Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is a very striking circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men." While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the noblest of sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What constitutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social conduct.

This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice can only find room in a character that has been made spacious by habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits. Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compass, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business to fix and root the habit of thinking of that moral union, into which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the pathological necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have been gradually transmuted. Instead of this, it is exactly the primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a maturer system.

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvétius himself. The accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations of duty and right, of gratitude for the past and resolute hope for the future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole multitude of dwellers on the earth,—a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.

What the young need to have taught to them in this too little cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of self or class and solicitous passion for justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all lands,—here is the church militant in which we should early seek to enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are the struggles with which the modern instructor should associate those virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to show for their gods or their sovereign. But the ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so much as one great forlorn cause.

"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, assuredly the best thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality that only hugs itself is under all circumstances chief among unclean things. Thus even Rousseau's finest monument of moral enthusiasm is fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at bottom the apotheosis of social despair.

IV.

The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of time and appreciating the slowly accumulating sum of endeavour, that the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.

Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of the multitude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time, although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.

It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in education unbridged.

It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau's notions about history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author's judgment is for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank without competitors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and the contemporary of Voltaire's Essai sur les Moeurs (1754-1757) might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the circumstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves—though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come Cæsar's Commentaries and Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician. Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.