French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

I, without knowing aught of the matter, ... gave myself out for a [musical] composer. Nor was this all: having been presented to M. de Freytorens, law professor, who loved music, and gave concerts at his house, nothing would do but I must give him a sample of my talent; so I set about composing a piece for his concert quite as boldly as though I had really been an adept in the science. I had the constancy to work for fifteen days on this fine affair, to copy it fair, write out the different parts, and distribute them with as much assurance as though it had been a masterpiece of harmony. Then, what will scarcely be believed, but which yet is gospel truth, worthily to crown this sublime production I tacked to the end thereof a pretty minuet which was then having a run on the streets.... I gave it as my own just as resolutely as though I had been speaking to inhabitants of the moon.

They assembled to perform my piece. I explain to each the nature of the movement, the style of execution, and the relations of the parts—I was very full of business. For five or six minutes they were tuning; to me each minute seemed an age. At length, all being ready, I rap with a handsome paper bâton on the leader’s desk the five or six beats of the “Make ready.” Silence is made—I gravely set to beating time—they commence! No, never since French operas began, was there such a charivari heard. Whatever they might have thought of my pretended talent, the effect was worse than they could possibly have imagined. The musicians choked with laughter; the auditors opened their eyes and would fain have closed their ears. But that was an impossibility. My tormenting set of symphonists, who seemed rather to enjoy the fun, scraped away with a din sufficient to crack the tympanum of one born deaf. I had the firmness to go right ahead, however, sweating, it is true, at every pore, but held back by shame; not daring to retreat, and glued to the spot. For my consolation I heard the company whispering to each other, quite loud enough for it to reach my ear: “It is not bearable!” said one. “What music gone mad!” cried another. “What a devilish din!” added a third. Poor Jean Jacques, little dreamedst thou, in that cruel moment, that one day before the king of France and all the court, thy sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and applause, and that in all the boxes around thee the loveliest ladies would burst forth with, “What charming sounds! what enchanting music! every strain reaches the heart!”

But what restored every one to good humor was the minuet. Scarcely had they played a few measures than I heard bursts of laughter break out on all hands. Every one congratulated me on my fine musical taste; they assured me that this minuet would make me spoken about, and that I merited the louded praises. I need not attempt depicting my agony, nor own that I well deserved it.

Readers have now had an opportunity to judge for themselves, by specimen, of the style, both of the writer and of the man Jean Jacques Rousseau. The writer’s style they must have felt even through the medium of imperfect anonymous translation, to be a charming one. If they have felt the style of the man to be contrasted, as squalor is contrasted with splendor, that they must not suppose to be a contrast of which Jean Jacques himself, the confessor, was in the least displacently conscious. Far from it. In the latter part of his “Confessions,” a part that deals with the author as one already now acknowledged a power in the world of letters, though with all his chief works still to write, Rousseau speaks thus of himself (he was considering at the time the ways and means available to him of obtaining a livelihood):

I felt that writing for bread would soon have extinguished my genius, and destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of thinking.... It is too difficult to think nobly when we think for a livelihood.

Is not that finely said? And one need not doubt that it was said with perfect sincerity. For our own part, paradoxical though it be to declare it, we are wholly willing to insist that Rousseau did think on a lofty plane. The trouble with him was, not that he thus thought with his heart, rather than with his head—which, however, he did—but that he thought with his heart alone, and not at all with his conscience and his will. In a word, his thought was sentiment rather than thought. He was a sentimentalist instead of a thinker. One illustration of the divorce that he decreed for himself, or rather—for we have used too positive a form of expression—that he allowed to subsist, between sentiment and conduct, will suffice. It was presently to be his fortune, as author of a tract on education (the “Emile”), to change the habit of a nation in the matter of the nurture for babes. French mothers of the higher social class in Rousseau’s time almost universally gave up their infants to be nursed at alien bosoms. Rousseau so eloquently denounced the unnaturalness of this, that from his time it became the fashion for French mothers to suckle their children themselves. Meantime, the preacher himself of this beautiful humanity, living in unwedded union with a woman (not Madame de Warens, but a woman of the laboring class, found after Madame de Warens was abandoned), sent his illegitimate children, against the mother’s remonstrance, one after another, to the number of five, to be brought up unknown at the hospital for foundlings! He tells the story himself in his “Confessions.” This course on his own part he subsequently laments with many tears and many self-upbraidings. But these, alas, he intermingles with self-justifications, nearly as many—so that at last it is hard to say whether the balance of his judgment inclines for or against himself in the matter. A paradox of inconsistencies and self-contradictions, this man—a problem in human character, of which the supposition of partial insanity in him, long working subtly in the blood, seems the only solution. The occupation finally adopted by Rousseau for obtaining subsistence was the copying of music. It extorts from one a measure of involuntary respect for Rousseau, to see patiently toiling at this slavish work, to earn its owner bread, the same pen which had lately set all Europe in ferment with the “Emile” and “The Social Contract.”

From Rousseau’s “Confessions,” we have not room to purvey further. It is a melancholy book—written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the author that he was the object of a wide-spread conspiracy against his reputation, his peace of mind, and even his life. The poor, shattered, self-consumed sensualist and sentimentalist paid dear in the agonies of his closing years for the indulgences of an unregulated life. The tender-hearted, really affectionate, and loyal friend came at length to live in a world of his own imagination, full of treachery to himself. David Hume, the Scotchman, tried to befriend him; but the monomaniac was incapable of being befriended. Nothing could be more pitiful than were the decline and the extinction that occurred of so much brilliant genius, and so much lovable character. It is even doubtful whether Rousseau did not at last take his own life. The voice of accusation is silenced in the presence of an earthly retribution so dreadful. One may not indeed approve, but one may at least be free to pity, more than he blames, in judging Rousseau.

Accompanying, and in some sort complementing the “Confessions,” are often published several detached pieces called “Reveries,” or “Walks.” These are very peculiar compositions, and very characteristic of the author. They are dreamy meditations or reveries, sad, even somber, in spirit, but “beautiful exceedingly,” in form of expression. Such works as the “René” of Chateaubriand, works but too abundant since in French literature, must all trace their pedigree to Rousseau’s “Walks.”

This author’s books in general are now little read. They worked their work and ceased. But there are in some of them passages that continue to live. Of these, perhaps quite the most famous is the “Savoyard Curate’s Confession of Faith,” a document of some length, incorporated into the “Émile.” This, taken as a whole, is the most seductively eloquent argument against Christianity that perhaps ever was written. It contains, however, concessions to the sublime elevation of Scripture and to the unique virtue and majesty of Jesus, which are often quoted, and which will bear quoting here. The Savoyard Curate is represented speaking to a young friend as follows:—

I will confess to you further, that the majesty of the Scriptures strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the gospel hath its influence on my heart. Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how mean, how contemptible, are they, compared with the Scripture! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man? Is it possible that the Sacred Personage, whose history it contains, should be himself a mere man? Do we find that he assumed the tone of an enthusiast or ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity, in his manners! What an affecting gracefulness in his delivery! What sublimity in his maxims! What profound wisdom in his discourses! What presence of mind, what subtilty, what truth, in his replies! How great the command over his passions! Where is the man, where the philosopher, who could so live and die, without weakness and without ostentation? When Plato described his imaginary good man loaded with all the shame of guilt, yet meriting the highest reward of virtue, he described exactly the character of Jesus Christ: the resemblance was so striking that all the Fathers perceived it.