enemies and suspect his friends. His moral character was
undoubtedly weak in other ways than this, but it is fair to
remember that but for his astounding Confessions the more
disgusting parts of it would not have been known, and that
these Confessions were written, if not under hallucination, at
any rate in circumstances entitling the self-condemned criminal
to the benefit of considerable doubt. If Rousseau had held
his tongue, he might have stood lower as a man of letters;
he would pretty certainly have stood higher as a man. He
was, moreover, really sinned against, if still more sinning.
The conduct of Grimm to him was certainly bad; and, though
Walpole was not his personal friend, a worse action than his
famous letter, considering the well-known idiosyncrasy of the
subject, would be difficult to find. It was his own fault that
he saddled himself with the Le Vasseurs, but their conduct was
probably, if not certainly, ungrateful in the extreme. Only
excuses' can be made for him; but the excuses for a man born,
as Hume after the quarrel said of him, “ without a skin” are
numerous and strong.
His peculiar reputation increased after his death. During his life his personal peculiarities and the fact that his opinions were nearly as obnoxious to the oneparty as to the other worked against him, but it was not so after his death. The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were far from idolizing him as a revolutionist. His style was taken up by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and by Chateaubriand. It was employed for purposes quite different from those to which he had himself applied it, and the reaction triumphed by the very arms which had been most powerful in the hands of the Revolution. Byron's fervid panegyric enlisted on his side all who admired Byronthat is to say, the majority of the younger men and women of Europe between 1820 and 1850-and thus different sides of his tradition were continued for a full century after the publication of his chief books. His religious unorthodoxy was condoned because he never scofied; his political heresies, after their first effect was over, seemed harmless from the very want of logic and practical spirit in them, while part at least of his literary secret was the common property of almost every one who attempted literature.
In religion Rousseau was undoubtedly what he has been called abovc%a sentimental deist; but no one who reads him with the smallest attention can fail to see that sentimentalism was the essence, deism the accident of his creed. In his time orthodoxy at once generous and intelligent hardly existed in France. 'l' here were ignorant persons who were sincerely orthodox; there were intelligent persons who pretended to be so. But between the time of Massillon and D'Aguesseau and the time of Lamennais and Joseph de Maistre the class of men of whom in England Berkeley, Butler and Johnson were representatives did not exist in France. Little inclined by nature to any but the emotional side of religion, and utterly undisciplined in any other by education, course of life, or the general tendency of public opinion, Rousseau naturally took refuge in the nebulous kind of natural religion which was at once fashionable and convenient. If his practice fell far short even of his own arbitrary standard of morality, as much may be said of persons far more dogmatically orthodox. In politics, on the other hand, Rousseau was a sincere and, as far as in him lay, a convinced republican. He had no great tincture of learning, he was by no means a profound logician, and he was impulsive and emotional in the extreme-character istics which in political matters predispose the subject to the preference of equality above all political requisites. He saw that under the French monarchy the actual result was the greatest misery of the greatest number, and, he did not look much further. The Control social is for the political student one of the most curious and interesting books existing. Historically it is null; logically it is full of gaping flaws, practically its manipulations of the 'volonté de tous and the 'volonté généiale are clearly insufficient to obviate anarchy. But its mixture of real eloquence and apparent cogency is exactly such as always carries a multitude with it, if only for a time. Moreover, in some minor branches of politics and economics Rousseau was a real reformer. Visionary as his educational schemes (chiefly promulgated in Emile) are in parts, they are admirable in others, and his protest against mothers refusing to nurse their children hit a blot in French life which is not removed yet, and has always been a source of weakness to the nation. But it is as a literary man pure and simple-that is to say, as an exponent rather than as an originator of ideas-that Rousseau is rnost noteworthy, and that he has exercised most influence. The first thing noticeable about him is that he defies all customary and mechanical classification. He is not a dramatist—his work as such is insignificant-nor a novelist, for, though his two chief works except the Confessions are called novels, .Emile is one only in name, and La Nouvelle Héloise is as a story diduse, prosy and awkward to.a -degree. He was without command of poetic form, and he could only be called a philosopher in an age when the term was used with such meaningless laxity as was customary in the 18th century. If he must be classed, he was before all things a describer—a describer of the passions of the human heart and of the beauties of nature. In the first part of 'his vocation the novelists of his own youth, such as Marivaux, Richardson and Prévost, may be"said' to have shown him the way, though he improved greatly upon them; in the second he was almost a creator. In combining the two and expressing the effect of nature on the feelings and of the feelings on the aspect of nature' he was absolutely without a forerunner or'a model. And, as literature since his time has been chiefly differentiated from literature before it by theicolour and tone resulting from this combination, Rousseau may be said to hold, as an influence, a place almost unrivalled in literary history. The defects of all sentimental writing are noticeable in him, but they are palliated by his wonderful feeling, and by the passionate sincerity even of his insincere passages. Some cavils have been made against his French, but none of much weight or importance. And in such passages as the famous “ Voila de la pervenche” of the Confessions, as the description of the isle of St Pierre in the Reveries, as some of the letters in the Nouvelle H éloise and others, he had achieved absolute perfection in doing what he intended to do. The reader, as it has been said, may think he might have done something else with advantage, but he can hardly think that he could have done this thing better. (G. SA.) ~
BIBLIOGRAPHY.¥-T he dates of most of Rousseau's works published during his lifetime have been given above. The Confessions and Réveries, which, read in private, had given much umbrage to persons concerned, and which -the author did not intend to be published until the end of the century, appeared in Geneva in 1782. In the same year and the following appeared a complete edition in forty-seven small volumes. There have been many since, the most important of them being that of Musset-Pathay (Paris, 1823). Some unpublished works, chiefly letters, were added by Bosscha (Paris, 1858) and Streckeisen Moulton (Paris, 1861). See also the latter's Rousseau el ses amis (1865). Works on Rousseau are innumerable. The chief biographies are: in French that of Saint Marc Girardin (1874), in English the Life by Viscount Morley. But the materials for his biography are so controversial and so personal-his own Confessions and the memoirs of associates whose accuracy and honesty are disputed-that the correct historical view can hardly be said yet to be standardized. Mrs Frederika Macdonald, in her Jean Jaoques Rousseau (1906), makes out a good case for regarding Mme. d'Epinay's Memoirs as coloured, if not actually dictated, by the malevolent attitude of Grimm and Diderot; and her study of the documents undoubtedly qualifies a good many of the assumptions that have been made on the strength of evidence which is at least tainted by contemporary prejudice, and leaves the way open for an interpretation of the facts which would reconcile Rousseau's character as a writer with his actions as a man. Unfortunately for the consistency of historical writing, the view taken of Rousseau's biography affects those of Grimm, Diderot;, Mme. d'Epinay and others, and while Mrs Macdonald's researches have done much to suggest a rehabilitation of Rousseau's veracity they have not definitely been accepted to an extent which would justify the rewriting of these other lives in her sense. See also E. Ritter, Famille et jeunesse de Rousseau (1896); A. Houssaye, Les Charmettes (znd ed., 1864); ]. Grand-Carteret, Rousseau jugé par les Frangais d' aujoufd'hui (1890); L. Ducros, J. J. Rousseau de Geneve d l'Hermitage, 1712-57 (1908). (H. CH.)
