, xx. 275 (II. Dialogue); xxi. 34 (III. Dialogue). Rousseau's writings generally must be taken as expressions of feeling, quite as much as attempts to change the world. They are growls or sighs, rather than sermons.]
While Rousseau's First Discourse is pernicious in its general teaching, it is rich in eloquent passages, and it contains some of those sensible remarks which we seldom fail to find in its author's works. At the time of writing it, as later, he was interested in education,—the subject on which his influence has been, on the whole, most useful.