ROUSSEAU 



as a writer of the romance of sentiment ; by the 

 second as a political socialist; by the third as an 

 educationist. 



But tlie views in finiile on kings and government 

 made him obnoxious to the state, and the parle- 

 ment condemned the author to be arrested and his 

 book to be burned ; while its deistic teaching in the 

 Savoyard vicar's confession made him hateful to 

 the cliurch, and called forth a denunciatory pastoral 

 from the Archbishop of Paris. Rousseau in terror 

 fled from France, and found shelter at Metiers, an 

 obscure village in Neuchatel, where he was safe 

 under the tolerant rule of Frederick the Great, 

 and the friendship of the Earl Marischal, George 

 Keith, the governor of the province. Although 

 he lived unobtrusively in botanising rambles, in 

 making laces, and in writing his aggressive Letters 

 from the Mountain, and his powerful reply to the 

 Archbishop of Paris, religious rancour followed 

 him to the remote and peaceful Val de Travers. 

 The ministers stirred up the villagers against the 

 heretic, and to escape their open hostility he 

 took flight in 1764. A residence of delicious 

 quietude in St Pierre on Lake Bienne was ended 

 by threat of prosecution from the government of 

 Berne ; and he accepted the offer of a home in 

 England, given through David Hume. Under the 

 charge of the good-natured historian, the irritated 

 and sensitive fugitive came to England in January 

 1766. During aliout eighteen months he lived at 

 Wootton in Staffordshire, solitary and quiet : here 

 he busied himself with Imtany and his Botani- 

 cal Dictionary, and especially in composing his 

 Confessions, in which he determined to write his 

 memoirs, to expose his enemies, to reveal himself 

 in spite of every fault, which he resolved to own 

 as one of the very ' best of men.' His suspicious 

 nature, his morbid distrust and fears, had increased 

 with his trials and his years. He had quarrelled 

 with almost every friend, imagining the worst 

 meaning in the best of motives ; he believed that 

 bis truest friends, like Hume, acted with the most 

 sinister designs, that the English government sought 

 his life, and that he was everywhere dogged by 

 spies. Suddenly he quitted Wootton, and, cross- 

 ing the Channel, got a shelter from the doctrinaire 

 Marquis de Mirabean, and then from the Prince de 

 Conti at Trye ; and there he lived, under the name 

 of ' M. Uemm,' till he fancied that he was insulted 

 by the domestics and that he was suspected of 

 poisoning a servant. After various shifty change* 

 he lived at Monquin, a retired, quiet spot, where 

 he composed those later parts of his Confessions, 

 in which each incident is coloured by his gather- 

 ing delusions as to the motives of every one with 

 whom he came in contact. In 1770 he returned to 

 .Paris, and remained unmolested, following his old 

 life an copyist at ten sous a page, in a fifth story in 

 the Kue Platriere, maintaining a surly independ- 

 ence, distrusting his friends, rebuffing admirers, 

 insulting his customers. During these years, in 

 different moods of mind and changing conditions 

 of his broken health, he wrote the wild, half-mail 

 Uognw, /.'""v^ mi /ni/e de Jean Jacques, in which 

 he vindicates his character in a strain which casts 

 doubt on his sanity, ami his Jifverif-t r/it Promt- 

 neur Solitaire, which, in singular contrast, are 

 calm in their tone, idyllic in their lieauty, and 

 perfect in their .style. Still the delusion* increased, 

 ami his mental misery deepened till he even craved 

 for shelter in a. hospital ; everywhere he felt 

 watched l>y s|iies, hated by the very children in 

 the streets. In 1778 he accepted the last of these 

 many offers of shelter, and retired to a cottage given 

 him by M. de Girardin on his estate at Ermenon- 

 ville, 20 miles from Paris. There he suffered from 

 the misconduct of Therese, and from inveterate 

 delusions, till, with a suddenness which has given 



much ground for suspicion of suicide, Jean Jacques 

 Rousseau died on July 2, 1778. His body now 

 rests in the Pantheon. 



If the character of Rousseau can be learned from 

 the judgment of his friends and foes, it can be also 

 discovered from his own writings, which tell the 

 story of his life his Confessions, his Letters, his 

 Reveries. We may receive his own version of 

 many of his own acts with doubt, and his inter- 

 pretation of the acts of others with reserve, while 

 details in the Confessions are known to be in many 

 cases inaccurate ; but as a picture of the man they 

 are strikingly truthful. He is moved by a daring 

 determination to conceal nothing, believing that 

 every defect will only show the intrinsic beauty of 

 his character as patches show off better the com- 

 plexion of the face. Therefore he tells his ignoble 

 intrigues and his paltry actions, how he deserted 

 his companion when he fell in a fit, how he basely 

 accused a poor girl, his fellow-servant, of theft 

 to conceal nis own dishonesty. He exhibits his 

 jealousies and his hates, his lofty sentiments and 

 his petty practices, his unl>ounded confidence in 

 himself not only as a man of genius, but as a 

 man of supreme rectitude. In spite of the worst 

 he confesses and the worst charged against him 

 by others, he needs commiseration in his faults, 

 as arising from a mind disordered, and he deserves 

 respect for his sincerity of thought, his independ- 

 ence of conduct in spite of its coarseness, his spirit 

 of reverence, and his generosity of heart and hand. 

 As a writer his influence has been exercised in 

 diverse directions. His New Htloise, suggested 

 alike in its clumsy form of letters, its didactic 

 passages, and its fervid romance by Richardson's 

 novels, stirred by its strain of passion a spirit of 

 sentiment in the society and literature of France, 

 Germany, and Italy ; by its idyllic pictures and 

 exquisite descriptions it'awakened a new admira- 

 tion for nature in its grand and wild aspects, and 

 touched the fashionable world with interest in 

 rural life and in its simple ways. Amidst all its 

 falsetto passion, it taught an artificial society the 

 rights of the poor and the duties of the rich. The 

 Social Contract proceeds on the premise that the 

 basis of society is an original compact by which 

 each nimiU'r surrenders his will to the will of all, 

 on the condition that he gets protection or defence ; 

 and arguing that the community is the true 

 sovereign, that each member of it has equal power 

 and right to make its laws, Rousseau arrives at 

 the conclusion that kings are usurpers, that no 

 laws are binding to which the whole people's assent 

 has not been gained. True to his own Genevan 

 traditions and tastes, he considers a republic in 

 which all the people have personal votes as alone 

 valid, and his doctrines of liberty, equality, and 

 fraternity were adopted by leaders of the people, 

 were carried by demagogues to logical extremes 

 he never dreamt of, and became war-cries of the 

 Revolution. By mile, in which the man who 

 abandoned his own offspring becomes the instructor 

 of the age on the nursing of infants, the rearing 

 of children, and the education of youth, with keen 

 observation of life he pointed out the defects of 

 common methods in the nursery and the school- 

 room. The work had marked results in discourag- 

 ing the faults and neglects in artificial society 

 towards children, and in indicating a more natural 

 and less pedantic method of training and develop- 

 ing the physical, mental, and moral faculties ; and 

 his ideas on this head (while many absurdities and 

 whimsicalities in the book were avoided ) were 

 in large measure carried out by educationists like 

 Froebel and Pestalozzi, and affected the educational 

 methods of all Europe. By his famous chapter on 

 the Savoyard vicars confession he gave a con- 

 fession of his own deistic faith, which disgusted 



