the earliest and most influential instructors of the whole of the generation that comes after.1 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.2 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 1 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.

2 Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain. 264, 523-526, and elsewhere. [Ed. 1847-1849.]

Euv., vi. pp.

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.1

X

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

1 Emile et Sophie, i.

clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage,
which made education one of the dark formalistic
árts.
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.1 But why try to state the in-
fluence of Emilius on France in this way? To strike
the account truly would be to write the history of
the first French Revolution.2 All mothers, as Michelet

1 For an account of some of these, see Grimm's Corr. Lit., iii. 211, 252, 347, etc. Also Corr. Inéd., p. 143.

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

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."

In Germany Emilius had great power. There it fell in with the extraordinary movement towards naturalness and freedom of which we have already spoken.2 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.3 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. 1 Louis xv. et xvi., p. 226. 2 See above, vol. ii. p. 193.

3 Hettner, III. iii., 2, p. 27, s. v. Herder.

4

4 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