Rousseau

Quid quod libelli Stoici inter sericos Jacere pulvillos amant?

So young mothers tried as well as they could to satisfy both desires, and their babes were brought to them at all unseasonable hours, while they were full of food and wine, or heated with dancing or play, and there received the nurture which, but for Rousseau, they would have drawn in more salutary sort from a healthy foster-mother in the country. This, however, was only an incidental drawback to a movement which was in its main lines full of excellent significance. The importance of giving freedom to the young limbs, of accustoming the body to rudeness and vicissitude of climate, of surrounding youth with light and cheerfulness and air, and even a tiny detail such as the propriety of subst.i.tuting for coral or ivory some soft substance against which the growing teeth might press a way without irritation, all these matters are handled with a fervid reality of interest that gives to the tedium of the nursery a genuine touch of the poetic.

Swathings, bandages, leading-strings, are condemned with a warmth like that with which the author had denounced comedy.[280] The city is held up to indignant reprobation as the gulf of infant life, just as it had been in his earlier pieces as the gulf of all the loftiest energies of the adult life. Every child ought to be born and nursed in the country, and it would be all the better if it remained in the country to the last day of its existence. You must accustom it little by little to the sight of disagreeable objects, such as toads and snakes; also in the same gradual manner to the sound of alarming noises, beginning with snapping a cap in a pistol. If the infant cries from pain which you cannot remove, make no attempt to soothe it; your caresses will not lessen the anguish of its colic, while the child will remember what it has to do in order to be coaxed and to get its own way. The nurse may amuse it by songs and lively cries, but she is not to din useless words into its ears; the first articulations that come to it should be few, easy, distinct, frequently repeated, and only referring to objects which may be shown to the child. "Our unlucky facility in cheating ourselves with words that we do not understand, begins earlier than we suppose." Let there be no haste in inducing the child to speak articulately. The evil of precipitation in this respect is not that children use and hear words without sense, but that they use and hear them in a different sense from our own, without our perceiving it. Mistakes of this sort, committed thus early, have an influence, even after they are cured, over the turn of the mind for the rest of the creature"s life. Hence it is a good thing to keep a child"s vocabulary as limited as possible, lest it should have more words than ideas, and should say more than it can possibly realise in thought.[281]

In moral as in intellectual habits, the most perilous interval in human life is that between birth and the age of twelve. The great secret is to make the early education purely negative; a process of keeping the heart, naturally so good, clear of vice, and the intelligence, naturally so true, clear of error. Take for first, second, and third precept, to follow nature and leave her free to the performance of her own tasks. Until the age of reason, there can be no idea of moral beings or social relations. Therefore, says Rousseau, no moral discussion. Locke"s maxim in favour of constantly reasoning with children was a mistake. Of all the faculties of man, reason, which is only a compound of the rest, is that which is latest in development, and yet it is this which we are to use to develop those which come earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful doctors and old infants.

To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to practise it. But n.o.body will deny the expediency of an intelligent acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a subst.i.tute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man"s life that demand the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using the mind be any exception?

Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable of Rousseau"s notions about education, though he by no means consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this fatuous subst.i.tution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible circ.u.mstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter, may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms, moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics, with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats, chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of Pinel.

It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young, and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by a.s.sociating it with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless for want of ready conclusions.

The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by having something of his own. But how are we to teach him the significance of a thing being one"s own? It is a prime rule to attempt to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a child"s mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time, labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer, as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was his land; that n.o.body touches the garden of his neighbour, in order that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short a time before.

Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight in their ingenuity. Besides the ill.u.s.tration of the origin and significance of property, there is the complex fancy in which a juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.

The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and weariness, and then is led on by his cunning tutor to a series of inferences from the position of the sun and so forth, which convince him that his home is just over the hedge, where it is duly found to be.[285] Here, again, is the way in which the instructor proposes to stir activity of limb in the young Emilius. "In walking with him of an afternoon, I used sometimes to put in my pocket two cakes of a sort he particularly liked; we each of us ate one. One day he perceived that I had three cakes; he could easily have eaten six; he promptly despatches his own, to ask me for the third. Nay, I said to him, I could well eat it myself, or we would divide it, but I would rather see it made the prize of a running match between the two little boys there." The little boys run their race, and the winner devours the cake. This and subsequent repet.i.tions of the performance at first only amused Emilius, but he presently began to reflect, and perceiving that he also had two legs, he began privately to try how fast he could run. When he thought he was strong enough, he importuned his tutor for the third cake, and on being refused, insisted on being allowed to compete for it. The habit of taking exercise was not the only advantage gained. The tutor resorted to a variety of further stratagems in order to induce the boy to find out and practise visual compa.s.s, and so forth.[286] If we consider, as we have said, first the readiness of children to suspect a stratagem wherever instruction is concerned, and next their resentment on discovering artifice of that kind, all this seems as little likely to be successful as it is a.s.suredly contrary to Rousseau"s general doctrine of leaving circ.u.mstances to lead.

In truth Rousseau"s appreciation of the real nature of spontaneousness in the processes of education was essentially inadequate, and that it was so, arose from a no less inadequate conception of the right influence upon the growing character, of the great principle of authority. His dread lest the child should ever be conscious of the pressure of a will external to its own, const.i.tuted a fundamental weakness of his system. The child, we are told with endless repet.i.tion, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret preparation of artificial sets of circ.u.mstances, alike in work and in amus.e.m.e.nt. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]

The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the child"s nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the actor"s own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with the t.i.tle of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them from yielding to a given impulse. Rousseau was quite right in insisting on practical experience of consequences as the only secure foundation for self-acting habit; he was fatally wrong in mutilating this experience by the exclusion from it of the effects of perceiving, resisting, accepting, ignoring, all will and authority from without. The great, and in many respects so admirable, school of Rousseauite philanthropists, have always been feeble on this side, alike in the treatment of the young by their instructors, and the treatment of social offenders by a government.

Again, consider the large group of excellent qualities which are a.s.sociated with affectionate respect for a more fully informed authority. In a world where necessity stands for so much, it is no inconsiderable gain to have learnt the lesson of docility on easy terms in our earliest days. If in another sense the will of each individual is all-powerful over his own destinies, it is best that this idea of firm purpose and a settled energy that will not be denied, should grow up in the young soul in connection with a riper wisdom and an ampler experience than its own; for then, when the time for independent action comes, the force of the a.s.sociation will continue. Finally, although none can be vicariously wise, none sage by proxy, nor any pay for the probation of another, yet is it not a puerile wastefulness to send forth the young all bare to the ordeal, while the armour of old experience and tempered judgment hangs idle on the wall? Surely it is thus by acc.u.mulation of instruction from generation to generation, that the area of right conduct in the world is extended. Such instruction must with youth be conveyed by military word of command as often as by philosophical persuasion of its worth.

Nor is the atmosphere of command other than bracing, even to those who are commanded. If education is to be mainly conducted by force of example, it is a dreadful thing that the child is ever to have before its eyes as living type and practical exemplar the pale figure of parents without pa.s.sions, and without a will as to the conduct of those who are dependent on them. Even a slight excess of anger, impatience, and the spirit of command, would be less demoralising to the impressionable character than the constant sight of a man artificially impa.s.sive. Rousseau is perpetually calling upon men to try to lay aside their masks; yet the model instructor whom he has created for us is to be the most artfully and elaborately masked of all men; unless he happens to be naturally without blood and without physiognomy.

Rousseau, then, while he put away the old methods which imprisoned the young spirit in injunctions and over-solicitous monitions, yet did none the less in his own scheme imprison it in a kind of hothouse, which with its regulated temperature and artificially contrived access of light and air, was in many respects as little the method of nature, that is to say it gave as little play for the spontaneous working and growth of the forces of nature in the youth"s breast, as that regimen of the cloister which he so profoundly abhorred. Partly this was the result of a ludicrously shallow psychology. He repeats again and again that self-love is the one quality in the youthful embryo of character, from which you have to work. From this, he says, springs the desire of possessing pleasure and avoiding pain, the great fulcrum on which the lever of experience rests. Not only so, but from this same unslumbering quality of self-love you have to develop regard for others. The child"s first affection for his nurse is a result of the fact that she serves his comfort, and so down to his pa.s.sion in later years for his mistress. Now this is not the place for a discussion as to the ultimate atom of the complex moral sentiments of men and women, nor for an examination of the question whether the faculty of sympathy has or has not an origin independent of self-love. However that may be, no one will deny that sympathy appears in good natures extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very first. Here is the only adequate key to that education of the affections, from their rudimentary expansion in the nursery, until they include the complete range of all the objects proper to them.

One secret of Rousseau"s omission of this, the most important of all educating agencies, from the earlier stages of the formation of character, was the fact which is patent enough in every page, that he was not animated by that singular tenderness and almost mystic affection for the young, which breathes through the writings of some of his German followers, of Richter above all others, and which reveals to those who are sensible of it, the hold that may so easily be gained for all good purposes upon the eager sympathy of the youthful spirit. The instructor of Emilius speaks the words of a wise onlooker, sagely meditating on the ideal man, rather than of a parent who is living the life of his child through with him. Rousseau"s interest in children, though perfectly sincere, was still aesthetic, moral, reasonable, rather than that pure flood of full-hearted feeling for them, which is perhaps seldom stirred except in those who have actually brought up children of their own. He composed a vindication of his love for the young in an exquisite piece;[289] but it has none of the yearnings of the bowels of tenderness.

II.

Education being the art of preparing the young to grow into instruments of happiness for themselves and others, a writer who undertakes to speak about it must naturally have some conception of the kind of happiness at which his art aims. We have seen enough of Rousseau"s own life to know what sort of ideal he would be likely to set up. It is a healthier epicureanism, with enough stoicism to make happiness safe in case that circ.u.mstances should frown. The man who has lived most is not he who has counted most years, but he who has most felt life.[290] It is mere false wisdom to throw ourselves incessantly out of ourselves, to count the present for nothing, ever to pursue without ceasing a future which flees in proportion as we advance, to try to transport ourselves from whence we are not, to some place where we shall never be.[291] He is happiest who suffers fewest pains, and he is most miserable who feels fewest pleasures. Then we have a half stoical strain. The felicity of man here below is only a negative state, to be measured by the more or less of the ills he undergoes. It is in the disproportion between desires and faculties that our misery consists. Happiness, therefore, lies not in diminishing our desires, nor any more in extending our faculties, but in diminishing the excess of desire over faculty, and in bringing power and will into perfect balance.[292] Excepting health, strength, respect for one"s self, all the goods of this life reside in opinion; excepting bodily pain and remorse of conscience, all our ills are in imagination. Death is no evil; it is only made so by half-knowledge and false wisdom. "Live according to nature, be patient, and drive away physicians; you will not avoid death, but you will only feel it once, while they on the other hand would bring it daily before your troubled imagination, and their false art, instead of prolonging your days, only hinders you from enjoying them. Suffer, die, or recover; but above all things live, live up to your last hour." It is foresight, constantly carrying us out of ourselves, that is the true source of our miseries.[293] O man, confine thy existence within thyself, and thou wilt cease to be miserable. Thy liberty, thy power, reach exactly as far as thy natural forces, and no further; all the rest is slavery and illusion. The only man who has his own will is he who does not need in order to have it the arms of another person at the end of his own.[294]

The training that follows from this is obvious. The instructor has carefully to distinguish true or natural need from the need which is only fancied, or which only comes from superabundance of life.

Emilius, who is brought up in the country, has nothing in his room to distinguish it from that of a peasant.[295] If he is taken to a luxurious banquet, he is bidden, instead of heedlessly enjoying it, to reflect austerely how many hundreds or thousands of hands have been employed in preparing it.[296] His preference for gay colours in his clothes is to be consulted, because this is natural and becoming to his age, but the moment he prefers a stuff merely because it is rich, behold a sophisticated creature.[297] The curse of the world is inequality, and inequality springs from the mult.i.tude of wants, which cause us to be so much the more dependent. What makes man essentially good is to have few wants, and to abstain from comparing himself with others; what makes him essentially bad, is to have many wants, and to cling much to opinion.[298] Hence, although Emilius happened to have both wealth and good birth, he is not brought up to be a gentleman, with the prejudices and helplessness and selfishness too naturally a.s.sociated with that abused name.

This cardinal doctrine of limitation of desire, with its corollary of self-sufficience, contains in itself the great maxim that Emilius and every one else must learn some trade. To work is an indispensable duty in the social man. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a knave. And every boy must learn a real trade, a trade with his hands. It is not so much a matter of learning a craft for the sake of knowing one, as for the sake of conquering the prejudices which despise it. Labour for glory, if you have not to labour from necessity. Lower yourself to the condition of the artisan, so as to be above your own. In order to reign in opinion, begin by reigning over it. All things well considered, the trade most to be preferred is that of carpenter; it is clean, useful, and capable of being carried on in the house; it demands address and diligence in the workman, and though the form of the work is determined by utility, still elegance and taste are not excluded.[299] There are few prettier pictures than that where Sophie enters the workshop, and sees in amazement her young lover at the other end, in his white shirt-sleeves, his hair loosely fastened back, with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, too intent upon his work to perceive even the approach of his mistress.[300]

When the revolution came, and princes and n.o.bles wandered in indigent exile, the disciples of Rousseau pointed in unkind triumph to the advantage these unfortunate wretches would have had if they had not been too puffed up with the vanity of feudalism to follow the prudent example of Emilius in learning a craft. That Rousseau should have laid so much stress on the vicissitudes of fortune, which might cause even a king to be grateful one day that he had a trade at the end of his arms, is sometimes quoted as a proof of his foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva had gone into exile, rather than endure the humiliation of their party.[301]

Besides all this, the propriety of being able to earn one"s bread by some kind of toil that would be useful in even the simplest societies, flowed necessarily from every part of his doctrine of the aims of life and the worth of character. He did, however, say, "We approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions," which proved true, but he added too much when he p.r.o.nounced it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe could last long.[302] And it is certain that the only one of the great monarchies which did actually fall would have had a far better chance of surviving if Lewis XVI. had been as expert in the trade of king as he was in that of making locks and bolts.

From this semi-stoical ideal there followed certain social notions, of which Rousseau had the distinction of being the most powerful propagator. As has so often been said, his contemporaries were willing to leave social questions alone, provided only the government would suffer the free expression of opinion in literature and science.

Rousseau went deeper. His moral conception of individual life and character contained in itself a social conception, and he did not shrink from boldly developing it. The rightly const.i.tuted man suffices for himself and is free from prejudices. He has arms, and knows how to use them; he has few wants, and knows how to satisfy them. Nurtured in the most absolute freedom, he can think of no worse ill than servitude. He attaches himself to the beauty which perishes not, limiting his desires to his condition, learning to lose whatever may be taken away from him, to place himself above events, and to detach his heart from loved objects without a pang.[303] He pities miserable kings, who are the bondsmen of all that seems to obey them; he pities false sages, who are fast bound in the chains of their empty renown; he pities the silly rich, martyrs to their own ostentation.[304] All the sympathies of such a man therefore naturally flow away from these, the great of the earth, to those who lead the stoic"s life perforce.

"It is the common people who compose the human race; what is not the people is hardly worth taking into account. Man is the same in all ranks; that being so, the ranks which are most numerous deserve most respect. Before one who reflects, all civil distinctions vanish: he marks the same pa.s.sions and the same feelings in the clown as in the man covered with reputation; he can only distinguish their speech, and a varnish more or less elaborately laid on. Study people of this humble condition; you will perceive that under another sort of language, they have as much intelligence as you, and more good sense.

Respect your species: reflect that it is essentially made up of the collection of peoples; that if every king and every philosopher were cut off from among them, they would scarcely be missed, and the world would go none the worse."[305] As it is, the universal spirit of the law in every country is invariably to favour the strong against the weak, and him who has, against him who has not. The many are sacrificed to the few. The specious names of justice and subordination serve only as instruments for violence and arms for iniquity. The ostentatious orders who pretend to be useful to the others, are in truth only useful to themselves at the expense of the others.[306]

This was carrying on the work which had already been begun in the New Helosa, as we have seen, but in the Emilius it is pushed with a gravity and a directness, that could not be imparted to the picture of a fanciful and arbitrarily chosen situation. The only writer who has approached Rousseau, so far as I know, in fulness and depth of expression in proclaiming the sorrows and wrongs of the poor blind crowd, who painfully drag along the car of triumphant civilisation with its handful of occupants, is the author of the Book of the People. Lamennais even surpa.s.ses Rousseau in the profundity of his pathos; his pictures of the life of hut and hovel are as sincere and as touching; and there is in them, instead of the anger and bitterness of the older author, righteous as that was, a certain heroism of pity and devoted sublimity of complaint, which lift the soul up from resentment into divine moods of compa.s.sion and resolve, and stir us like a tale of n.o.ble action.[307] It was Rousseau, however, who first sounded the note of which the religion that had once been the champion and consoler of the common people, seemed long to have lost even the tradition. Yet the teaching was not constructive, because the ideal man was not made truly social. Emilius is brought up in something of the isolation of the imaginary savage of the state of nature. He marries, and then he and his wife seem only fitted to lead a life of detachment from the interests of the world in which they are placed.

Social or political education, that is the training which character receives from the medium in which it grows, is left out of account, and so is the correlative process of preparation for the various conditions and exigencies which belong to that medium, until it is too late to take its natural place in character. Nothing can be clumsier than the way in which Rousseau proposes to teach Emilius the existence and nature of his relations with his fellows. And the reason of this was that he had never himself in the course of his ruminations, willingly thought of Emilius as being in a condition of active social relation, the citizen of a state.

III.

There appear to be three dominant states of mind, with groups of faculties a.s.sociated with each of them, which it is the business of the instructor firmly to establish in the character of the future man.

The first is a resolute and unflinching respect for Truth; for the conclusions, that is to say, of the scientific reason, comprehending also a constant anxiety to take all possible pains that such conclusions shall be rightly drawn. Connected with this is the discipline of the whole range of intellectual faculties, from the simple habit of correct observation, down to the highly complex habit of weighing and testing the value of evidence. This very important branch of early discipline, Rousseau for reasons of his own which we have already often referred to, cared little about, and he throws very little light upon it, beyond one or two extremely sensible precepts of the negative kind, warning us against beginning too soon and forcing an apparent progress too rapidly. The second fundamental state in a rightly formed character is a deep feeling for things of the spirit which are unknown and incommensurable; a sense of awe, mystery, sublimity, and the fateful bounds of life at its beginning and its end. Here is the Religious side, and what Rousseau has to say of this we shall presently see. It is enough now to remark that Emilius was never to hear the name of a G.o.d or supreme being until his reason was fairly ripened. The third state, which is at least as difficult to bring to healthy perfection as either of the other two, is a pa.s.sion for Justice.

The little use which Rousseau made of this momentous and much-embracing word, which names the highest peak of social virtue, is a very striking circ.u.mstance. The reason would seem to be that his sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes most to the common good of men."

While enjoining the discipline of pity as one of the n.o.blest of sentiments, he warns us against letting it degenerate into weakness, and insists that we should only surrender ourselves to it when it accords with justice.[308] But that is all. What const.i.tutes justice, what is its standard, what its source, what its sanction, whence the extraordinary holiness with which its name has come to be invested among the most highly civilised societies of men, we are never told, nor do we ever see that our teacher had seen the possibility of such questions being asked. If they had been propounded to him, he would, it is most likely, have fallen back upon the convenient mystery of the natural law. This was the current phrase of that time, and it was meant to embody a hypothetical experience of perfect human relations in an expression of the widest generality. If so, this would have to be impressed upon the mind of Emilius in the same way as other mysteries. As a matter of fact, Emilius was led through pity up to humanity, or sociality in an imperfect signification, and there he was left without a further guide to define the marks of truly social conduct.

This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau"s tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about either one or the other."[309] This is profoundly true, but we hardly see in the morality which is designed for Emilius the traces of political elements. Yet without some gradually unfolded presentation of society as a whole, it is scarcely possible to implant the idea of justice with any hope of large fertility. You may begin at a very early time to develop, even from the primitive quality of self-love, a notion of equity and a respect for it, but the vast conception of social justice can only find room in a character that has been made s.p.a.cious by habitual contemplation of the height and breadth and close compactedness of the fabric of the relations that bind man to man, and of the share, integral or infinitesimally fractional, that each has in the happiness or woe of other souls. And this contemplation should begin when we prepare the foundation of all the other maturer habits.

Youth can hardly recognise too soon the enormous unresting machine which bears us ceaselessly along, because we can hardly learn too soon that its force and direction depend on the play of human motives, of which our own for good or evil form an inevitable part when the ripe years come. To one reared with the narrow care devoted to Emilius, or with the capricious negligence in which the majority are left to grow to manhood, the society into which they are thrown is a mere moral wilderness. They are to make such way through it as they can, with egotism for their only trusty instrument. This egotism may either be a bludgeon, as with the most part, or it may be a delicately adjusted and fastidiously decorated compa.s.s, as with an Emilius. In either case is no perception that the gross outer contact of men with another is transformed by worthiness of common aim and loyal faith in common excellences, into a thing beautiful and generous. It is our business to fix and root the habit of thinking of that _moral_ union, into which, as Kant has so admirably expressed it, the _pathological_ necessities of situation that first compelled social concert, have been gradually trans.m.u.ted. Instead of this, it is exactly the primitive pathological conditions that a narrow theory of education brings first into prominence; as if knowledge of origins were indispensable to a right attachment to the transformed conditions of a maturer system.

It has been said that Rousseau founds all morality upon personal interest, perhaps even more specially than Helvetius himself. The accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social conscience, which animates a man with all the a.s.sociations of duty and right, of grat.i.tude for the past and resolute hope for the future, in face of the great body of which he finds himself a part. "I observe," says Rousseau, "that in the modern ages men have no hold upon one another save through force and interest, while the ancients on the other hand acted much more by persuasion and the affections of the soul."[310] The reason was that with the ancients, supposing him to mean the Greeks and Romans, the social conscience was so much wider in its scope than the comparatively narrow fragment of duty which is supposed to come under the sacred power of conscience in the more complex and less closely contained organisation of a modern state. The neighbours to whom a man owed duty in those times comprehended all the members of his state. The neighbours of the modern preacher of duty are either the few persons with whom each of us is brought into actual and palpable contact, or else the whole mult.i.tude of dwellers on the earth,--a conception that for many ages to come will remain with the majority of men and women too vague to exert an energetic and concentrating influence upon action, and will lead them no further than an uncoloured and nerveless cosmopolitanism.

What the young need to have taught to them in this too little cultivated region, is that they are born not mere atoms floating independent and apart for a season through a terraqueous medium, and sucking up as much more than their share of nourishment as they can seize; nor citizens of the world with no more definite duty than to keep their feelings towards all their fellows in a steady simmer of bland complacency; but soldiers in a host, citizens of a polity whose boundaries are not set down in maps, members of a church the handwriting of whose ordinances is not in the hieroglyphs of idle mystery, nor its hope and recompense in the lands beyond death. They need to be taught that they owe a share of their energies to the great struggle which is in ceaseless progress in all societies in an endless variety of forms, between new truth and old prejudice, between love of self or cla.s.s and solicitous pa.s.sion for justice, between the obstructive indolence and inertia of the many and the generous mental activity of the few. This is the sphere and definition of the social conscience. The good causes of enlightenment and justice in all lands,--here is the church militant in which we should early seek to enrol the young, and the true state to which they should be taught that they owe the duties of active and arduous citizenship. These are the struggles with which the modern instructor should a.s.sociate those virtues of fort.i.tude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to a.s.sert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to show for their G.o.ds or their sovereign. But the ideal of Emilius was an ideal of quietism; to possess his own soul in patience, with a suppressed intelligence, a suppressed sociality, without a single spark of generous emulation in the courses of strong-fibred virtue, or a single thrill of heroical pursuit after so much as one great forlorn cause.

"If it once comes to him, in reading these parallels of the famous ancients, to desire to be another rather than himself, were this other Socrates, were he Cato, you have missed the mark; he who begins to make himself a stranger to himself, is not long before he forgets himself altogether."[311] But if a man only nurses the conception of his own personality, for the sake of keeping his own peace and self-contained comfort at a glow of easy warmth, a.s.suredly the best thing that can befall him is that he should perish, lest his example should infect others with the same base contagion. Excessive personality when militant is often wholesome, excessive personality that only hugs itself is under all circ.u.mstances chief among unclean things. Thus even Rousseau"s finest monument of moral enthusiasm is fatally tarnished by the cold damp breath of isolation, and the very book which contained so many elements of new life for a state, was at bottom the apotheosis of social despair.

IV.

The great agent in fostering the rise to vigour and uprightness of a social conscience, apart from the yet more powerful instrument of a strong and energetic public spirit at work around the growing character, must be found in the study of history rightly directed with a view to this end. It is here, in observing the long processes of time and appreciating the slowly acc.u.mulating sum of endeavour, that the mind gradually comes to read the great lessons how close is the bond that links men together. It is here that he gradually begins to acquire the habit of considering what are the conditions of wise social activity, its limits, its objects, its rewards, what is the capacity of collective achievement, and of what sort is the significance and purport of the little span of time that cuts off the yesterday of our society from its to-morrow.

Rousseau had very rightly forbidden the teaching of history to young children, on the ground that the essence of history lies in the moral relations between the bare facts which it recounts, and that the terms and ideas of these relations are wholly beyond the intellectual grasp of the very young.[312] He might have based his objections equally well upon the impossibility of little children knowing the meaning of the mult.i.tude of descriptive terms which make up a historical manual, or realising the relations between events in bare point of time, although childhood may perhaps be a convenient period for some mechanical acquisition of dates. According to Rousseau, history was to appear very late in the educational course, when the youth was almost ready to enter the world. It was to be the finishing study, from which he should learn not sociality either in its scientific or its higher moral sense, but the composition of the heart of man, in a safer way than through actual intercourse with society. Society might make him either cynical or frivolous. History would bring him the same information, without subjecting him to the same perils. In society you only hear the words of men; to know man you must observe his actions, and actions are only unveiled in history.[313] This view is hardly worth discussing. The subject of history is not the heart of man, but the movements of societies. Moreover, the oracles of history are entirely dumb to one who seeks from them maxims for the shaping of daily conduct, or living instruction as to the motives, aims, caprices, capacities of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, of those with whom the occasions of life bring us into contact.

It is true that at the close of the other part of his education, Emilius was to travel and there find the comment upon the completed circle of his studies.[314] But excellent as travel is for some of the best of those who have the opportunity, still for many it is valueless for lack of the faculty of curiosity. For the great majority it is impossible for lack of opportunity. To trust so much as Rousseau did to the effect of travelling, is to leave a large chasm in education unbridged.

It is interesting, however, to notice some of Rousseau"s notions about history as an instrument for conveying moral instruction, a few of them are so good, others are so characteristically narrow. "The worst historians for a young man," he says, "are those who judge. The facts, the facts; then let him judge for himself. If the author"s judgment is for ever guiding him, he is only seeing with the eye of another, and as soon as this eye fails him, he sees nothing." Modern history is not fit for instruction, not only because it has no physiognomy, all our men being exactly like one another, but because our historians, intent on brilliance above all other things, think of nothing so much as painting highly coloured portraits, which for the most part represent nothing at all.[315] Of course such a judgment as this implies an ignorance alike of the ends and meaning of history, which, considering that he was living in the midst of a singular revival of historical study, is not easy to pardon. If we are to look only to perfection of form and arrangement, it may have been right for one living in the middle of the last century to place the ancients in the first rank without compet.i.tors. But the author of the Discourse upon literature and the arts might have been expected to look beyond composition, and the contemporary of Voltaire"s _Essai sur les Moeurs_ (1754-1757) might have been expected to know that the profitable experience of the human race did not close with the fall of the Roman republic. Among the ancient historians, he counted Thucydides to be the true model, because he reports facts without judging, and omits none of the circ.u.mstances proper for enabling us to judge of them for ourselves--though how Rousseau knew what facts Thucydides has omitted, I am unable to divine. Then come Caesar"s Commentaries and Xenophon"s Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The good Herodotus, without portraits and without maxims, but abounding in details the most capable of interesting and pleasing, would perhaps be the best of historians, if only these details did not so often degenerate into puerilities. Livy is unsuited to youth, because he is political and a rhetorician.

Tacitus is the book of the old; you must have learnt the art of reading facts, before you can be trusted with maxims.

The drawback of histories such as those of Thucydides and Caesar, Rousseau admits to be that they dwell almost entirely on war, leaving out the true life of nations, which belongs to the unwritten chronicles of peace. This leads him to the equally just reflection that historians while recounting facts omit the gradual and progressive causes which led to them. "They often find in a battle lost or won the reason of a revolution, which even before the battle was already inevitable. War scarcely does more than bring into full light events determined by moral causes, which historians can seldom penetrate."[316] A third complaint against the study which he began by recommending as a proper introduction to the knowledge of man, is that it does not present men but actions, or at least men only in their parade costume and in certain chosen moments, and he justly reproaches writers alike of history and biography, for omitting those trifling strokes and homely anecdotes, which reveal the true physiognomy of character. "Remain then for ever, without bowels, without nature; harden your hearts of cast iron in your trumpery decency, and make yourselves despicable by force of dignity."[317] And so after all, by a common stroke of impetuous inconsistency, he forsakes history, and falls back upon the ancient biographies, because, all the low and familiar details being banished from modern style, however true and characteristic, men are as elaborately tricked out by our authors in their private lives as they were tricked out upon the stage of the world.

V.

As women are from the const.i.tution of things the educators of us all at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own s.e.x from the beginning to the end of education, the writer of the most imperfect treatise on this world-interesting subject can hardly avoid saying something on the upbringing of women. Such a writer may start from one of three points of view; he may consider the woman as destined to be a wife, or a mother, or a human being; as the companion of a man, as the rearer of the young, or as an independent personality, endowed with gifts, talents, possibilities, in less or greater number, and capable, as in the case of men, of being trained to the worst or the best uses. Of course to every one who looks into life, each of these three ideals melts into the other two, and we can only think of them effectively when they are blended. Yet we test a writer"s appreciation of the conditions of human progress by observing the function which he makes most prominent. A man"s whole thought of the worth and aim of womanhood depends upon the generosity and elevation of the ideal which is silently present in his mind, while he is specially meditating the relations of woman as wife or as mother. Unless he is really capable of thinking of them as human beings, independently of these two functions, he is sure to have comparatively mean notions in connection with them in respect of the functions which he makes paramount.

Rousseau breaks down here. The unsparing fashion in which he developed the theory of individualism in the case of Emilius, and insisted on man being allowed to grow into the man of nature, instead of the man of art and manufacture, might have led us to expect that when he came to speak of women, he would suffer equity and logic to have their way, by giving equally free room in the two halves of the human race, for the development of natural force and capacity. If, as he begins by saying, he wishes to bring up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted to her as were given to her predestined mate? Again, the pictures of the New Helosa would have led us to conceive the ideal of womanly station not so much in the wife, as in the house-mother, attached by esteem and sober affection to her husband, but having for her chief functions to be the gentle guardian of her little ones, and the mild, firm, and prudent administrator of a cheerful and well-ordered household. In the last book of the Emilius, which treats of the education of girls, education is reduced within the compa.s.s of an even narrower ideal than this. We are confronted with the oriental conception of women. Every principle that has been followed in the education of Emilius is reversed in the education of women. Opinion, which is the tomb of virtue among men, is among women its high throne. The whole education of women ought to be relative to men; to please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honoured by them, to console them, to render their lives agreeable and sweet to them,--these are the duties which ought to be taught to women from their childhood. Every girl ought to have the religion of her mother, and every wife that of her husband.

Not being in a condition to judge for themselves, they ought to receive the decision of fathers and husbands as if it were that of the church. And since authority is the rule of faith for women, it is not so much a matter of explaining to them the reasons for belief, as for expounding clearly to them what to believe. Although boys are not to hear of the idea of G.o.d until they are fifteen, because they are not in a condition to apprehend it, yet girls who are still less in a condition to apprehend it, are _therefore_ to have it imparted to them at an earlier age. Woman is created to give way to man, and to suffer his injustice. Her empire is an empire of gentleness, mildness, and complaisance. Her orders are caresses, and her threats are tears.

Girls must not only be made laborious and vigilant; they must also very early be accustomed to being thwarted and kept in restraint. This misfortune, if they feel it one, is inseparable from their s.e.x, and if ever they attempt to escape from it, they will only suffer misfortunes still more cruel in consequence.[318]

After a series of oriental and obscurantist propositions of this kind, it is of little purpose to tell us that women have more intelligence and men more genius; that women observe, while men reason; that men will philosophise better upon the human heart, while women will be more skilful in reading it.[319] And it is a mere mockery to end the matter by a fervid a.s.surance, that in spite of prejudices that have their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is worthy and n.o.ble is no more foreign to women than it is to men, and that there is nothing which under the guidance of nature may not be obtained from them as well as from ourselves.[320] Finally there is a complete surrender of the obscurantist position in such a sentence as this: "I only know for either s.e.x two really distinct cla.s.ses; one the people who think, the other the people who do not think, and this difference comes almost entirely from education. A man of the first of these cla.s.ses ought not to marry into the other; for the greatest charm of companionship is wanting, when in spite of having a wife he is reduced to think by himself. It is only a cultivated spirit that provides agreeable commerce, and "tis a cheerless thing for a father of a family who loves his home, to be obliged to shut himself up within himself, and to have no one about him who understands him.

Besides, how is a woman who has no habits of reflection to bring up her children?"[321] Nothing could be more excellently urged. But how is a woman to have habits of reflection, when she has been constantly brought up in habits of the closest mental bondage, trained always to consider her first business to be the pleasing of some man, and her instruments not reasonable persuasion but caressing and crying?

This pernicious nonsense was mainly due, like nearly all his most serious errors, to Rousseau"s want of a conception of improvement in human affairs. If he had been filled with that conception as Turgot, Condorcet, and others were, he would have been forced as they were, to meditate upon changes in the education and the recognition accorded to women, as one of the first conditions of improvement. For lack of this, he contributed nothing to the most important branch of the subject that he had undertaken to treat. He was always taunting the champions of reigning systems of training for boys, with the vicious or feeble men whom he thought he saw on every hand around him. The same kind of answer obviously meets the current idea, which he adopted with a few idyllic decorations of his own, of the type of the relations between men and women. That type practically reduces marriage in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred to a dolorous parody of a social partnership. It does more than any one other cause to keep societies back, because it prevents one half of the members of a society from cultivating all their natural energies. Thus it produces a waste of helpful quality as immeasurable as it is deplorable, and besides rearing these creatures of mutilated faculty to be the intellectually demoralising companions of the remaining half of their own generation, makes them the mothers and the earliest and most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes after.[322] Of course, if any one believes that the existing arrangements of a western community are the most successful that we can ever hope to bring into operation, we need not complain of Rousseau. If not, then it is only reasonable to suppose that a considerable portion of the change will be effected in the hitherto neglected and subordinate half of the race. That reconst.i.tution of the family, which Rousseau and others among his contemporaries rightly sought after as one of the most pressing needs of the time, was essentially impossible, so long as the typical woman was the adornment of a semi-philosophic seraglio, a sort of compromise between the frowzy ideal of an English bourgeois and the impertinent ideal of a Parisian gallant. Condorcet and others made a grievous mistake in defending the free gratification of sensual pa.s.sion, as one of the conditions of happiness and making the most of our lives.[323] But even this was not at bottom more fatal to the maintenance and order of the family, than Rousseau"s enervating notion of keeping women in strict intellectual and moral subjection was fatal to the family as the true school of high and equal companionship, and the fruitful seed-ground of wise activities and new hopes for each fresh generation.

This was one side of Rousseau"s reactionary tendencies. Fortunately for the revolution of thirty years later, which ill.u.s.trated the gallery of heroic women with some of its most splendid names, his power was in this respect neutralised by other stronger tendencies in the general spirit of the age. The aristocracy of s.e.x was subjected to the same destructive criticism as the aristocracy of birth. The same feeling for justice which inspired the demand for freedom and equality of opportunity among men, led to the demand for the same freedom and equality of opportunity between men and women. All this was part of the energy of the time, which Rousseau disliked with undisguised bitterness. It broke inconveniently in upon his quietest visions. He had no conception, with his sensuous brooding imagination, never wholly purged of grossness, of that high and pure type of women whom French history so often produced in the seventeenth century, and who were not wanting towards the close of the eighteenth, a type in which devotion went with force, and austerity with sweetness, and divine candour and transparent innocence with energetic loyalty and intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will. Such thoughts were not for Rousseau, a dreamer led by his senses. Perhaps they are for none of us any more. When we turn to modern literature from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has pa.s.sed out from our hearts?

The fifth book of Emilius is not a chapter on the education of women, but an idyll. We have already seen the circ.u.mstances under which Rousseau composed it, in a profound and delicious solitude, in the midst of woods and streams, with the fragrance of the orange-flower poured around him, and in continual ecstasy. As an idyll it is delicious; as a serious contribution to the hardest of problems it is naught. The sequel, by a stroke of matchless whimsicality, unless it be meant, as it perhaps may have been, for a piece of deep tragic irony, is the best refutation that Rousseau"s most energetic adversary could have desired. The Sophie who has been educated on the oriental principle, has presently to confess a flagrant infidelity to the blameless Emilius, her lord.[324]