The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Cæsar, Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature; harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.
V.
As women are from the constitution of things the educators of us all at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex from the beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer's appreciation of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he makes most prominent. A man's whole thought of the worth and aim of womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.
Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Heloïsa would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education is reduced within the compass of an even narrower ideal than this. We are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render their lives agreeable and sweet to them,—these are the duties which ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband. Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to hear of the idea of God until they are fifteen, because they are not in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a condition to apprehend it, are therefore to have it imparted to them at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears. Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their sex, and if ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes still more cruel in consequence.[318]
After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the matter by a fervid assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is worthy and noble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as this: "I only know for either sex two really distinct classes; one the people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of these classes ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that provides agreeable commerce, and 'tis a cheerless thing for a father of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him. Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?
This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most serious errors, to Rousseau's want of a conception of improvement in human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot, Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the relations between men and women. That type practically reduces marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconstitution of the family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in defending the free gratification of sensual passion, as one of the conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of the family, than Rousseau's enervating notion of keeping women in strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh generation.
This was one side of Rousseau's reactionary tendencies. Fortunately for the revolution of thirty years later, which illustrated the gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of sex was subjected to the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in which Fénelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has passed out from our hearts?
The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but an idyll. We have already seen the circumstances under which Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau's most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]
VI.
Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New Heloïsa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter. Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science. It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampère, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]