Chapter IV: Emilius (2)

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 spacious 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 compass, 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 transmuted. 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 Helvétius himself. The accusation is just. Emilius will enter adult life without the germs of that social conscience, which animates a man with all the associations of duty and right, of gratitude 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 multitude 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 class and solicitous passion 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 associate those virtues of fortitude, tenacity, silent patience, outspoken energy, readiness to assert ourselves and readiness to efface ourselves, willingness to suffer and resolution to inflict suffering, which men of old knew how to show for their gods 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, assuredly 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 circumstances 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 accumulating 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 multitude 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 competitors. 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 circumstances 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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar, 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 constitution of things the educators of us all at the most critical periods, and mainly of their own sex 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 Heloïsa 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 compass 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 God 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 sex, 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 assurance, that in spite of prejudices that have their origin in the manners of the time, the enthusiasm for what is worthy and noble 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 sex two really distinct classes; 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 classes 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 reconstitution 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 passion, 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 illustrated 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 sex 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 Fénelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accent, as if some ineffable essence has passed 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 circumstances 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]

VI.

Yet the sum of the merits of Emilius as a writing upon education is not to be lightly counted. Its value lies, as has been said of the New Heloïsa, in the spirit which animates it and communicates itself with vivid force to the reader. It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature, and of such books the worth resides less in the parts than in the whole. It touched the deeper things of character. It filled parents with a sense of the dignity and moment of their task. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage, which made education one of the dark formalistic arts. It admitted floods of light and air into the tightly closed nurseries and schoolrooms. It effected the substitution of growth for mechanism. A strong current of manliness, wholesomeness, simplicity, self-reliance, was sent by it through Europe, while its eloquence was the most powerful adjuration ever addressed to parental affection to cherish the young life in all love and considerate solicitude. It was the charter of youthful deliverance. The first immediate effect of Emilius in France was mainly on the religious side. It was the Christian religion that needed to be avenged, rather than education that needed to be amended, and the press overflowed with replies to that profession of faith which we shall consider in the next chapter. Still there was also an immense quantity of educational books and pamphlets, which is to be set down, first to the suppression of the Jesuits, the great educating order, and the vacancy which they left; and next to the impulse given by the Emilius to a movement from which the book itself had originally been an outcome.[325] But why try to state the influence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike the account truly would be to write the history of the first French Revolution.[326] All mothers, as Michelet says, were big with Emilius. "It is not without good reason that people have noted the children born at this glorious moment, as animated by a superior spirit, by a gift of flame and genius. It is the generation of revolutionary Titans: the other generation not less hardy in science. It is Danton, Vergniaud, Desmoulins; it is Ampère, La Place, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint Hilaire."[327]

In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have already spoken.[328] Herder, whom some have called the Rousseau of the Germans, wrote with enthusiasm to his then beloved Caroline of the "divine Emilius," and he never ceased to speak of Rousseau as his inspirer and his master.[329] Basedow (1723), that strange, restless, and most ill-regulated person, was seized with an almost phrenetic enthusiasm for Rousseau's educational theories, translated them into German, and repeated them in his works over and over again with an incessant iteration. Lavater (1741-1801), who differed from Basedow in being a fervent Christian of soft mystic faith, was thrown into company with him in 1774, and grew equally eager with him in the cause of reforming education in the Rousseauite sense.[330] Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the most systematic, popular, and permanently successful of all the educational reformers, borrowed his spirit and his principles mainly from the Emilius, though he gave larger extension and more intelligent exactitude to their application. Jean Paul the Unique, in the preface to his Levana, or Doctrine of Education (1806), one of the most excellent of all books on the subject, declares that among previous works to which he owes a debt, "first and last he names Rousseau's Emilius; no preceding work can be compared to his; in no previous work on education was the ideal so richly combined with the actual," and so forth.[331] It was not merely a Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder, whom Rousseau fired with new thoughts. The smaller men, such as Fr. Jacobi, Heinse, Klinger, shared the same inspiration. The worship of Rousseau penetrated all classes, and touched every degree of intelligence.[332]

In our own country Emilius was translated as soon as it appeared, and must have been widely read, for a second version of the translation was called for in a very short time. So far as a cursory survey gives one a right to speak, its influence here in the field of education is not very perceptible. That subject did not yet, nor for some time to come, excite much active thought in England. Rousseau's speculations on society both in the Emilius and elsewhere seem to have attracted more attention. Reference has already been made to Paley.[333] Adam Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) has many allusions, direct and indirect, to Rousseau.[334] Kames's Sketches of the History of Man (1774) abounds still more copiously in references to Emilius, sometimes to controvert its author, more often to cite him as an authority worthy of respect, and Rousseau's crude notions about women are cited with special acceptance.[335] Cowper was probably thinking of the Savoyard Vicar when he wrote the energetic lines in the Task, beginning "Haste now, philosopher, and set him free," scornfully defying the deist to rescue apostate man.[336] Nor should we omit what was counted so important a book in its day as Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is perhaps more French in its spirit than any other work of equal consequence in our literature of politics, and in its composition the author was avowedly a student of Rousseau, as well as of the members of the materialistic school.

In fine we may add that Emilius was the first expression of that democratic tendency in education, which political and other circumstances gradually made general alike in England, France, and Germany; a tendency, that is, to look on education as a process concerning others besides the rich and the well-born. As has often been remarked, Ascham, Milton, Locke, Fénelon, busy themselves about the instruction of young gentlemen and gentlewomen. The rest of the world are supposed to be sufficiently provided for by the education of circumstance. Since the middle of the eighteenth century this monopolising conception has vanished, along with and through the same general agencies as the corresponding conception of social monopoly. Rousseau enforced the production of a natural and self-sufficing man as the object of education, and showed, or did his best to show, the infinite capacity of the young for that simple and natural cultivation. This easily and directly led people to reflect that such a capacity was not confined to the children of the rich, nor the hope of producing a natural and sufficing man narrowed to those who had every external motive placed around them for being neither natural nor self-sufficing.

Voltaire pronounced Emilius a stupid romance, but admitted that it contained fifty pages which he would have bound in morocco. These, we may be sure, concerned religion; in truth it was the Savoyard Vicar's profession of faith which stirred France far more than the upbringing of the natural man in things temporal. Let us pass to that eloquent document which is inserted in the middle of the Emilius, as the expression of the religious opinion that best befits the man of nature--a document most hyperbolically counted by some French enthusiasts for the spiritualist philosophy and the religion of sentiment, as the noblest monument of the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[273] _Mém. de Mdme. d'Epinay_, ii. 276, 278.

[274] _Lettres à mon Fils_ (1758), and _Les Conversations d'Emilie_ (1783).

[275] _Lettres Péruviennes._

[276] _Oeuv._, ii. 785-794.

[277] _Corr. Lit._, iii. 65.

[278] _Emile_, I. 27.

[279] It is interesting to recall a similar movement in the Roman society of the second century of our era. See the advice of Favorinus to mothers, in Aulus Gellius, xii. 1. M. Boissier, contrasting the solicitude of Tacitus and Marcus Aurelius for the infant young with the brutality of Cicero, remarks that in the time of Seneca men discussed in the schools the educational theories of Rousseau's Emilius. (_La Relig. Romaine_, ii. 202.)

[280] See also his diatribe against whalebone and tight-lacing for girls, V. 27.

[281] _Emile_, I. 93, etc.

[282] _Emile_, II. 141.

[283] _Emile_, II. 156-160.

[284] _Emile_, III. 338-345.

[285] III. 358, etc.

[286] _Emile_, II. 263-267.

[287] _Levana_, ch. iii. § 54.

[288] _Emile_, II. 163.

[289] The Ninth Promenade (_Rêveries_, 309).

[290] _Emile_, I. 23.

[291] II. 109.

[292] II. 111.

[293] _Emile_, II. 113-117.

[294] II. 121.

[295] II. 143.

[296] _Emile_, III. 382.

[297] II. 227.

[298] IV. 10.

[299] _Emile_, III. 394.

[300] V. 199.

[301] The reader will not forget the famous supper-party of princes in _Candide_.

[302] _Emile_, III. 392, and note. A still more remarkable passage, as far as it goes, is that in the _Confessions_ (xi. 136):--"The disasters of an unsuccessful war, all of which came from the fault of the government, the incredible disorder of the finances, the continual dissensions of the administration, divided as it was among two or three ministers at open war with one another, and who for the sake of hurting one another dragged the kingdom into ruin; the general discontent of the people, and of all the orders of the state; the obstinacy of a wrong-headed woman, who, always sacrificing her better judgment, if indeed she had any, to her tastes, dismissed the most capable from office, to make room for her favourites ... all this prospect of a coming break-up made me think of seeking shelter elsewhere."

[303] _Emile_, V. 220.

[304] IV. 85.

[305] _Emile_, IV. 38, 39. Hence, we suppose, the famous reply to Lavoisier's request that his life might be spared from the guillotine for a fortnight, in order that he might complete some experiments, that the Republic has no need of chemists.

[306] IV. 65. Jefferson, who was American minister in France from 1784 to 1789, and absorbed a great many of the ideas then afloat, writes in words that seem as if they were borrowed from Rousseau:--"I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former public opinion is in the state of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing, they have divided their nation into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate; this is a true picture of Europe." Tucker's _Life of Jefferson_, i. 255.

[307] Lamennais was influenced by Rousseau throughout. In the _Essay on Indifference_ he often appeals to him as the vindicator of the religious sentiment (_e.g._ i. 21, 52, iv. 375, etc. Ed. 1837). The same influence is seen still more markedly in the _Words of a Believer_ (1835), when dogma had departed, and he was left with a kind of dual deism, thus being less estranged from Rousseau than in the first days (_e.g._ § xix. "Tous naissent égaux," etc., § xxi., etc.) The _Book of the People_ is thoroughly Rousseauite.

[308] _Emile_, IV. 105.

[309] _Emile_, IV. 63.

[310] _Emile_, IV. 273.

[311] _Emile_, IV. 83.

[312] _Emile_, II. 185. See the previous page for some equally prudent observations on the folly of teaching geography to little children.

[313] _Emile_, IV. 68.

[314] V. 231, etc.

[315] _Emile_, IV. 71.

[316] _Emile_, IV. 73.

[317] IV. 77.

[318] _Emile_, V. 22, 53, 54, 101, 128-132.

[319] _Emile_, V. 78.

[320] V. 122.

[321] V. 129, 130.

[322] Well did Jean Paul say, "If we regard all life as an educational institution, a circumnavigator of the world is less influenced by all the nations he has seen than by his nurse."--_Levana._

[323] _Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._, vi. pp. 264, 523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]

[324] _Emile et Sophie_, i.

[325] For an account of some of these, see Grimm's _Corr. Lit._, iii. 211, 252, 347, etc. Also _Corr. Inéd._, p. 143.

[326] For the early date at which Rousseau's power began to meet recognition, see D'Alembert to Voltaire, July 31, 1762.

[327] _Louis xv. et xvi._, p. 226.

[328] See above, vol. ii. p. 193.

[329] Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, _s.v._ Herder.

[330] The suggestion of the speculation with which Lavater's name is most commonly associated, is to be found in the Emilius. "It is supposed that physiognomy is only a development of features already marked by nature. For my part, I should think that besides this development, the features of a man's countenance form themselves insensibly and take their expression from the frequent and habitual wearing into them of certain affections of the soul. These affections mark themselves in the countenance, nothing is more certain; and when they grow into habits, they must leave durable impressions upon it." IV. 49, 50.

[331] Author's Preface, x.

[332] See an excellent page in M. Joret's _Herder_, 322.

[333] See above, vol. ii. p. 191.

[334] _E.g._ pp. 8, 198, 204, 205.

[335] _E.g._ Bk. I. § 5, p. 279. § 6, p. 406, 419, etc. (the portion concerning the female sex).

[336] Vv. 670-703. We have already seen (above, vol. ii. p. 41, _n._) that Cowper had read Emilius, and the mocking reference to the Deist as "an Orpheus and omnipotent in song," coincides with Rousseau's comparison of the Savoyard Vicar to "the divine Orpheus singing the first hymn" (_Emile_, IV. 205).