Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of Rousseau's own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness safe in case that circumstances should frown. The man who has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength, respect for one's self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion; excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover; but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at the end of his own.[294]
The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life. Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is inequality, and inequality springs from the multitude of wants, which cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally associated with that abused name.
This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his mistress.[300]
When the revolution came, and princes and nobles wandered in indigent exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301] Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one's bread by some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies, flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added too much when he pronounced it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.
From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions, of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science. Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly constituted man suffices for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not, limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown; he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic's life perforce. "It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same passions and the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense. Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]
This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New Heloïsa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the People. Lamennais even surpasses Rousseau in the profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from resentment into divine moods of compassion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of noble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed. Social or political education, that is the training which character receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account, and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations, willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social relation, the citizen of a state.
III.
There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of faculties associated with each of them, which it is the business of the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man. The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was never to hear the name of a God or supreme being until his reason was fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a passion for Justice.