I purpose an undertaking that never had an example, and whose execution never will have an imitator. I would exhibit to my fellows a man, in all the truth of nature, and that man—myself.
Myself alone. I know my own heart, and I am acquainted with men. I am made unlike any one I have ever seen—I dare believe unlike any living being. If no better than, I am at least different from, others. Whether nature did well or ill in breaking the mold wherein I was cast, can be determined only after having read me.
Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil. I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good; and if I have happened to make use of some unimportant ornament, it has, in every case, been simply for the purpose of filling up a void occasioned by my lack of memory. I may have taken for granted as true what I knew to be possible, never what I knew to be false. Such as I was, I have exhibited myself—despicable and vile, when so; virtuous, generous, sublime, when so. I have unveiled my interior being, such as Thou, Eternal Existence, hast beheld it. Assemble around me the numberless throng of my fellow-mortals; let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravities, let them shrink appalled at my miseries. Let each of them, in his turn, with equal sincerity, lay bare his heart at the foot of thy throne, and then let a single one tell thee, if he dare, I was better than that man.
Notwithstanding our autobiographer’s disavowal of debt to example for the idea of his “Confessions,” it seems clear that Montaigne here was at least inspiration, if not pattern, to Rousseau. But Rousseau resolved to do what Montaigne had done, more ingenuously and more courageously than Montaigne had done it. This writer will make himself his subject, and then treat his subject with greater frankness than any man before him ever used about himself, or than any man after him would ever use. He undoubtedly succeeded in his attempt. His frankness, in fact, is so forward and eager that it is probably even inventive of things disgraceful to himself. Montaigne makes great pretense of telling his own faults, but you observe that he generally chooses rather amiable faults of his own to tell. Rousseau’s morbid vulgarity leads him to disclose traits in himself of character or of behavior, that, despite whatever contrary wishes on your part, compel your contempt of the man. And it is for the man who confesses, almost more than for the man who is guilty, that you feel the contempt.
The “Confessions” proceed:
I was born at Geneva, in 1712, of Isaac Rousseau and Susannah Bernard, citizens.... I came into the world weak and sickly. I cost my mother her life, and my birth was the first of my misfortunes.
I never learned how my father supported his loss, but I know that he remained ever after inconsolable.... When he used to say to me, “Jean Jacques, let us speak of your mother,” my usual reply was, “Well, father, we’ll cry then,” a reply which would instantly bring the tears to his eyes. “Ah!” he would exclaim with agitation, “give me her back, console me for her loss, fill up the void she has left in my soul. Could I love thee thus wert thou but my son?” Forty years after having lost her he expired in the arms of a second wife, but with the name of the first on his lips, and her image engraven on his heart.
Such were the authors of my being. Of all the gifts Heaven had allotted them, a feeling heart was the only one I had inherited. While, however, this had been the source of their happiness, it became the spring of all my misfortunes.
“A feeling heart!” That expression tells the literary secret of Rousseau. It is hardly too much to say that Rousseau was the first French writer to write with his heart; but heart’s blood was the ink in which almost every word of Rousseau’s was written. This was the spring of his marvelous power. Rousseau: