Henri Rousseau

“ Rousseau returns to France at the age of fifty-five. After various wanderings he is permitted to settle in Paris, where he lives with great frugality in a single room, poorly furnished,--supporting himself by again copying music, sought still in high society, yet shy, reserved, forlorn, bitter; occasionally making new friends, who are attracted by the infantine simplicity of his manners and apparent amiability, but losing them almost as soon as made by his petty jealousies and irritability, being "equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention." ”

“ This single axiom, from which the correlative notions of the Rights of Man—Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality—are natural outcomes, became the lever which helped to set the vast forces of the Revolution in motion, as well as the lode-star of its reconstructive tendencies. Rousseau's leading conception is, that Might is not Right, and that, although the power of the strong may enable him to frame laws which force the weak to obey him, the moment the weak becomes strong enough to refuse, he is justified in doing so. ”

“ Rousseau was indeed short-sighted. Brought up in virtue and honour, as a man of his talents ought to have brought up his offspring,—or genius were a vainer gift even than it is,—these children might have clustered round him in his days of desolation, have cheered his house with smiles, and been a help and support in his age. He would not have felt friendless, nor been driven to suicide by the sense of abandonment and treachery. He indeed sowed the wind, and reaped the whirlwind. France was on the eve of a sanguinary revolution. ”

“ It is in these remarks that nature is chiefly found in the writings of Rousseau: too much engrossed in himself to be deeply skilled in the characters of others, that very self-study had yet given him a knowledge of the more hidden recesses of the heart. ”

“ In the same way the political Anglomaniacs in France saw that in some things England was ahead of them, and aspired to transplant the British Constitution bodily. In literature, Rousseau was attracted by a style which was breaking with the old conventions, and was admired for its frank utterance of common sentiments and freedom in dealing with common objects and simple human emotions. He loved the 'individualism' which meant an expression of a man's natural feelings without deference to pretentious authority. ”

“ Rousseau now established himself at Paris. Several persons have detailed their recollections of him during this latter part of his life; and there is something touching in the mixture of friendliness and distrust, of gloom and gaiety, of frugality and hospitality, which the various details record. Every word we read stamps the "Confessions" with truth, and animates them with a living image; for when we find how eloquent, agreeable, and warm-hearted he was, even when oppressed by long physical suffering and heavy mental disquietudes, we may believe that he was fascinating in his younger days. ”

“ Rousseau was barely sixteen when he began that roving existence which is so attractive to young people, so hateful in ripe age, and which lasted as long as his life. Flying from his master whose brutality he dreaded, and taking refuge at Oharmettes in Savoy with a woman whom he at first loved passionately, only to leave her subsequently with disgust, he had reached the age of one and twenty, and had already gone through many adventures when he set out, heart-sore and depraved, to seek at Paris a means of subsistence. ”

“ You seem to me to be so worthy of tasting the charms of private life! Why do not you reside at Clarens? I would go there in search of happiness; but the castle of Montmorency, and the Hotel de Luxembourg! Is it in these places Jean Jacques ought to be seen? Is it there a friend to equality ought to carry the affections of a sensible heart, and who thus paying the esteem in which he is held, thinks he returns as much as he receives? You are good and susceptible also: this I know and have seen ”

“ When the enthusiasm of Rousseau's genius was thus usefully submitted to his good sense and knowledge of mankind, he little expected every hamlet in France would be inundated with scraps of the contrat social, and thousands of inoffensive peasants massacred for not understanding the Profession de Foi. ”

“ My Dear Jean-Jacques,—You have renounced Geneva, your native place. You have caused your expulsion from Switzerland, a country so extolled in your writings; France has issued a warrant against you: so do you come to me. My states offer you a peaceful retreat. I wish you well, and will treat you well, if you will let me. But, if you persist in refusing my help, do not reckon upon my telling any one that you did so. If you are bent on tormenting your spirit to find new misfortunes, choose whatever you like best. I am a king, and can procure them for you at your pleasure ”

“ Rousseau does his best, in the "Confessions," to show how contented and happy he was in his new abode—the number of friends he still retained—and his delight at being still at a distance from Paris. He, with proper pride, boasts of his contempt for party spirit, and the formation of cabals in literature, in which Paris was rife. Nothing debases literary men more than owning dependence, for praise or blame, on aught but the public at large.
Not far from his abode of Mont Louis was the chateau of Montmorenci, where the marshal duke de Luxembourg, with his family, usually passed the summer. ”

“ Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that he never could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but as suggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domestic relations between human beings in organised society. ”

“ Rousseau, whether considered as a poet or a philosopher, always obeys the same tendency; to seek nature or to avenge it by art. According to the state of his heart, whether he prefers to seek nature or to avenge it, we see him at one time roused by elegiac feelings, at others showing the tone of the satire of Juneval; and again, as in his Julia, delighting in the sphere of the idyl. His compositions have undoubtedly a poetic value, since their object is ideal; only he does not know how to treat it in a poetic fashion. No doubt his serious character prevents him from falling into frivolity ”

“ Rousseau with his soundings struck deep and true through his own trials and through genius. In a wholly artificial society where people are drawing room puppets, and where life consists in a graceful parade according to a recognized model, he preaches a return to nature, independence, earnestness, passion, and effusion, a manly, active, ardent and happy existence in the open air and in sunshine. ”

“ Jean Jacques Rousseau is perhaps the most squalid, as it certainly is one of the most splendid, among French literary names. The squalor belongs chiefly to the man, but the splendor is wholly the writer's. There is hardly another example in the world's literature of a union so striking of these opposites.
Rousseau's life he has himself told, in the best, the worst, and the most imperishable, of his books, the "Confessions." ”

“ We discover that there were persons of cultivation in England at that time who did not hesitate deliberately to pronounce that Rousseau was, "without exception, the greatest genius and the finest writer that ever lived." This opinion the judicious Green is by no means able to endorse; but he makes a very curious confession which throws a strong light on the best English opinion in 1800. The Lover of Literature says that Rousseau is a character "who has by turns transported me with the most violent and opposite emotions of delight and disgust, admiration and contempt, indignation and pity." ”

“ This doctrine was eagerly seized upon by the French people, maddened by generations of oppression, poverty, and degradation, because it appealed to the pride and vanity of the masses, at that time congregated bodies of ignorance and wickedness.
Rousseau had an unbounded trust in human nature,--that it is good and wise, and will do the best thing if left to itself. But can anything be more antagonistic to all the history of the race? ”

“ His love of nature, his contempt for the silly showiness and shallow hypocrisy of eighteenth-century society, made the idea a favorite one. He loved to dream of the times [Footnote: It must be confessed that here Rousseau was dreaming of times that probably never existed.] when men were all free and equal, when nobody claimed to own the land which God had made for all, when there were no wars to kill, no taxes to oppress, no philosophers to deceive the people. ”

“ This was because, as we repeat so often, Rousseau's ideas, all engendered of dreams as they were, yet lived in him and were truly rooted in his character. He did not merely say, as any of us can say so fluently, that he craved reality in human relations, that distinctions of rank and post count for nothing, that our lives are in our own hands and ought not to be blown hither and thither by outside opinion and words heedlessly scattered; that our faith, whatever it may be, is the most sacred of our possessions, organic, indissoluble, self-sufficing ”

“ It was natural that Rousseau, a man of great genius, whose writings had produced a prodigious influence on his age,—one who had shown, in many instances, the outward manifestations of a kind unselfish disposition, and who had discarded, with an air of magnanimous scorn, all the grovelling ties that bind the human creature to the earth on which he crawls,—should have champions and supporters in any dispute in which he might be involved, be his conduct what it might. ”

“ If examination is made into Rousseau's career, it will be found that he has ever been in the front line of battle, not only at Buena Vista, in our miniature contest with Mexico, at Shiloh, Perryville, and Stone River, but in every aspect, and under all circumstances of his career, always ahead, and leading his people in politics as in war. A self-educated and self-made man, of strong intellectual and reasoning powers, quick to resolve and prompt to act, he appears at all times in that noble attitude of one who has led instead of following public sentiment. ”

“ In religion Mr. Rousseau is an earnest Roman Catholic, and in politics a staunch Conservative. He was married on May 2nd, 1875, to Hermine Gendron, daughter of Jacques Gendron, merchant, of St. Rosalie, by whom he has five children. Comparatively a young man, and judging by what he has already accomplished, it is safe to prophesy a still more brilliant future, and an immortal artistic fame. ”

“ Rousseau's conception went no further than political association, as distinct from subjection. Socialism, which came by and by to the front place, carried the idea to its fullest capacity, and presented all the relations of men with one another as fixed by the same bond. Men had entered the social union as brethren, equal, and co-operators, not merely for purposes of government, but for purposes of mutual succour in all its aspects. This naturally included the most important of all, material production. They were not associated merely as equal participants in political sovereignty ”

“ Rousseau opposed also the atheistic tendencies of the day, declaring belief in a personal God and the immortality of the soul requisite to make life endurable to the oppressed. His indifference to knowledge and culture caused him to regard the masses themselves as alone able to regenerate France, if indeed regeneration were still possible. Society, according to him, was originally based on a contract by which every citizen in return for protection of person and property placed himself under the general will. ”

“ But his general remarks had such a way of bearing very obvious particular applications, and were so obviously inspired by a particular attitude towards the government of his day, that even philosophy became in his hands unsafe, and he was attacked for what men read between the lines of his works. It is owing to this faculty of giving his generalisations content and actuality that Rousseau has become the father of modern political philosophy. He uses the method of his time only to transcend it; out of the abstract and general he creates the concrete and universal. ”

“ Rousseau leapt into fame in 1749, when he was thirty-seven years old, by reason of an article extolling the savage over the civilized state. His two most celebrated books are “Le Contrat Social” and “La nouvelle Heloise.” Only the indulgence of his contemporaries would have granted him the title of “philosopher,” but as a “man of letters” he occupies “a place unrivalled in literary history.” His fame, great as it was during his lifetime, reached to vertiginous heights after his death. Rousseau’s health was execrable and like Voltaire it was said of him that he “was born dying.” ”

“ To him right feeling was as important as right thinking, and in this respect he quarreled with the rationalists who claimed that common sense alone was worth while. Rousseau was a Deist—at most he believed but vaguely in a "Being, whatever He may be, Who moves the universe and orders all things." ”

“ Of all the writers mentioned in this chapter the influence of Rousseau on literature and on life was probably the largest. He was the direct inspirer of the men who made the French Revolution, and the theories of his Contrat Social were closer at the root of Jacobin politics than any other. His fervid declamation about equality and brotherhood, and his sentimental republicanism, were seed as well suited to the soil in which they were sown as Montesquieu's reasoned constitutionalism was unsuited to it. ”