ROUSSEAU 27 picions of suicide having at the time and since bsen fre- quent. On the whole the theory of a natural death due to a fit of apoplexy and perhaps to injuries inflicted accident- ally during that fit seems most probable. He had always suffered from internal and constitutional ailments not unlikely to bring about such an end. Rousseau's character, the history of his reputation, and the intrinsic value of his literary work are all subjects of much interest. 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'Epinaj r , he was not wholly sane the 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. Freron on the orthodox side had his share of it, as well as Voltaire, Helvetius, 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 Helvetius ; 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 Freron and Diderot. When he was molested he could only shriek at his enemies and suspect his friends, and, being more given than any man whom history mentions to this latter weakness, he suffered intensely from it. His moral character was undoubtedly weak in other ways than this, but it is fair to remember that but for his astounding Confessions the more disgusting parts of it would not have been known, and that these Confessions were written, if not under hallucination, at any rate in circumstances entitling the self-condemned criminal to the benefit of very considerable doubt. If Rousseau had held his tongue, he might have stood lower as a man of letters ; he would pretty certainly have stood higher as a man. He was, moreover, really sinned against, if still more sinning. The conduct of Grimm to him was certainly very bad ; and, though AValpole was not his personal friend, a worse action than his famous letter, considering the well-known idiosyncrasy of the subject, would be difficult to find. It was his own fault that he saddled himself with the Le Vasseurs, but their conduct was probably if not certainly ungrateful in the extreme. Only excuses can be made for him ; but the excuses for a man born, as Hume after the quarrel said of him, " without a skin " are numerous and strong. It was to be expected that his peculiar reputation would increase rather than diminish after his death ; and it did so. During his life his personal peculiarities and the fact that his opinions were nearly as obnoxious to the one party as to the other worked against him, but it was not so after his death. The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were very far from idolizing him as a revolutionist. His style was taken up by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and by Chateaubriand. It was employed for purposes quite different from those to which he had himself applied it, and the reaction triumphed by the very arms which had been most powerful in the hands of the Revolution. Byron's fervid panegyric en- listed on his side all who admired Byron that is to say, the majority of the younger men and women of Europe between 1820 and 1850 and thus different sides of his tradition were continued for a full century after the publication of his chief books. His religious unorthodox}* was condoned because he never scoffed ; his political heresies, after their first effect was over, seemed harmless from the very want of logic and practical spirit in them, while part at least of his literary secret was the common property of almost everyone who attempted literature. At the present day persons as different as M. Renan and Mr Ruskin are children of Rousseau. It is therefore important to characterize this influence which was and is so powerful, and there are three points of view those of religion, politics, and literature which it is necessary to take in doing this. In religion Rousseau was undoubtedly what he has been called above a sentimental deist ; but no one who reads him with the smallest attention can fail to see that sentimentalism was the essence, deism the accident of his creed. In his time ortho- doxy at once generous and intelligent hardly existed in France. There were ignorant persons who were sincerely orthodox ; there were intelligent persons who pretended to be so. But between the time of Massillon and D'Aguesseau and the time of Lamennais and Joseph de Maistre the class of men of whom in England Berkeley, Butler, and Johnson were representatives simply did not exist in France. Little inclined by nature to any but the emotional side of religion, and utterly undisciplined in any other by education, course of life, or the general tendency of public opinion, Rousseau naturally took refuge in the nebulous kind of natural religion which was at once fashionable and convenient. If his practice fell very far short even of his own very arbitrary standard of morality as much may be said of persons far more dogmatically orthodox. In politics, on the other hand, there is no doubt that Rousseau was a sincere and, as far as in him lay, a convinced republican. He had no great tincture of learning, he was by no means a profound logician, and he was impulsive and emotional in the extreme characteristics which in political matters undoubtedly predispose the subject to the preference of equality above all political requisites. He saw that under the French monarchy the actual result was the greatest misery of the greatest number, and he did not look much further. The Contrat Social is for the political student one of the most curious and interesting books existing. Historically it is null ; logically it is full of gaping flaws ; practically its manipulations of the volonU de tous and the volonte ginirale are clearly insufficient to obviate anarchy. But its mixture of real eloquence and apparent cogency is exactly such as always carries a multitude with it, if only for a time. Moreover, in some minor branches of politics and economics Rousseau was a real reformer. Visionaiy as his educational schemes (chiefly promulgated in &nile] are in parts, they are admirable in others, and his protest against mothers refusing to nurse their children hit a blot in French life which is not removed yet, and has always been a source of weakness to the nation. But it is as a literary man pure and simple that is to say, as an exponent rather than as an originator of ideas that Rousseau is most noteworthy, and that he has exercised most influence. The first thing noticeable about him is that he defies all customary and mechanical classification. He is not a dramatist his work as such is insignificant nor a novelist, for, though his two chief works except the Confessions are called novels, Anile is one only in name, and La Nouvelle Ilelolsc is as a story diffuse, prosy, and awkward to a degree. He was perfectly without command of poetic form, and he could only be called a philosopher in an age when the term was used with such meaningless laxity as was customary in the 18th century. If he must be classed, he was before all things a describer a describer of the passions of the human heart and of the beauties of nature. In the first part of his vocation the novelists of his own youth, such as Marivaux, Richardson, and Prevost, may be said to have shown him the way, though he improved greatly upon them ; in the second he was almost a creator. In combining the two and expressing the effect of nature on the feelings and of the feelings on the aspect of nature he was absolutely without a forerunner or a model. And, as literature since his time has been chiefly differentiated from literature before it by the colour and tone resulting from this combination, Rousseau may be said to hold, as an influence, a place almost unrivalled in literary history. The defects of all sentimental writing occasional triviality and exag- geration of trivial things, diffuseness, overstrained emotion, false sentiment, disregard of the intellectual and the practical are of course noticeable in him, but they are excused and palliated by his wonderful feeling, and by what may be called the passionate sincerity even of his insincere passages. Some cavils have been made against his French, but none of much weight or importance. And in such passages as the famous " Voila de la pervenche " of the Confessions, as the description of the isle of St Pierre in the Reveries, as some of the letters in the Nouvelle Helolse and others, he has achieved the greatest success possible that of absolute perfection in doing what he intended to do. The reader, as it has been said, may think he might have done something else with advantage, but he can hardly think that he could have done this thing better. The dates of most of Rousseau's works published during his lifetime have been given above. The Confessions and Reveries, which, read in private, had given much umbrage to persons concerned, and . which the author did not intend to be published until the end of the century, appeared at Geneva in 1782. In the same year and the following appeared a complete edition in forty-seven small volumes. There have been many since, the most important of them being that of Musset- Pathay (Paris, 1823). Some unpublished works, chiefly letters, were added by Bosscha (Paris, 1858) and Streckeisen Moultou (Paris, 1861). The most con- venient edition is perhaps that of Didot in 4 vols. large 8vo, but a handsome and well-edited collection is still something of a desideratum. AVorks on Rousseau are innumerable. The chief aie in French that of Saint Marc Girardin (1874), in English the excellent book of Mr John Morley. (G. SA.) ROUSSEAU, THEODORE (1812-1867), a distinguished landscape painter, was born at Paris, and studied in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, after which he spent some time in travelling and making studies of landscape and sky effects. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1834, obtained gold medals in 1849 and 1854, and in 1852 received the Legion of Honour. His paintings became very popular in France, and Rousseau grew to be the acknowledged founder of the modern realistic school of landscape. He was largely influenced in style by Constable and Turner, the former of whom was perhaps more thoroughly appreci- ated in France than in England. The influence of Turner is clearly seen in some of Rousseau's pictures, with striking effects of cloud or storm, as, for example, in his Effet de Soleil and Apres la Pluie (1852), in the Matinee
