to depend on individual effort as against the tendency 18 INTRODUCTION of society is a defect not of Romanticism itself, but of the time—and things have grown no better since then, Rather are they much worse, despite Professor Babbitt’s concealed attempt to make the mechanical, Standardised, uniformised man of the present day “ content with his condition.”
Iv The position that Rousseau took up was indeed governed by error, but not such an error as Professor Babbitt describes. The error Rousseau made was based on a confusion of the values of society with the values of truth—it is essentially the same mistake as that made by Plato, when he supposed that a human society based on justice and truth could exist, Asa matter of fat, we know enough about human societies to know that they are formed and held together not by truth, but by what Thrasymachus, in Plato’s “Re- public ” itself, calls the “ instin® of the Stronger,” and that this instiné is dire&tly di€tated by material neces- sity. Out of necessity comes the faith that a certain course of action is moral for all. The Australian native of the Witchetty Grub tribe performs certain magic rites in order to obtain a supply of his favourite food; the ancient Greek worships Zeus, the fertilising rain that falls into the lap of the earth-mother, in order that Dionysus, the wine-god who comforts man, may be born. Both these ations are motivated by the realisa- tion of necessity symbolising itself as truth, As 19 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY regards ultimate truth apart from necessity, there is no such thing. And this profound mystical fact, realised by all the great poets, to the point that they spoke not in the positive terms, beloved of all the Babbitts, but rather in parables, paradoxes, and myth- creations, was expressly denied by Rousseau, who unfortunately growing up under the sentimental deism of the day, never grasped Blake’s greatest saying: that “ there is no natural religion.”
If we look at the hiftory of man, we can see that man as soon as he leaves the pure tribal state (which must be regarded as the prehistoric State) adopts one of four forms of government, Each of these forms is modelled on what he conceives the ideal of all possible govern- ment to be, Each form claims to come from heaven, and each is an attempt to approximate the government of heaven (which only the exceptional individuals—the medicine-men, priests, and ecétatics—are allowed to know anything about) on earth, The firs of these forms of government is that of the only great civilisa- tions that the world has ever known. It is the form that was carried out alike in India, in China, in Egypt, and to a lesser degree by the Hebrews, and by the ancient Incas. Under a government of this sort, men are ruled by a divine king and his descendants and by the priestly caste who are his chief ministers. Under such governments men live divided into caftes or colours; there is the priestly caste, which alone has full knowledge of “truth,” and which supplies the 20 INTRODUCTION 20 INTRODUCTION Gate with its great architetts, poets, law-makers, musicians, engineers, and magic-makers. Below them is the warrior caste, who defend the State from external attack, the merchants and the work-people. Above them all is the divine king, the “Son of Heaven ” or “of the Sun,” the representative of the gods on earth, the link of union between the world-order and the order of the universe. Governments of this type have attained the highest possible form of culture that man can achieve; they have also provided happiness for millions of common people over thousands of years. Their great works still remain to confound the petty beings of these latter years. The duration of life of such governments is dependent on the ability of the priesthood to continue the sacrifices unbroken, the maintenance of purity of caste in the royal family (ensured under the Egyptians by the practice of the Pharaohs of marrying their sisters) and the ability of the warriors to ward off invasion from without, They have been the most lasting and beneficent governments man has known.
Less important, because less lasting in effect, have been the great Empires dependent upon military power, and the prowess of the warrior caéte, Such govern- ments have been realised by Rome, by the Mogul Empire, the Early Califate, and by the Aztec confedera~ tion. Such governments, no longer dependent on the support of a united priesthood, always practise tolerance of religions, but can only survive so long as they are ar REVERIES OF A SOLITARY able to push forward the conquest of their neighbours, and so long as they are able to support the severe economic burden of a vast military establishment. They do not achieve such sublime and immense creations of art as do the governments of the first class, Rather do they tend to borrow art from the nations they conquer, and to apply it to their own glorification, The third class of government comes into existence at the point when religion, as the sense of man’s contact with the higher sphere of spiritual values, begins to break down, and human beings lose their desire to achieve great things for the sake of the gods, or to think of their lives as being in any way in contact with higher planes of existence than our earth can show. Under governments of the third class, the programme of representative democracy is applied, not by the small specialised city-state, which, as Rousseau has pointed out, is the only body that has produced under it a vital form of living culture, but by vast industrial communi- ties. England, America, and most of Europe are now controlled in this way. But the government of such communities is always carried on by tradespeople in the interest of the merchant class. Such governments have no programme; they pay as little attention to the dominant sentiments of the people governed as they do to the traditions of the past. They exist in order to bargain, to vulgarise, to compete, to offer the bait of glittering promises to the vast and over-crowded swarms of industrial world-centres. Rome in its later 22 INTRODUCTION phase—the phase of bread and circuses, of free corn from Egypt and wild-beast shows from all over the world; the phase of nigger dances, exotic cults,and tene- ment over-crowding—began the list of governments of this specifically “modern” type. England trans- formed itself from a great military power to an industrial democracy of this sort in the century that lay between 1688 and the French Revolution, America, since 1860, has never known any other kind of government than this shameless thing which calls itself democracy, but which works always in the interest of the pluto- cracy, and which has neither the honour nor the integrity, nor the religious sense of destiny, to create a culture. This pseudo-democratic, in reality dema- gogic and plutocratic phase of government, is what Oswald Spengler, the most profound of living histor- ians, calls the “ decline of the West ”—he might with more appropriateness call it the decline of mankind. The last class of government possible to man—for with the return to primeval anarchy and disorder no historian need concern himself—is 2 pure and simple dictatorship of the working-class, resting upon the will of one man drawn out of that class. Such dictatorships are at present being sketched out in Italy, in Russia, in Spain, in Greece, and may very soon come in England, France and Germany. A government of this nature may indeed provide some improvement on a govern- ment by a dishonest and bargaining Parliament elected, as all Parliaments must be elected, solely in the interests 23 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY of the merchant-class, but no means has as yet been devised whereby a diator can appoint his successors, and such governments offer at the best only intervals of order certain to be broken by intervals of complete anarchy. They are only the desperate last expedients of civilisations exhausted to the point of being unable to struggle again& their own disintegration.
Apart from all these is the government represented by the small city-state of antiquity, which can only come into being at a time when all forms of central government have broken down, and can only persist and flourish under special geographical and social con- ditions. These conditions have only been provided by Nature in four cases: in the case of Ancient Greece, in Japan, in Switzerland, and in the case of the Maya con- federation. In all cases, civilisations of high power have existed for a time on the basis of a confederation of such small city-States; but they owed their existence to countries in which means of communication were difficult, sea travel more available than land travel, and where the centres of population lie widely apart.
It was precisely, however, this type of government which Rousseau upheld, misled largely as he was by the retrospective and false romanticism which puts an ideal Greece (largely derived from Plato and Plutarch, and not from the main body of the Greeks themselves) at the very centre of all human Striving that has gone on in this planet. Unlike an intelligent modern historian who sees that Egypt, China, India, the 24 INTRODUCTION Peruvian-Mayan confederations, the Califate, and to a much lesser degree the Empires of Persia, Rome, and Great Britain, are of the utmost importance in the history of man’s ideas and inspirations—unlike this historian, to whom Greece, Japan, and the Mayan confederacy are offshoots, not lacking in charm, but off- shoots none the less—Rousseau committed the blunder of supposing that everything had to be modelled on Ancient Athens or Sparta, and was blissfully unaware of the fa that the Ancient Athens and Sparta of reality kept large populations of slaves, and that they owed their independence to geographical conditions impossible to duplicate under the social and economic conditions of the centralised nation- tates of his day. Finding the centralised monarchy of his day distasteful in its outlook and methods—and in this he was quite right, for the late French monarchy only ranks as a very poor example of a government of the second order, and does not belong to the early high cultures I have mentioned—Rousseau fell back on the meagre provincialism of the Swiss city-state with its system of dire& representative government. And his successors, confusing the devolution of power which he had desperately seized upon, as being the one way out of nationalistic tyranny, the one means of breaking down the absolutism of Louis XIV and his successors, proceeded to apply with their own much more middle-class dreams, his idea to vast traéts of territory by bestowing representative government to 25 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY such countries as the United States and the major part of Europe, thereby bringing about the purely com- mercial plutocracy which calls itself democracy in all the Western nations—and which England to her shame was the first to eftablish. It is another irony of history that through Rousseau, the disillusioned upholder of the simple Swiss system again&t the complex and decaying military and nationalistic system of the French —through him the English owe the spread of Imperial- istic and constitutional, that is to say plutocratic and industrial government, throughout the world. What Rousseau should have been—what he would have been in our day—is an Easterner as against a Westerner, an upholder of absolutism and caste against mechanical disruption and disorder.
Vv Thus we see that Rousseau, in his harking back to a condition which can only persist under special con- ditions of soil, climate, and population, effectively killed the decadent French monarchy, and that his successors were unable to put in its place anything but the vulgar, time-serving, dishonestly bargaining com- mercial democracy under which the whole of the Occident is at present fallen, and which rules solely by means of greed and grab, bread and circuses, glittering promises to the working-class which are immediately broken or withdrawn. The interest, therefore, that we can take in his life and work is entirely the interest 26 INTRODUCTION 26 INTRODUCTION in the solitary, the man born out of his time, the tragic prophet who saw with clear-sighted pessimism that nothing could save European culture, and still more, religion, upon which all culture rests, except a complete “return to nature.”
There are many passages in which Rousseau recalls some of the Hindu or Buddhist hermits of the East, or the early Franciscans. Such, for ingtance, is his description of the lake of Bienne in the present volume. Like these holy men of old, he lived (but more acutely than they) a life of dissociated consciousness—a waking dream, a contemplative trance—and devoted himself to idleness, pantheism, and observation of the instinét inherent in animal and vegetable states of existence, And it is for this fa& that Western democracy, which regards a mountain as a thing to plant a quarry on, a tree as something to turn into wood pulp, a wild animal as something to shoot, Stuff, or put in a Zoo, and an ocean as something to defile with petrol—it is for this that we, in the name of a classicism which Aristotle would loathe and Plato shrink back from in horror, condemn him. But Rousseau lived at a time when the type of the holy man, the man who is concerned only with intimations of States which rest beyond mortality, and which only gods perhaps can fully experience, was no longer permitted to exist, except under ecclesiastical or political (and unfortunately both in his day came to the same thing) supervision. There was for him no abiding-place where he might withdraw from the world, 27 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY be honoured and respected in solitude, and yet remain in intimate counsel and contaét with mankind. That State of society does evil, for which countless generations have to pay, which does not provide safety, respect, honour for the holy one who wears simple clothes, prefers the forest to the city, and communes with the gods, Rousseau lived under a government which had already lost wisdom and which was rapidly toppling into that Occidental devil-take-the-hindmost industrial madness which may deStroy not only culture and civi- lisation, but all of mankind in the near future. He, therefore, prepared the vengeance of the gods on the society which had unlearned wisdom; that vengeance was the French Revolution. We who have witnessed the most bloody, unnecessary, cruel and futile war in history, fought in the name of democracy, and won by international plutocratic capital, now Struggle under a shadow Still greater—a twilight of humanity with scarcely the hope of new dawn. And what we need now is not a single Rousseau, but a whole body of Prophets—a great sacred caste of “ superior men ” in the sense that Confucius used the word—to bring us forth from the darkness, {* The Reveries of a Solitary” is the last of Rousseau’s works. Intended as 2 sequel and complement to the “‘ Confessions,” it takes up the story of Roussean’s life at the point where the “ Confessions ” leaves it—that is to say, with his final exile from Swiss territory in 1765, Rousseau did not live to complete the book which he began in the last year of his life, in 1778.]
(ROUSSEAU’S DEDICATION) To M. DUCLOS, ISTORIOGRAPHER OF FRANCE, ONE OF THE ¥ORTY OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY, AND THE ACADEMY OF BEILYS LETTRES, Suffer, Sir, that your nome showld appear at the head of this work, wohich, without you, would nat have seen the daylight. Tihs woill be my fir8 and unique dedication: may it do you as much honour as I?
T am with all my heart, Sir, your ocry bumble asd obedient servant }. J. ROUSSEAU.
29 FIRST PROMENADE ERE am I, then, alone upon the earth, having no brother, or neighbour, or friend, or society but myself. The mos sociable and loving of human beings has been proscribed by unanimous agreement. They have sought in the refinements of their hatred whatever torment could be most cruel to my sensitive soul, and they have violently broken all the links which attached me to them. I would fain have loved men in despite of themselves; they have not been able to conceal themselves from my affection, except by ceasing to be men. They are, then, strangers, unknown, nothing finally for me, because they have wished it. But I, detached from them and from all, what am I in myself? That is what remains to be discovered. Unhappily this search must be preceded by a backward glance over my position; that is a mental stage through which I mug necessarily pass in order to arrive at myself.
For fifteen years and more I have been in this Strange position, and it Still appears to mea dream. I always imagine to myself that an indigestion is tormenting me, that I am sleeping badly, and that I am about to awake, eased of my troubles, and to find myself again with my friends. Yes, without doubt, it must be that, yt REVERIES OF A SOLITARY without perceiving it, I have made a leap from waking to sleep, or from life to death. Drawn, I know not how, from the order of things, I have seen myself precipitated into an incomprehensible chaos, in which I perceive nothing at all; and the more I think of my present state, the less I can understand where I am.
But how could I have foreseen the deStiny that awaited me? How can I understand it even to-day when I Still suffer from it? Could I, in my good sense, suppose that, one day, I, the same man that I have always been, the same man that I am Mill, should appear, should be held, as a monster, a poisoner, an assassin; that I should become the horror of the human race, the plaything of the mob; that all the salutation which I should receive from passers-by would be for them to spit in my face; that an entire generation should amuse themselves with burying me alive? When this Strange revolution occurred, I was taken by surprise and utterly dumbfounded. My agitation, my indignation, plunged me into a delirium which has taken fully ten years to calm down; and, in that interval, fallen from error to error, from fault to fault, from Stupidity to aupidity, I have furnished, by my own imprudences, as many means to the controllers of my destiny, which they have skilfully made use of to render it inalterable, I have struggled for a long time as violently as vainly. Without skill, without art, without dissimu- lation, without prudence, frankly, openly, impatiently, 32 FIRST PROMENADE carried away by my enthusiasm, I have only succeeded, by Struggling, in tying myself up more closely, and in giving my enemies perpetually new holds upon myself which they have taken care not to neglect. Feeling finally that all my efforts were useless, and that I was tormenting myself to pure loss, I have taken up the sole position that remained to me, that of submitting to my destiny, without again revolting against necessity, J have found in this resignation the amends for all my woes, by the tranquillity which it has procured me, and. which cannot ally itself with the continual working of a resistance as painful as it was fruitless, Another thing has contributed to this tranquillity, In all the refinements of their hatred, my persecutors have omitted one which their animosity has made them forget; that of graduating so well the effect of their hatred, that they could have kept up and renewed my sorrows unceasingly, by always inflifting on me some new blow. If they had had the skill to leave open some loophole of hope, they could have held me by this alone, They could have made of me their play- thing by some false lure, and made me heart-broken again with new torment caused by deceiving my expectations, But they have exhausted in advance all their own resources; by leaving me nothing, they have taken away everything from themselves as well. The defamation, the derision, the depression, the oppro- brium with which they have covered me, are no longer susceptible of increase or of softening; we are both 33 sd REVERIES OF A SOLITARY equally incapable—on their side, of aggravating my condition, on my side of dragging myself forth from it. They have been in such haste to bring to its height the measure of my misery, that all of human power, aided by all the ruses of hell, could not add anything to it. Physical pain itself, far from augmenting my trouble, would create a diversion. In wrenching cries from me, perhaps it would spare me groans, and the tortures of my body would suspend those of my heart.
What have I to fear from them still, since all is over? Not being able to make my state worse, they have not been able to inspire me with any more fears. Inquietude and fright are evils from which they have forever delivered me; that is always a relief. True evils have but little hold upon me; I can always over- come those which I experience, but not those which I fear. My Startled imagination combines them, turns them around, extends them, and increases them. Their expectation torments me a hundred times more than their presence, and the menace is more terrible than the blow. As soon as they have arrived, the event, removing from them everything imaginary, reduces them to their own just value. I find them, then, much slighter than I have pictured them; and even in the midst of my suffering, I do not cease to feel relieved. In this state, freed from each new fear and delivered from inquietude, from hope, habit alone suffices to make a situation which nothing can worsen, 34 FIRST PROMENADE more supportable from day to day; and to the degree that feeling fades away in time, they have no means to reawaken it. This is the good which my persecutors have done me, by exhausting boundlessly all the traits of their animosity. They have deprived themselves of all power over me, and I can henceforth mock them.
Two months have not gone by since full calm was re-eStablished in my heart. For a long time I had ceased to fear anything, but I till hoped; and this hope, now cherished, now broken, was a snare by which a thousand diverse passions did not cease to agitate me, An event as sad as unforeseen came finally to efface from my heart this feeble ray of hope, and make me see my destiny fixed forever without change here below. From thence, I have resigned myself without reserve and I have rediscovered peace.
As soon as I began to see the plot in all its extent, I lost forever the notion of bringing the public back to my side while I live; and even this return, being no longer reciprocal, would be hence- forth quite useless. Mankind may well come back to me, but they will not find me any more. With the disdain they have inspired in me, to mingle with them would be insipid and even a burden; and I am a hundred times more happy in my solitude than I could be in living with them. They have torn from my heart all the sweetnesses of society. These cannot germinate again at my age; it is too late, Let them, therefore, do me good or evil; everything on their part 35 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY is indifferent to me, and whatever they may do, my contemporaries will never be anything to me.
But I still counted upon the future, and I hoped that a later generation examining better both the judgments made by this generation upon me, and its condu€t towards me, would easily distinguish the trickery of those who carried it on, and would see me finally as Iam. It is this hope which made me write my “Dialogues,” and suggested to me a thousand foolish attempts to enable them to pass into posterity. This hope, though distant, kept my soul in the same agitation as when I still searched in this age for a true heart; and my hopes that I did well to rest upon the distant future have equally made me the plaything of men of to-day. I have told in my “ Dialogues” the reasons upon which I rested this expectation. I was deceived, I have discovered this, happily, in sufficient time to find still, before my last hour, an interval of full quietness and of absolute repose. This interval began in the epoch of which I am now speaking, and I have reason to believe that it will not be interrupted.
Not many days have gone by since new reflections confirmed to me how much it was a mistake to count upon the return of the public, even in another age; because it is led on, in that which concerns me, by guides who incessantly renew themselves in the bodies of those who have taken a hatred to me. Particular individuals die, but colle€tive bodies do not die. The same passions perpetuate themselves, and their ardent 36 FIRST PROMENADE hatred, immortal like the demon that inspires them, has always the same a¢tivity. When all my particular friends are dead, the do¢tors and the Oratorians will live on Still; and when I shall not have any persecutors but those two bodies, I may be sure that they will not grant any more peace to my memory after my death than they have granted to my person being alive. Perhaps, by lapse of time, the doctors whom I have really offended, can be pacified: but the Oratorians, whom I have loved, whom I have esteemed, in whom I have had all confidence, and whom I have never offended; the Oratorians, people of the Church and half monks, will be forever implacable; their own iniquity has created my crime, which their self-love will never pardon; and the public, in which they will take care to stir up and reawaken hostility to me incessantly, will not appease itself any more than they.
All is ended for me upon the earth; none can now do me good or evil. There remains for me neither anything to hope for nor to fear in this world, and now I am tranquil at the bottom of the gulf, 2 poor unfor- tunate mortal, but as undisturbed as God Himself.
All that is external to me, is now strange hencefor- ward, I have, in this world, neither neighbour, nor kinsmen, nor brothers. I am upon this earth as upon a strange planet, whence I have fallen from that which I inhabited, If] recognise anything about me, it is only some obje& which is affliGing and tor- turing to my heart; and I cannot cast my eyes upon that 37 REVERIES OF A SOLITARY which touches and surrounds me without finding always some subject of disdain which rouses my indignation, or of sorrow which affliéts me. Let me remove, then, from my spirit all the painful objeéts with which I have occupied myself as sorrowfully as uselessly. Alone for the rest of my life, because I cannot find except in myself consolation, hope and peace, I ought not, and do not wish to occupy myself any longer save with myself, It is in this Sate that I am taking up the sequel of that sincere and severe examination that I once called my Confessions. I shall consecrate my Ja&t days to the Study of myself, and to preparing in advance the account which I shall not be slow to give of myself. Let me devote myself entirely to the sweetness of speaking with my own soul, because that is the only thing of which men cannot rob me. If, by force of refle€ting upon my inward propensities, I succeed in putting these in order and correcting the evil that may remain there, my meditations will not be entirely useless, and although I shall not be good for anything upon this earth, I shall not have lost entirely my last days. The leisures of my daily walks have often been filled with delightful contemplations of which I regret having lost the memory. [I shall set down in writing those which may Still come to me; each time that I reread them will give me new pleasure. I shall forget my sufferings, my persecutors, my oppro- brium, in dreaming of the reward which my heart has merited. 38 FIRST PROMENADE These leaves will not be, properly speaking, anything but a formless journal of my reveries. There will be much concerning myself, because a solitary who reflects occupies himself necessarily much with himself. For the rest, all the Strange ideas which pass through my head in walking about will equally find a place. I shall say that which I have thought exa¢tly as it has come to me, and also with as little linking together as the ideas of yeSterday ordinarily have with those of the day following. But there will always result a new understanding of my nature and my humour, through the knowledge of the sentiments and the thoughts on which my spirit feeds daily, in this Strange State in which Jam. These leaves can then be regarded as an appen- dix to my “Confessions,” but I do not give them this title, as I have nothing more to say which can merit being said. My heart has been purified in the crucible of adversity, and I scarcely find, in sounding it carefully, anything that remains of a reprehensible tendency. What could I have Still to confess, when all my earthly affections are torn away? I have nothing to praise or blame myself for; I am nothing henceforward among men, and that is all that I can be, having no more a real relation or a veritable companionship with them. Not being able to do any good that does not turn into evil, not being able to a&t without injury to another or to my- self, to abftain has become my unique duty, and I shall