IE IR BRE IRE INE AEB ROUSSEAU, Engraved by David Martin: after the paisting by Allan Ramsay (1760). (Notional Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.)
front, RENAL SA SAN LR ROR BR ae cena & THE BROADWAY LIBRARY OF XVIII CENTURY FRENCH LITERATURE Et oe) THE REVERIES OF A SOLITARY BY JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU Translated with an Introduction by John Gould Fletcher Published by GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS, LTD, BROADWAY HOUSE, CARTER LANE, LONDON PRISTED 08 OREAT BRITAIS AY RULING AXD S085, 17D, CLTLDSORD AND FUIER CONTENTS Phir The Reveries of a Solitary INTRODUCTION I [LASSICISM, about which we have heard so much of recent years, is a thing that cannot exi&t without some settled mythological system.
Thus there have been in the world Egyptian classicism, based upon the cult of the dead and its elaboration into Egyptian mythology; Chinese classicism, based upon ancestor-worship and the Confucian cult; Indian classicism, based upon the Vedas and their elaboration into the Upanishads, the epic poems, the system of the Puranas; Greek classicism, based on Homer and Hesiod, and by them transmitted to the lyrists, the dramatists, the sculptors and archite&ts of Athens. Even the ancient Hebrews, though’ their social and religious order scarcely advanced beyond the tribal stage, and the power of Islam, though it depended for its spread solely on conquest by the sword, had their periods of great classical art. But Christianity, alone, among world-religions has never known a period of inde- pendent classic culture, if we except the brief epoch of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Up to that a REVERIES OF A SOLITARY time, Christian culture had largely been a question of the continuation of the afterglow of pagan culture. Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, taught and thought in terms that Cicero and Virgil had taught them. Charlemagne expressly had himself crowned Roman Emperor as a symbol of his control over Europe. So great was the power of the unified civilisation Rome had imposed, that the shadow of the Empire per- sisted, and the Romanesque basilica repeated the forms of the Roman senate-house. It was not until after the Norman conquest of England, the rise of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, the Arthurian cycle of poems, the birth of scholasticism and Gothic architeCture, not until the coming of the Crusades, that Christian classicism was set going; and it died in the Renaissance. The Renaissance began Roman- ticism, and was itself a wildly Romantic movement. It resuscitated Plato as against Aristotle, all the old gods against the Trinity, the fine clothes and jewels as against secular dirt and squalor. The only figure it took over intact from the Middle Ages was the figure of the Virgin, who—to the scandal of theologians of the Augustine and Cardinal Newman cast—had represented in the century of scholasticism the incurable romanticism that rests undisturbed by the noise of all classical pedantry. The Renaissance made more of the worldliness or unworldliness of Chaucer and Boccaccio, Ramon Lull and Joachim of Floris, than it did of all the Seely rhythm and filed form of the 2 INTRODUCTION “ Divina Commedia” or the “Dies Ira.” In fac, the Renaissance was perhaps the most Romantic move- ment that has ever existed. It set men digging the soil of Italy to find forgotten gods; drew Columbus westward to find the Earthly Paradise and Cathay; transformed Wycliffand Luther into rebels, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Rabelais into heretics and dreamers of Utopia. And from that moment till the opening of the eighteenth century, Christian Europe has never known a classical period. Roman- ticism found its last champions in Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, and that extraordinary creature, Charles XII of Sweden. All three failed, and thanks to the Jesuits, Baroque architecture, Kepler and Newton, the eighteenth century was again a brief period of worldly and sceptical classicism.
But not for long. It is one of the mysteries of history, and marvels of the secret designs of Providence, this question: why Christianity has never achieved a fixed classical Standard of taste, values, learning, archi- te€ture, and social etiquette, such as was granted in China to the apparently weaker system of Confucian- ism, in Egypt to the Amon-Ra and Osiris religion, in India to Hinduism, in Japan and Ceylon to Buddhism. Perhaps it was because Jesus believed, far more than any classicist can believe, in liberty. But the last classic period of Christianity, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, had begun to break down in France from the time Rousseau started to write. The 3 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY feudal and still more the craft-guilt system of the Middle Ages were unable through rottenness to support society. One of the firs aéts of the States-General convoked in 1789 was the abolition of the trades- guild system and its privileges, but long before that date the sytem of the farmers-general, the system of drafted and forced labour (such as had built Versailles) had to be called upon to prevent uprisings and deal with unemployment. Competition between state and State, dire&ted by the rising power of the bourgeois in such countries as England, had already begun. Industrialism, though the steam-engine and machine- technique were not yet invented, was already under way.
From that time onward down to the end of the nineteenth century, and for at least the first ten years of the twentieth, Romanticism has steadily fought on again& industrialism and naturalistic science, in alliance with commercial “ progress,” which even so pronounced an anti-Romanticist as Professor Irving Babbitt says is the greatest enemy of the human race. ‘That Romanticism has done so in the name of individual liberty may be left for consideration in a further section of this Introduction. What must be insisted on here is that the Romantics of the end of the nine- teenth century in England, men like Ruskin or William Morris, were not less opposed to machinery and to central machine-made government, than was Rousseau in 1748, when he declared that the savage races were morally and intelle€tually superior to the civilised.
4 INTRODUCTION 4 INTRODUCTION Unfortunately, however, Romanticism, in order to fight on against the disappearance of the handicraftsman and the landowner and the subStitution therefor of the faCtory-hand and the tenant, backed the wrong horse from the beginning, by espousing the cause of political democracy, now shown to be everywhere a failure. And to investigate the reason why it did so is to Study the most impressive error of the whole human mind. Voltaire and Rousseau achieved this error between them—the one by attacking the Church without providing a substitute, thus leading the way to the construction of the Revolutionary Society as a sort of substitute church or crusade within the state (the early Freemasons, the Jacobins, and so on, are all examples of this), the other by declaring that all men had inalienable rights, and that governments thus reéted on the consent of the governed—thereby leading the way to the abolition of the hereditary principle in anything, and the creation of the modern megalo- politan democracy.
Il Jean Jacques Rousseau was born on the 28th of June, 1712, three years before “le grand monarque,” “le Roi Soleil,” Louis XIV, who had done more than any other sovereign of his time to establish a classical order and hierarchy of society, died. Providence, which seems to work often on 2 principle of vast if unconscious 5 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY irony, made the most turbulent and disorderly intel- le@tual force of the day the son of a Geneva watchmaker, It was not until Rousseau was nearly forty that he achieved any reputation. Nothing proves better that he was not naturally gifted as a writer than his own account, in the “‘ Confessions,” of the enormous diffi- culties under which he laboured in producing his works, Had it not been for the rupture with Madame de Warens, for which he—by his own reckoning— was largely responsible, he might have lived and died obscure and unfamed, But from the moment when he set foot in Paris in 1741, bearing with him an utterly worthless syStem of musical notation and some slight skill as a copyist of music, his fate—to which he seems driven despite himself—was settled. Into the tedious, facile, jaded and sated society of his time, the uncouth Genevan, with his love for Plutarch’s heroes and his exasperated sensitivity, brought something like a breath from his native mountains. He did not retail ons mots; he had no liking for Jesuitry or intrigue; he was dull to incapacity in a secretaryship which for a brief time he obtained in the Embassy at Venice; and he concealed the fac that his taste was not modelled upon that of society as a whole, by taking as a mistress, not some brilliant member of that society, but an almo& illiterate, though well-born girl, Thérése le Vasseur, whose only claim to his consideration was her unspoilt freshness.
From this time onward, Rousseau’s life was a double 6 INTRODUCTION watfare——a warfare to justify his charaéter in the eyes of his contemporaries, and a warfare to reform society. It is a curious fact that the works which he wrote to reform society are at the present day dull and tedious, while those which he wrote to justify himself find in every generation their admirers, For every reader of the “Contrat Social,” of “Julie,” of “Emile,” there are probably dozens who intimately know the “ Confessions.” And another curious fa&: it is upon Rousseau’s own account of himself that we have to depend in studying him. His enemies, though he counted among them Madame d’Epinay, Grimm, Diderot, and Voltaire, never succeeded in giving such convincing pi€tures of themselves “Stripped bare” as the author of the “ Confessions,” the “ Dialogues,” and the work here translated. Their memory depends in great measure upon the ardour and vitality of their great enemy's prose.
Yet it is a Striking faét, and one which provides a further proof how little men know about each other, that the world has never been able to make up its mind about Rousseau’s chara@ter. Was he essentially mean or noble? Or was he simply crotchety to the point of sheer insanity? There is but little doubt that from the time “Emile” was condemned by the Parliament of Paris in 1762, and he was driven into exile, Rousseau was affli€ted with something closely resembling persecutional mania, and that this mania for finding a plot of his enemies against him on every 7 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY occasion disfigures the “Confessions” and distorts the present work, But if we are to allow that during the last years of his life he struggled not ignobly with ill-health and misfortune of all sorts, what are we to think of his early years during which he successively deserted Madame de Warens, who had not only constituted herself his protector, but had given him as much as a woman can give to a man, and Madame de Larnage, who, if we are to believe his own account, literally threw herself into his arms?
The fact is, that Rousseau was a creature of impulse, whose conduct throughout life, and especially with women, displayed a singular mixture of chivalrous desire to protect one weaker than himself, and timidity in venturing to declare himself. Like all the Ro- mantics that have been and will be—for Romanticism is not dead, nor can it die until the la&t man draws his last breath on this planet—Rousseau may Strike the present generation, hardened by the brutal experience of war, of incessant economic struggle and competition, of relaxation of Puritanic Standards of condu& into 2 superficial brilliance of surface and underlying sophis- tication of impulse, as a mere childlike sentimentalist, Jess heroic than absurd. I am far from saying that Rousseau would not have been as much out of place in our present State of human society—critical as it is of everything in the past and the present, and yet reStlessly seeking some better way of living in the future—as he so obviously was among the more facile INTRODUCTION and uncomplex standards of the eighteenth century. Yet no one can possibly say that his charaéter was not of a piece, consistent with itself, and that he himself did not strive to maintain a Standard, not only higher than that of his contemporaries, but one to which he himself was not able to conform, according to his own judgment. Ofvery few, if of any of his contemporaries, could so much be said. Certainly not of Diderot, not of Voltaire, In contrast with the worldliness with which they accepted pensions from princes with one hand, while writing libels on society with the other, in contrast with the facility with which they slipped from one love affair to the other, Rousseau’s decision to stand aloof from society, as well as his decision to make his union with Thérése le Vasseur as permanent as possible, has the authentic ring of the heroic. It may be that he was writing in the “ Confessions ” and later as a man under a grievance, and that, too, a grievance exasperated by ill-health and over-tortured by nerves to the point of obsession. But no one can read his autobiography without realising that under its mingled Strains of abasement and passionate self- defence there runs a strain of chivalrous tenderness, of noble regard for life. Less masculine than Cervantes certainly, though equally unfortunate in the society among which he was thrown, Rousseau has, in depidt- ing himself, given us a figure not unworthy to be set beside Don Quixote. Whether either the legendary Manchegan, or the Jean Jacques of flesh and blood, is 9 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY a figure that can appear as anything but absurd in this hard workaday world of ours, is a question that the critic need not settle.
What appears most certain is that none of the women with whom Rousseau was brought into contact were in the least worthy of him. Madame de Warens, the friend and proteétor of his youth, and later his mistress in point of fa€@, was on the whole the most amiable, tolerant, and well-educated, and his own statement that he was happy in her company is in her favour; but there seems reason to believe that she had pre- viously deserted and robbed her husband, and her looseness in providing herself immediately with a substitute on his departure shows she shared to the full in the laxity of the times. Madame de Larnage was an adventuress, pure and simple. The utmost one can say of Madame d’Epinay is that she offered the impecunious and irritable man of forty-four a shelter at the Hermitage, because she was amused at his gaucheries and half-disposed to love him; and that she withdrew her support because of a Aaison with Grimm, whose conduét was that of an extreme worldling, tainted with all the scepticism of the eighteenth century. Whether Rousseau was right or wrong in declaring that Grimm had plotted against him, and had drawn Thérése into the plot, there is no means of knowing exaétly; all that one can say is that Madame d’Epinay was an adventurous bluestocking, an equal compound of sensualist and sentimentali&t. As for Thérése 0 INTRODUCTION 0 INTRODUCTION le Vasseur, she proved, though Rousseau married her, the mos unworthy of them all. There is little doubt that the five children she claimed to have by him and in whose existence she persuaded him to believe, were fi€tions invented by her mother, to involve him more deeply into the support of her household, which not only contained the mother aforesaid, but a scape-grace son; and though Rousseau himself is at pains to whitewash her conduct, it was both stupid and abominable. Thus we can only say of this unfortunate man whose troubled life ended in poverty and neglect—not without suspicion of suicide -—that his prevailing weakness was to be deluded by women. Nor was he any more fortunate with his men friends, With most of them he quarrelled, because they had not either the courage nor the conviction to adopt his principles. Egotistic he was not, nor selfish, not envious, but he expected too much from the world, And in his latest years he grew into the habit of trans- ferring to others the suspicions he might have more properly felt on account of Thérése and her appalling family.
We can sum up his chara¢ter, as well as his mis- fortunes, by saying that he was a myétic who, instead of following the path of individual self-ennihilation in the total consciousness of the world, sought instead the goal of an undifferentiated consciousness in the primal impulse of nature. In doing this, he chose a route which has had more success in the East than in Ir Ir REVERIES OF A SOLITARY the West, and which is incompatible with a Sate of achieved and sophisticated intelletual civilisation. For one single St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, Jacob Behmen, or Jelaluddin Rumi, there have been dozens of failures in Western mysticism: hysterics of the Chateaubriand type, or despairing disillusion- i&ts like Baudelaire and the later James Thomson. Rousseau was such a failure, because he could not pass the bounds of pure natural sensation and regard man as an element in the world’s order superior to nature, and dependent on a higher plane of inspiration; nor could he reduce the men and women with whom he came into contact back to some more primitive contact with reality. He was thus the very opposite of such mystics as Behmen and Blake, whose aim was to show man and his perceptions as tending towards an infinite order above the bounded and limited domain of natural faGt. And because he could find no place in the social order of his day, he became the most severe critic of that order, employing a weapon of such radical sharp- ness that Voltaire himself declared that he wrote his books against the human race, and Napoleon later uttered the dictum that perhaps it would have been better if neither he nor Rousseau had ever existed. Yet, despite the fa& that he regarded himself as a complete failure, despite the fact that his political, social and economic writings represent a point of view that we can only accept if we are prepared to deny that human history has any significance—for Rousseau’s 12 INTRODUCTION judgments were unhiStorical throughout—we find that his influence on European thought has been literally enormous. Not Voltaire, but Rousseau, was the true father of the French Revolution. Jefferson, in the preamble to the American Declaration of In- dependence, simply repeated the leading thought of the “Contrat Social.” A century after the “ Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” we find Marx and Engels, in their famous Communist manifesto, varying the thought “ Manis born free and is everywhere in chains ” into “ Workers of the world, unite! You have only your chains to lose, and a world to win.” Politically it is not too much to say that the whole of the nine- teenth century owes its revolutionary character to the genius of this one man, And his influence was not less great on literature and the arts. It traversed the young Goethe of the fir&t part of “Faust” and “Werther.” It swept through Germany and France a torrent of romanticism. Culminating about 1848, it persisted in various forms down to the outbreak of the war in 1914—though from 1900 onwards its major power was on the wane. Tolstoy, with his theories about art, his gospel of brotherhood, his hatred of civilisation, was one of the last pure Rousseauists to State the gospel in its extreme form—though there are Still some pure disciples of Rousseau alive in England, notably Mr. Edward Carpenter. It was only after the war, with Professor Babbitt’s “ Rousseau and Romanticism,” with Jacques 13 13 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY Maritain’s “Trois Reformateurs,” with Mr. Wyndham Lewis's “The Art of Being Ruled,” that criticism of the Rousseau position began.
Hk As typical of this criticism, we may take Professor Babbitt with his book on“ Rousseau and Romanticism.” This book aims at opposing the naturalistic and sentimental ideal of the whole Romantic movement with a classical culture based upon humanistic and positive principles, Apparently the great upholders of this culture are, in Professor Babbitt’s view, Matthew Arnold, Aristotle, and Auguste Comte—three men whose somewhat pedantic tediousness and lecture- room manners are accurately reflected in the American teachers’ own style. The theories which this true-blue academic, who conétantly treats India, China, Egypt and Islam as being inferior to Greece and Rome, puts forward have unfortunately made some stir in the world, as they happened to coincide with the close of the war, when Western culture reached its nadir of disillusionment; therefore we must examine them, Professor Babbitt declares not once but many times in his onslaught against the whole Romantic school, that what the arts must portray is what is normal and centrally representative in human experience, as opposed to what is eccentric and disorganised. Butthe ideal which Professor Babbitt upholds is as unhistorical at bottom as Rousseau’s own defence of savage instin® 14 INTRODUCTION as opposed to civilised sophistication, What is normal and representative in one age is not what is normal in another. In the thirteenth century it was normal and representative for the man of Western Europe to go on pilgrimage and crusade for the sake of saving his soul; in the twentieth it is normal and representative for him to slay his neighbours with poison gas for the sake of getting more markets, drowning the world with petrol, and thoroughly cheating everybody. That the crusades betrayed underlying imperialistic ambitions, and that the preat war was ostensibly advertised as fought for the sake of political democracy, is a matter which does not affeét the argument, that what is normal in one age is not normal in another. Without en- quiring whether the normal in this age is not debased to such an extent that it has become a menace to all idealism, Professor Babbitt would have the young man of the present day be so modern as to ape Horace, that venal scribbler who played the sedulous ape to Alexan- drian culture, or Ovid, the even more facile writer of society verses—poets scarcely on a better level than the late Austin Dobson. To the rest of the world, in- cluding Shakespeare and Goethe, both of whom longed for Utopia, he applies his critical scalpel. The fac that Professor Babbitt, in defending normality, up- holds, consciously or not, a world of company-pro- moters, hotel-proprietors, manufaCturers of motor-cars, and Zenith Babbitts, seems to have escaped all his contemporaries.
15 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY It is, however, not necessary to show that his criticism levelled at Rousseau has no constructive side, in order to prove that Professor Babbitt is mistaken. What is important for us to see is that not one of the great artists of the world, or the great art movements of the world, has sprung from central and normal human experience, or has been dependent on the values of the great bulk of society, The genius, whether he exist in ancient Egypt or China, or to-day in the midst of the industrial community (and to have the former lot was far more preferable than to have to endure the latter), is always exceptional, and works from an experience that is not shared by those about him. This experience is the desire to attain to the absolute, the will to the absolute, in distinétion with the great mass of men who are content with the relative. That the “ end of ends,” in Professor Babbitt’s phrase, “is happiness” is expressly denied by all the highest art —by the art of the Gothic cathedrals no less than the art of the Romantic poet. The end of art is religion, whether it be art that unites great bodies of men as in the early period, or art that seeks the path of individual salvation as in the nineteenth century. The moral and the asthetic are one? That the esthetic creator is at one period concerned with one side of experience, and at another with another, matters notatall. Human experience itself, far from being sole, unified and con~ Stant, as Professor Babbitt would say, is diversified INTRODUCTION to infinity. If it were not so, we should all live to the age of seventy years and be company-promoters or college professors. It is the esthetic attitude alone that, eternally superior to human experience, draws portions of that experience, from age to age, up into higher harmony, as the light of the sun which illumin- ates but one portion of the planet at a time, nevertheless illuminates the whole planet. It is through the esthetic experience alone that we reach out to the beyond and transcend time and space by fusing them. If it be argued that art mus ethically submit itself to what is normal and central in human experience, we might as well carry the argument logically one step further and point out that art need never exist at all, since the great majority of people (who are normal and central) are not concerned with it, and do not lift a finger tocarryiton. The factis, that Professor Babbitt has been misled by Goethe, who said that art existed to “make mankind content with their condition.” How far “ Faust” or “ Werther ” can make mankind content is not stated. In any case, this argument, used by Goethe to defend the growing Philistinism of his own later years against the “Sturm und Drang” of other arti&ts who were pushing his own youthful attitude further, is false, and all art displays its falsity.
Apart from his upholding of a mummy of classical precept against the Striving art of the day, Professor Babbitt’s argument against Rousseau becomes very inconclusive. He says that Pascal was right in saying REVERIES OF A SOLITARY that imagination, which rules the world, is illusory, and right also in saying that reason (which Descartes and his like were forcing on the world in its place) cannot prevail againé&t the Maya-realm of the imagina- tion. Pascal therefore seeks for a harmony with the divine in human intuition, Now, under any unified religion, the intuition of society at large rests on a broad and simple basis. This basis in Christianity was destroyed by the Renaissance, and nothing since has been given to man to supplant it. If the whole of Europe could be induced again to go barefoot to St. James of Compoéstella or Jerusalem, there might be an awakening of intuition so great as again to result in a new period of cathedral-building and great poetry; but since the religious leaders themselves think in the terms not of revival but of mechanical conversion of everybody to the commercial intuitional basis of un- restricted industrial competition and cheap motors for all, archite€ture and the arts generally have to suffer. Professor Babbitt himself says that naturalistic science, represented by Darwin and other apostles of the sur- vival of the fittest school, is a greater enemy to man than individualistic Romanticism. But he does not see that what Rousseau and the other Romanticigts were fighting against was precisely this naturalistic science in its early Stages under Locke, Descartes, and other defenders of the reason against intuition. That Rousseau was obliged, in order to defend intuition,