careless, gay, openhearted; having, in a word, all the good qualities which spring in certain generous soils from human. impulse, and hardly any of those which spring from reflection, or are implanted by the ordering of society. Her reason had been warped in her youth by an instructor of the devil's stamp ;1 finding her attached to her husband and to her duties, always cold, argumentative, and impregnable on the side of the senses, he attacked her by sophisms, and at last persuaded her that the union of the sexes is in itself a matter of the most perfect indifference, provided only that decorum of appearance be preserved, and the peace of mind of persons concerned be not disturbed. This execrable lesson, which greater and more unselfish men held and propagated in grave books before the end of the century, took root in her mind. If we accept Rousseau's explanation, it did so the more easily as her temperament was cold, and thus corroborated the idea of the indifference of what public opinion and private passion usually concur in investing with such enormous weightiness. "I will even dare to say," Rousseau declares, "that she only knew one true pleasure in the world, and that was to give pleasure to those whom she loved." He is at great pains to protest how compatible this coolness of temperament is with excessive sensibility of character; and neither ethological theory nor practical observation of men and women is at all hostile to what he is so anxious to prove. The cardinal element of character is the speed at which its energies move; its rapidity or its steadiness, concentration or volatility; whether the thought and feeling travel as quickly as light, or as slowly as sound. A rapid and volatile constitution, like that of Madame de Warens, is inconsistent with ardent and glowing warmth, which belongs to the other sort, but it is essentially bound up with sensibility, or readiness of sympathetic answer to every cry from 1 De Tavel, by name. Disorderly ideas as to the relations of the sexes began to appear in Switzerland along with the reformation of religion. In the sixteenth century a woman appeared at Geneva with the doctrine, that it is as inhuman and as unjustifiable to refuse the gratification of this appetite in a man, as to decline to give food and drink to the starving. (Picot's Hist. de Genève, vol. ii.) 3 Ibid., v. 345 2 Conf., v. 341. Also ii. 83; and vi. 401. another soul. It is the slow, brooding, smouldering nat Rousseau's own, in which we may expect to find the tropics To bring the heavy artillery of moral reprobation to bear t a poor soul like Madame de Warens, is as if one should denoun flagrant want of moral purpose in the busy movements of ephemera. Her activity was incessant, but it ended in nothing better than debt, embarrassment, and confusion. She inherited from her father a taste for alchemy, and spent much time in search after secret elixirs and the like. "Quacks taking advantage of her weakness, made themselves her master, constantly infested. her, ruined her, and wasted, in the midst of furnaces and chemicals, intelligence, talents, and charms, which would have made her the delight of the best societies." Perhaps, however, the too notorious vagrancy of her amours had at least as much to do with her failure to delight the best societies, as her indiscreet passion for alchemy. Her person was attractive enough. “She had those points of beauty," says Rousseau, "which are desirable, because they reside rather in expression than in feature. She had a tender and caressing air, a soft eye, a divine smile, light hair of uncommon beauty. You could not see a finer head, or bosom, finer arms or hands." She was full of tricks and whimsies. She could not endure the first smell of the soup and meats at dinner; when they were placed on the table, she nearly swooned, and her disgust lasted some time, until at the end of half an hour or so, she took her first morsel. On the whole, if we accept the current standard of sanity, Madame de Warens must be pronounced ever so little flighty; but a monotonous world can afford to be lenient to people with a slight craziness, if it only has hearty benevolence and cheerfulness in its company, and is free from egoism or rapacious vanity. This was the person within the sphere of whose attraction Rousseau was decisively brought in the autumn of 1729, and he remained, with certain breaks of vagabondage, linked by a close attachment to her until 1738. It was in many respects the truly formative portion of his life. He acquired during this time much of his knowledge of books, such as it was, and his principles of 1 Conf., ii. 83. 2 Ibid., ii. 82. 3 Ibid., iii. 179. See also 200. judging them. He saw much of the lives of the poor and of the world's ways with them. Above all his ideal was revolutionized, and the recent dreams of Plutarchian heroism, of grandeur, of palaces, princesses, and a glorious career full in the world's eye, were replaced by a new conception of blessedness of life, which never afterwards faded from his vision, and which has held a front place in the imagination of literary Europe ever since. The notions or aspirations which he had picked up from a few books, gave way to notions and aspirations which were shaped and fostered by the scenes of actual life into which he was thrown, and which found his character soft for their impression. In one way the new pictures of a future were as dissociated from the conditions of reality as the old had been, and the sensuous life of the happy valley in Savoy as little fitted a man to compose ideals for our gnarled and knotted world, as the mental life among the heroics of sentimental fiction had done. Rousseau's delight in the spot where Madame de Warens lived at Annecy, was the mark of the new ideal which circumstances were to engender in him, and after him to spread in many hearts. His room looked over gardens and a stream, and beyond them stretched a far landscape. "It was the first time since leaving Bossey that I had green before my windows. Always shut in by walls, I had nothing under my eye but house-tops and the dull grey of the streets. How moving and delicious this novelty was to me! It brightened all the tenderness of my disposition. I counted the landscape among the kindnesses of my dear benefactress; it seemed as if she had brought it there expressly for me. I placed myself there in all peacefulness with her; she was present to me everywhere among the flowers and the verdure; her charms and those of spring were all mingled together in my eyes. My heart, which had hitherto been stifled, found itself more free in this ample space, and my sighs had more liberal vent among these orchard gardens." Madame de Warens was the semi-divine figure who made the scene live, and gave it perfect and harmonious accent. He had neither transports nor desires by her side, but existed in a state of ravishing calm, enjoying without knowing 1 1 Conf., iii. 177, 178. what. "I could have passed my whole life and eternity itself in this way, without an instant of weariness. She is the only person with whom I never felt that dryness in conversation, which turns the duty of keeping it up into a torment. Our intercourse was not so much conversation as an inexhaustible stream of chatter, which never came to an end until it was interrupted from without. I only felt all the force of my attachment for her, when she was out of my sight. So long as I could see her, I was merely happy and satisfied, but my disquiet in her absence went so far as to be painful. I shall never forget how one holiday, while she was at vespers, I went for a walk outside the town, my heart full of her image and of an eager desire to pass all my days by her side. I had sense enough to see that for the present this was impossible, and that the bliss which I relished so keenly must be brief. gave to my musing a sadness which was free from everything sombre, and which was moderated by pleasing hope. The sound of the bells, which has always moved me to a singular degree, the singing of the birds, the glory of the weather, the sweetness of the landscape, the scattered rustic dwellings in which my imagination placed our common home ;-all this so struck me with a vivid, tender, sad, and touching impression, that I saw myself as in an ecstasy transported into the happy time and the happy place where my heart, possessed of all the felicity that could bring it delight, without even dreaming of the pleasures of sense, should share joys inexpressible." 1 This There was still, however, a space to be bridged between the doubtful now and this delicious future. The harshness of circumstance is ever interposing with a money question, and for a vagrant of eighteen the first of all problems is a problem of economics. Rousseau was submitted to the observation of a kinsman of Madame de Warens, and his verdict corresponded with that of the notary of Geneva, with whom years before Rousseau had first tried the critical art of making a living. He pronounced that in spite of an animated expression, the lad was, if not thoroughly inept, at least of very slender intelligence, without ideas, almost without attainments, very narrow indeed in all respects, and that the honour of 1 Conf., iii. 183. 2 M. d'Aubonne. one day becoming a village priest was the highest piece of fortune to which he had any right to aspire.' So he was sent to the seminary, to learn Latin enough for the priestly offices. He began by conceiving a deadly antipathy to his instructor, whose appearance happened to be displeasing to him. A second was found, and the patient and obliging temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of his two teachers at the seminary of Annecy had greasy black hair, a complexion as of gingerbread, and bristles in place of beard, while the second had the most touching expression he ever saw in his life, with fair hair and large blue eyes, and a glance and a tone which made you feel that he was one of the band predestined from their birth to unhappy days. While at Turin, Rousseau had made the acquaintance of another sage and benevolent priest, and uniting the two good men thirty years after he conceived and drew the character of the Savoyard Vicar.1 Shortly the seminarists reported that, though not vicious, their pupil was not even good enough for a priest, so deficient was he in intellectual faculty. It was next decided to try music, and Rousseau ascended for a brief space into the seventh heaven of the arts. This was one of the intervals of his life of which he says that he recalls not only the times, places, persons, but all the surrounding objects, the temperature of the air, its odour, its colour, a certain local impression only felt there, and the memory of which stirs the old transports anew. He never forgot a certain tune, because one Advent Sunday he heard it from his bed being sung before daybreak on the steps of the cathedral; nor an old lame carpenter who played the counter-bass, nor a fair little 1 Conf., iii. 192. 3 M. Gaime. 2 M. Gatier. |