A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted from men by a just G.o.d as indispensable to virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.[348] It was turning an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching inquiry and comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety.
"Then no other study will be possible but that of religion: hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar"s profession, as well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of a.s.sault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau"s gravely urged objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church.
Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he knew there is a supreme G.o.d, and that the soul must have here and hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing on its efficacy or conclusiveness.
Deism like the Savoyard Vicar"s opens no path for the future, because it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant"s recoil rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to a.s.sociate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an a.s.surance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard world of his own egotistic pa.s.sions, by the pain and sacrifice by which generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful character,--those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor h.e.l.l, in their religion, but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated grat.i.tude, and sovereign pitifulness.
And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger partic.i.p.ant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and r.e.t.a.r.ded mankind, because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the generation of the dead who have prepared the present, and by the purport of our hopes and the direction of our activity for the generations that are to fill the future, the religious sentiment will more and more attach itself to the great unseen host of our fellows who have gone before us and who are to come after. Such a faith is no rag of metaphysic floating in the sunshine of sentimentalism, like Rousseau"s faith. It rests on a positive base, which only becomes wider and firmer with the widening of experience and the augmentation of our skill in interpreting it.
Nor is it too transcendent for practical acceptance. One of the most scientific spirits of the eighteenth century, while each moment expecting the knock of the executioner at his door, found as religious a solace as any early martyr had ever found in his barbarous mysteries, when he linked his own efforts for reason and freedom with the eternal chain of the destinies of man. "This contemplation," he wrote and felt, "is for him a refuge into which the rancour of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights."[349]
This, to the shame of those wavering souls who despair of progress at the first moment when it threatens to leave the path that they have marked out for it, was written by a man at the very close of his days, when every hope that he had ever cherished seemed to one without the eye of faith to be extinguished in bloodshed, disorder, and barbarism.
But there is a still happier season in the adolescence of generous natures that have been wisely fostered, when the horizons of the dawning life are suddenly lighted up with a glow of aspiration towards good and holy things. Commonly, alas, this priceless opportunity is lost in a fit of theological exaltation, which is gradually choked out by the dusty facts of life, and slowly moulders away into dry indifference. It would not be so, but far different, if the Savoyard Vicar, instead of taking the youth to the mountain-top, there to contemplate that infinite unseen which is in truth beyond contemplation by the limited faculties of man, were to a.s.sociate these fine impulses of the early prime with the visible, intelligible, and still sublime possibilities of the human destiny,--that imperial conception, which alone can shape an existence of entire proportion in all its parts, and leave no natural energy of life idle or athirst. Do you ask for sanctions! One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in this faith, can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by wrong act or unworthy thought on the high memories with which he has been used to walk, and the discord wrought in hopes that have become the ruling harmony of his days.
FOOTNOTES:
[337] See Hallam"s _Literature of Europe_, Pt. I. ch. ii. -- 64. Again (for the 16th century), Pt. II. ch. ii. -- 53. See also for mention of a sect of deists at Lyons about 1560, Bayle"s Dictionary, _s.v._ Viret.
[338] See above, vol. i. pp. 223-227.
[339] _Emile_, IV. 163.
[340] IV. 183-185.
[341] M. Henri Martin"s _Hist. de France_, xvi. 101, where there is an interesting, but, as it seems to the present writer, hardly a successful attempt, to bring the Savoyard Vicar"s eloquence into scientific form.
[342] _Emile_, IV. 135.
[343] _Emile_, IV. 204.
[344] _Emile_, IV. 181, 182. In a letter to Vernes (Feb. 18, 1758.
_Corr._, ii. 9) he expresses his suspicion that possibly the souls of the wicked may be annihilated at their death, and that being and feeling may prove the first reward of a good life. In this letter he asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, "of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him."
[345] A similar disparagement of Socrates, in comparison with the Christ of the Gospels, is to be found in the long letter of Jan. 15, 1769 (_Corr._, vi. 59, 60), to M----, accompanied by a violent denigration of the Jews, conformably to the philosophic prejudice of the time.
[346] _Emile_, IV. 241, 242.
[347] _Emile_, IV. 243.
[348] IV. 210-236.
[349] Condorcet"s _Progres de l"Esprit Humain_ (1794). _Oeuv._, vi.
276.
CHAPTER VI.
ENGLAND.[350]
There is in an English collection a portrait of Jean Jacques, which was painted during his residence in this country by a provincial artist. Singular and displeasing as it is, yet this picture lights up for us many a word and pa.s.sage in Rousseau"s life here and elsewhere, which the ordinary engravings, and the trim self-complacency of the statue on the little island at Geneva, would leave very incomprehensible. It is almost as appalling in its realism as some of the dark pits that open before the reader of the Confessions. Hard struggles with objective difficulty and external obstacle wear deep furrows in the brow; they throw into the glance a solicitude, half penetrating and defiant, half dejected. When a man"s hindrances have sprung up from within, and the ill-fought battle of his days has been with his own pa.s.sions and morbid broodings and unchastened dreams, the eye and the facial lines tell the story of that profound moral defeat which is unlighted by the memories of resolute combat with evil and weakness, and leaves only eternal desolation and the misery that is formless. Our English artist has produced a vision from that prose Inferno which is made so populous in the modern epoch by impotence of will. Those who have seen the picture may easily understand how largely the character of the original must have been pregnant with hara.s.sing confusion and distress.
Four years before this (1762), Hume, to whom Lord Marischal had told the story of Rousseau"s persecutions, had proffered his services, and declared his eagerness to help in finding a proper refuge for him in England. There had been an exchange of cordial letters,[351] and then the matter had lain quiet, until the impossibility of remaining longer in Neuchatel had once more set his friends on procuring a safe establishment for their rather difficult refugee. Rousseau"s appearance in Paris had created the keenest excitement. "People may talk of ancient Greece as they please," wrote Hume from Paris, "but no nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged their attention as Rousseau! Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by him." Even Theresa Le Va.s.seur, who was declared very homely and very awkward, was more talked of than the Princess of Morocco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her fidelity towards him. His very dog had a name and reputation in the world.[352]
Rousseau is always said to have liked the stir which his presence created, but whether this was so or not, he was very impatient to be away from it as soon as possible.
In company with Hume, he left Paris in the second week of January 1766. They crossed from Calais to Dover by night in a pa.s.sage that lasted twelve hours. Hume, as the orthodox may be glad to know, was extremely ill, while Rousseau cheerfully pa.s.sed the whole night upon deck, taking no harm, though the seamen were almost frozen to death.[353] They reached London on the thirteenth of January, and the people of London showed nearly as lively an interest in the strange personage whom Hume had brought among them, as the people of Paris had done. A prince of the blood at once went to pay his respects to the Swiss philosopher. The crowd at the playhouse showed more curiosity when the stranger came in than when the king and queen entered. Their majesties were as interested as their subjects, and could scarcely keep their eyes off the author of Emilius. George III., then in the heyday of his youth, was so pleased to have a foreigner of genius seeking shelter in his kingdom, that he readily acceded to Conway"s suggestion, prompted by Hume, that Rousseau should have a pension settled on him. The ever ill.u.s.trious Burke, then just made member of Parliament, saw him nearly every day, and became persuaded that "he entertained no principle either to influence his heart, or guide his understanding, but vanity."[354] Hume, on the contrary, thought the best things of his client; "He has an excellent warm heart, and in conversation kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like inspiration; I love him much, and hope that I have some share in his affections.... He is a very modest, mild, well-bred, gentle-spirited and warm-hearted man, as ever I knew in my life. He is also to appearance very sociable. I never saw a man who seems better calculated for good company, nor who seems to take more pleasure in it." "He is a very agreeable, amiable man; but a great humorist. The philosophers of Paris foretold to me that I could not conduct him to Calais without a quarrel; but I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I believe one great source of our concord is that neither he nor I are disputatious, which is not the case with any of them. They are also displeased with him, because they think he over-abounds in religion; and it is indeed remarkable that the philosopher of this age who has been most persecuted, is by far the most devout."[355]
What the Scotch philosopher meant by calling his pupil a humorist, may perhaps be inferred from the story of the trouble he had in prevailing upon Rousseau to go to the play, though Garrick had appointed a special occasion and set apart a special box for him. When the hour came, Rousseau declared that he could not leave his dog behind him.
"The first person," he said, "who opens the door, Sultan will run into the streets in search of me and will be lost." Hume told him to lock Sultan up in the room, and carry away the key in his pocket. This was done, but as they proceeded downstairs, the dog began to howl; his master turned back and avowed he had not resolution to leave him in that condition. Hume, however, caught him in his arms, told him that Mr. Garrick had dismissed another company in order to make room for him, that the king and queen were expecting to see him, and that without a better reason than Sultan"s impatience it would be ridiculous to disappoint them. Thus, a little by reason, but more by force, he was carried off.[356] Such a story, whatever else we may think of it, shows at least a certain curious and not untouching simplicity. And singularity which made Rousseau like better to keep his dog company at home, than to be stared at by a gaping pit, was too private in its reward to be the result of that vanity and affectation with which he was taxed by men who lived in another sphere of motive.
There was considerable trouble in settling Rousseau. He was eager to leave London almost as soon as he arrived in it. Though pleased with the friendly reception which had been given him, he p.r.o.nounced London to be as much devoted to idle gossip and frivolity as other capitals.
He spent a few weeks in the house of a farmer at Chiswick, thought about fixing himself in the Isle of Wight, then in Wales, then somewhere in our fair Surrey, whose scenery, one is glad to know, greatly attracted him. Finally arrangements were made by Hume with Mr.
Davenport for installing him in a house belonging to the latter, at Wootton, near Ashbourne, in the Peak of Derbyshire.[357] Hither Rousseau proceeded with Theresa, at the end of March. Mr. Davenport was a gentleman of large property, and as he seldom inhabited this solitary house, was very willing that Rousseau should take up his abode there without payment. This, however, was what Rousseau"s independence could not brook, and he insisted that his entertainer should receive thirty pounds a year for the board of himself and Theresa.[358] So here he settled, in an extremely bitter climate, knowing no word of the language of the people about him, with no companionship but Theresa"s, and with nothing to do but walk when the weather was fair, play the harpsicord when it rained, and brood over the incidents which had occurred to him since he had left Switzerland six months before. The first fruits of this unfortunate leisure were a bitter quarrel with Hume, one of the most famous and far-resounding of all the quarrels of ill.u.s.trious men, but one about which very little needs now be said. The merits of it are plain, and all significance that may ever have belonged to it is entirely dead. The incubation of his grievances began immediately after his arrival at Wootton, but two months elapsed before they burst forth in full flame.[359]
The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D"Alembert were the other partners; and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render his life miserable. The particular acts on which this belief was established were the following:--
(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D"Alembert. It was really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris. Now Hume was the friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some papers. Although the false letter produced the liveliest amus.e.m.e.nt at Rousseau"s cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When Rousseau a.s.sured Hume that D"Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the latter to be Rousseau"s enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution from so many governments. England was proud of being his place of refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.
Suddenly and for no a.s.signable cause the public tone changed, the newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau was thought of no more. This must have been due to Hume, who had much influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5) Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau"s letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in the course of his dreams, _Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau_, with extreme vehemence--which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8) Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his best to combat it. On one of these occasions he was seized with remorse, fell upon Hume"s neck, embraced him warmly, and, suffocated with sobs and bathed in tears, cried out in broken accents, _No, no, David Hume is no traitor_, with many protests of affection.
The phlegmatic Hume only returned his embrace with politeness, stroked him gently on the back, and repeated several times in a tranquil voice, _Quoi, mon cher monsieur! Eh! mon cher monsieur! Quoi donc, mon cher monsieur!_[367] (9) Although for many weeks Rousseau had kept a firm silence to Hume, neglecting to answer letters that plainly called for answer, and marking his displeasure in other unmistakable ways, yet Hume had never sought any explanation of what must necessarily have struck him as so singular, but continued to write as if nothing had happened. Was not this positive proof of a consciousness of perfidy?
Some years afterwards he subst.i.tuted another shorter set of grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly as a bear.[368]
It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole"s very small pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the letter const.i.tuted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing the King of Prussia"s letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume"s agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau"s mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like these, the state of Hume"s mind towards his curious ward is abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as Rousseau"s grat.i.tude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau"s charges with gravity is irrational.
If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingrat.i.tude. He reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had once used of Rousseau"s character, and subst.i.tuting in their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D"Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various expressions in Hume"s narrative, which he p.r.o.nounced too harsh. It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of letters always does. The governing committee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man can have.
Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection.
Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer.
That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that pa.s.sed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot"s answer shows both how sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically serviceable.[372]
Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities sent the doc.u.ments to the British Museum. There was silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia.
Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and temperament between the king"s daughter and the executioner"s son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That Rousseau"s conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it extended. These conditions in Rousseau"s case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual const.i.tution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility. Corrective discipline from circ.u.mstance and from formal instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe"s Princess warn the hapless Ta.s.so:--
Dieser Pfad Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebusch, Durch stille Thaler fortzuwandern; mehr Und mehr verwohnt sich das Gemuth und strebt Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt, In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen, So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it.
The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.
"He has only _felt_ during the whole course of his life," wrote Hume sympathetically; "and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of; but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who was stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements."[374]
A morbid affective state of this kind and of such a degree of intensity, was the sure antecedent of a morbid intellectual state, general or partial, depressed or exalted. One who is the prey of unsound feelings, if they are only marked enough and persistent enough, naturally ends by a correspondingly unsound arrangement of all or some of his ideas to match. The intelligence is seduced into finding supports in misconception of circ.u.mstances, for a misconception of human relation which had its root in disordered emotion. This completes the breach of correspondence between the man"s nature and the external facts with which he has to deal, though the breach may not, and in Rousseau"s case certainly did not, extend along the whole line of feeling and judgment. Rousseau"s delusion about Hume"s sinister feeling and designs, which was the first definite manifestation of positive unsoundness in the sphere of the intelligence, was a last result of the gradual development of an inherited predisposition to affective unsoundness, which unhappily for the man"s history had never been counteracted either by a strenuous education, or by the wholesome urgencies of life.
We have only to remember that with him, as with the rest of us, there was entire unity of nature, without cataclysm or marvel or inexplicable rupture of mental continuity. All the facts came in an order that might have been foretold; they all lay together, with their foundations down in physical temperament; the facts which made Rousseau"s name renowned and his influence a great force, along with those which made his life a scandal to others and a misery to himself.
The deepest root of moral disorder lies in an immoderate expectation of happiness, and this immoderate unlawful expectation was the mark both of his character and his work. The exaltation of emotion over intelligence was the secret of his most striking production; the same exaltation, by gaining increased mastery over his whole existence, at length pa.s.sed the limit of sanity and wrecked him. The tendency of the dominant side of a character towards diseased exaggeration is a fact of daily observation. The ruin which the excess of strong religious imagination works in natures without the quality of energetic objective reaction, was shown in the case of Rousseau"s contemporary, Cowper. This gentle poet"s delusions about the wrath of G.o.d were equally pitiable and equally a source of torment to their victim, with Rousseau"s delusions about the malignity of his mysterious plotters among men. We must call such a condition unsound, but the important thing is to remember that insanity was only a modification of certain specially marked tendencies of the sufferer"s sanity.