Rousseau’s sensibility was extreme. The child who, unjustly treated, experienced one of those violent fits of passion which he has so well described in his Confessions, and who writhed a whole night in his bed, crying “Carnifex, carnifex!” was surely not an ordinary child. “I had no idea of things, but all varieties of feeling were already known to me. I had conceived nothing; I had felt everything.” Even a mediocre representation of Alzire made him beside himself, and he refused witnessing the play of tragedies for fear of becoming ill.
The sentiment of nature early inspired him with a passion which was not to be quenched. His philosophic optimism and his faith in providence were never forgotten. Other pure and generous emotions filled his soul. The study of Plutarch had inspired him with a taste for republican virtues and with an enthusiasm for liberty. Falsehood caused him a veritable horror. He had the feeling of equity in a high degree. Later, to the hatred of injustice there was joined in his heart an implacable resentment against the oppressors of the people. He had doubtless received the first germ of this hate when, making the journey afoot from Paris to Lyons, he entered the cabin of a poor peasant, and there found, as in a picture, the affecting summary of the miseries of the people.
At the same time he was an insatiable reader. He nourished himself on the poets, historians, and philosophers of antiquity, and he studied the mathematics and astronomy. As some one has said, “That life of reading and toil, interrupted by so many romantic incidents and adventurous undertakings, had vivified his imagination as a regular course of study in the College of Plessis could not possibly have done.”
It is in this way that his literary genius was formed, and, in due order, his genius for pedagogy. We need not seek in the life of Rousseau any direct preparation for the composition of the Émile. It is true that for a time he had been preceptor, in 1739, in the family of Mably, but he soon resigned duties in which he was not successful. A little essay which he composed in 1740[174] does not yet give proof of any great originality. On the other hand, if he loved to observe children, he observed, alas, only the children of others. There is nothing sadder than that page of the Confessions in which he relates how he often placed himself at the window to observe the dismission of school, in order to listen to the conversations of children as a furtive and unseen observer!
The Émile is thus less the result of a patient induction and of a real experience than a work of inspiration or a brilliant improvisation of genius.
308. General Principles of the Émile.—A certain number of general principles run through the entire work, and give it a systematic form and a positive character.
The first of these is the idea of the innocence and of the perfect goodness of the child. The Émile opens with this solemn declaration:—
“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” And in another place, “Let us assume as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right; there is no original perversity in the human heart.”
Without doubt Rousseau was right in opposing the pessimism of those who see in the child a being thoroughly wicked and degraded before birth; he is deceived in turn when he affirms that there is no germ of evil in human nature.
Society is wicked and corrupt, he says, and it is from society that all the evil comes; it is from its pernicious influence that the soul of the child must be preserved! But, we reply, how did society itself happen to be spoiled and vitiated? It is nothing but a collection of men; and if the individuals are innocent, how can the aggregate of individuals be wicked and perverse? But let the contradictions of Rousseau pass; the important thing to note is that from his optimism are derived the essential characteristics of the education which he devises for Émile. This education will be at once natural and negative:—