“The vulgar opinion, then, which, on health reasons, condemns vegetable food and so much praises animal food, being so ill-founded, I have always thought it well to oppose myself to it, moved both by experience and by that refined knowledge of natural things which some study and conversation with great men have given me. And perceiving now that such my constancy has been honoured by some learned and wise physicians with their authoritative adhesion (della autorevole sequela), I have thought it my duty publicly to diffuse the reasons of the Pythagorean diet, regarded as useful in medicine, and, at the same time, as full of innocence, of temperance, and of health. And it is none the less accompanied with a certain delicate pleasure, and also with a refined and splendid luxury (non è privo nemmeno d’una certa delicate voluttà e d’un lusso gentile e splendido ancora), if care and skill be applied in selection and proper supply of the best vegetable food, to which the fertility and the natural character of our beautiful country seem to invite us. For my part I have been so much the more induced to take up this subject, because I have persuaded myself that I might be of service to intending diet-reformers, there not being, to my knowledge, any book of which this is the sole subject, and which undertakes exactly to explain the origin and the reasons of it.”
His special motive to the publication of his treatise, however, was to vindicate the claims of the reformer of Samos upon the gratitude of men:—
“I wished to show that Pythagoras, the first founder of the vegetable regimen, was at once a very great physicist and a very great physician; that there has been no one of a more cultured and discriminating humanity; that he was a man of wisdom and of experience; that his motive in commending and introducing the new mode of living was derived not from any extravagant superstition, but from the desire to improve the health and the manners of men.”[174]
XXVII.
ROUSSEAU. 1712–1778.
FEW lives of writers of equal reputation have been exposed to our examination with the fulness and minuteness of the life of this the most eloquent name in French literature. With the exception of the great Latin father, St. Augustine, no other leader of thought, in fact, has so entirely revealed to us his inner life, his faults and weaknesses (often sufficiently startling), no less than the estimable parts of his character, and we remain in doubt whether more to lament the infirmities or to admire the candour of the autobiographer.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, son of a Genevan tradesman, had the misfortune to lose his mother at a very early age. It is to this want of maternal solicitude and fostering care that some of the errors in his after career may perhaps be traced. After a short experience of school discipline he was apprenticed to an engraver, whose coarse violence must injuriously have affected the nervous temperament of the sensitive child. Ill-treatment forced him to run away, and he found refuge with Mde. de Warens, a Swiss lady, a convert to Catholicism, who occupies a prominent place in the first period of his Confessions. Influenced by her kindness, and by the skilful arguments of his preceptors at the college at Turin, where she had placed him, the young Rousseau (like Bayle and Gibbon, before and after him, though from a different motive) abjured Protestantism, and, for the moment, accepted, or at least professed, the tenets of the old Orthodoxy. Dismissed from the college because he refused to take orders, he engaged himself as a domestic servant or valet. He did not long remain in this position, and he resought the protection of his friend Mde. de Warens at Chambéry. His connexion with his too indulgent patroness terminated in the year 1740. For some years after this his life was of a most erratic, and not always edifying, kind. We find him employed in teaching at Lyons, and at another time acting as secretary to the French Embassy at Venice. In 1745 he came to Paris. There he earned a living by copying music. About this time he met with Therèse Levasseur, the daughter of his hostess, with whom he formed a lasting but unhappy connexion.
It was in 1748, at the age of 36, that he made the acquaintance, at the house of Mde. d’Epinay, of the editors of the Encyclopédie, D’Alembert and Diderot, who engaged him to write articles on music and upon other subjects in that first of comprehensive dictionaries. His first independent appearance in literature was in his essay on the question, “Whether the progress of science and of the arts has been favourable to the morals of mankind,” in which paradoxically he maintains the negative. It was the eloquence, we must suppose, rather than the reasoning, which gained him the prize awarded by the Académie of Dijon. His next production—a more important one—was his Discours sur l’Inegalité parmi les Hommes (“Discourse upon Inequality amongst Men”). In this treatise—the prelude to his more developed Contrat Social—Rousseau affirms the paradox of the natural school, as it may be termed, which alleged the state of nature—the life of the uncivilised man—to be the ideal condition of the species. His thesis that all men are born with equal rights takes a much more defensible position. In this Discours diet is assigned its due importance in relation to the welfare of communities.
The romance of Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloise, which excited an unusual amount of interest, appeared in 1759. Emile: ou de l’Education, was given to the world three years later. It is the most important of his writings. In the education of Emile, or Emilius, he propounds his ideas upon one of the most interesting subjects which can engage attention—the right training of the young. The earlier part of the book is almost altogether admirable and useful. The later portion is more open to criticism, although not upon the grounds upon which was founded the hostility of the authorities of the day who unjustly condemned the book as irreligious and immoral. Rousseau begins with laying down the principles of a new and more rational method of rearing infants, agreeing, in many particulars, with the system of his predecessor, Locke. At least some of his protests against the unnatural treatment of children were not altogether in vain. Mothers in fashionable ranks of life began to recognise the mischief arising from the common practice of putting their infants out to nurse in place of suckling them themselves. They began also to abandon the absurd custom of confining their limbs in mummy-like bandages. Nor, though long in bearing adequate fruit, were his denunciations of the barbarous severity of parents and schoolmasters without some result. He insists upon the incalculable evils of inoculating the young, according to the almost universal custom, with superstitious beliefs and fancies which grow with the growth of the recipient until they become radically fixed in the mind as by a natural development. Most important of all his innovations in education, and certainly the most heretical, is his recommendation of a pure dietary.
The publication of his treatise on education brought down a storm of persecution and opprobrium upon the author. The Contrat Social (in which he seemed to aim at subverting the political and social traditions, as he had in Emile the educational prejudices of the venerated Past) appearing soon afterwards added fuel to the flames. Rousseau found himself forced to flee from Paris, and he sought shelter in the territory of Geneva. But the authorities, unmindful of the old reputation of the land of freedom, refusing him an asylum, he proceeded to Neuchâtel, then under Prussian rule, where he was well received. From this retreat he replied to the attacks of the Archbishop of Paris, and addressed a letter to the magistrates of Geneva renouncing his citizenship. He also published Letters Written from the Mountain, severely criticising the civil and church government of his native canton. These acts did not tend to conciliate the goodwill of the rulers of the people with whom he had taken refuge. At this moment an object of dislike to all the Continental sovereign powers, he gladly embraced the offer of David Hume to find him an asylum in England. The social and political revolutionist arrived in London in 1766, and took up his residence in a village in Derbyshire. He did not remain long in this country, his irritable temperament inducing him too hastily to suspect the sincerity of the friendship of his host.