Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

Rousseau's ecstatic vision on the road to Vincennes was the opening of a life of thought and production which only lasted a dozen years, but which in that brief space gave to Europe a new gospel. Emilius and the Social Contract were completed in 1761, and they crowned a work which if you consider its origin, influence, and meaning with due and proper breadth, is marked by signal unity of purpose and conception. The key to it is given to us in the astonishing transport at the foot of the wide-spreading oak. Such a transport does not come to us of cool and rational western temperament, but more often to the oriental after lonely sojourning in the wilderness, or in violent reactions on the road to Damascus and elsewhere. Jean Jacques detected oriental quality in his own nature,[156] and so far as the union of ardour with mysticism, of intense passion with vague dream, is to be defined as oriental, he assuredly deserves the name. The ideas stirred in his mind by the Dijon problem suddenly "opened his eyes, brought order into the chaos in his head, revealed to him another universe. From the active effervescence which thus began in his soul, came sparks of genius which people saw glittering in his writings through ten years of fever and delirium, but of which no trace had been seen in him previously, and which would probably have ceased to shine henceforth, if he should have chanced to wish to continue writing after the access was over. Inflamed by the contemplation of these lofty objects, he had them incessantly present to his mind. His heart, made hot within him by the idea of the future happiness of the human race, and by the honour of contributing to it, dictated to him a language worthy of so high an enterprise ... and for a moment, he astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only eloquence and brightness of understanding, but in which those who dwell in the ethereal regions recognised with joy one of their own."[157]

This was his own account of the matter quite at the end of his life, and this is the only point of view from which we are secure against the vulgarity of counting him a deliberate hypocrite and conscious charlatan. He was possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression. The last word of this great expansion was Emilius, its first and more imperfectly articulated was the earlier of the two Discourses.

Rousseau's often-repeated assertion that here was the instant of the ruin of his life, and that all his misfortunes flowed from that unhappy moment, has been constantly treated as the word of affectation and disguised pride. Yet, vain as he was, it may well have represented his sincere feeling in those better moods when mental suffering was strong enough to silence vanity. His visions mastered him for these thirteen years, grande mortalis oevi spatium. They threw him on to that turbid sea of literature for which he had so keen an aversion, and from which, let it be remarked, he fled finally away, when his confidence in the ease of making men good and happy by words of monition had left him. It was the torment of his own enthusiasm which rent that veil of placid living, that in his normal moments he would fain have interposed between his existence and the tumult of a generation with which he was profoundly out of sympathy. In this way the first Discourse was the letting in of much evil upon him, as that and the next and the Social Contract were the letting in of much evil upon all Europe.

Of this essay the writer has recorded his own impression that, though full of heat and force, it is absolutely wanting in logic and order, and that of all the products of his pen, it is the feeblest in reasoning and the poorest in numbers and harmony. "For," as he justly adds, "the art of writing is not learnt all at once."[158] The modern critic must be content to accept the same verdict; only a generation so in love as this was with anything that could tickle its intellectual curiousness, would have found in the first of the two Discourses that combination of speculative and literary merit which was imputed to Rousseau on the strength of it, and which at once brought him into a place among the notables of an age that was full of them.[159] We ought to take in connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse, which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in this wise:—

Before art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to use a too elaborate speech, men were rude but natural, and difference of conduct announced at a glance difference of character. To-day a vile and most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions, fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety, arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians, Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators, and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching and its ministry.[160]

This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.

Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride. Are we for ever to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.

How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful? And by what marks are we to know truth, when we think that we have found it? And above all, if we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it? If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result; and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common men are neither celestial nor Socratic.

Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man; and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the relations of areas traversed in equal times—let us ask those who have attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it? Now if the works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the public substance in pure loss.

Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury, and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which make the independence of a nation worth preserving. Your children go to costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties. They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to others by specious arguments. Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.