ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques, one of the most distinguished writers of the eighteenth century, was born at Geneva on the 28th of June 1712. His father was by profession a clock and watch maker. At his birth, which, he says, was the first of his misfortunes, he endangered the life of his mother; and he himself was for a long time afterwards in a very weak and languishing state of health. But as his bodily strength increased, his mental powers gradually opened, and afforded the happiest presages of future distinction. His father, a citizen of Geneva, was a well-informed tradesman; and in the place where he wrought he kept a Plutarch and a Tacitus, authors which, of course, soon became familiar to his son. Some acts of youthful misconduct compelled him to leave his native city. "Finding himself a fugitive in a strange country, and without money or friends, he changed his religion in order to procure a subsistence." Bornex, Bishop of Annecy, from whom he sought an asylum, committed the care of his education to Madame Warens, whose history and life were from this time identified with his, and whose benevolence Rousseau required basely in his revelations of criminal conduct for which he was himself greatly if not chiefly to blame.
He possessed more than ordinary talents for music; and the Abbé Blanchard, to whom his education had been entrusted, flattered his hopes of a place in the royal chapel, which he, however, failed in obtaining for him. He was therefore under the necessity of teaching music at Chamberi. In this place he remained till 1741, in which year he went to Paris, where he was long in very destitute circumstances. But he at length began to emerge from that obscurity in which he had hitherto been buried; and his friends placed him with M. de Montaigne, French ambassador at Venice. According to his own confession, a proud misanthropy, and a peculiar contempt for the riches and pleasures of this world, constituted the chief traits in his character; and a misunderstanding soon took place between him and his employer. The place of deputy, under M. Dupin, a wealthy farmer-general, gave him some temporary relief, and enabled him to show some kindness to Madame de Warens, his former benefactress. The year 1750 witnessed the commencement of his literary career. The academy of Dijon had proposed the following question: "Whether the revival of the arts and sciences has contributed to the refinement of manners?" Rousseau at first inclined to support the affirmative. "Take the negative side of the question," said Diderot, who was at that time his friend, "and I'll promise you the greatest
success." His discourse against the sciences having been found to be the best written, and replete with brilliant reasoning, was publicly crowned with the approbation of that learned body. Never was a paradox supported with greater eloquence. It was not, however, a new one; but he enriched it with all the advantages which either knowledge or genius could confer upon it. Immediately after its appearance he met with several opponents of his tenets, which he defended; and, from one dispute to another, he found himself involved in a formidable train of correspondence, without having ever almost dreamed of such opposition. From that period he decreased in happiness as he increased in celebrity. His Discourse on the Causes of Inequality amongst Mankind, and on the Origin of Social Compacts, was written with a view to prove that mankind are equal; that they were born to live apart from each other; and that they have perverted the order of nature in forming societies. He bestows the highest praise on the State of Nature, and deprecates the idea of every social compact. By presenting this performance to the magistrates of Geneva he was received again into his native country, and re-instated in all the privileges and rights of a citizen, after having with much difficulty prevailed on himself to abjure the Catholic religion. He soon returned to France, however, and lived for some time in Paris. He afterwards gave himself up to retirement, partly to escape the shafts of criticism, and partly to follow the regimen rendered necessary by the painful disease under which he laboured. This is an important epoch in the history of his life, as it was owing to this circumstance, perhaps, that we have the most eloquent works that have proceeded from his pen. His Letter to M. D'Alembert on the design of erecting a theatre at Geneva, written in his retirement, and published in the year 1757, contains, along with some paradoxes, some very important and well-handled truths. Although so great an enemy to theatrical representations, he caused a comedy to be printed; and in 1752 he gave to the theatre a pastoral, called Le Devin du Village, of which he composed the poetry and the music, both of them abounding with sentiment and elegance, and full of innocent rural simplicity. His Dictionary of Music contains some good but many more indifferent articles. Soon after the rapid success of his Village Conjuror, he published a Letter on French Music, or rather against French Music, written with equal freedom and liveliness. The exasperated partisans of French comedy treated him with as much fury as if he had conspired against the state; and a crowd of enthusiasts spent their strength in loud and open menaces against him.
That interesting and tender style which is so conspicuous throughout the Devin du Village marks many of the letters in the Nouvelle Héloïse, which was published in 1761. This epistolary romance, of which the plot is ill managed, and the arrangement bad, has great beauties as well as great faults. Some of the letters are indeed admirable, from their force and warmth of expression as well as their intensity of passion, from an effervescence of sentiment, and from the irregularity of ideas which always characterises a passion carried to its height. In the Héloïse Rousseau's unlucky talent of rendering everything problematical appears very conspicuous. This is the case in his arguments in favour of and against duelling, which afford an apology for suicide, and a just condemnation of it; his facility in palliating the crime of adultery, and his strong reasons to make it abhorred; his declamations against social happiness, and transports in favour of humanity; his violent rhapsodies against philosophers, and his rage for adopting their opinions; the existence of God attacked by sophistry, and the Christian religion combated by the most specious objections, and celebrated by the most sublime eulogies.
Rousseau. His next work, Emile, made more noise than its predecessor. This moral romance, which was published in the year 1762, treats chiefly of education. Rousseau wished to follow nature in everything; and though much of his system was quite impracticable, yet many of his hints and suggestions have been followed out, and with good effect, by practical teachers. His precepts are expressed with the force and dignity of a mind full of the leading truths of morality. If he has not always been virtuous, nobody at least has felt virtue more, or made it appear to greater advantage. What is most to be lamented is, that in wishing to educate a young man as a Christian, he has filled a volume with objections against Christianity. On the other hand, it must be confessed that he has given a very sublime eulogium on the gospel, and an affecting portrait of its divine Author; but the miracles and the prophecies which serve to establish his mission he attacks without reserve. Admitting only natural religion, he weighs everything in the balance of reason; and this reason being false, leads him into dilemmas which are very unfavourable to his own repose and happiness. The French Parliament condemned this book in 1762, and by instituting a criminal prosecution against the author forced him to make a precipitate retreat from France. He directed his steps towards his native town, but it shut its gates upon him. Proscribed in the place where he had first drawn breath, he sought an asylum in Switzerland, and found one in the principality of Neuchâtel. But the protection of the King of Prussia, to whom the principality belonged, was not sufficient to rescue him from that obloquy which the minister of Moutiers-Travers, the village to which he had retired, had excited against him. He preached against Rousseau, and his sermons produced an uproar amongst the people. One night some fanatics, inspired by wine and the declamations of their minister, threw stones at the windows of the Genevese philosopher, who, fearing new insults, sought an asylum in the canton of Berne. As this canton was connected with the republic of Geneva, the authorities did not think proper to allow him to remain in their city. Neither his broken health nor the approach of winter could soften their hearts. To relieve them from all anxiety about the spread of his opinions, he besought them to shut him up in prison till the spring. But even this favour was denied him. Obligated to set out on a journey in the beginning of a most inclement season, he reached Strasbourg in a very destitute condition. From Strasbourg he proceeded in the autumn of 1765 to Paris, where the protection of the Prince de Conti, and his own eccentricities of life and opinions, made him once more the lion of the hour. Among the notable men whose acquaintance he formed in the course of this winter was the philosopher David Hume, on whose invitation he visited England in the spring of 1766. Hume's conduct to his guest was marked by a delicacy and good sense beyond all praise. The new friends settled at Wootton in Derbyshire, where, however, they had not resided three months when the morbid vanity and diseased imagination of the Frenchman discovered in some very innocent acts of "ce bon David" a deep-laid scheme for ruining his peace and hopes of literary glory. A letter of Horace Walpole, written under the name of the King of Prussia, and in which Rousseau's mania of believing himself persecuted by the whole world was held up to ridicule, led to an irreparable breach between the two philosophers. In his celebrated Letter to a Member of the National Assembly Burke alludes to this period of Rousseau's life in the following terms:—"We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity in England. As I had good opportunity of knowing his proceedings almost from day to day, he left no doubt on my mind that he entertained no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding but vanity. With this vice he was pos-
sessed to a degree little short of madness." Rousseau accordingly returned to France, spited with the world, and particularly offended with the English philosopher. In July 1770 he appeared for the first time at the Café de la Régence dressed in ordinary attire, having laid aside the Armenian dress in which he is generally represented in the best portraits of him that now exist. He was loaded with praises by the surrounding multitude. "It was somewhat singular," says M. Sennebier, "to see a man so haughty as he returning to the very place from whence he had been banished so often. Nor is it one of the smallest inconsistencies of this extraordinary character, that he preferred a retreat in that place of which he had spoken so much ill." It is as singular that a person under sentence of imprisonment should wish to live in so public a manner in the very place where his sentence was in force against him. His friends, however, procured for him the liberty of staying, on condition that he should write neither on religion nor on politics; and he kept his word, for he ceased to write altogether. He was contented with living in quiet seclusion in the society of a few tried friends, shunning the company of the great, and giving up all his old eccentricities. He died of apoplexy at Erménoville, about ten leagues from Paris, July 2, 1778, at the age of sixty-six years.
Much of the unhappiness of Rousseau's life is to be attributed to the marriage which he contracted while living in the neighbourhood of Lyons with a woman named Thérèse Levasseur, who, though poor, ugly, and ill-tempered, exercised over her husband the empire of a nurse over a child. Her conduct and influence had the effect of driving away from his house the few friends whose society was either useful or agreeable to him, and of confirming him in those vices and eccentricities to which he was naturally prone. He sent his children into orphan hospitals as soon as they were born, rather than take upon himself the charge of their maintenance and education. It is to this part of his conduct Burke alludes in the Letter already quoted:—"He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then without one natural pang casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural feelings. Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish." The unsocial habits of Rousseau, and his strange ways, both of living and thinking, which can only be explained and may be partly, at least, excused by the plex of insanity, made him an object of curiosity, and helped to procure him a name. Like Diogenes of old, he united simplicity of manners with pride of genius; and a very large stock of indolence, with an extreme sensibility, served to render his character still more uncommon. "An indolent mind," says he, "terrified at every application, a warm, bilious, and irritable temperament, sensible also in a high degree to every thing that can affect it, appear not possible to be united in the same person; and yet these two contrarieties compose the chief of mine. An active life has no charms for me. I would an hundred times rather consent to be idle than to do anything against my will; and I have an hundred times thought that I would not live amiss in the Bastile, provided I had nothing to do but just continue there. In my younger days I made several attempts to get in there; but as they were only with the view of procuring a refuge and rest in my old age, and, like the exertions of an indolent person, only by fits and starts, they were never attended with the smallest success. When misfortunes came, they afforded me a pretext for giving myself up to my ruling passion."
His ideas on politics were as eccentric as his paradoxes
Roussillon about religion. Some reckon his Social Compact, which Voltaire calls the Unsocial Compact, the greatest effort of his genius; whilst others find it full of contradictions, errors, and cynical passages, obscure, ill arranged, and by no means worthy of his pen. There were found in his portfolio his Confessions, in twelve books; the first six of which were published. "His Confessions," says Sennebier, in his Literary History of Geneva, "appear to me to be a very dangerous book, and paint Rousseau in such colours as we would never have ventured to apply to him. The excellent analysis which we meet with of some sentiments, and the delicate anatomy which he makes of some actions, are not sufficient to counterbalance the detestable matter which is found in them, and the unceasing obloquies everywhere to be met with." Amongst his other posthumous pieces are the following:—The Reveries of a Solitary Wanderer, being a journal of the latter part of his life; Considerations upon the Government of Poland; The Adventures of Lord Edicard, a novel, being a kind of supplement to the New Heloise; various memoirs and fugitive pieces, with a great number of letters, containing some eloquent passages and deep thoughts; Emilia and Sophia; The Levite of Ephraim, a poem in prose, in four cantos, written in a style of ancient simplicity; Letters to Sara; an Opera and a Comedy; translations of the first book of Tacitus's History, of the episode of Olinda and Sophronia, from Tasso, &c. Like all the other writings of Rousseau, we find in these posthumous pieces many admirable and some useful things; but they also abound with contradictions, paradoxes, and ideas very unfavourable to religion. In his letters, especially, we see a man chagrined at misfortunes which he never attributes to himself; suspicious of everybody about him, calling and believing himself a lamb in the midst of wolves. Viewing him solely as a writer, his character is perhaps described with truth and accuracy in the following words of Hume:—"Though I see some tincture of extravagance in all his writings, I also think I see so much eloquence and force of imagination, such an energy of expression, and such a boldness of conception, as entitle him to a place amongst the first writers of his age." A complete edition of his works was published in 1788 and the following years, extending to thirty-seven volumes octavo. The best edition, however, is that published by Musset-Pathay, his biographer, Paris, 1823-25, 20 vols. 8vo. M. Villemain has given an analysis and criticism of the works of Rousseau in his recent Cours de Littérature Française au 18th siècle.