On his tomb was inscribed—
ICI REPOSE
L'HOMME DE LA NATURE
ET DE LA VÉRITÉ.
Vitam impendere vero.
These last words he had adopted as his device. His grave ought to have been held sacred; but, in the rage for desecration that possessed the French at the period of the revolution, the body was exhumed and placed in the Pantheon. When the allies invaded France, out of respect for his memory, Ermenonville was exempted from contribution.
Rousseau has described himself; but, though sincere in an unexampled degree, it is difficult to appreciate his character from the "Confessions." A recent writer, Barante, founding his opinion on this work, considers him a proud and envious egotist, full of vague aspirations after virtue, incapable of a virtuous deed; yet we find Saint Pierre, who knew him during the latter years of his life, when the struggle between circumstances and his disposition had ceased, and his character was formed, applaud his firm probity, his mild benevolence, his frankness and natural gaiety of heart. One fact stamps Rousseau with nobleness of soul. We turn to the pages of Voltaire's Correspondence, and find it full of the most vilifying and insolent epithets applied to his great contemporary—the opprobrium and insult with which he loads his name bearing the stamp of the impurity and arrogance of his own heart. Rousseau never spoke ill of Voltaire: when others dispraised, he defended him; this might be the result of pride, but it was a noble and generous pride.
Rousseau was proud; nourished in dreams of ancient virtue or chivalrous romance, he respected himself, and he felt deeply aggrieved if he did not meet respect in others. It is a strange anomaly to find this proud man confessing the most degrading errors; but this arose from the highest pride of all, and the most mistaken: he declared his faults, and yet assumed himself to be better than other men.
Was Rousseau envious? Grimm says, that anger at finding men of greater genius preferred engendered most of his ill-humour against society. But who were these superior men? not Voltaire, with whom, as older than himself, he never competed: it was Helvetius, Thomas, and, above all, Diderot. Whatever merits Diderot had in society and conversation, he is so poor a writer that Rousseau could never have been really hurt by any mistaken preference shown him. Envy, base as it is, does not stoop to envy that which is immeasurably inferior. Rousseau had certainly sufficient cause to be displeased with Diderot, the tone of his letters being arrogant and presumptuous; but his real displeasure was caused by the belief that he had betrayed him, when he confided to him his sentiments for madame d'Houdetot: balked and trampled on all sides, he was stung to resent his disappointment somewhere, and he selected Diderot for his victim. This was very wrong and self-deceptive: he quotes good authority for proving the propriety of declaring to the world that he and Diderot wore no longer friends, and there was no great harm in so doing; but when he appended the quotation from Ecclesiastes in a note, accusing Diderot of a great social crime, the betraying the secret of a friend, he erred grossly, and cannot be defended.
Rousseau had passed his existence in romantic reveries. This abstraction of mind always engenders an indolence that concentrates the mind in self, and hates to be intruded upon by outward circumstances. Pride and indolence conjoined, created the independence of spirit for which he took praise to himself. Independence is of two sorts. When we sacrifice our pleasures and our tastes to preserve the dear privilege of not deferring our principles and feelings to others, we foster an exalted virtue; but the independence that finds duty an unwelcome clog—that regards the just claims of our fellow-creatures as injurious and intolerable, and that casts off the affections as troublesome shackles—is one of the greatest errors that the human heart can nourish; and such was the independence to which Rousseau aspired when he neglected the first duty of man by abandoning his children. He often dilates on simple pleasures—the charms of unsophisticated affections, and the ecstasy to be derived from virtuous sympathy—he, who never felt the noblest and most devoted passion of the human soul—the love of a parent for his child! We cannot help thinking that even while Rousseau defends himself by many baseless sophisms, that this crime, rankling at his heart, engendered much of the misery that he charged upon his fellow-creatures. Still Barante is unjust when he declares Rousseau's life to have been devoid of virtuous actions. He was unpretendingly charitable; and his fidelity to Thérèse, unworthy as she was, deserves praise. It would have been easy to cast her off, and gain a more suitable companion; but he bore her defects; and even to the last, when it has been suspected that her worthlessness drove him to suicide, he never complained. There was, with all his errors, great nobleness in Rousseau's soul. The pride and envy of which he is accused led him to cherish poverty, to repel benefits, to suspect his friends, but never to cringe, or grasp, or lie. Distrust was his chief error—a mighty one—but it did not injure others, while it destroyed himself.
Of his works, the "Emile" stands in the first rank for its utility: his theories however engendered some errors. The notion to which he was attached, that entire independence, even of natural duties, was the state congenial to man, mars many of his views. He would not allow a man to be a father, scarcely a woman to be a mother; yet such are the natural and imperative duties of life, even in the most primitive states of society. We may add a further defect, gathered partly from the continuation he projected. Sophie proves faithless; and Emile, meditating on the conduct he ought to pursue, makes himself the centre of his reflections, nor reverts to the claims which his unhappy wife and blameless child have still on him. He leaves both to the mercy of a hard world, and affords another proof of Rousseau's natural deficiency in a sense of duty. Barante well observes that the "Emile" is the less useful, because it gives no rules for public education; and public education is doubtless the best fitted to form the character of social man. Properly carried on, it prevents all need of having recourse to those plans and impostures which deface Rousseau's system. The little world of boys brings its own necessities and lessons with it: the chief care devolving on the master, to prevent the elder and stronger from domineering over the young and weak.
He perverts virtue and vice in the "Heloïse" still more glaringly, and clashes against the prejudices of every country. In France, the fault of an unmarried girl was regarded as peculiarly degrading and even ridiculous, and the early error of Julie therefore could find little sympathy in that country. In ours we commiserate such; but we turn disgusted from her wedding another man; and the marriage with the elderly Wolmar, which Rousseau makes the crown of her virtue, is to us the seal of her degradation. His ideas also of a perfect life are singularly faulty. It includes no instruction, no endeavours to acquire knowledge and refine the soul by study; but is contracted to mere domestic avocations, and to association with servants and labourers, on their own footing of ignorance, though such must lead to mean and trivial occupations and thoughts.
No author knows better than Rousseau how to spread a charm over the internal movements of the mind, over the struggles of passion, over romantic reveries that absorb the soul, abstracting it from real life and our fellow-creatures, and causing it to find its joys in itself. No author is more eloquent in paradox, and no man more sublime in inculcating virtue. While Voltaire taints and degrades all that is sacred and lovely by the grossness of his imagination, Rousseau embellishes even the impure, by painting it in colours that hide its real nature; and imparts to the emotions of sense all the elevation and intensity of delicate and exalted passion.