The emotions of the eighteenth century were vivid and easily roused; fastening upon everything without any earnest purpose, and without any great sense of responsibility, it grew as hot over a musical dispute as over the gravest questions of morality or philosophy. Grimm had attacked French music, Rousseau supported his thesis by a Lettre sur la Musique. It was the moment of the great quarrel between the Parliament and the clergy. “When my letter appeared, there was no more excitement save against me,” says Rousseau; “it was such that the nation has never recovered from it. When people read that this pamphlet probably prevented a revolution in the state, they will fancy they must be dreaming.” And Grimm adds in his correspondence: “The Italian actors who have been playing for the last ten months on the stage of the Opera de Paris and who are called here bouffons, have so absorbed the attention of Paris that the Parliament, in spite of all its measures and proceedings which should have earned it celebrity, could not but fall into complete oblivion. A wit has said that the arrival of Manelli saved us from a civil war; and Jean Jacques Rousseau of Geneva, whom his friends have dubbed the citizen of citizens (le citoyen par excellence), that eloquent and bilious foe of the sciences, has just set fire to the four corners of Paris with a Lettre sur la Musique, in which he proves that it is impossible to set French words to music. . . . What is not easy to believe, and is none the less true for all that, is that M. Rousseau was afraid of being banished for this pamphlet. It would have been odd to see Rousseau banished for having spoken ill of French music, after having with impunity dealt with the most delicate political matter.”
Rousseau had just printed his Discours sur l’Inegalite des conditions, a new and violent picture of the corruptions of human society. “Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature,” he says, “it derives its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human mind . . . according to the poet it is gold and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which have civilized men and ruined the human race.”
The singularity of his paradox had worn off; Rousseau no longer astounded, he shocked the good sense as well as the aspirations, superficial or generous, of the eighteenth century. The Discours sur l’Inegalite des conditions was not a success. “I have received, sir, your new book against the human race,” wrote Voltaire; “I thank you for it. You will please men to whom you tell truths about them, and you will not make them any better. Never was so much good wit expended in the desire to make beasts of us; one feels disposed to walk on all fours when one reads your work. However, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the knack, I unfortunately find it impossible to recover it, and I leave that natural gait to those who are better fitted for it than you or I. No more can I embark upon a visit to the savages of Canada, first, because the illnesses to which I am subject render a European doctor necessary to me; secondly, because war has been introduced into that country, and because the examples of our nations have rendered the savages almost as wicked as ourselves. I shall confine myself to being a peaceable savage in the solitude I have selected hard by your own country, where you ought to be.”
Rousseau had, indeed, thought of returning and settling at Geneva. In 1754, during a trip he made thither, he renounced the Catholic faith which he had embraced at sixteen under the influence of Madame de Warens, without any more conviction than he carried with him in his fresh abjuration. “Ashamed,” says he, “at being excluded from my rights of citizenship by the profession of a cult other than that of my fathers, I resolved to resume the latter openly. I considered that the Gospel was the same for all Christians, and that, as the fundamental difference of dogma arose from meddling with explanations of what could not be understood, it appertained in every country to the sovereigns alone to fix both the cult and the unintelligible dogma, and that, consequently, it was the duty of the citizen to accept the dogma and follow the cult prescribed by law.” Strange eccentricity of the human mind! The shackles of civilization are oppressive to Rousseau, and yet he would impose the yoke of the state upon consciences. The natural man does not reflect, and does not discuss his religion; whilst seeking to recover the obliterated ideal of nature, the philosopher halts on the road at the principles of Louis XIV. touching religious liberties.
Madame d’Epinay had offered Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the Hermitage. There it was that he began the tale of La Nouvelle Heloise, which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency’s, when the susceptible and cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions of Grimm. The latter had but lately said to Madame d’Epinay “I see in Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you will do yourself a still more sorry one. Solitude will complete the blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust, ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his country. I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the letters you have shown me.”
Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d’Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D’Holbach, Diderot; his quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some noise. “Good God!” said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, “wherever I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Did anybody ever? Fellows who are nobody, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a third floor! Positively, one can’t stand that sort of thing!” The rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot. “Nobody can put himself in my place,” wrote Rousseau, “and nobody will see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their rules.”
Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not forgive him for his independence. His merits as well as his defects annoyed them equally: his “Lettre contre les Spectacles” had exasperated Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger. “It is against that Jean Jacques of yours that I am most enraged,” he writes in his correspondence with D’Alembert: “he has written several letters against the scandal to deacons of the Church of Geneva, to my ironmonger, to my cobbler. This arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes’ tub and gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in so many words, ‘You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she gave you;’ as if I cared to soften the manners of Geneva, as if I wanted an asylum, as if I had taken any in that city of Socinian preachers, as if I were under any obligation to that city!”
More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D’Alembert felt the danger of discord amongst the philosophical party. In vain he wrote to the irritated poet: “I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thinks he is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous. I grant that he has written you an impertinent letter; I grant that you and your friends have reason to complain of that; in spite of all this, however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words: ‘What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?’ We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides, wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to them all. Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his feelings hurt.” Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.