? of his own life. You may perceive these two to be mere im- The citizen of Geneva with this unseen fibre of Calvinistic veneration and austerity strong and vigorous within him, found a world that had nothing sacred and took nothing for granted; that held the past in contempt, and ever like old Athenians asked for some new thing; that counted simplicity of life an antique barbarism, and literary curiousness the master virtue. There were giants in this world, like the panurgic Diderot. There were industrious, worthy, disinterested men, who used their minds honestly and actively with sincere care for truth, like D'Holbach. There was poured around the whole, like a high stimulating atmosphere to the stronger, and like some evil mental aphrodisiac to the weaker, the influence of Voltaire, the great indomitable chieftain of them all. Intellectual size half redeems want of perfect direction by its generous power and fulness. It was not the strong men, atheists and philosophizers as they were, who first irritated Rousseau into revolt against their whole system of thought in all its principles. The dissent between him and them was fundamental and enormous, and in time it flamed out into open war. Conflict of theory, however, was brought home to him first by slow-growing exasperation at the follies in practice of the minor disciples of the gospel of knowing and acting, as distinguished from his own gospel of placid being. He craved beliefs that should uphold men in living their lives, substantial helps on which they might lean without examination and without mistrust his life in Paris was thrown among people who lived in K the midst of open questions, and revelled in a reflective and didactic morality, which had no root in the heart and so made things easy for the practical conscience. He sought tranquillity and valued life for its own sake, not as an arena and a theme for endless argument and debate: he found friends who knew no higher pleasure than the futile polemics of mimic philosophy over dessert, who were as full of quibble as the wrongheaded interlocutors in a Platonic dialogue, and who babbled about God and state of nature, about virtue and the spirituality of the soul, much as Boswell may have done when Johnson complained of him for asking questions that would make a man hang himself. The highest things were thus brought down to the level of the cheapest discourse, and subjects which the wise take care only to discuss with the wise, were here every-day topics for all comers. The association with such high themes of those light qualities of tact, gaiety, complaisance, which are the life of the superficial commerce of men and women of the world, probably gave quite as much offence to Rousseau as the doctrines which some of his companions had the honest courage or the heedless fatuity to profess. It was an outrage to all the serious side of him to find persons of quality introducing materialism as a new fashion, and atheism as the liveliest of condiments. The perfume of good manners only made what he took for bad principles the worse, and heightened his impatience at the flippancy of pretensions to overthrow the beliefs of a world between two wines. Doctrine and temperament united to set him angrily against the world around him. The one was austere and the other was sensuous, and the sensuous temperament in its full strength is essentially solitary. The play of social intercourse, its quick transitions and incessant demands, are fatal to free and uninterrupted abandonment to the flow of soft internal emotions. Rousseau, dreaming, moody, indolently meditative, profoundly enwrapped in the brooding egoism of his own sensations, had to mix with men and women whose egoism took the contrary form of an eager desire to produce flashing effects on other people. We may be sure that as the two sides of his character, his notions of serious principle, and his notions of personal comfort, both went in the same direction, the irritation and impatience with which they inspired him towards society, did not lessen with increased communication, but naturally deepened with a more profoundly settled antipathy. Rousseau lived in Paris for twelve years, from his return from Venice in 1744, until his departure in 1756 for the rustic lodge in a wood which the good will of Madame d'Epinay provided for him. We have already seen one very important side of his fortunes during these years, in the relations he formed with Theresa, and the relations which he repudiated with his children. We have heard too the new words with which during these years he first began to make the hearts of his contemporaries wax hot within them. It remains to examine the current of daily circumstance on which his life was embarked, and the shores to which it was bearing him. His patrons were at present almost exclusively in the circle of finance. Richelieu, indeed, took him for a moment by the hand, but even the introduction to him was through the too frail wife of one of the greatest of the farmers general. Madame Dupin and Madame d'Epinay, his two chief patronesses, were also both of them the wives of magnates of the farm. The society of the great people of this world was marked by all the glare, artificiality, and sentimentalism of the epoch, but it had also one or two specially hollow characteristics of its own. As is always the case when a new rich class rises in the midst of a community possessing an old caste, the circle of Parisian financiers made it their highest social aim to thrust and strain into the circle of the Versailles people of quality. They had no normal life of their own, with independent traditions and self-respect; and for the same reason that an essentially worn-out aristocracy may so long preserve a considerable degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances, by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralized from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an 1 Madame de la Popelinière, whose adventures and the misadventures of her husband are only too well known to the reader of Marmontel's Memoirs. upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious conduct and social diversion. The result is seen in imitative manners, affected culture, and a mixture of timorous self-consciousness within and noisy self-assertion without, which completes the most distasteful scene that any collected spirit can witness. Rousseau was, as has been said, the secretary of Madame Dupin and her step-son Francueil. He occasionally went with them to Chenonceaux in Touraine, one of Henry the Second's castles built for Diana of Poitiers, and here he fared sumptuously every day. In Paris his means, as we know, were too strait. For the first two years he had a salary of nine hundred francs; then his employers raised it to as much as fifty louis. For the first of the Discourses the publisher gave him nothing, and for the second he had to extract his fee penny by penny, and after long waiting. His comic opera, the Village Soothsayer, was a greater success; it brought him the round sum of two hundred louis from the court, and some five and twenty more from the bookseller, and so, he says, "the interlude which cost me five or six weeks of work, produced nearly as much money as Emilius afterwards did, which had cost me twenty years of meditation and three years of composition." Before the arrival of this windfall, M. Francueil, who was receiver-general, offered him the post of cashier in that important department, and Rousseau attended for some weeks to receive the necessary instructions. His progress was tardy as usual, and the complexities of accounts were as little congenial to him as notarial complexities had been three and twenty years previously. It is, however, one 1 The passages relating to income during his first residence in Paris (1744— 1756) are at pp. 119, 145, 153, 165, 200, 227, in Books vii.-ix. of the "Confessions." Rousseau told Bernardin de St. Pierre (Euv., xii. 74) that Emile was sold for 7000 livres. In the Confessions (xi. 126), he says 6000 livres, and one or two hundred copies. It may be worth while to add that Diderot and D'Alembert received 1200 livres a year apiece for editing the Encyclopædia. Sterne received 650/. for two volumes of Tristram Shandy in 1760. (Walpole's Letters, iii. 298.) of the characteristics of times of national break-up not to be peremptory in exacting competence, and Rousseau gravely sat at the receipt of custom, doing the day's duty with as little skill as liking. Before he had been long at his post, his official chief going on a short journey left him in charge of the chest, which happened at the moment to contain no very portentous amount. The disquiet with which the watchful custody of this moderate treasure harassed and afflicted Rousseau, not only persuaded him that nature had never designed him to be the guardian of money chests, but also threw him into a fit of very painful illness. The surgeons let him understand that within six months he would be in the pale kingdoms. The effect of such a hint on a man of his temper, and the train of reflections which it would be sure to set aflame, are to be foreseen by us who know Rousseau's fashion of dealing with the irksome. Why sacrifice the peace and charm of the little fragment of days left to him, to the bondage of an office for which he felt nothing but disgust? How reconcile the austere principles which he had just adopted in his denunciation of sciences and arts, and his panegyric on the simplicity of the natural life, with such duties as he had to perform? And how preach disinterestedness and frugality from amid the cashboxes of a receiver-general? Plainly it was his duty to pass in independence and poverty the little time that was yet left to him, to bring all the forces of his soul to bear in breaking the fetters of opinion, and to carry out courageously whatever seemed best to himself, without suffering the judgment of others to interpose the slightest embarrassment or hindrance.1 With Rousseau, to conceive a project of this kind for simplifying his life was to hasten urgently towards its realization, because such projects harmonized with all his strongest predispositions. His design mastered and took whole possession of him. He resolved to earn his living by copying music, as that was conformable to his taste, within his capacity, and compatible with entire personal freedom. His patron did as the world is so naturally ready to do with those who choose the stoic's way; he declared that Rousseau was gone mad. Talk like this had no effect on a man 1 Conf., viii. 154-157. * Ibid., viii. 160. |