  FEW lives of writers of equal reputation have been exposed to our examination with the fulness and minuteness of the life of this the most eloquent name in French literature. With the exception of the great Latin father, St. Augustine, no other leader of thought, in fact, has so entirely revealed to us his inner life, his faults and weaknesses (often sufficiently startling), no less than the estimable parts of his character, and we remain in doubt whether more to lament the infirmities or to admire the candour of the autobiographer. Jean Jacques Rousseau, son of a Genevan tradesman, had the misfortune to lose his mother at a very early age. It is to this want of maternal solicitude and fostering care that some of the errors in his after career may perhaps be traced. After a short experience of school discipline he was apprenticed to an engraver, whose coarse violence must injuriously have affected the nervous temperament of the sensitive child. Ill-treatment forced him to run away, and he found refuge with Mde. de Warens, a Swiss lady, a convert to Catholicism, who occupies a prominent place in the first period of his Confessions. Influenced by her kindness, and by the skilful arguments of his preceptors at the college at Turin, where she had placed him, the young Rousseau (like Bayle and Gibbon, before and after him, though from a different motive) abjured Protestantism, and, for the moment, accepted, or at least professed, the tenets of the old Orthodoxy. Dismissed from the college because he refused to take orders, he engaged himself as a domestic servant or valet. It was in 1748, at the age of 36, that he made the acquaintance, at the house of Mde. d’Epinay, of the editors of the EncyclopÉdie, D’Alembert and Diderot, who engaged him to write articles on music and upon other subjects in that first of comprehensive dictionaries. His first independent appearance in literature was in his essay on the question, “Whether the progress of science and of the arts has been favourable to the morals of mankind,” in which paradoxically he maintains the negative. It was the eloquence, we must suppose, rather than the reasoning, which gained him the prize awarded by the AcadÉmie of Dijon. His next production—a more important one—was his Discours sur l’InegalitÉ parmi les Hommes (“Discourse upon Inequality amongst Men”). In this treatise—the prelude to his more developed Contrat Social—Rousseau affirms the paradox of the natural school, as it may be termed, which alleged the state of nature—the life of the uncivilised man—to be the ideal condition of the species. His thesis that all men are born with equal rights takes a much more defensible position. In this Discours diet is assigned its due importance in relation to the welfare of communities. The romance of Julie: ou la Nouvelle HÉloise, which excited an unusual amount of interest, appeared in 1759. Emile: ou de l’Education, was given to the world three years later. It is the most important of his writings. In the education of Emile, or Emilius, he propounds his ideas upon one of the most interesting subjects which can engage attention—the right training of the young. The earlier part of the book is almost altogether admirable and useful. The later portion is more open to criticism, although not upon the grounds upon which was founded the hostility of the authorities of the day who unjustly condemned the book as irreligious and immoral. Rousseau begins with laying down the principles of a new and more rational method of rearing infants, agreeing, in many particulars, with the system of his predecessor, Locke. At least some of his protests against the unnatural treatment of children were not altogether in vain. Mothers in fashionable ranks of life began to recognise the mischief arising from The publication of his treatise on education brought down a storm of persecution and opprobrium upon the author. The Contrat Social (in which he seemed to aim at subverting the political and social traditions, as he had in Emile the educational prejudices of the venerated Past) appearing soon afterwards added fuel to the flames. Rousseau found himself forced to flee from Paris, and he sought shelter in the territory of Geneva. But the authorities, unmindful of the old reputation of the land of freedom, refusing him an asylum, he proceeded to NeuchÂtel, then under Prussian rule, where he was well received. From this retreat he replied to the attacks of the Archbishop of Paris, and addressed a letter to the magistrates of Geneva renouncing his citizenship. He also published Letters Written from the Mountain, severely criticising the civil and church government of his native canton. These acts did not tend to conciliate the goodwill of the rulers of the people with whom he had taken refuge. At this moment an object of dislike to all the Continental sovereign powers, he gladly embraced the offer of David Hume to find him an asylum in England. The social and political revolutionist arrived in London in 1766, and took up his residence in a village in Derbyshire. He did not remain long in this country, his irritable temperament inducing him too hastily to suspect the sincerity of the friendship of his host. The next eight years of his life were passed in comparative obscurity, and in migrating from one place to another in the neighbourhood of Paris. In his solitude gardening and botanising occupied a large part of his leisure hours. It was at this period he made the acquaintance of Bernardin St. Pierre, his enthusiastic disciple, and immortalised as the author of Paul et Virginie. His end came suddenly. He had been settled only a few months in a cottage given him by one of his numerous aristocratic friends and admirers, when one morning, feeling unwell, he requested his wife to open the window that he His character (as we have already remarked) is revealed in his Confessions—which was written, in part, during his brief exile in England. It, as well as his other productions, shews him to us as a man of extraordinary sensibility, which, in regard to himself, occasionally degenerated into a sort of disease or, in popular language, morbidness (a word, by the way, constantly abused by the many who seem to excuse their own insensibility to surrounding evils by stigmatising with that vague expression the acuter feeling of the few), which sometimes assumed the appearance of partial unsoundness of mind. This it was that caused him to suspect and quarrel with his best friends, and which, we may suppose, led him, in his minute dissection of himself, to exaggerate his real moral infirmities. In summing up his personal character we shall perhaps impartially judge him to have been, on the whole, amiable rather than admirable, of good impulses, and of a naturally humane disposition, cultivated by reading and reflection, but to have been wanting in firmness of mind and in that virtue so much esteemed in the school of Pythagoras—self control. His philosophy is distinguished rather by refinement than by vigour or depth of thought. It is in the education of the young that Rousseau exerts his eloquence to enforce the importance of a non-flesh diet:— “One of the proofs that the taste of flesh is not natural to man is the indifference which children exhibit for that sort of meat, and the preference they all give to vegetable foods, such as milk-porridge, pastry, fruits, &c. It is of the last importance not to denaturalise them of this primitive taste (de ne pas dÉnaturer ce goÛt primitif), and not to render them carnivorous, if not for health reasons, at least for the sake of their character. For, however the experience may be explained, it is certain that great eaters of flesh are, in general, more cruel and ferocious than other men. This observation is true of all places and of all times. English coarseness is well known. Rousseau, in a free translation, here quotes a considerable part of Plutarch’s Essay. He insists, especially, that children should be early accustomed to the pure diet:— “The further we remove from a natural mode of living the more do we lose our natural tastes; or rather habit makes a second nature, which we substitute to such a degree for the first that none among us any longer knows what the latter is. It follows from this that the most simple tastes must also be the most natural, for they are those which are most easily changed, while by being sharpened and by being irritated by our whims they assume a form which never changes. The man who is yet of no country will conform himself without trouble to the customs of any country whatever, but the man of one country never becomes that of another. This appears to me true in every sense, and still more so applied to taste properly so-called. Our first food was milk. We accustom ourselves only by degrees to strong flavours. At first they are repugnant to us. Fruits, vegetables, kitchen herbs, and, in fine, often broiled dishes, without seasoning and without salt, composed the feasts of the first men. The first time a savage drinks wine he makes a grimace and rejects it; and even amongst ourselves, whoever has lived to his twentieth year without tasting fermented drinks, cannot afterwards accustom himself to them. We should all be abstinents from alcohol if we had not been given wines in our early years. In fine, the more simple our tastes are the more universal are they, and the most common repugnance is for made-up dishes. Does one ever see a person have a disgust for water or bread? Behold here the impress of nature! Behold here, then, our rule of life. Let us preserve to the child as long as possible his primitive taste; let its nourishment be common and simple; let not its palate be familiarised to any but natural flavours, and let no exclusive taste be formed.... I have sometimes examined those people who attached importance to good living, who thought, upon their first awaking, of what they should eat during the day, and described a dinner with more exactitude than Polybius would use in describing a battle. I have thought that all these so-called men were but children of forty years without vigour and without consistence—fruges consumere nati. In the Julie: ou la Nouvelle Heloise he describes his heroine as preferring the innocent feast:— “Although luxurious in her repasts she likes neither flesh-meat nor ragoÛts. Excellent vegetable dishes, eggs, cream, fruits—these constitute her ordinary food; and, excepting fish, which she likes as much, she would be a true Pythagorean.” Although he was not a thorough or consistent abstainer, Rousseau speaks with enthusiasm of the pleasures of his frugal repasts, in which, it seems, when he was not seduced by the sumptuous dinners of his fashionable admirers, flesh, as a rule, had no part:— “Who shall describe, who shall understand, the charm of these repasts, composed of a quartern loaf, of cherries, of a little cheese, and of a half-pint of wine, which we drank together. Friendship, confidence, intimacy, sweetness of soul, how delicious are your seasonings!” |
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