Volume VI Part 16 (1/2)
”Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature,” he says, ”it derives its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human mind . . . according to the poet it is gold and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which have civilized men and ruined the human race.”
The singularity of his paradox had worn off; Rousseau no longer astounded, he shocked the good sense as well as the aspirations, superficial or generous, of the eighteenth century. The _Discours sur l'Inegalite des conditions_ was not a success. ”I have received, sir, your new book against the human race,” wrote Voltaire; ”I thank you for it. You will please men to whom you tell truths about them, and you will not make them any better. Never was so much good wit expended in the desire to make beasts of us; one feels disposed to walk on all fours when one reads your work. However, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the knack, I unfortunately find it impossible to recover it, and I leave that natural gait to those who are better fitted for it than you or I. No more can I embark upon a visit to the savages of Canada, first, because the illnesses to which I am subject render a European doctor necessary to me; secondly, because war has been introduced into that country, and because the examples of our nations have rendered the savages almost as wicked as ourselves. I shall confine myself to being a peaceable savage in the solitude I have selected hard by your own country, where you ought to be.”
Rousseau had, indeed, thought of returning and settling at Geneva. In 1754, during a trip he made thither, he renounced the Catholic faith which he had embraced at sixteen under the influence of Madame de Warens, without any more conviction than he carried with him in his fresh abjuration. ”Ashamed,” says he, ”at being excluded from my rights of citizens.h.i.+p by the profession of a cult other than that of my fathers, I resolved to resume the latter openly. I considered that the Gospel was the same for all Christians, and that, as the fundamental difference of dogma arose from meddling with explanations of what could not be understood, it appertained in every country to the sovereigns alone to fix both the cult and the unintelligible dogma, and that, consequently, it was the duty of the citizen to accept the dogma and follow the cult prescribed by law.” Strange eccentricity of the human mind! The shackles of civilization are oppressive to Rousseau, and yet he would impose the yoke of the state upon consciences. The natural man does not reflect, and does not discuss his religion; whilst seeking to recover the obliterated ideal of nature, the philosopher halts on the road at the principles of Louis XIV. touching religious liberties.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Rousseau and Madame D'Epinay----338]
Madame d'Epinay had offered Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the Hermitage. There it was that he began the tale of _La Nouvelle Heloise,_ which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency's, when the susceptible and cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions of Grimm. The latter had but lately said to Madame d'Epinay ”I see in Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you will do yourself a still more sorry one. Solitude will complete the blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust, ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his country. I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the letters you have shown me.”
Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d'Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot; his quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some noise. ”Good G.o.d!” said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, ”wherever I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Did anybody ever? Fellows who are n.o.body, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a third floor! Positively, one can't stand that sort of thing!” The rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot.
”n.o.body can put himself in my place,” wrote Rousseau, ”and n.o.body will see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their rules.”
Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not forgive him for his independence. His merits as well as his defects annoyed them equally: his ”Lettre contre les Spectacles” had exasperated Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger. ”It is against that Jean Jacques of yours that I am most enraged,” he writes in his correspondence with D'Alembert: ”he has written several letters against the scandal to deacons of the Church of Geneva, to my ironmonger, to my cobbler. This arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes' tub and gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in so many words, 'You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she gave you;' as if I cared to soften the manners of Geneva, as if I wanted an asylum, as if I had taken any in that city of Socinian preachers, as if I were under any obligation to that city!”
More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D'Alembert felt the danger of discord amongst the philosophical party. In vain he wrote to the irritated poet: ”I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thinks be is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous. I grant that he has written you an impertinent letter; I grant that you and your friends have reason to complain of that; in spite of all this, however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words: 'What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?'
We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides, wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to them all. Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his feelings hurt.” Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.
Isolated henceforth by the good as well as by the evil tendencies of his nature, Jean Jacques stood alone against the philosophical circle which he had dropped, as well as against the Protestant or Catholic clergy whose creeds he often offended. He had just published _Le Contrat Social,_ ”The Gospel,”; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, ”of the theory as to the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people.”
The governing powers of the time had some presentiment of its danger; they had vaguely comprehended what weapons might be sought therein by revolutionary instincts and interests; their anxiety and their anger as yet brooded silently; the director of publications (_de la librairie_), M. de Malesherbes, was one of the friends and almost one of the disciples of Rousseau whom he s.h.i.+elded; he himself corrected the proofs of the _Emile_ which Rousseau had just finished. The book had barely begun to appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a message from la Marchale de Luxembourg: the Parliament had ordered _Emile_ to be burned, and its author arrested. Rousseau took flight, reckoning upon finding refuge at Geneva. The influence of the French government pursued him thither; the Grand Council condemned _Emile_.
One single copy had arrived at Geneva it was this which was burned by the hand of the common hangman, nine days after the, burning at Paris in the Place de Greve. ”The Contrat Social has received its whipping on the back of Emile,” was the saying at Geneva. ”At the instigation of M. de Voltaire they have avenged upon me the cause of G.o.d,” Jean Jacques declared.
Rousseau rashly put his name to his book; Voltaire was more prudent.
One day, having been imprisoned for some verses which were not his, he had taken the resolution to impudently repudiate the paternity of his own works. ”You must never publish anything under your own name,” he wrote to Helvetius; ”La Pucelle was none of my doing, of course. Master Joly de Fleury will make a fine thing of his requisition; I shall tell him that he is a calumniator, that La Pucelle is his own doing, which he wants to put down to me out of spite.”
Geneva refused asylum to the proscribed philosopher; he was warned of hostile intentions on the part of the magnific signiors of Berne.
Neuchatel and the King of Prussia's protection alone were left; thither he went for refuge. Received with open arms by the governor, my lord Marshal (Keith), he wrote thence to the premier syndic Favre a letter abdicating his rights of burghers.h.i.+p and citizens.h.i.+p in the town of Geneva. ”I have neglected nothing,” he said, ”to gain the love of my compatriots; n.o.body could have had worse success. I desire to indulge them even in their hate; the last sacrifice remaining for me to make is that of a name which was dear to me.”
Some excitement, nevertheless, prevailed at Geneva; Rousseau had partisans there. The success of _Emile_ had been immense at Paris, and was destined to exerciso a serious influence upon the education of a whole generation. It is good,” wrote Voltaire, ”that the brethren should know that yesterday six hundred persons came, for the third time, to protest on behalf of Jean Jacques against the Council of Geneva, which had dared to condemn the Vicaire savoyard.” The Genevese magistrates thought it worth while to defend their acts; the _Lettres ecrites de la Campagne,_ published to that end, were the work of the attorney-general Robert Tronchin. Rousseau replied to them in the _Lettres de la Montagne,_ with a glowing eloquence having a spice of irony. He hurled his missiles at Voltaire, whom, with weakly exaggeration, he accused of being the author of all his misfortunes. ”Those gentlemen of the Grand Council,” he said, ”see M. de Voltaire so often, how is it that he did not inspire them with a little of that tolerance which he is incessantly preaching, and of which he sometimes has need? If they had consulted him a little on this matter, it appears to me that he might have addressed them pretty nearly thus: 'Gentlemen, it is not the arguers who do harm; philosophy can gang its ain gait without risk;' the people either do not hear it at all or let it babble on, and pay it back all the disdain it feels for them. I do not argue myself, but others argue, and what harm comes of it? We have arranged that my great influence in the court and my pretended omnipotence should serve you as a pretext for allowing a free, peaceful course to the sportive jests of my advanced years; that is a good thing, but do not, for all that, burn graver writings, for that would be too shocking. I have so often preached tolerance! It must not be always required of others and never displayed towards them. This poor creature believes in G.o.d, let us pa.s.s over that; he will not make a sect.
He is a bore; all arguers are. If all bores of books were to be burned, the whole country would have to be made into one great fireplace. Come, come, let us leave those to argue who leave us to joke; let us burn neither people nor books and remain at peace, that is my advice. That, in my opinion, is what might have been said, only in better style, by M.
Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice he could have given.”
My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there; he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle of the Lake of Bienne. Before long an order from the Bernese senate obliged, him to quit it ”within four and twenty hours, and with a prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties.”
Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume. There it was that he began writing his _Confessions_.
Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume. The latter flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d'Holbach: ”My dear Baron, Rousseau is a scoundrel.” Rousseau was by this time mad.
He returned to France. The Prince of Conti, faithful to his philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near Gisors. Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by invisible enemies. Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville, which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life. The disproportion between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and the impa.s.sioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries. By his writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.
He belonged moreover and by antic.i.p.ation to a new era; from the restless working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies, he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work, their world was never his. He had attempted a n.o.ble reaction, but one which was fundamentally and in reality impossible. The impress of his early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in G.o.d, he had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood, he admired the morality and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of adoration and submission. ”The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits the moral world, but not that other which is above,” M. Joubert has said in his _Pensees_. The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a foregone conclusion. Against the systematic infidelity which was more and more creeping over the eighteenth century, the Christian faith alone, with all its forces, could fight and triumph. But the Christian faith was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel's rigging instead of defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the dikes were breaking one after, another. The religious belief of the Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in _Emile,_ and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the soul and regulate life.
”What the eighteenth century lacked [M. Guizot, _Melanges biographiques_ (Madame la Comtesse de Rumford)], ”what there was of superficiality in its ideas and of decay in its morals, of senselessness in its pretensions and of futility in its creative power, has been strikingly revealed to us by experience; we have learned it to our cost. We know, we feel the evil bequeathed to us by that memorable epoch. It preached doubt, egotism, materialism. It laid for some time an impure and blasting hand upon n.o.ble and beautiful phases of human life. But if the eighteenth century had done only that, if such had been merely its chief characteristic, can any one suppose that it would have carried in its wake so many and such important matters, that it would have so moved the world? It was far superior to all its sceptics, to all its cynics. What do I say?
Superior? Nay, it was essentially opposed to them and continually gave them the lie. Despite the weakness of its morals, the frivolity of its forms, the mere dry bones of such and such of its doctrines, despite its critical and destructive tendency, it was an ardent and a sincere century, a century of faith and disinterestedness. It had faith in the truth, for it claimed the right thereof to reign in this world. It had faith in humanity, for it recognized the right thereof to perfect itself and would have had that right exercised without obstruction. It erred, it lost itself amid this twofold confidence; it attempted what was far beyond its right and power; it misjudged the moral nature of man and the conditions of the social state. Its ideas as well as its works contracted the blemish of its views. But, granted so much, the original idea, dominant in the eighteenth century, the belief that man, truth, and society are made for one another, worthy of one another, and called upon to form a union, this correct and salutary belief rises up and overtops all its history. That belief it was the first to proclaim and would fain have realized. Hence its power and its popularity over the whole face of the earth. Hence also, to descend from great things to small, and from the destiny of man to that of the drawing-room, hence the seductiveness of that epoch and the charm it scattered over social, life. Never before were seen all the conditions, all the cla.s.ses that form the flower of a great people, however diverse they might have been in their history and still were in their interests, thus forgetting their past, their personality, in order to draw near to one another, to unite in a communion of the sweetest manners, and solely occupied in pleasing one another, in rejoicing and hoping together during fifty years which were to end in the most terrible conflicts between them.”
At the death of King Louis XV., in 1774, the easy-mannered joyance, the peaceful and brilliant charm of fas.h.i.+onable and philosophical society were reaching their end: the time of stern realities was approaching with long strides.
CHAPTER LVI.----LOUIS XVI.--MINISTRY OF M. TURGOT. 1774-1776.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Louis XVI.----347]