Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

There is certainly no real contradiction between the quality of reverence and the more equivocal quality of a sensuous temperament, though a man may well seem on the surface, as the first succeeds the second in rule over him, to be the contradiction to his other self. The objects of veneration and the objects of sensuous delight are externally so unlike and so incongruous, that he who follows both in their turns is as one playing the part of an ironical chorus in the tragi-comic drama of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere imperfect or illusory opposites, when you confront a man like Rousseau with the true opposite of his own type; with those who are from their birth analysts and critics, keen, restless, urgent, inexorably questioning. That energetic type, though not often dead or dull on the side of sense, yet is incapable of steeping itself in the manifold delights of eye and ear, of nostril and touch, with the peculiar intensity of passive absorption that seeks nothing further nor deeper than unending continuance of this profound repose of all filled sensation, just as it is incapable of the kindred mood of elevated humility and joyful unasking devoutness in the presence of emotions and dim thoughts that are beyond the compass of words.

The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and philosophisers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without examination and without mistrust: his life in Paris was thrown among people who lived in the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrong-headed interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care only to discuss with the wise, were here everyday topics for all comers.

The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact, gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines.

Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions, and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently, meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two sides of his character—his notions of serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort—both went in the same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society did not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy.

Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in 1744 until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the good-will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him.

His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the greatest of the farmers general.[205] Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness.

Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her stepson Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers, and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know, were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the interlude, which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of meditation and three years of composition."[206] Before the arrival of this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is, however, one of the characteristics of times of national break-up not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself, without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest embarrassment or hindrance.[207]

With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his life was to hasten urgently towards its realisation, because such projects harmonised with all his strongest predispositions. His design mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad.[208] Talk like this had no effect on a man whom self-indulgence led into a path that others would only have been forced into by self-denial. Let it be said, however, that this is a form of self-indulgence of which society is never likely to see an excess, and meanwhile we may continue to pay it some respect as assuredly leaning to virtue's side. Rousseau's many lapses from grace perhaps deserve a certain gentleness of treatment, after the time when with deliberation and collected effort he set himself to the hard task of fitting his private life to his public principles. Anything that heightens the self-respect of the race is good for us to behold, and it is a permanent source of comfort to all who thirst after reality in teachers, whether their teaching happens to be our own or not, to find that the prophet of social equality was not a fine gentleman, nor the teacher of democracy a hanger-on to the silly skirts of fashion.

Rousseau did not merely throw up a post which would one day have made him rich. Stoicism on the heroic, peremptory scale is not so difficult as the application of the same principle to trifles. Besides this greater sacrifice, he gave up the pleasant things for which most men value the money that procures them, and instituted an austere sumptuary reform in truly Genevese spirit. His sword was laid aside; for flowing peruke was substituted the small round wig; he left off gilt buttons and white stockings, and he sold his watch with the joyful and singular thought that he would never again need to know the time. One sacrifice remained to be made. Part of his equipment for the Venetian embassy had been a large stock of fine linen, and for this he retained a particular affection, for both now and always Rousseau had a passion for personal cleanliness, as he had for corporeal wholesomeness. He was seasonably delivered from bondage to his fine linen by aid from without. One Christmas Eve it lay drying in a garret in the rather considerable quantity of forty-two shirts, when a thief, always suspected to be the brother of Theresa, broke open the door and carried off the treasure, leaving Rousseau henceforth to be the contented wearer of coarser stuffs.[209]

We may place this reform towards the end of the year 1750, or the beginning of 1751, when his mind was agitated by the busy discussion which his first Discourse excited, and by the new ideas of literary power which its reception by the public naturally awakened in him. "It takes," wrote Diderot, "right above the clouds; never was such a success."[210] We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed independence. Rousseau very soon made up his mind what the world was worth to him; and this, not as the ordinary sentimentalist or satirist does, by way of set-off against the indulgence of personal foibles, but from recognition of his own qualities, of the bounds set to our capacity of life, and of the limits of the world's power to satisfy us. "When my destiny threw me into the whirlpool of society," he wrote in his last meditation on the course of his own life, "I found nothing there to give a moment's solace to my heart. Regret for my sweet leisure followed me everywhere; it shed indifference or disgust over all that might have been within my reach, leading to fortune and honours. Uncertain in the disquiet of my desires, I hoped for little, I obtained less, and I felt even amid gleams of prosperity that if I obtained all that I supposed myself to be seeking, I should still not have found the happiness for which my heart was greedily athirst, though without distinctly knowing its object. Thus everything served to detach my affections from society, even before the misfortunes which were to make me wholly a stranger to it. I reached the age of forty, floating between indigence and fortune, between wisdom and disorder, full of vices of habit without any evil tendency at heart, living by hazard, distracted as to my duties without despising them, but often without much clear knowledge what they were."[211]