We have spoken of the literature of science. In the literature which is an art, and an end in itself, Geneva never excelled; and if we look for reasons, we can find several.

The first difficulty was with the language. French came to the Genevans as a foreign tongue at a time when their men of learning wrote Latin and their populace spoke a Savoyard patois; and, even to the present day, few of them avoid a certain provincial awkwardness in the handling of it. Anyone who wishes to see the proof has only to compare the Journal de GenÈve with the Gil Blas or the Figaro. The few stylists whom Geneva can claim have generally been of French extraction, like Marc Monnier, or have lived abroad, like Rousseau and Madame de StaËl. A far more typical Genevan writer was Charles Bonnet whose perplexing circumlocutions swamp his elevated sentiments and effectively prevent his books from being read. There is also, of course, Amiel; but even ‘Roulez, tambours’ is tolerably obvious; while the trail of the clichÉ lies even over that famous ‘Journal Intime’ which Mrs. Humphry Ward translated.

Another difficulty was the vexatious censorship exercised by Town Councillors, whose views of literature were parochial. Even Agrippa d’AubignÉ, with all his fame and merit, was pursued by their suspicions both during his lifetime and after his death. The printer of one of his works was imprisoned and fined for issuing from his press a book alleged to contain ‘much impious and blasphemous matter which scandalizes well-conducted persons’; while, after his decease, his papers were sent for, to be inspected by public officials. ‘Anything composed by the defunct,’ it was decided, ‘during his residence in this State must be suppressed, but anything composed on other territory may be restored to his heirs.’ Literary decorum may have been insured by such measures; but they were not calculated to encourage originality, and it is not surprising that we search Genevan annals in vain for distinguished literary names.

The name of which the Genevans are proudest is probably that of Rousseau, who has sometimes been spoken of as ‘the austere citizen of Geneva.’ But ‘austere’ is a strange epithet to apply to the philosopher who endowed the Foundling Hospital with five illegitimate children; and Geneva cannot claim a great share in a citizen who ran away from the town in his boyhood to avoid being thrashed for stealing apples. It was, indeed, at Geneva that Jean Jacques received from his aunt the disciplinary chastisement of which he gives such an exciting account in his ‘Confessions’; and he once returned to the city and received the Holy Communion there in later life. But that is all. Jean Jacques was not educated at Geneva, but in Savoy—at Annecy, at Turin, and at ChambÉry; his books were not printed at Geneva, though one of them was publicly burnt there, but in Paris and Amsterdam; it is not to Genevan but to French literature that he belongs. And when Jean Jacques has been named, there remains no other Genevan citizen of letters worthy to be mentioned in the same paragraph. So that branch of the subject may be left.