Chapter VI: Paris (2)

This was no farce, such as Voltaire played now and again at the expense of an unhappy bishop or unhappier parish priest; nor such as Rousseau himself had played six-and-twenty years before, at the expense of those honest Catholics of Turin whose helpful donation of twenty francs had marked their enthusiasm over a soul that had been lost and was found again. He was never a Catholic, any more than he was ever an atheist, and if it might be said in one sense that he was no more a Protestant than he was either of these two, yet he was emphatically the child of Protestantism. It is hardly too much to say that one bred in Catholic tradition and observance, accustomed to think of the whole life of men as only a manifestation of the unbroken life of the Church, and of all the several communities of men as members of that great organisation which binds one order to another, and each generation to those that have gone before and those that come after, would never have dreamed that monstrous dream of a state of nature as a state of perfection. He would never have held up to ridicule and hate the idea of society as an organism with normal parts and conditions of growth, and never have left the spirit of man standing in bald isolation from history, from his fellows, from a Church, from a mediator, face to face with the great vague phantasm. Nor, on the other hand, is it likely that one born and reared in the religious school of authority with its elaborately disciplined hierarchy, would have conceived that passion for political freedom, that zeal for the rights of peoples against rulers, that energetic enthusiasm for a free life, which constituted the fire and essence of Rousseau's writing. As illustration of this, let us remark how Rousseau's teaching fared when it fell upon a Catholic country like France: so many of its principles were assimilated by the revolutionary schools as were wanted for violent dissolvents, while the rest dropped away, and in this rejected portion was precisely the most vital part of his system. In other words, in no country has the power of collective organisation been so pressed and exalted as in revolutionised France, and in no country has the free life of the individual been made to count for so little. With such force does the ancient system of temporal and spiritual organisation reign in the minds of those who think most confidently that they have cast it wholly out of them. The use of reason may lead a man far, but it is the past that has cut the groove.

In re-embracing the Protestant confession, therefore, Rousseau was not leaving Catholicism, to which he had never really passed over; he was only undergoing in entire gravity of spirit a formality which reconciled him with his native city, and reunited those strands of spiritual connection with it which had never been more than superficially parted. There can be little doubt that the four months which he spent in Geneva in 1754 marked a very critical time in the formation of some of the most memorable of his opinions. He came from Paris full of inarticulate and smouldering resentment against the irreverence and denial of the materialistic circle which used to meet at the house of D'Holbach. What sort of opinions he found prevailing among the most enlightened of the Genevese pastors we know from an abundance of sources. D'Alembert had three or four years later than this to suffer a bitter attack from them, but the account of the creed of some of the ministers which he gave in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopedia, was substantially correct. "Many of them," he wrote, "have ceased to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Hell, one of the principal points in our belief, is no longer one with many of the Genevese pastors, who contend that it is an insult to the Divinity to imagine that a being full of goodness and justice can be capable of punishing our faults by an eternity of torment. In a word, they have no other creed than pure Socinianism, rejecting everything that they call mysteries, and supposing the first principle of a true religion to be that it shall propose nothing for belief which clashes with reason. Religion here is almost reduced to the adoration of one single God, at least among nearly all who do not belong to the common people; and a certain respect for Jesus Christ and the Scriptures is nearly the only thing that distinguishes the Christianity of Geneva from pure Deism."[240] And it would be easy to trace the growth of these rationalising tendencies. Throughout the seventeenth century men sprang up who anticipated some of the rationalistic arguments of the eighteenth, in denying the Trinity, and so forth,[241] but the time was not then ripe. The general conditions grew more favourable. Burnet, who was at Geneva in 1685-6, says that though there were not many among the Genevese of the first form of learning, "yet almost everybody here has a good tincture of a learned education."[242] The pacification of civic troubles in 1738 was followed by a quarter of a century of extreme prosperity and contentment, and it is in such periods that the minds of men previously trained are wont to turn to the great matters of speculation. There was at all times a constant communication, both public and private, going on between Geneva and Holland, as was only natural between the two chief Protestant centres of the Continent. The controversy of the seventeenth century between the two churches was as keenly followed in Geneva as at Leyden, and there is more than one Genevese writer who deserves a place in the history of the transition in the beginning of the eighteenth century from theology proper to that metaphysical theology, which was the first marked dissolvent of dogma within the Protestant bodies. To this general movement of the epoch, of course, Descartes supplied the first impulse. The leader of the movement in Geneva, that is of an attempt to pacify the Christian churches on the basis of some such Deism as was shortly to find its passionate expression in the Savoyard Vicar's Confession of Faith, was John Alphonse Turretini (1661-1737). He belonged to a family of Italian refugees from Lucca, and his grandfather had been sent on a mission to Holland for aid in defence of Geneva against Catholic Savoy. He went on his travels in 1692; he visited Holland, where he saw Bayle, and England, where he saw Newton, and France, where he saw Bossuet. Chouet initiated him into the mysteries of Descartes. All this bore fruit when he returned home, and his eloquent exposition of rationalistic ideas aroused the usual cry of heresy from the people who justly insist that Deism is not Christianity. There was much stir for many years, but he succeeded in holding his own and in finding many considerable followers.[243] For example, some three years or so after his death, a work appeared in Geneva under the title of _La Religion Essentielle a l'Homme_, showing that faith in the existence of a God suffices, and treating with contempt the belief in the inspiration of the Gospels.[244]

Thus we see what vein of thought was running through the graver and more active minds of Geneva about the time of Rousseau's visit. Whether it be true or not that the accepted belief of many of the preachers was a pure Deism, it is certain that the theory was fully launched among them, and that those who could not accept it were still pressed to refute it, and in refuting, to discuss. Rousseau's friendships were according to his own account almost entirely among the ministers of religion and the professors of the academy, precisely the sort of persons who would be most sure to familiarise him, in the course of frequent conversations, with the current religious ideas and the arguments by which they were opposed or upheld. We may picture the effect on his mind of the difference in tone and temper in these grave, candid, and careful men, and the tone of his Parisian friends in discussing the same high themes; how this difference would strengthen his repugnance, and corroborate his own inborn spirit of veneration; how he would here feel himself in his own world. For as wise men have noticed, it is not so much difference of opinion that stirs resentment in us, at least in great subjects where the difference is not trivial but profound, as difference in gravity of humour and manner of moral approach. He returned to Paris (Oct. 1754) warm with the resolution to give up his concerns there, and in the spring go back once and for all to the city of liberty and virtue, where men revered wisdom and reason instead of wasting life in the frivolities of literary dialectic.[245]

The project, however, grew cool. The dedication of his Discourse on Inequality to the Republic was received with indifference by some and indignation by others.[246] Nobody thought it a compliment, and some thought it an impertinence. This was one reason which turned his purpose aside. Another was the fact that the illustrious Voltaire now also signed himself Swiss, and boasted that if he shook his wig the powder flew over the whole of the tiny Republic. Rousseau felt certain that Voltaire would make a revolution in Geneva, and that he should find in his native country the tone, the air, the manners which were driving him from Paris. From that moment he counted Geneva lost. Perhaps he ought to make head against the disturber, but what could he do alone, timid and bad talker as he was, against a man arrogant, rich, supported by the credit of the great, of brilliant eloquence, and already the very idol of women and young men?[247] Perhaps it would not be uncharitable to suspect that this was a reason after the event, for no man was ever so fond as Rousseau, or so clever a master in the art, of covering an accident in a fine envelope of principle, and, as we shall see, he was at this time writing to Voltaire in strains of effusive panegyric. In this case he almost tells us that the one real reason why he did not return to Geneva was that he found a shelter from Paris close at hand. Even before then he had begun to conceive characteristic doubts whether his fellow-citizens at Geneva would not be nearly as hostile to his love of living solitarily and after his own fashion as the good people of Paris.

Rousseau has told us a pretty story, how one day he and Madame d'Epinay wandering about the park came upon a dilapidated lodge surrounded by fruit gardens, in the skirts of the forest of Montmorency; how he exclaimed in delight at its solitary charm that here was the very place of refuge made for him; and how on a second visit he found that his good friend had in the interval had the old lodge pulled down, and replaced by a pretty cottage exactly arranged for his own household. "My poor bear," she said, "here is your place of refuge; it was you who chose it, 'tis friendship offers it; I hope it will drive away your cruel notion of going from me."[248] Though moved to tears by such kindness, Rousseau did not decide on the spot, but continued to waver for some time longer between this retreat and return to Geneva.

In the interval Madame d'Epinay had experience of the character she was dealing with. She wrote to Rousseau pressing him to live at the cottage in the forest, and begging him to allow her to assist him in assuring the moderate annual provision which he had once accidentally declared to mark the limit of his wants.[249] He wrote to her bitterly in reply, that her proposition struck ice into his soul, and that she could have but sorry appreciation of her own interests in thus seeking to turn a friend into a valet. He did not refuse to listen to what she proposed, if only she would remember that neither he nor his sentiments were for sale.[250] Madame d'Epinay wrote to him patiently enough in return, and then Rousseau hastened to explain that his vocabulary needed special appreciation, and that he meant by the word valet "the degradation into which the repudiation of his principles would throw his soul. The independence I seek is not immunity from work; I am firm for winning my own bread, I take pleasure in it; but I mean not to subject myself to any other duty, if I can help it. I will never pledge any portion of my liberty, either for my own subsistence or that of any one else. I intend to work, but at my own will and pleasure, and even to do nothing, if it happens to suit me, without any one finding fault except my stomach."[251] We may call this unamiable, if we please, but in a frivolous world amiability can hardly go with firm resolve to live an independent life after your own fashion. The many distasteful sides of Rousseau's character ought not to hinder us from admiring his steadfastness in refusing to sacrifice his existence to the first person who spoke him civilly. We may wish there had been more of rugged simplicity in his way of dealing with temptations to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; less of mere irritability. But then this irritability is one side of soft temperament. The soft temperament is easily agitated, and this unpleasant disturbance does not stir up true anger nor lasting indignation, but only sends quick currents of eager irritation along the sufferer's nerves. Rousseau, quivering from head to foot with self-consciousness, is sufficiently unlike our plain Johnson, the strong-armoured; yet persistent withstanding of the patron is as worthy of our honour in one instance as in the other. Indeed, resistance to humiliating pressure is harder for such a temper as Rousseau's, in which deliberate endeavour is needed, than it is for the naturally stoical spirit which asserts itself spontaneously and rises without effort.

When our born solitary, wearied of Paris and half afraid of the too friendly importunity of Geneva, at length determined to accept Madame d'Epinay's offer of the Hermitage on conditions which left him an entire sentiment of independence of movement and freedom from all sense of pecuniary obligation, he was immediately exposed to a very copious torrent of pleasantry and remonstrance from the highly social circle who met round D'Holbach's dinner-table. They deemed it sheer midsummer madness, or even a sign of secret depravity, to quit their cheerful world for the dismal solitude of woods and fields. "Only the bad man is alone," wrote Diderot in words which Rousseau kept resentfully in his memory as long as he lived. The men and women of the eighteenth century had no comprehension of solitude, the strength which it may impart to the vigorous, the poetic graces which it may shed about the life of those who are less than vigorous; and what they did not comprehend, they dreaded and abhorred, and thought monstrous in the one man who did comprehend it. They were all of the mind of Socrates when he said to Phædrus, "Knowledge is what I love, and the men who dwell in the town are my teachers, not trees and landscape."[252] Sarcasms fell on him like hail, and the prophecies usual in cases where a stray soul does not share the common tastes of the herd. He would never be able to live without the incense and the amusements of the town; he would be back in a fortnight; he would throw up the whole enterprise within three months.[253] Amid a shower of such words, springing from men's perverse blindness to the binding propriety of keeping all propositions as to what is the best way of living in respect of place, hours, companionship, strictly relative to each individual case, Rousseau stubbornly shook the dust of the city from off his feet, and sought new life away from the stridulous hum of men. Perhaps we are better pleased to think of the unwearied Diderot spending laborious days in factories and quarries and workshops and forges, while friendly toilers patiently explained to him the structure of stocking looms and velvet looms, the processes of metal-casting and wire-drawing and slate-cutting, and all the other countless arts and ingenuities of fabrication, which he afterwards reproduced to a wondering age in his spacious and magnificent repertory of human thought, knowledge, and practical achievement. And it is yet more elevating to us to think of the true stoic, the great high-souled Turgot, setting forth a little later to discharge beneficent duty in the hard field of his distant Limousin commissionership, enduring many things and toiling late and early for long years, that the burden of others might be lighter, and the welfare of the land more assured. But there are many paths for many men, and if only magnanimous self-denial has the power of inspiration, and can move us with the deep thrill of the heroic, yet every truthful protest, even of excessive personality, against the gregarious trifling of life in the social groove, has a side which it is not ill for us to consider, and perhaps for some men and women in every generation to seek to imitate.

FOOTNOTES:

[201] _Rép. à M. Bordes_, 163.

[202] Pictet de Sergy., i. 18.

[203] _Conf._, iv. 248.

[204] _Ib._ ix. 279. Also _Economie Politique_.

[205] Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventures of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's Memoirs.

[206] The passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris (1744-1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books vii.-ix. of the _Confessions_. Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (_Oeuv._, xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the _Confessions_ (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopædia. Sterne received £650 for two volumes of _Tristram Shandy_ in 1780. Walpole's _Letters_, in. 298.

[207] _Conf._, viii. 154-157.

[208] _Ib._ viii. 160.

[209] _Conf._, viii. 160, 161.

[210] _Ib._ viii. 159.

[211] _Réveries_, iii 168.

[212] _Rêveries_, iii. 166.

[213] See the _Epître à Mdme. la Marquise du Châtelet, sur la Calomnie_.

[214] _La Femme au 18ième siècle_, par MM. de Goncourt, p. 40.

[215] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 295.

[216] Quoted in Goncourt's _Femme au 18ième siècle_, p. 378.

[217] _Ib._, p. 337.

[218] Mdlle. L'Espinasse's _Letters_, ii. 89.

[219] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, ii. 47, 48.

[220] _Ib._, ii. 55.

[221] _Mém._, Bk. iv. 327.

[222] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 58.

[223] _Ib._, 54.

[224] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 378-381. Saint Lambert formulated his atheism afterwards in the _Catéchisme Universel_.

[225] Madame d'Epinay's _Mém._, i. 443.

[226] _Corr._, i. 317. Sept. 14, 1756.

[227] Letter to Madame de Créqui, 1752. _Corr._, i. 171.

[228] _Conf_,., vii. 104.

[229] The _Devin du Village_ was played at Fontainebleau on October 18, 1752, and at the Opera in Paris in March 1753. Madame de Pompadour took a part in it in a private performance. See Rousseau's note to her, _Corr._, i. 178.

[230] _Conf._, viii. 190.

[231] _Conf._, viii. 183.

[232] _Conf._, viii. 202; and Musset-Pathay, ii. 439. When in Strasburg, in 1765, he could not bring himself to be present at its representation. _Oeuv. et Corr. Inéd._, p. 434.

[233] Madame de Staël insisted that her father said this, and Necker insisted that it was his daughter's.

[234] _Corr._, i. 176. Feb. 13, 1753.

[235] _Conf._, viii. 208-210.

[236] She died on July 30, 1762, aged "about sixty-three years." Arthur Young, visiting Chambéri in 1789, with some trouble procured the certificate of her death, which may be found in his _Travels_, i. 272. See a letter of M. de Conzié to Rousseau, in M. Streckeisen-Moultou's collection, ii. 445.

[237] _Conf._, xii. 233.

[238] _Conf._, viii. 210.

[239] Gaberel's _Rousseau et les Genevois_, p. 62. _Conf._, viii. 212.

[240] The venerable Company of Pastors and Professors of the Church and Academy of Geneva appointed a committee, as in duty bound, to examine these allegations, and the committee, equally in duty bound, reported (Feb. 10, 1758) with mild indignation, that they were unfounded, and that the flock was untainted by unseasonable use of its mind. See on this Rousseau's _Lettres écrites de la Montagne_, ii. 231.

[241] See Picot's _Hist. de Genève_, ii. 415.

[242] _Letters containing an account of Switzerland, Italy, etc., in 1685-86._ By G. Burnet, p. 9.

[243] J.A. Turretini's complete works were published as late as 1776, including among much besides that no longer interests men, an _Oratio de Scientiarum Vanitate et Proestantia_ (vol. iii. 437), not at all in the vein of Rousseau's Discourse, and a treatise in four parts, _De Legibus Naturalibus_, in which, among other matters, he refutes Hobbes and assails the doctrine of Utility (i. 173, etc.), by limiting its definition to [Greek: to pros heauton] in its narrowest sense. He appears to have been a student of Spinoza (i. 326). Francis Turretini, his father, took part in the discussion as to the nature of the treaty or contract between God and man, in a piece entitled _Foedus Naturæ a primo homine ruptum, ejusque Proevaricationem posteris imputatam_ (1675).

[244] Gaberel's _Eglise de Genève_, iii. 188.

[245] _Corr._, i. 223 (to Vernes, April 5, 1755).

[246] _Conf._, viii. 215, 216. _Corr._, i. 218 (to Perdriau, Nov. 28, 1754).

[247] _Conf._, viii. 218.

[248] _Conf._, viii. 217. It is worth noticing as bearing on the accuracy of the Confessions, that Madame d'Epinay herself (_Mém._, ii. 115) says that when she began to prepare the Hermitage for Rousseau he had never been there, and that she was careful to lead him to believe that the expense had not been incurred for him. Moreover her letter to him describing it could only have been written to one who had not seen it, and though her Memoirs are full of sheer imagination and romance, the documents in them are substantially authentic, and this letter is shown to be so by Rousseau's reply to it.

[249] _Mém._, ii. 116.

[250] _Corr._ (1755), i. 242.

[251] _Corr._, i. 245.

[252] _Phædrus_, 230.

[253] _Conf._, viii. 221, etc.