Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/818

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ROUSSEAU, J. J.
777


Montmorency. A letter to Voltaire on his poem about the Lisbon earthquake embittered the dislike between the two, being surreptitiously published. La Nouvelle H éloise appeared in the same year (1760), and it was immensely popular. In 1762 appeared the Contrat social at Amsterdam, and Emile, which was published both in the Low Countries and at Paris. For the latter the author received 6000 livres, for the Contrat 1000. Julie, on La Nouvelle Héloise, is a novel written in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman. It is too long, the sentiment is over strained, and severe moralists have accused it of a certain complaisance in dealing with amatory errors; but it is full of pathos and knowledge of the human heart. The Contrat social, as its title implies, endeavours to base all government on the consent, direct or implied, of the governed, and indulges in much ingenious argument to get rid of the practical inconveniences of such a suggestion. Emile, the second title of which is De l'Education, is much more of a treatise than of a novel, though a certain amount of narrative interest is kept up throughout. Rousseau's reputation was now higher than ever, but the term of the comparative prosperity which he had enjoyed for nearly ten years was at hand. The Contra! social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Héloise was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the “Profession du vicaire Savoyard” in Emile irritated equally the philosopher party and the church. On June 11, 1762, Emile was condemned by the parlement of Paris, and two days previously Madame de Luxembourg and the prince de Conti gave the author information that he would be arrested if he did not Hy. They also furnished him with means of flight, and he made for Yverdun in the territory of Bern, whence he transferred himself to Motiers in Neuchatel, which then belonged to Prussia. Frederick II. was not indisposed to protect the persecuted when it cost him nothing and might bring him fame, and in Marshal Keith, the governor of Neuchatel, Rousseau found a true and firm friend. He was, however, unable to be quiet or to practise any of those more or less pious frauds which were customary at the time with the unorthodox. The archbishop of Paris had published a pastoral against him, and Rousseau did not let the year pass without a Lettre d M . de Beaumont. The council of Geneva had joined in the condemnation of Emile, and Rousseau first solemnly renounced his citizenship, and then, in the Lettres de la montagne (1763), attacked the council and the Genevan constitution unsparingly. All this excited public opinion against him, and gradually he grew unpopular in his own neighbourhood. This unpopularity is said on uncertain authority to have culminated in a nocturnal attack on his house., At any rate he thought he was menaced if he was not, and migrated to the Ile St Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where he once more for a short, and the last, time enjoyed that idyllic existence which he loved. But the Bernese government ordered him to' quit its territory. He was for some time uncertain' where to go, and thought of Corsica (to join Paoli) and Berlin. But finally David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in England, and he accepted., He passed through Paris, where his presence was tolerated for a time, and landed in England on January 13, 1766. Thérése travelled separately, and was entrusted to' the charge of James Boswell, who had already made Rousseau's acquaintance. Here he had once more a chance of settling peaceably. Severe English moralists like Johnson thought but ill of him, but the public generally was not unwilling to testify against French intolerance, and regarded his sentimentalism with favour. He was lionized in London to his heart's content and discontent, for it may truly be said of Rousseau that he was equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention. When, after not a few displays of his strange humour, he professed himself tired of the capital, Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr Davenport at Wootton in Derbyshire. Here, though the place was bleak and lonely, he might have been happy enough, and he actually employed himself in writing the greater part of his Confessions. But his habit of self-tormenting and tormenting others never left him. His own caprices interposed some delay in the conferring of a pension which George III. was induced to grant him, and he took this as a crime of Hume's. The publication of a spiteful letter (really by Horace Walpole, one of whose worst deeds it was) in the name of the king of Prussia made Rousseau believe that plots of the most terrible kind were on foot against him. Finally he quarrelled with Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own friends and Rousseau's supposed enemies of the philosopher circle to be rascals. He remained, however, at Wootton during the year and through the winter. In May 1767 he fled to France, addressing letters to the lord chancellor and to General Conway, which can only be described as the letters of a lunatic. He was received in France by the marquis de Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), of whom he soon had enough, then by the .prince de Conti at Trye. From this place he again fled and wandered about for some time in a wretched fashion, still writing the Confessions, constantly receiving generous help, and always quarrelling with, or at least suspecting, the helpers. In the summer of 1770 he returned to Paris, resumed music-copying, and was on the whole happier than he had been since he had to leave Montlouis. He had by this time married Therese le Vasseur, or had at least gone through some form of marriage with her. Many of the best-known stories of Rousseau's life date from this last time, when he was tolerably accessible to visitors, though clearly half-insane. He finished his Confessions, wrote his Dialogues (the interest of which is not quite equal to the promise of their curious sub-title, Rousseau jugede Jean J aoques), and began his Réveries du promeneur solitaire, intended as a sequel and complement to the Confessions, and one of the best of all his books. It should be said that besides these, which complete the list of his principal works, he has left a very large number of minor works and a considerable correspondence. During this time he lived in the Rue Platiere, which is now named after him. But his suspicions of secret enemies grew stronger rather than weaker, and at the beginning of 1778 he was glad to accept the offer of M. de Girardin, a rich financier, and occupy a cottage at Ermenonville. The country was beautiful; but his old terrors revived, and his woes were complicated by the alleged inclination of Thérese for one of M. de Girardin's stable-boys. On July 2nd he died in a manner which has been much discussed, suspicions of suicide being circulated at the time by Grimm and others.1 There is little doubt that for the last ten or fifteen' years of his life, if not from the time of his quarrel with Diderot and Madame d'Epinay, Rousseau was not wholly sanwthe combined influence of late and unexpected literary fame and of constant solitude and discomfort acting upon his excitable temperament so as to overthrow the balance, never very stable, of his fine and acute but unrobust intellect. He was by no means the only man of letters of his time who had to submit to something like persecution. Fréron on the orthodox side had his share of it, as well as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot and Montesquieu on that of the innovators But Rousseau had not, like Montesquieu, a position which guaranteed him from serious danger; he was not wealthy like Helvétius, he had not the wonderful suppleness and trickiness which even without his wealth would probably have defended Voltaire himself; and he lacked entirely the “ bottom” of Fréron and Diderot. When he was molested he could only shriek at his 1 The local inquiry into the death, on the following day, resulted in a certificate that he died of apoplexy; but the story that he shot himself persisted. In December 1897 Rousseau's coffin in the Panthéon was opened, and M. Berthelot, who examined the skull, found no trace of injury by a bullet; and on the whole there is no reason to doubt the verdict of the original inquiry at Er1?§ nonvi§ le. CH.