Aspects and Impressions Part 9

But he gave the Genevese philosopher credit for nothing worse than levity; he had raised up political and social paradoxes in the spirit in which a story-teller, eager to arouse the attention of an idle audience, evokes giants and fairies to satisfy the credulity of his hearers. And Burke has the indulgence to admit that, "I believe, were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the fanatical frenzy of his scholars, who ... are servile imitators; and even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith."

But when events had rapidly developed, and Burke came to write the flaming sentences of his great _Letter to a Member of the National a.s.sembly_ (1791), the importance of Rousseau's influence in bringing about the events which Burke so pa.s.sionately deplored had greatly widened and deepened. He saw that the very blood of Rousseau had been transfused into the veins of the National a.s.sembly of France. "Him they study," he wrote, "him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of _Polyc.l.i.tus_; he is their standard figure of perfection." Burke felt obliged to denounce, with his unparalleled wealth of picturesque eloquence, the fatal character of the fascination exercised by the author of the _Lettres de la Montague_ and the _Confessions_.

To Burke, thus brought face to face with what he believed to be the very Ragnarok of the G.o.ds, the ruin of all which made life in Europe worth living, it now became a religious duty to expose the malefic character of the charming, exquisite pleadings of the revolutionary of Geneva. He declared that the virtue propounded by Rousseau was not virtue at all, but "a selfish, flattering, seductive, ostentatious vice." This was a theory new to Englishmen, a theory which had, of course, in faltering accents, been here and there suggested by opponents, but never before deliberately and logically a.s.serted by a great master of English oratory. Burke spoke, not merely with the immense prestige of his position, but as one who had been subjected to the personal charm of Rousseau, and who had studied him in his lifetime, not merely without prejudice, but with sympathy and admiration. His grave censure of the philosopher came with unction from the lips of one who was known to have been in communication with him, during his first visit to London, almost from day to day.[5] Burke spoke with authority to a large section of the public when he stated that he had gradually become persuaded that Rousseau "entertained no principle either to guide his heart, or to guide his understanding, but _vanity_." He did not deny the charm of Rousseau's writing, or pretend to depreciate his incomparable talents, but he p.r.o.nounced him to be deranged and eccentric, and to have gloried in the illumination of the obscure and vulgar vices. He described the _Confessions_, over which the English world had bowed in transports of emotional adulation, as the record of "a life that, with wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator." Violence carried Burke so far as to describe Rousseau as a man, by his own account, without a single virtue. There can be no question that this diatribe, prominently brought forward by the first of English orators, in a work which was read by every educated man in Great Britain, sapped the reputation of Rousseau amongst our countrymen, and led to the gradual decline of his fame in England all down the nineteenth century.

The attack on Rousseau, contained in many fulminating pages of the _Letter to a Member of the National a.s.sembly_, is extravagant and unjust. We read it now with a certain indignation, tempered by a mild amus.e.m.e.nt. It should have been injured by its absurd denunciation of Frenchmen and of the French nation, in whom Burke saw little but a furious congeries of dancing-masters, fiddlers, and _valets-de-chambre_.

But there were already in England, in the reaction of terror brought about by the French Revolution, many who were delighted to accept this grotesque perversion of the truth, and Burke, with all his powers of speech, all his knowledge of his countrymen, knew how to play upon the alarms and the ignorances of the English. He had, at all events, the dangerous gift of unqualified statement, and when he solemnly declared, as if by reluctant conviction, that "the writings of Rousseau lead directly to shameful evil" both in theory and practice, there were thousands only too ready to accept the warning.

We may observe, too, that Burke was the earliest English critic of weight who suggested that the exquisite literary art of Rousseau had its limitations. His remarks are worthy of being quoted at length, since they contain the germ of the English att.i.tude through the whole of the nineteenth century:--

I have often wondered how he comes to be so much more admired and followed on the Continent than he is here. Perhaps a secret charm in the language may have its share in this extraordinary difference. We certainly perceive, and to a degree we feel, in this writer, a style glowing, animated, enthusiastic; at the same time that we find it lax, diffuse, and not in the best taste of composition; all the members of the piece being pretty equally laboured and expended, without any due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too much on the stretch, and his manner has little variety. We cannot rest upon any of his works, though they contain observations which occasionally discover a considerable insight into human nature.

The attacks of Burke upon their idol were not accepted tamely by the Whigs, or by the Radical wing of their party, which included most of the intellectual men of the time. It was recognized that Burke spoke with excessive violence, and that his emotion was largely provoked by political apprehensions which were not shared by the more enlightened of his countrymen. It was easily pointed out that the great orator's objection to Rousseau was founded on a predilection for aristocracy, a dread of innovation, an abhorrence for abstract politics, rather than on a serious and philosophical consideration of Rousseau's contributions to literature. There were many indignant replies to his denunciation, the most effective being those contained in Sir James Mackintosh's famous _Vindiciae Gallicae_. Mackintosh, with less eloquence but far more knowledge, denied the responsibility of Rousseau for the excesses of the Revolution, and suggested that Burke had not made himself acquainted with the _Contrat Social_. Rousseau was vindicated as one of the immortal band of sages "who unshackled and emanc.i.p.ated the human mind,"

and he was a.s.sured a place in eternal glory, by the side of Locke and Franklin.

All that was generous, all that was enthusiastic in English opinion, was still marshalled on the side of Rousseau, but Burke's measured attack, so universally considered, was the gradual cause of an ever-increasing defection. For the time being, however, this was confined to the more timid and the less intelligent part of the community. Burke had a.s.sailed in Rousseau the politician and the moralist, but although it was evident that he was out of sympathy with the imaginative writer, his diatribe did little at first to weaken the spell of the sentimental and literary writings. There was no sign, in 1800, that the _Nouvelle Helose_ had lost its magic for English readers, though it may be doubted whether these were so numerous as they had been twenty years earlier. The famous romance had been the direct precursor of the school of romantic-sentimental novels in England, but it would take us too far back to consider in any detail its influence on Holcroft, whose _Hugh Trevor_ dates from 1797; on Bage, in such romances as _Hermsp.r.o.ng_ (1796); on Mrs. Inchbold, in _Nature and Art_ (1796); and on Charlotte Smith. But it must be remembered that these popular novelists lived well on into the nineteenth century, and that their romances were still widely read, and by advanced thinkers warmly accepted, long after our period begins.

Moreover, in William G.o.dwin (1756-1836), once known as "the immortal G.o.dwin," we have the most p.r.o.nounced type in English literature of the novelist started and supported by a devotion to the principles of Rousseau. _Caleb Williams_ (1794) is still a minor English cla.s.sic, and _Fleetwood_ (1804) is an example of a Rousseau novel actually written within the confines of our century. But with these names the list of the novelists directly inspired by the _Nouvelle Helose_, and in a much lesser degree by _Emile_, practically ceases, and the advent of Walter Scott gave them their _coup de grace_.

The excessive admiration of Englishmen for the imaginative writings of Rousseau was already on the wane, or rather it was beginning to be old-fas.h.i.+oned. That very remarkable work, _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_, by Thomas Green (1769-1825), gives us a valuable insight into the critical opinions of the opening years of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1810, but it reflects the feeling of a slightly earlier time. It represents the views of an independent and transitional thinker, remote from all the literary cliques, who read extensively in his hermitage at Ipswich, and it mirrors the mind of the average educated Englishman between 1795 and 1805. We discover that there were persons of cultivation in England at that time who did not hesitate deliberately to p.r.o.nounce that Rousseau was, "without exception, the greatest genius and the finest writer that ever lived."

This opinion the judicious Green is by no means able to endorse; but he makes a very curious confession which throws a strong light on the best English opinion in 1800. The Lover of Literature says that Rousseau is a character "who has by turns transported me with the most violent and opposite emotions of delight and disgust, admiration and contempt, indignation and pity." He points out, with great ac.u.men, the peculiar conditions of Rousseau's "distempered sensibility," and says that his wrath against evil-doing burns "in consuming fire." Green's a.n.a.lysis of Rousseau's genius is very ingenious and glowing, but he sees spots in the sun, and thus, at the immediate opening of the new century, we meet with high critical commendation, but also with the faint beginnings of reproof.

It is necessary to note that the earliest objections made to Rousseau's influence by Englishmen were political. They were not directed against the _Nouvelle Helose_, nor _Emile_, nor the _Confessions_, but against the _Contrat Social_. The name of Rousseau was used, in connexion with this work, to justify the horrors of the French Revolution, the _jacqueries_, the September ma.s.sacres. Serious English people, whom Burke had originally awakened to suspicion, became more and more persuaded that it was the doctrine of Rousseau which had conducted Louis XVI to the scaffold. The book itself was never much read in England, but it formed part of a tradition. It was understood to have consecrated the violent acts of the Revolution, and English people began to shrink from a name so tainted with blood. This view found a striking exponent in the opening number of the _Edinburgh Review_, where Jeffrey, reviewing Monnier's _Influence attribuee aux Philosophes_, warned his readers with earnest unction against "the presumptuous and audacious maxims" of Rousseau, which had a natural tendency to do harm. The arguments of the _Contrat Social_ were exposed by the Whig critic as unsettling the foundations of political duty, and as teaching the citizens of every established Government that they were enslaved, and had the power of being free. Whatever influence Rousseau still had, and in 1802 it was already waning, the _Edinburgh Review_ solemnly declared to be "unquestionably pernicious."

By English politicians of the Tory type, Rousseau was now regarded with growing suspicion. They looked back to first causes, and found him at the end of the vista. They blamed him all the more because they still lay under the spell of his style and his sentiment. He was beginning to be regarded with more disapproval than other and more definitely revolutionary philosophers, than Condorcet, for instance, as being more presumptuous and less logical, more "improvident," to use the expression of an early English critic. There was no considerable desire in England for the subversion of monarchy, and it was only in countries where there was a wish to believe that kings were toppling from their thrones that the political writings of the arch-firebrand could expect to find a welcome. All such speculation had been pleasant enough before the great revolution set in in France, but England, thrilled for a moment by Quixotic hopes, had turned into another path, where Rousseau had not led her, nor could ever be her companion. He appeared as a demagogue and a disturber of the public peace, as an apostle of change and crisis and unrest. In England everyone, or almost everyone, craved a respite from such ideas, and his prestige began to sink. Let us note, then, that beyond question the earliest objection to Rousseau came from the political side.

The personal character of the Genevese philosopher was still little known. It was revealed, in certain unfavourable aspects, by several collections of memoirs, which now began to be published. Those of Marmontel, in 1805, were widely read in England, and were recommended to a large circle of readers by Jeffrey in a famous essay. The anecdotes, so amusing and often so piquant, appeared to the Scotch critic and to his British audience more discreditable than Marmontel, who belonged to an earlier and looser generation, had intended them to seem. From 1805 began to arise in England the conception of a Rousseau full of cruel vanity, implacable, calumnious, and wholly wanting in that frankness and bluff candour upon which John Bull delights to pride himself. But the splendour of his writings was still uncontested. In 1809, the _Edinburgh Review_ said of the _Contrat Social_ that "it contains some deep observations, and many brilliant and elevated thoughts, along with a good deal, we admit, of impracticable and very questionable theory." The _Confessions_ was not much read, but the precise Jeffrey did not hesitate to recommend it, in 1806, as in some respects the most interesting of books, and in 1807 Capel Lofft declared, "If I had five millions of years to live upon the earth, I would read Rousseau daily with increasing delight."

It would take us too far to consider how the sentimental Pantisocracy of the youthful Lake Poets coincided with the direct influence of Rousseau.

That movement, moreover, belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth century, since it was all over by 1794. But so far as it was an outcome of the teaching of Rousseau, the reaction which followed it was not favourable to the prestige of works which now came to seem almost hateful to the Lake Poets. Wordsworth branched away irrevocably, and his account of the Saturnian Reign in _The Excursion_ (finished in 1805) would have given little satisfaction to Rousseau. Southey was early, and permanently, disgusted with himself for having supposed that the millennium would be ushered in from Geneva. But perhaps the best example of the revulsion of opinion which followed the juvenile raptures of the Lake Poets is to be found in the pages of _The Friend_ (1809-10), where Coleridge derides

Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs; shy of light as the mole, but quick-eared, too, for every whisper of the public opinion; the teacher of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct.

Yet this was premature, as an expression of general critical disapprobation. In November, 1809, the high Tory organ, the _Quarterly Review_,[6] spoke, without a shade of disapproval, of "the tremendous fidelity" of the picture of life in the _Confessions_. In 1812, the same severe periodical, then forming the most dreaded tribunal of British intellectual taste, devoted several pages to an examination of the moral character of Rousseau, and the result was by no means unfavourable. The writer was John Herman Merivale (1779-1844), who declared that "Rousseau's system of morality is as little practicable as would be a system of politics invented by one who had always lived in a state of savage independence," and suggested, but without bitterness, that portions of the _Nouvelle Helose_ betrayed "a certain lack of just moral taste and feeling." The _Confessions_ are described in faltering terms which suggest that Merivale had not read them with any attention.

On the whole, we find, up to this point, no difference between the views of Englishmen and of similarly placed Frenchmen. Even Sh.e.l.ley, in his _Proposals for an a.s.sociation_ (1812), blames the tendency of some of Rousseau's political writings in exactly the conventional Continental tone.

But a brief and limited, though splendid revival was now approaching, the last which the reputation of Rousseau was to enjoy in England. We must note the sphere within which this esoteric celebration of his genius was confined; it was not an explosion of national enthusiasm, but the defiant glorification of a power which had already begun to decline; it was not a general expression of approval, but the effort of a group of revolutionaries. It was roused, no doubt, by the att.i.tude of the official critics who were affecting to think that the influence of Rousseau was exploded. The _Quarterly_ had said in 1813, "As it is probable that we may not soon be again in the company of this extraordinary man, we would willingly take leave of him in good humour,"

and though it was quite unable to keep up this att.i.tude of dignified dismissal, and returned to the attack in April, 1814, nevertheless that was the tone adopted towards Rousseau, as of a man played out, and rapidly being forgotten.

The publication of the voluminous _Correspondence_ of Grimm, which was much read in England, led Englishmen to review the subject of the character and writings of Rousseau, and in the remarks which contemporaries made in 1813 and 1814 we may trace a rapid cooling of their enthusiasm. The scorn of all French habits of thought and conduct, which immediately succeeded the anxious and wearisome period of the Napoleonic wars, makes itself particularly felt in the English att.i.tude towards Rousseau, who was regarded as the source from which all the revolutionary sorrows of Europe had directly proceeded. The _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1814, p.r.o.nounced a judgment upon Rousseau, of which a portion must be quoted here, since it may be considered as the original indictment, the doc.u.ment which served to start the unfavourable opinion which now became more and more that which sober and conservative Englishmen were to adopt during the next fifty years. The opening lines give a new warning, which was to gain more and more in emphasis, while the end repeats praise which was conventional in 1814, but was already fading, and was soon to disappear.

It says:--

A writer who professes to instruct mankind is bound to deliver precepts of morality. But it is by inflaming the pa.s.sions, and by blotting out the line which separates virtue from vice, that Rousseau undertakes to teach young ladies to be chaste, and young men to respect the rights of hospitality. His heroine, indeed, in conformity to his own example, is always prating about virtue, even at the time when she deviates most essentially from its precepts; but to dogmatize is not to be innocent. Yet, with all its defects, there are numerous pa.s.sages in this celebrated work which astonish by their eloquence. Language, perhaps, never painted the conflicts of love in colours more animated and captivating than in the letter written by St. Preux when wandering among the rocks of Meillerie.

Unfortunately, the name of this critic is unknown.

But the charm was not to be broken without a violent effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling cla.s.ses, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolution were more dear than they had ever been, and who pinned their attractive and enthusiastic aesthetic reforms to the voluptuous ecstasy of the _Nouvelle Helose_ and the chimerical sentiment of _Emile_. Already, in _The Round_ _Table_ (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the _Confessions_ as the "most valuable" of all Rousseau's writings; he was presently in his _Liber Amoris_ (1823) to produce the work which of all important books of the English nineteenth century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very careful examination of the works, Hazlitt published his essay _On the Character of Rousseau_, which was not surpa.s.sed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty years afterwards.

Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks, while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did. It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled the towers of the Bastille with the dust,"

but Hazlitt, an intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission.

Hazlitt allows, nevertheless, that the exaggerated hopes founded upon such books as the _Contrat Social_ have been followed by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his inspired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned, with ingrat.i.tude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly possible that they ever could be. The writings of Rousseau, he declares, are looked up to with admiration by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolutionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates, through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and always with admiration. He is the most illuminating and the most thoughtful of all his early English critics.

In the summer of 1816 the two young poets of the day who displayed the most extraordinary genius in England, or perhaps in Europe, made acquaintance with one another for the first time, and instantly determined to travel together. They met in Switzerland, intoxicated with the unfamiliar beauty around them, and Byron took the Villa Diodati, close to Geneva, where he and Sh.e.l.ley steeped themselves in the _Nouvelle Helose_ under the shadow of Mont Blanc. In June they started together round the lake on a journey, which turned into a pilgrimage. In Sh.e.l.ley's _Letters_ may be read the enthusiastic account of the poets'

visit to Meillerie. Sh.e.l.ley refrained from gathering acacia and roses from Gibbon's garden at Lausanne, "fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau, the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in his heart for mortal things." As they sauntered along the sh.o.r.es of the enchanted Leman, the friends "read Julie all day." They lived, with the characters of the great romance, in an endless melancholy transport. Byron's enthusiasm took the form of the famous stanzas in "Childe Harold III," beginning:

Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.

It is a remarkable instance of the complete decline of the prestige of Rousseau in England that Byron's editor of 1899 is astonished that Byron and Sh.e.l.ley "should not only wors.h.i.+p at the shrine of Rousseau, but take delight in reverently tracing the footsteps of St. Preux and Julie." He is so completely disconcerted that he can only exclaim, "But to each age its own humour!" The age of 1899 was certainly not in the humour for Rousseau, but it was almost to go beyond the boundaries of reason to denounce, as this editor did, in the face of Byron's raptures, "the unspeakable philanderings" of Rousseau. Such was not the poet's judgment when, in a trance of pleasure, he visited all the scenes of the _Nouvelle Helose_. To Byron the long-drawn loves of St. Preux and of Julie seemed "most pa.s.sionate, yet not impure," and he vivaciously proclaimed their creator as the one prophet of Ideal Beauty. The five or six stanzas mentioned above are so well-known as to be positively hackneyed. We no longer set on them any very high poetical value; we see that none of them are good as verses, and that some of them are bad. But the whole pa.s.sage retains its full interest for us. It is a perfectly logical statement of the author's unbounded admiration for Rousseau, and in particular for the "burning page, distempered though it seems," upon which are celebrated the devouring loves of Julie and St. Preux.

Further on, in the same poem, Byron rose to far purer heights of style.

The invocation to Clarens, in the texture of which the result of his recent intercourse with Sh.e.l.ley may be plainly perceived, is probably the most impa.s.sioned tribute ever paid by one great writer to the literature of another.

All things are here of _him_; from the black pines, Which are his shade on high, and the loud roar Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines Which slope his green path downward to the sh.o.r.e, Where the bow'd waters meet him, and adore, Kissing his feet with murmurs, and the wood, The covert of old trees, with trunks all h.o.a.r, But light leaves, young as joy, stands where it stood, Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude.

A populous solitude of bees and birds, And fairy-form'd and many-colour'd things, Who wors.h.i.+p him with thoughts more sweet than words, And innocently open their glad wings, Fearless and full of life.

This was a challenge, addressed by the most powerful poet of the day, and couched in idolatrous language, which it was not possible that those in England who were opposed to the influence of Rousseau could fail to take up. Nor did Byron pause here. Writing from Diodati, July, 1816, his famous _Sonnet to Lake Leman_, Rousseau's was the first ill.u.s.trious name he mentioned in the brief roll of "Heirs of Immortality." Enthusiasm for the _Nouvelle Helose_ led directly to the composition of _The Prisoner of Chillon_. Byron discussed and repudiated, with Stendhal in 1817, his mother's old dream that he closely resembled Rousseau. All that prevented his embracing this notion, and insisting on being considered an avatar of the philosopher, was his perception of something turbid in the character of Rousseau, hostile to the fiery ideal of 1816. The English poet preferred to be thought to resemble "an alabaster vase lighted up within." But all his life the memory of Jean Jacques continued to haunt him; he recollected the _ranz des vaches_ when he was writing _The Two Foscari_ (1821) and _la pervenche_ in the fourteenth canto of _Don Juan_ (December, 1823). When Byron died at Missolonghi the latest and the most pa.s.sionate of Rousseau's English admirers pa.s.sed away with him.

The rapture of the sentimental poets was not allowed to pa.s.s unrebuffed.

In October, 1816, no less an authority on romance, no less sane and typical, and yet moderate and sound exponent of English feeling than Sir Walter Scott took up his parable against the sentimentality of the disciples of Rousseau. In reviewing "Childe Harold III" in the _Quarterly_, Walter Scott takes Byron severely to task for his exaggerated praise of Rousseau. He says of himself that he is "almost ashamed to avow the truth--he had never been able to feel the interest or discover the merit of the _Nouvelle Helose_.... The dulness of the story is the last apology for its exquisite immorality." It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this utterance of Walter Scott, who was at that very moment bringing forth the amazing series of his own novels, which were to destroy the taste of his countrymen for all such works of the imagination as Rousseau had produced. Scott is no less condemnatory of the political influence of the philosopher. Deeply blaming the French Revolution, he styles Rousseau "a primary apostle" of it. "On the silliness of Rousseau," on the subject of political equality, "it is at this time of day, thank G.o.d! useless to expatiate."

This was a counter-blast, indeed, to the melodious trumpetings of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley.

To a reputation already much reduced, the publication, in 1818, of the _Memoires et Conversations_ of Madame d'Epinay was a serious blow. These were very much discussed in England, and Jeffrey called the special attention of his readers to the lady's revelations of Rousseau's "eccentricity, insanity, and vice." This produced a painful effect. It was urged by English critics that Jean Jacques, who had been held up as a portent of almost divine moral beauty, seemed, on the contrary, to have claimed, "as the reward of genius and fine writing, an exemption from all moral duties." Jeffrey called indignant attention to the "most rooted and disgusting selfishness" of Rousseau, and quoted with approval the _boutade_ of Diderot, "Cet homme est un forcene." The publication of Madame de Stael's _uvres Inedites_, brought out by Madame Necker Saussure in 1820, further lowered the English estimate of the "selfish and ungrateful" Rousseau. He was still praised for his "warmth of imagination," but told that he was vastly inferior to Madame de Stael in style. The _Edinburgh Review_ now proclaimed, as a painful discovery, that Rousseau's affection for mankind was entirely theoretical, and "had no living objects in this world," and blushed at the "very scandalous and improper" facts about his private life which were now more and more frequently being revealed.

The publication of Simondi's _Voyage en Suisse_ (1822), which was widely read in England, continued the work of denigration. Simondi spoke with contempt and even with bitterness, of the character of Rousseau. His English critics pointed out that, although a republican, Simondi rose above political prejudice. He called the _Confessions_ the most admirable, but at the same time the most vile of all the productions of genius. Jeffrey, once again, was eloquent in the denunciation of Rousseau's personal character, which there seemed to be no one left in England to defend. This was about the time that special attention began to be drawn to Rousseau's exposure of his natural children, which had long been known, but which now began to excite English disgust.

Moreover, the loose way in which Rousseau treated fact and logic irritated the newer school of English and Scotch politicians much more than it had their predecessors, and the invectives of Burke were revived and confirmed. There were still some private, though few public, admirers of Rousseau in England. Carlyle was too original not to perceive the value of the Genevan philosopher's historical att.i.tude, and not to feel a genuine sympathy for his character. But we find him quoting (in 1823) the habits of "John James," as he chose to call him, not adversely but a little slightingly.

Almost the latest eulogist of Rousseau, before Morley, was the veteran Republican poet Walter Savage Landor, whose admirable _Malesherbes and Rousseau_ appeared, almost unnoticed, in the third series of the _Imaginary Conversations_ (1828). This interesting composition was certainly not written when Landor reviewed his unpublished writings in 1824; we may probably date it 1826. It was a belated expression of the enthusiasm of a preceding generation, in full sympathy with the att.i.tude of Hazlitt and Byron. It attracted no attention, for England was by this time wholly out of touch with the old preference of the impulse of the individual in opposition to the needs of the State. There was in England a growing cultivation of science, and by its side a growing suspicion of rhetoric, and both of these discouraged what was superficially lax in the views and in the expression of Rousseau. The _Discourse on the Origin of Inequality_, which had delighted an earlier generation of English Liberals, was now re-examined, and was rejected with impatience as "dangerous moons.h.i.+ne," supported by illogical and even ridiculous arguments. Moreover, the study of anthropology was advancing out of the state of infancy, and was occupying serious minds in England, who were exasperated by Rousseau's fantastic theory of the purity of savage society, and a Golden Age of primal innocence.

Moreover, as Morley long afterwards pointed out, from about the year 1825, there was a rapid increase in England of the superficial cultivation of letters, and particularly of scientific investigation. At the same time, the temper of the English nation repelled, with anger, the notion that a Swiss philosopher, of discredited personal character, could be allowed to denounce the science and literature of Europe.

Thus from every point of view, the hold which Rousseau had held on English admiration was giving way. His influence was like a snow man in the sun; it melted and dripped from every limb, from all parts of its structure. But probably what did more than anything else to exclude Rousseau from English sympathy, and to drive his works out of popular attention, was the sterner code of conduct which came in, as a reaction to the swinish coa.r.s.eness of the late Georgian period. We must pay some brief attention to a moral and religious phenomenon which was probably more than any other fatal to the prestige of Rousseau.

The great feature of the new Evangelical movement was an insistence on points of conduct which had, indeed, always been acknowledged in the English Church as theoretically important, but which were now exalted into a lively pre-eminence. There was suddenly seen, throughout the country, a marvellous increase in religious zeal, in the urging of penitence, contrition and unworldliness upon young minds, in the activity which made practical and operative what had hitherto been largely nominal. There was a very wide awakening of the sense of sin, and a quickening, even a morbid and excessive quickening, of the Christian instinct to put off "the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful l.u.s.ts, and to put on the new man, which, after G.o.d, is created in righteousness and true holiness." This conviction of sin and humble acceptance of righteousness was to be accompanied by a cultivation of all the contrite and retired and decent apt.i.tudes of conduct, so that not only should no wrong be done to the soul of others, but no offence given. These were the objects which occupied the active and holy minds of the early Evangelists, and of none of them more practically, in relation to the studies and the reading of the young, than of the great leader of the movement, Charles Simeon (1756-1836).

We have forgotten, to a great extent, the amazing influence which the preaching and the practice of these leading Evangelicals exercised in England between 1820 and 1840. It is certain that the young scholars of Cambridge who surrounded Simeon from 1810 onwards were much more numerous and no less active than those who surrounded Newman and Pusey at Oxford about 1835; while in each case the disciples trained in the school of enthusiasm were soon dispersed, to spread the flame of zeal throughout the length and breadth of the Three Kingdoms. In the preface of his famous _Helps to Composition_, a work of epoch-making character, Simeon boldly proposed three tests to be applied to any species of literature. When confronted by a book, the reader should ask, "Does it uniformly tend to humble the Sinner, to exalt the Saviour, to promote holiness?" A work that lost sight of any one of these three points was to be condemned without mercy. The simplicity and freshness of the Evangelicals, their ridicule of what was called "the dignity of the pulpit," their active, breathless zeal in urging what they thought a purer faith upon all cla.s.ses of society, gave them a remarkable power over generous and juvenile natures. They were wealthy, they were powerful, they stormed the high places of society, and it may without exaggeration be said that for the time being they changed the whole character of the surface of English social life.

The work of the Evangelicals, in emphasizing the strong reaction against the coa.r.s.eness of the Georgian era, has been greatly forgotten in England, and on the Continent has never been in the least understood. It is responsible, to deal solely with what interests us in our present inquiry, for the prudery and "hypocrisy" of which European criticism so universally accuses our Victorian literature and habits of thought. It is perhaps useless to contend against a charge so generally brought against English ideas, and this is not the place to attempt it. But, so far as Rousseau is concerned, it is necessary to point out that to a generation which revolted against lasciviousness in speech, and which believed that an indecent looseness in art and literature was a sin against G.o.d, the charm of the _Nouvelle Helose_ and of the _Confessions_ could not be apparent. It is of no service to talk about "hypocrisy"; English readers simply disliked books of that sort, and there must be an end of it.

A single example may serve to show how rapid the change had been. Sir James Edward Smith (1759-1828) was an eminent botanist, who travelled widely and wrote many letters. In 1832 his _Memoirs and Correspondence_ were published, a lively work which was much read. But Smith, living at the close of the eighteenth century, had been an ardent admirer of Rousseau, and this appeared glaringly in his letters. Reviewers in 1832 had to find excuses for his "charitable eye" and to attribute his partiality to Rousseau's being a botanist. There was quite a flutter, almost a scandal. One critic plainly said that Sir J. E. Smith's "character would not have suffered if he had made some abatement from his extravagant eulogy" of Rousseau. The _Edinburgh Review_ was very severe, and regretted that the worthy botanist had not realized that "religious toleration does not imply the toleration of immorality," and that "licentiousness of speculation is as hostile to civil liberty as licentiousness of conduct." A critic of the same period roundly says that "the vices and opinions of Rousseau are of so malignant an aspect that the virtues which accompany them serve only to render them more loathsome."

Thus Rousseau, who in 1800 was regarded in England, even by his enemies, as the most enchanting of writers, had by 1835 sunken to be regarded as despicable, not to be quoted by decent people, not to be read even in secret. He was seldom mentioned, save to be reviled. The career of Rousseau does not come within the scope of Hallam as a critic, yet that historian was unable, in the second volume of his _Literature of Europe_ (1838), to resist a sneer at the _Contrat Social_, while he describes Rousseau's arguments as an "insinuation" and a "calumny." We find so grave and dignified an historian as Burton using his _Life of Hume_ (1846) as a means of placing Rousseau in the most odious light possible, and without a word of sympathy. To the younger Herman Merivale, in 1850, the influence of Rousseau seemed "simply mischievous," but he rejoiced to think that his fame was "a by-gone fas.h.i.+on." Having, in October, 1853, been led to express an ambiguous comment on the _Confessions_, Mrs. Jameison, then the leading English art critic, hastened to excuse herself by explaining that "of course, we speak without reference to the immorality which deforms that work." It would be easy to multiply such expressions, but difficult, indeed, in the middle of the century, to find a responsible word published by an English writer in praise of Rousseau.

After this, till John Morley's monograph, there is very little to be recorded. Rousseau pa.s.sed out of sight and out of mind, and was known only to those few who went to foreign sources of inspiration in that age of hard British insularity. But we have lately learned that there were two great authors who, in the seclusion of their own libraries, were now subjecting themselves to the fascination of the Genevan. On February 9th, 1849, George Eliot wrote thus privately to a friend:

It would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau's views of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous--that he was guilty of some of the worst _ba.s.sesses_ that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this: and it would not be the less true that Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has wakened me to new perceptions.... The rus.h.i.+ng mighty wind of his imagination has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim _Ahnungen_ in my soul; the fire of his genius has so fused together old thoughts and prejudices, that I have been ready to make new combinations.

Even more remarkable is the evidence which Edward Cook, in his _Life of Ruskin_ (1911) has produced with regard to the att.i.tude of that ill.u.s.trious writer. It was in 1849, just when George Eliot was finding her spirit quickened by the inspiration of Rousseau, that John Ruskin, at the age of thirty, made a pilgrimage to Les Charmettes. The political revolt which coloured all his later years was now beginning to move in him, and for the first time he felt affinities existing between his own nature and that of Rousseau. This consciousness increased upon him. In 1862 he wrote, "I know of no man whom I more entirely resemble than Rousseau. If I were asked whom of all men of any name in past time I thought myself to be grouped with, I should answer unhesitatingly--Rousseau.

I judge by the _Nouvelle Helose_, the _Confessions_, the writings of Politics and the life in the Ile St. Pierre." In 1866 Ruskin added, "The intense resemblance between me and Rousseau increases upon my mind more and more." Finally, in _Preterita_ (1886) he openly acknowledged his life-long debt to Rousseau. We may therefore set down the impact of Rousseau upon Ruskin as marking the main influence of the Genevese writer's genius upon English literature in the nineteenth century, but this was sympathetic, subterraneous, and, in a sense, secret. Without Rousseau, indeed, there never would have been Ruskin, yet we are only now beginning to recognize the fact.

Of the overt cult of Rousseau, even of careful and detailed examination of his works, there was none until Mr. (now Viscount) Morley published his brilliant monograph in 1873. This famous book, so remarkable for its gravity and justice, its tempered enthusiasm, its absence of prejudice, the harmony and illumination of its parts, is the one exception to the public neglect of Jean Jacques by nineteenth-century Englishmen. It removed the reproach of our insular ignorance; it rose at once to the highest level of Continental literature on the subject. The monograph of Morley has become a cla.s.sic. Incessantly reprinted, it has remained the text-book of English students of Rousseau. It is needless in this place to draw attention to its eminent qualities, or to the fact that it contained, and continues to contain, _lacunae_ which the eminent writer has not attempted to fill up by the light of later research. In particular, it is impossible not to regret that Lord Morley was unacquainted with the doc.u.ments, so learnedly edited and lucidly arranged by Mr. L. J. Courtois, on the events of Rousseau's sojourn in England. But Lord Morley, immersed in the duties of a statesman, seems long ago to have lost all interest in the subject which he illuminated so brilliantly nearly fifty years ago.