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HATCHAM LIBERAL CLUB LECTURES
ON
Political, Social and Literary Subjects.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEMU:
HIS INFLUENCE ON MODERN THOUGHT,
BY
Mrs. FREDERIKA MACDONALD.
A LL RIGHTS RES E R W E D B Y. T H E A U THOR.
PUBLISHED BY THE HATCHAM LIBERAL CLUB, PORTLAND
House, NEw CROSS ROAD.
IF ER, IET; IET A. C. IFI} .
THE following lecture is one of a series in course of delivery at the
Hatcham Liberal Club on Sunday evenings. These lectures have
drawn large audiences and aroused much interest ; and now and
again we intend sending them forth to seek a larger public, and to
meet, may be, a severer criticism. Their principal aim is to stimulate
the spirit of inquiry—to induce our neighbours, whether rich or poor,
to give more thought than they have hitherto done to the relationship
in which they stand towards each other. We offer an open platform
to all, and only ask for a patient hearing and candid examination of
the theories advanced.
W. GARDINER,
Lecture Secretary.
Hatcham Liberal Club,
May, 1887.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
AS THE
FATHER OF THE MODERN SPIRIT.
UNTIL quite recently it has been the custom with English critics
and historians to speak only in disparagement of that wonderful
France of the Eighteenth Century, the France of Voltaire and
Rousseau, that Mr. Matthew Arnold truly says, “told more
powerfully upon the mind of Europe then even the France of the
Revolution.”%
. Carlyle, especially, who in that magnificent prose epic his
History of the French Revolution, shows so much sympathy
with the noble “Faith and Hope in deliverance from the reign of
injustice,” that was the animating soul of the Revolution, yet
never loses an opportunity of expressing his contemptuous dislike
of the age in which that noble hope and faith were born—“the
Ahilosophe century” he contemptuously calls it—where, if we
will believe him, we can only find to amaze us the insane levity
of a world that feasted and made merry beneath the clouds that
foretold the deluge; and where even those who foresaw the coming
destruction of their world, found no better employment to their
hands than hastening on the general ruin, out of sheer mischief
and gaiety of heart.
... Well, it is, of course, quite possible to study France in the
eighteenth century under this aspect; and so long as we con-
centrate our attention, upon what was decaying and going to
pieces, and overlook what was beginning and awakening to life,
so long we can find nothing truer or finer than the description
given by Carlyle.f
“This epoch,” he says, “ was properly the end—the end of
a social system that for above a thousand years had been
building itself together, and after that had begun for some
centuries, as human things will do, to moulder down.”
But if it is true—as it unquestionably is true—that all human
systems do thus, after a time, “moulder down,” and become
unfit and unsafe habitations for the human spirit, it is not true
that that indomitable and eager spirit sits at home and waits to
be overwhelmed amidst the crumbling ruins. And this epoch
that is rightly described as the end of a social system once
serviceable to mankind, is even more interesting to us as the
* “Essay on the Function of Criticism.”
# “Miscellanies. Essay on Diderot.”
4. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
birthplace of a new ideal faith, destined to transform the old
views of the duties, rights, and aims of human life.
This new ideal faith—based upon belief in the health and
beauty, instead of the grossness and impurity of nature; upon the
natural goodness instead of the innate depravity of the human
heart; upon the need, instead of the peril, of cultivating human intel-
ligence, and of strengthening the powers of reason, instead of keep-
ing them weak and in subjection to unquestioning faith;finally upon
the natural claim of all men to justice, instead of the divine right
of a few men to special privileges and power—this new ideal
faith neither sprang into existence with the popular uprising that
marked its first triumph in the taking of the Bastille, nor was
stamped out of existence by Bonaparte when he commanded that
historical whiff of grapeshot by which, Carlyle tells us, “the thing
specifically called French Revolution was blown into space, and
became a thing that was.” “The thing specifically called French
Revolution ” we must not feel disappointed to find disfigured, and
in the end destroyed by crimes and cruelties that, seen rightly, had
no part in the new faith, but were the inevitable results of the
legacy of hatred left by past oppression and wrong. But the
spiritual revolution will neither accomplish itself in deeds of
violence, nor be snuffed out by violence; but, like all great ideas
that have once taken possession of the human soul, it will spread
from heart to heart, and from mind to mind, until material
obstacles will melt away before it.
This spiritual revolution it is that has its starting-point in the
eighteenth century, and its first prophets and promulgators
amongst those well-abused “philosophers” painted for us under
the image of lunatics setting fire to their own dwellings or cutting
away from the parent tree the bough on which they sat; but whom
rather we will see as the heroic builders of the ark that was to
bear across the destructive flood of waters the ideal treasures their
passionate pursuit of truth, justice, and intellectual liberty had
won for mankind.
When we look back to this age before our own, our parent age
in the fullest sense of the term, we find three men who, before all
others, deserve to be described as the spiritual fathers of the
Revolution. These three men are Voltaire, Diderot, and Jean
Jacques Rousseau.
I will not attempt to decide between these three who most
deserves gratitude for his services and indulgence for his faults on
the ground that he was a “brave soldier in the war of liberation of
humanity.” All three fought bravely in this war, endured perils,
wounds, and seeming defeat, and died without seeing the end of
the struggle. All three, therefore, claim gratitude from us who
taste many of the spiritual fruits of their victory.
In Voltaire we have the leader of that intellectual movement
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. º: 5
Mr. Matthew Arnold compares to the Renaissance.” But that
differed from the Renaissance in being no effort to revive lost
culture, nor even directly to reach new forms of culture, but in
being an effort to make culture universal as well as perfect by the
liberation of the human mind from that Bastille of thought, the
Mediaeval Religious System, still standing as a prison and place of
torture for free intelligence.
In Diderot we have the leader of a kindred effort to free
knowledge from bondage to error and superstition, and to make
historical research and patient investigation of facts take the
place of authority and tradition in establishing the foundations of
learning. And we have the splendid enterprise of the Encyclo-
paedia carried out successfully under his generalship in the face
of the enmity of the Church, and the suspicions of a corrupt
king and court, as a monument of his indefatigable zeal for the
spread of truth and exact knowledge.
In Jean Jacques Rousseau's influence we have what at first
seems an effort and aspiration in an opposite direction, but what
was in reality the carrying forward of the same work of liberation
in the social sphere and the life of the affections. As Voltaire
made thought free and declared that pernicious errors are the
result of stifling human reason, so Rousseau laboured to free life
itself from bondage to false institutions and prejudices; and was
never weary of insisting that vicious conduct is the result of
stifling and perverting the wholesome instincts and impulses of
nature. Again, as Diderot would have no theories that would
not bear comparison with actual facts, and declared that special
knowledge is of value only when studied in its relation to general
knowledge, Rousseau would recognise no laws or systems that
sinned against the moral instincts of mankind, and denied that
human progress is made when special advantages or accomplish-
ments are won for a favoured class at the cost of the servitude of
the people. I have said that I do not for a moment wish to
compare the relative value of the different work done by these
three great spiritual Fathers of the Revolution; but if all three
claim our gratitude equally, J. J. Rousseau, it seems to me,
requires to-day our special study: and for this reason. Here and
there we may still find some sentimentalist who deplores the loss
of those persecuting powers that were amongst the charming
characteristics of an age of faith; but in a general way it may be
said that the claims of thought and knowledge to perfect freedom
of expression and research are now established : and therefore the
mission of Voltaire and Diderot may be said to be, to a great
©xtent, accomplished. Then the personalities of these two men,
Voltaire and Diderot, are well known and familiar to most of us ;
* “French Revolution,” Vol. III.
6 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
or if they are not, it is only because we have neglected to acquaint
ourselves with well authenticated and easily accessible informa-
tion concerning them. But whilst the spirit of J. J. Rousseau.still
applies itself to the solution of the most difficult problems of our |
day, the man himself remains enveloped in a cloud of dark |
suspicions that hides him away, from the reverence and gratitude
even of those who recognise their profound spiritual obligations
to the teacher. * * ' < , ă. . . . . . . . . .
Now that this is the result arrived at by the received method “ ”
of interpreting Rousseau's life and character seems to me a
sufficient proof that there is need to investigate the correctness
of the plan followed. It is #6t.gnºly: that Rousseau is shown us
as a worse man than we can willingly, believe him to have been, !
but that he is painted as some strange, incredible monster whom |
we fail to realise can ever have,worn human shape at all. The |
old-fashioned belief that a tree is knpwn by:its fruits still survives g
in healthy minds; and yet in this case, we are constantly asked :
to believe that men have actually, gathered grapes from thorn J
trees, and figs from, thistles. “It was Rousseau's work more }
than that of any one man,” says Mr. Morley; “that France arose.
from deadly decay and found irresistible energy.” Aid then he
proceeds to paint the man who did this work as a miserable ..]
diseased sensialist. Who; in one forcible passage, hē compares.“to f
the heavy-eyed ind-scaly, monsters that haunted, the primaºval
ooze.” Mr. Morley has certaş outdistanced former biogra-
phers in the glaring, and I think everyone, must feel humanly ;
impossible contragictions he assumes existed between Rousseau's |
*
i
genius and what he is pleased to describe as the “vile outer life .
of the man.” But, he is not alone in thinking that he has
explained Rousseau . to us, when he has declared that he had in
him two natures quite unreconcilable with each other. From . #
the time & Grimm and; Diderot in Rousseau's own day, down to
Messrs. Perry and Māugras, and Mr. Morley in our own, this f *%.
theory of a mysterious duality has served the purpose of critics ".
who have been pleased to. start with the assumption that there | "...
does exist this hopelešegiſtradiction between Rousseau's moral
• . . n |
character and his genius... . * = . . * 35, 3
Now it is this assumption that I believe patient investigation ( : ,
of the evidence on which it rests will prove an error at the outset. ( ;
An exactly opposite conviction has in my own case been the §.
result of some years, now spent in studying Rousseau's life and ºft
§
#.
character in the light of evidence afforded from every source,
partial and impartial, his own evidence;and that of friends, and
enemies, and especially, in the evidence of those who were neithérº.
friends nor enemies, and whose witness is that of the bulk of his
contemporaries. Rousseau, if you will believe me, was nothing
less than two men in one man, a noble dreamer, and a vile per-
‘.
:
i.
-*.
º,
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 7
former. He and his dream, his mood, were one. His own
Surrender of himself to nature, and to the impulses and im-
pressions sovereign with him at the hour, was so absolute and
cóñplete that eyen his genius was uncóñtrolled by a self-conscious
intellect and will.; and, we have the most influential of all his
works inhis own day—the “New Héloise"—composed indefianceof
: . . . . himself as it were, and ifi oppºsition to principles he had not only
... ', ' maintained eloquently but had sacrificed his worldly interests to
follow. : We shall never conquer this difficulty whilst we persist
- in judging Rousseau as ān ordinary man; and lose sight of the
fact that he was a blind inspiréd being who followed, but did not
A control, the genius of his life-that led him often where by choice
he would not have gone. “The life drama' of the original
man,” Carlyle says" of Mirabeau, “cannot be measured by
... the three tinitiés aloné, but partly by a rule of its own,
too.” In J. J., Röusséâu we hāve" not only an original man
. . , -one distinguished by his genits:from 3rdinary mortals—we have
: ' , also a man who had grown: tú màturity; and who continued
through life outside of the rules; and unbroken to the laws that are
* recognised;by all who have in their youtfi.undergone the discipline
. . . of civilisation. Rousseau névéRünderwént this discipline. Acci-
dent and neglect in his case sectired him the very education of
* "...º nature.hèdèsiréd for his imagináry pupil “Emile;” and in the most
cultivated-age the world has kºwn and in cóntact, and often in
: conflict, with the most finished #iligences of this age, he stands,
with all his spléndid gifts of mind and imaginătion, the untamed
”. natural man; swayed by his feelings and passigns as the trees are
3. by the strong-winds, and driven by his géâilis is by a compelling
º
*
power he could neither-direct nor subdüé. : " . . *
| * , To try such a being as this?by the standard of the average
º' civilised man, is to court confusion; Röässeau; the Superior of
* , the average civiliséd; man in-intuitibh; eñthūsiasm, and genius,
< ... was the inferior of the average civilisédºnian in power of self-
*:...control and intelligent-self-direction. Nöthing can be easier
than to preach the tisſal sermonº tipóñº-this text; the sermon
º: where all who run-and-read may learfittișat géniuš undirected by

$ intelligence follows a dangerous path; ifid thät the faults and
3. misfortunes of Rousseåis life are the bºčíðöfs of the peril of his
3, ... own doctrine, that féeliigis a saférgißto-human conduct than
&: réâsoh. There is not ºne word.'in this sermon that is not
ğs absoljitely true, Šofārāšit:goes; but there is not one word in it
§ 3; either that is necessary, or even helpful; to a fight understanding
...; ióf what is really esseåtiãl and interésting-in the exceptional
"*" destiny of this extraordinary man. It is not as a type of the
perfect human character that J. J. Rousseau claims to be studied
* “Miscellanies.” Mirabeau.
8 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
—still less is it as one whose early education was disastrous to
habits of self-control and prosperous respectability. It is as the
man born in due season, and prepared by a special education and
temperament, to meet the need and expectation of the time. In
an age of artificial culture and repression, it was Rousseau's
mission to speak for Nature, and on Nature's side, with such
strange eloquence and power that the civilised corrupt society
that first deigned to patronise him, and then thought to crush
him with its scorn, vanished away beneath his influence. Had
Adousseau been other than he was he would not have worked the miracle;
stronger to resist external influences that made him guilty of
deeds his heart abhorred, he would have cried out with less
bitterness and power against the false institutions that perverted
the wholesome impulses of upright natures. Less blind upon the
side of the intelligence, he might well have found consolations for
the life of the affections all in ruins, in the intellectual life, never
more animated, absorbing, and full of charm. More capable of
those “deep mystical aspirations and haunting visions of forms
rather divine than human” that Mr. Morley quite gratuitously
attributes to him, his heart would have been less filled and satis-
fied with the love of nature, his sympathies less bounded by the
actual life around him ; his holy rage and pity less stirred by the
spectacle of the “oppressions that are done under the sun.”
I have said that whilst Rousseau's influence appeared to clash
with that of Voltaire and Dideröf; it was actually a movement in
the same direction, or, rather, the carrying forward of the same
movement, that had before been limited to an Intellectual circle
in the open world, and amidst the actual labours and homely
pleasures and pains of human life. And again, that whilst he
imagined himself to stand alone and in opposition to the tendencies
of his own day, he stood actually in the stream of those tendencies,
and was carried forward by them. What Emerson says# generally
of the “great man,” the man of genius, is especially true of Jean
Jacques Rousseau.
“Valuable originality,” Emerson says, “does not consist in
unlikeness to other men—the hero is in the thick of knights and
the press of events.” And again, “He stands in the river of
thoughts and events forced onwards by the ideas, and necessities
of his contemporaries.” That Rousseau found his inspiration in the
unuttered desires and unrecognised needs of his contemporaries
is abundantly plain. He was not, like Voltaire or Diderot, a man
born to the profession of letters who in any age would have been
an intellectual force. For thirty-seven years of his life he remained
a mere visionary. Then, brought into the animative atmosphere
of Paris with all these unuttered dreams and aspirations busy at
his heart, he was transformed by enthusiasm of pity and hope from a
* “Legende des Siècles, Le Satyr.”
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 9
dreamer of dreams into an inspired prophet. For twelve years he
was sustained by a sort of religious fervour, his “heart made hot
within him” he says of himself “by the idea of the future happiness
of the human race and the honour of contributing to it,” and during
those twelve inspired years, he composed all those great works
that (to quote Mr. Morley) “gave Europe a new gospel.”
Then, losing with his belief in his power to serve mankind all
taste for literary production, he threw down his pen at an age
when most men are in their full intellectual vigour. True, he took
up the pen later on, but only in self-defence. The Confessions,
Dialogues and Reveries were composed with no other motive than
to defend himself, as he fondly believed, from the calumnies of his
enemies.
To understand the Rousseau of these twelve inspired years
thoroughly, it is necessary in the first place to know something
of this brilliant, cynical Paris of the eighteenth century,
admirable in its wealth of intelligence, pitiable in its poverty of
heart; and then it is necessary to have followed through what we
may call the formative period of his life, this son of the Geneva
watchmaker—untrained,unguided, undisciplined in youth as I have
said ; yet who, at seven years of age, was stirred to enthusiasm for
human greatness by reading “Plutarch's Lives,” and who could
never recollect a time when the sublime and lovely nature amidst
which he was born, the snow-crowned mountains and the shin-
ing lake were not a source of daily delight and joy. We have to
get hold of the idea of a boy thus formed, or rather left amidst
beautiful and good influences, to form himself, open to all that was
good, but also defenceless against evil, undisciplined to endure
pain or to resist temptation, and we have to see this boy driven
by his destiny at sixteen years of age to face the world, penniless,
friendless, aimless, but full of confidence in the beauty of the world,
the goodness of man, and the sufficiency of simple joys to
human happiness. Then we must endeavour to grasp the effect
upon his conduct (not upon his character, for throughout and from
his childhood upwards Rousseau is always the same Rousseau
with all his gifts as I have said, the untrained man unbroken to
civilisation, incapable of self-direction or control.) Well, we have
to imagine the effect produced upon such a being as this by
acquaintance with the humiliations and restraints of servitude; with
the hardships but freedom of homeless wandering; with the
uncertainty of favour and patronage; with the injustice of men in
power to those who serve them honourably and well. And going
along with these harsh experiences, we must also take into account
the softening influence derived from the knowledge of the suffer-
ings of the poor, of the kindness and generosity of those who
have known hunger and homelessness to the hungry and homeless,
and then of the noble and pure enjoyments, too, the peace and
IO JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
freedom and innocence that belong to simple life untroubled by
envy or ambition. Here we must understand were the elements
that went to the making of this genius that was kindled to flame
by contact with this brilliant and amiable but sick and suffering
eighteenth century Society.
In one of his long and interesting letters to Malesherbes,
Rousseau gives his own account of the sort of ecstatic vision with
which his sense of a mission to reform the world commenced.
He was walking from Paris to Vincennes, he says, one hot June
day, to visit Diderot, then in prison, because some allusions in
his writings had offended a certain great lady, whose influence
secured her easily a lettre de cachet against so mean a mortal as a
philosopher. The day was hot, and Rousseau, walking slowly,
had taken a newspaper with him to read by the way. Turning
over the pages of this paper, The Mercury of France, his eye
chanced to light upon the announcement that the Academy of
Dijon proposed as the subject for a prize essay “The influence upon
Morality of the Progress of the Arts and Sciences.” “If anything
ever resembled a sudden inspiration,” Rousseau says, “it was
the movement that began in me when I read this. All at once I
felt illumined, dazzled—ideas crowded upon me so that in my
agitation I could not sort or classify them. I felt carried beyond
myself—intoxicated. I sank under one of the trees of the
avenue, and passed half-an-hour there. Ah, could I but have
written the quarter of what I saw and felt beneath that wide-
spreading oak, with what clearness should I have brought out all
the contradictions of our social system, with what simplicity
should I have shown that man is good naturally, and that by
institutions only is he made bad.”
Mr. Morley has only a sneer for what he describes as “this
astonishing transport beneath the wide-spreading oak;” but
Marmontel, one of the most constant libellers of Rousseau, has
called the truth of the whole story in question, and declares that
Rousseau came to Diderot in uncertainty and asked him which
side he should take in his essay. That Marmontel's account is
simply false is proved by the fact that Diderot, after his
quarrel with Rousseau, gives an account of the incident that
corresponds with Rousseau's ; but one has only to turn to
Rousseau's correspondence long before the composition of the
First Discourse, indeed one has only to trace the man's character
and career up to this period to feel that it was inevitable he
should take the side he did, and that he should defend this
side with all the impassioned eloquence of which he was
capable. The First Discourse was crowned by the Academy
of Dijon, and it was the starting-point of Rousseau's personal
misfortunes and of his undying celebrity. Addressed to the men
and women of his own generation, it was a passionate appeal
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. I I
…A
warning them that whilst they were busy cultivating the flowers
of intelligence, sickness and corruption were at the very roots of
life. Taken literally as philosophic dogma, and not as the
impassioned speech of a prophet eager to turn men's hearts in
the direction he sees they need to go, the First Discourse, and
the Second upon Inequality, may easily be quoted to support the
somewhat stupid opinion that Rousseau preferred the savage to
the civilised state, and advocated a return to a state of barbarism.
To suppose that this was actually the spiritual aim and purpose
of Rousseau's teaching is to fall into the same intellectual blunder
those commit who suppose that Jesus sets the sinner above the
saint when he recognises the strength and courage needed to
reconquer lost habits of virtue in the generous outburst, “There
is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over
ninety-and-nine just persons who need no repentance;” or,
again, who suppose that He is praising improvidence when He
bids the worldly mind and those who, pre-occupied by care for
the means of living, forget to live, to “consider the lilies of the
field how they grow.” The prophetic teacher does not, like the
philosopher or man of science, set himself to state truths in
abstract and changeless terms ; his purpose is to bring some
special truth home to some special souls in need of it—in other
words, as I have said before, to turn men's hearts in the direction
Åe sees they need to go. Rousseau saw plainly, or rather I should
say, he felt intensely, the direction in which the men and women
of his day needed to go to find refreshment and renewal; and the
return to nature he inaugurated, and the revival of energy of
feeling and wholesomeness of heart that followed it, were neces-
ary to give, the purely intellectual movement set going by
Voltaire and Diderot the moral vitality and emotional force needed
to carry it beyond the salon and the library, and to make the
Revolution thrill with new fervour of ideal hope, not only the
sphere of literature and art, but the whole domain of life.
For us, the two Discourses are chiefly interesting, because we
find stated in them for the first time the texts upon which the
whole Gospel according to Jean Jacques Rousseau is founded.
These texts may be summed up as three:—
I. That it is in human nature itself we must find the standard
of human virtue and the source of human laws.
2. That by the study of human nature we find the idea of
Justice as the source of virtue and the origin of law, and we find
that this idea of Justice proceeds naturally from man's self love,
and the sentiment of compassion by which he feels and suffers in
the place of his fellow men, and of all sentient beings.
3. That every social system that perverts or obscures
the sense of Justice that is the source of the moral instincts of
I2 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
mankind violates the laws of human nature, and has no claims
upon the obedience of men.
The three great works that followed the Discourses are the
application of these texts to life under all its aspects, and in all
its relations.
In the “New Heloise” we have them applied to the life
of the affections, to marriage and the just relations between men
and women. In the “Emile” to education and religion. In the
Social Contract, to politics, and the constitution of Society.
To take the last first. The Social Contract that was the Bible
of a more heroic generation than our own, is very often dismissed
now by people who, perhaps, have never been at the pains of
reading it, as a book built up of theories, and hence unworthy of
the attention of the scientific student of sociology. Now, I am
not afraid to put forward an exactly opposite statement and to
say that no scientific student of sociology can safely neglect the
Social Contract; and for this reason, that it marks a stage in the
development of the social idea. It is in the Social Contract that
we have, for the first time, to use Mr. Matthew Arnold's phrase,
“ the modern spirit applied to politics.” It is of this work especially
that Micheletº is thinking when he describes Rousseau as the
“Founder of Justice; “Montesquieu,” he says, “defined justice.”
Voltaire called out aloud for justice; Rousseau founded it.” And
here just let me point out the unity in purpose and spirit that
makes the three men whom I have called the Spiritual Fathers of
the Revolution, workers together in one and the same movement.
Diderot, as we have seen, laboured to make all physical facts
objects of observation and experience; in other words he made
the senses and judgment of man the final test of knowledge.
Voltaire strove to overthrow dogmatic intolerance and superstition;
that is to say he made free and enlightened human intelligence the
minister and measure of truth. Æousseau made the human con-
science the measure of justice. He brought to it social customs and
institutions, and comparing them with the moral instincts of
mankind he decided whether or no they were lawful and just.
In studying the Social Contract we must bear in mind the
object that Rousseau had in view. At the outset he clearly states
this object. He is not attempting to trace the history of any
actual state of society—he is endeavouring to show under what
circumstances the social state exists rightfully, and is securely
founded upon those principles of justice that harmonise with the
moral constitution of man.
This distinction is lost sight of by Mr. Morley when he severely
blames Rousseau for neglecting “ the historic method which traces
the present along a line of ascertained circumstances, and seeks
* “La Revolution,” Introduction.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. I3
animproved future by an unbroken continuance of that line.” (I
may observe here that Rousseau would have denied that an im-
proved future could have been attained by an unbroken continu-
ance of the line that had brought about the social conditions in
which Louis XV., under Madame de Pompadour, was accepted
as Supreme).
“The opening words of the Social Contract,” Mr. Morley con-
tinues, “which sent such a thrill through the generation to which
they were uttered in two continents, “man is born free and every-
where he is in chains,’ show us at the outset that we are as far
away as ever from the patient method of positive research, and as
deeply buried as ever in deducing practical maxims from a set of
conditions that never had any other than an abstract and phan-
tasmatic existence. How is a man born free? Man was hardly
born free amongt Romans and Athenians, when both law and
public opinion left a father at perfect liberty to expose his new-
born infant. And the more primitive the circumstances the
later the period at which he obtains freedom. A child was not
born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the Patria
Potestas was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go back further, was he born
free in the time of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham had
full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his
daughter.”
Rousseau would have answered these objections easily by
denying that Abraham or Jephthah had this right, although super-
stitious beliefs at variance with the moral instincts of mankind
might so have perverted their consciences as to lead them to
believe that they had it.
But it is idle to blame Rousseau for neglecting the historic
method, when at the outset he repudiates this method by con-
demning Grotius for assuming that the right to do a thing is
established when one has proved that it has been done.
Again, if Rousseau is held to assume too much when he
asserts that man is by nature free, it must be understood that
he is after all assuming no more in the moral sphere than the
physicist does in the material sphere when he assumes the exis-
tence of atoms as the ultimate particles of matter. The
ultimate fact in morals is man's freedom of will, his natural right
and power to direct his own actions; and if we do not recognise
this freedom it is absurd to speak of man as a moral being at
all, having either rights or duties. But on entering the social
state man parts with this natural freedom and right to absolute
power over his own acts, and Rousseau's inquiry is, under what
circumstances this passage from the natural to the civilised state
really marks a moral progress, and can be shown to be founded on
laws that are derived from the moral constitution of man.
Rousseau's first position is that if man's natural liberty is taken
**
I4. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
from him by force, the social state is not lawfully, and therefore
not securely, founded.
“If,” he says, “I considered force and the effects of force as
the causes of social order, I should say, so long as a people is
constrained to obey, and obeys, it does well; but from the moment
it is able to fling off the yoke and does so, it does better, for by
using force to recover what was taken from it by force it exercises
the same right in its own service that was employed against it.”
Social order, then, established by force cannot be said to be
established at all, since force constantly changes hands. “No
man,” says Rousseau, “is so strong as to be always the master
unless he transform his force into a right and obedience into a
duty.” I would advise all who have been led away by their
legitimate admiration of Carlyle to accept his brilliant paradox
that might is right, to study Rousseau's beautifully clear demon-
stration that force, might, can never constitute a right. “To obey
force is a necessity,” he says, “ or at most an act of prudence.
How can it be a duty P” But social order is a sacred right, the
basis of all other rights and its secure foundation therefore must
be on right. If force cannot rightly take from men their natural
liberties, it is proved that in the justly established social state men
must freely, and for their own advantage, exchange natural liberty
for civil liberty—that is to say, each gives himself to all that the
common strength may protect all in the enjoyment of their rights
and liberties. This is what Rousseau means by the social con-
tract. I have dwelt upon it, because great nonsense is often
talked of Rousseau's preposterous notion that the origin of society
was an actual contract entered into by all the members of primi-
tive communities. It is hardly necessary to tell you that he held
no notion of the sort; what he maintained was that the under-
standing that the restraints imposed on men in the social state
have their object in the protection and advantage of all, is the
only understanding by which men can justly be bound to endure
these restraints themselves, or permitted to impose them upon
others. Society, then, if justly founded, rests on a general agree-
ment to seek the general good; it follows, then, that the sovereign
power and the author of the laws of the State is the general will.
But here a great deal remains to be said. . Rousseau distinguishes
between the rights of the individual and the rights of the State as
clearly as Mr. Herbert Spencer himself. The general will is only
infallible and incorruptible where questions of general interest are
concerned ; and it neither should, nor properly speaking can,
desire to interfere with the particular wills of individuals, except in
cases that affect the welfare of the whole community. The grand
idea developed in the Social Contract is that voluntary obedience to
the law of justice is the highest state of human liberty. “The passage
from the natural to the civil state,” it says, “produces a remark-
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. I 5
able change in man by substituting justice for selfish instinct as
the motive of his conduct, and thus giving his actions the morality
that was before wanting. It is only when duty succeeds physical
impulse, and the desire to do right takes the place of the desire
to satisfy appetite, that the man who before saw only himself,
becomes a reasonable and responsible being, who consults his
conscience when before he obeyed his inclinations. Although in
this state he deprives himself of several advantages he held from
nature, he gains so many greater advantages—his faculties are so
developed, his ideas so enlarged, his sentiments so ennobled, his
soul so raised, that if the abuses of this new condition did not
often degrade him beneath his natural state, he would have cause
to bless the happy moment that raised him out of it, and that
changed him from a stupid and narrow animal into an intelligent
being and a man.”
After this it is a little difficult to maintain that Rousseau's
ideal was a state of barbarism; although he did maintain, and was
never weary of repeating, that the civilised state founded upon
force and injustice, instead of upon civil liberty and right, is more
degrading and productive of misery and evil than the natural
state of man. I have said that those who apply the modern spirit
to political and social questions, yet omit to study the social
contract, continue ignorant of the source from which some of
their most cherished ideals are derived. It is in the Social
Contract, for instance, that the modern idea of “the People”
first stands out clearly. Before Rousseau, the People, when it
was not the vulgar herd whose stupidity and commonness served
as a background for some bright particular hero, was but the
great multitude whose dumb sufferings moved Jesus to tears of
compassion. But with Rousseau the idea of the “People” gains
dignity. It is no longer the common People, but the sovereign
People—not the People who, like sheep, are dependent on their
shepherd, but the People that is itself the source of law, the
revealer of justice.
The Social Contract was the work that most deeply affected
the generation that arose after Rousseau's death, but the men
and women of his own day were even more stirred by the “New
Heloise.” So many eminent critics have declared the “New
Heloise” unreadable in modern times that I should be almost
afraid to confess with how much enjoyment I have read, and still
re-read it myself, were it not that I find Shelley amongst those
who maintain that the book has a constant and enduring charm.
Still, I am quite willing to admit that the “New Heloise” cannot
come to us, as it did to the men and women of Rousseau's day,
as a thrilling page torn out of the very book of life.
But the interest the “New Heloise” has for us is not so much
moral as literary and artistic. Just as in the Social Contract we
I6 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
have for the first the modern spirit applied to politics, so in the
“New Heloise” we meet for the first time with the modern senti-
ment for nature. This sentiment is as different as possible from
the outside delight in trees and flowers and fine landscape that
we find in earlier writers of poetic temperament. Æousseau enters
into the very life of nature, escapes from the fret and fatigue of
man's little kingdom into the great calm, sympathetic life behind
and around him, and invites us to taste with him the renewal of
health and appeasement of pain he himself derived from com-
munion with nature.
But it is in the “Emile” that we have, as it seems to me, the
noblest of all Rousseau's works, and the one that especially earns
for him the title of the spiritual Father of the Revolution. No
wonder the “Emile” provoked the vehement indignation of the
clerical party, and of all the representatives of the old system,
for it struck at the very roots of this system.
In the “Emile,” Rousseau applies the Modern Faith, whose
corner-stone is belief in human nature, to the deliverance of
that innocent victim of the doctrine of original sinfulness, the
poor infant; born in sin, and the child of wrath, whose whole
education from the ceremony of exorcism gone through at
baptism upwards, was conducted on the principle that the sinful
nature inherited at birth had to be subdued, if not eradicated.
Rousseau, starting from the principle of trust in the natural
goodness of man, made the aim of education the encouragement
and development of moral and mental faculties, in the order and
by the plan indicated by nature. The aim of the parent or
teacher must be to study the method of nature and to make his
own method correspond with it. Thus, as the child feels before
it thinks, the effort must be to give it just and clear impressions of
sensible objects before attempting to impose upon its dawning
intelligence ideas it cannot grasp until experience has developed
powers of comparison and reflection. We have only to consult
former treatises upon education to understand how directly this
is opposed to the old system that considered no time was to be
lost in taking possession of the young mind, and filling it with the
abstract truths of religion, before the deceitful senses and per-
verted human understanding had inclined it to error. This is the
intellectual side of the question. But the moral is even graver.
Guardians of the young who, like St. Augustin, discovered malice,
gluttony and evil temper, in the babe at its mother's breast, were
naturally taken up with watching to uproot the springing seeds of
evil, and constant punishment and reproof became the necessary
employment of the educator; it was Rousseau who gave him the
kinder and more hopeful task of protecting and strengthening
the growth of true instincts and generous impulses, and of con-
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. 17
tinuing and perfecting instead of contradicting and transforming
the work of nature.
It is, of course, very easy to prove that the “Emile” cannot be
followed out in every detail, nor accepted literally as giving a
precise plan of education. Rousseau does not profess to lay down
hard and fast rules; what he attempted to do, what he actually
did, in the “Emile” was to revolutionise the whole theory of
education by establishing a new starting-point. By the “Emile”
education was brought under the influence of the new faith in
man and nature, and the rights of man more firmly established by
the recognition of the rights of children. In Rousseau, then, we
have the father and founder of the modern theory of education, just
as we have in him the first exponent of the modern political ideal,
and of the sentiment for nature that is the distinguishing influence
that makes itself felt in modern literature and art.
Theimmediate effect of the “Emile,” apart from the persecution
it drew down upon its author, was the revival of the sense of parental
duty and affection, especially amongst those brilliant and out-
wardly callous women of the world, whom Rousseau knew to be
more sick at heart than vicious, the victims of a system that
condemned them to loveless marriages and childless homes; and
that made the principal affair of their lives, in many instances, the
concealment of the humiliation and pain brought them by the
thoroughly ugly sentiment that called itself by the name of
“gallantry’ in the eighteenth century.
It was Rousseau who first tore the veil and declared that these
flattered and spoiled sovereigns of society were women who had
been wronged and robbed.
And the proof that he was right is that these very women of
the great world, whose faults he criticised so rudely, and to whose
accomplished wit and grace he professed himself indifferent, were
his secret or open worshippers his life through, and his warmest
defenders after his death.
“How can we remember his faults P” said one of them, “He
has taught us the duties of motherhood.”
And here it might seem cowardly in me, as a believer in
Rousseau's absolute sincerity, were I to pass over the charge of
hypocrisy often made against the author of “Emile,” on the ground
that whilst he himself advocated the cause of the children, and
recalled others to a sense of their parental duties, he himself
neglected these duties, and sent his own children to the
Foundling Hospital. Well, I certainly shall not attempt to whiten
or wash away the one serious stain that must for ever blot
Rousseau's reputation, but this I will say, that whatever the
production of the “Emile” proves, it certainly does not show that
Rousseau was a hypocrite. Remember, it was not the author of
the “Emile” who repudiated his children, but the man who, ten
18 JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
years earlier, had let his extreme poverty and the bad example of
others persuade him that he could without sin leave his children
to the mercy of strangers, who did not hesitate to bring down
condemnation upon himself by denouncing his own conduct, and
conduct like his own, in the “Emile.”
And in acting as he did, Rousseau must have foreseen
perfectly the storm he was stirring up against himself. When he
wrote the “Emile,” he had quarrelled with Voltaire, Grimm, and
Diderot, and knew himself to be surrounded by enemies eagerly on
the watch to ruin him in public esteem,yet whilst these enemies were
exaggerating mere faults of temper into atrocious crimes, they
never thought of reproaching him with having sent his illegitimate
children to the Foundling Hospital, so perfectly was this conduct
in accordance with the manners and morals of the time, and so
amply did it seem excused by Rousseau's great poverty, and the
character of his relations with Thérèse Levasseur. It was
Rousseau who opened their eyes to the enormity of his own
fault, and who placed in their hands the weapon they did not
hesitate to use against him. Under these circumstances the
“Emile” was a proof of sincerity that, if it does not atone for the
fault, at least proves Rousseau's remorse for it.
As to the fault itself, let us at once admit that no excuse can
be held sufficient for it; at the same time, I believe that careful
and impartial students of Rousseau's character will discover that,
however inexcusable, the fault was not only natural, but in-
evitable. We must remember this man's early training, or, rather,
want of training, and then we must attempt to realise his circum-
stances at the time when he repudiated his children. Sharing a
garret with Thérèse, and earning his bread and hers precariously
from day to day as a copyist of music; whilst all his moral
enthusiasm was for the time being directed to keeping aloof from
the wealthy and interested patrons who alone in this age made
the profession of letters a paying concern. At this very time
Rousseau had steadily refused a highly-salaried post, the duties of
which he felt himself incompetent to fulfil, and had made the vow
that he would keep his spiritual independence by avoiding all
temptations of serving the interests of men in power, who would
expect him to palter with the truth in exchange for their benefits.
Then we must remember that at this time Rousseau was so far
from holding his later views of parental obligations, that he
honestly and steadily supported the view set forth in Plato's
“Republic” that it is for the advantage of the State that all
children should be brought up equally in ignorance of their parents,
and as children of the State. Remembering all this, we must ask
ourselves how this impractical and impracticable man was to
overcome the difficulties and temptations that assailed him, and
to come out of this trial triumphantly P. There was no moral
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. I9
energy or strength in him, and he fell, and did not triumph. Here
we have the explanation of his conduct, if not the excuse for it.
How this conduct appeared to himselfat the time we can best judge
by consulting a letter of his own, fearlessly defending himself, on
the ground that he has considered his children's interest before
his own feelings. “Yes, Madame,” he wrote to Madame de
Franceuil in April, 1751, “I have sent my children to the
Foundling Hospital. I have charged with their support the
establishment instituted for that purpose. If my poverty and
misfortunes prevent me from myself fulfilling a natural duty, this is
a misfortune for which you should pity me, and not a crime with
which you should reproach me. It was my duty to secure them
their support, and I have secured it for them, better, or at least
more safely, than I could otherwise have done. This was bound
to be my first consideration. . . You know my circumstances.
I gain from day to day, and with difficulty, my own bread. How
could I feed a family P. Were I to try the trade of author, what
peace would domestic cares and the turmoil of children leave me
in my poor garret to make such a trade lucrative P And then
writings dictated by hunger have small worth. Such a resource
would soon be exhausted. What would be left 2 I should be
forced to have recourse to intrigue and trickery. I might hunt up
some employment and make it a paying concern by the usual
devices, or else consent to starve upon it; in a word, I might
practise myself the very infamies I have condemned, and regard
with horror—What? Should I nourish myself, my children, and
their mother, on blood drained from the poor? No, madam;
better my children should be orphans than have a scoundrel for
their father. But this is not all. Suffering from a painful and
mortal complaint, I cannot expect a long life. Even if I could
contrive to support these unhappy children during my own life-
time—destined to suffer more later on—they would pay dearly
for being more delicately cared for than they now are for a time.
Their mother is even less able to support them than I am ; bur-
thened with her own support, she would be forced to abandon
them, and I see no resource for them but to become thieves and
vagabonds. But one should not have children, you will say, if
one cannot maintain them. Pardon me, madame, nature meant
we should have children, since she has supplied enough for all.
But it is the wealthy class—your class—that deprives my class of
bread for their children. Still, the children must have bread, and
I have secured them this. Did no asylum exist, be sure I would
myself have starved before they should. But perhaps this name
of ‘Foundling Hospital' misleads you? You imagine children
are left out in the street, at the risk of perishing if not found and
rescued. Be sure you have not more horror than I of any un-
worthy father capable of such a barbarous action. These are
2O JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU.
well-established rules. Inform yourself what these are, and you
will learn that the child only leaves the midwife's arms for those of a
nurse. I know that these children are not daintily brought up,
but so much the better for them, they will become all the more
robust. They are not made fine gentlemen, but peasants or
artisans. I see nothing in this education I would not have chosen
myself for them. Were I the master, I would not prepare them
by luxury for future hardships. By the simple education that will
be given them they will be made happier men than their father.
But this education is poor and disgraceful? Ah, yes, here is the
crime, and you do not see that in following the prejudice of the
world you mistake for the disgrace of vice what is only that of
poverty.” Well, ten years later Rousseau saw his own conduct
differently, and the expiation he made for his fault was to expose
the falseness of the arguments that had led him astray, to acknow-
ledge fully his own unpardonable error, and to accept in silence
the flood of ridicule and abuse he thus drew down upon himself.
But when we have said all that can be said of this and other
lesser faults of conduct that can be found in Jean Jacques Rous-
seau, the principal fact still remains the same—that this man, with
all his weaknesses and to a great extent because of the regrets brought
him by his weaknesses, performed the task a stronger and more per-
fect being would hardly have accomplished. Here we have what is
vitally true and impressive. No advantage, no illumination, has
been or ever can be gained by studying the life of Jean Jacques
Rousseau as one of tragical failure and disappointment. No
doubt the faults and miseries of Rousseau's life were great; but
it shows a want of sensibility, and is as well a critical blunder, to
concentrate attention upon these faults and miseries in such a
way as to obscure the fact that the benefits he has conferred upon
mankind, and the spiritual triumphs he attained are greater and
more astounding. Drawn into conflict with the most finished intelli-
gence of his age, this sick, solitary and susceptible Jean Jacques was
grievously vexed indeed, tormented and torn, but never overthrown.
From the time of the publication of his first discourse onwards,
his personal influence never waned, but grew always, and waxed
more strong. Philosophers, courtiers, priests, and populace,
strove against him vainly. Ridiculed, calumniated, betrayed,
persecuted, hunted from place to place, maddened in the end,
he still lives and rules in the hearts and lives of men and women,
the sovereign spirit of the age. And when we look back now
across the flame and fierceness of that angry fire of the Revolu-
tion that until recently has left much darkness immediately behind
it, it is still Jean Jacques Rousseau whom we find, the blind
inspired man of Nature, and not any one amongst the perfectly
disciplined men of intelligence who despised him, with power not
only to kindle the flames of Revolution, but to pass through and
survive them.