DE MUSSET'S LIFE OF JEAN-JAQUES ROUSSEAU.

THIS is in some respects a singular work, and in many points an interesting one-though we must add, that it is indebted for the latter quality, rather to the intrinsic attractions of the subject, and to the zeal which has accumulated the mass of materials (some quite original ones) that compose it, than to the style or the intellectual powers of the biographer. The general style is not only languid and diffuse, and the disquisitions, both in phrase and thought, what are termed prosing, but in offering this voluntary tribute to Rousseau's memory, M. de Musset has displayed an appetite for profitless drudgery, such as is rarely connected with a vigorous mind, and which often reminded us of the patient index-makers of former times, composing tables of reference for each emphatic word that occurred in the pages of their favourite authors. Thus, not content with voluminous details of Rousseau's writings, opinions, and adventures, he presents us with a laborious analysis of his correspondence (956 letters) and biographical notices of more than 760 of his contemporaries-the two portions occupying full one half of the entire work. Besides this, we have an abridgement of the "Confessions,"" qui," says the writer," m'ont causé, je l'avoue, un mortel embarras," and frequent notes adjusting the dates of letters or occurrences -upon the exactness of which the biographer lays as much stress as if he were engaged throughout in a mathematical calculation. Yet, though this extreme precision be often tedious and unnecessary, it turns out occasionally to be very material for the justification of Rousseau against the charges of his enemies, which is the main design of the present publication.

When we spoke of the singularity of this work, we adverted to the uncommon devotion of M. de Musset to the cause of Rousseau's fame, which could alone have enabled him to sacrifice the time and labour that he seems to have expended in collecting the materials of his defence, and in arranging the whole with the rigorous prolixity we have noticed. At an early age, he tells us in the preface, he was passionately moved by the writings of Jean-Jaques, and the effect not diminishing as he advanced in years, he became anxious to investigate the grounds of the many accusations against his personal character and conduct. For this purpose he made it a point to read every thing that had been written on the subject of Rousseau :

Je le fis avec courage. Rien n'égala ma surprise, en trouvant de la mauvaise foi dans les unes-un esprit faux au prévenu dans les autres; dans toutes, sans exception, le langage de la passion ou de l'erreur-ici de l'inexactitude dans les faits exposés, des conjectures gratuites; là de l'alteration dans les citations, des suppositions sans fondement, des interprétations fausses; partout des préventions."+

Histoire de la vie, et des ouvrages de J. J. Rousseau-composée des documents authentiques, et dont une partie est restée inconnue jusqu'à ce jour; d'une biographie de ses contemporains, considérés dans leurs rapports avec cet homme celèbre; suivie des Lettres inedites. pp. 1070. Paris, 1821.

I did this courageously. Nothing could equal my astonishment at finding bad faith in some, a false and prejudiced spirit in others, and in all, without erception, the language of passion and error. Here, inaccuracy in the facts alleged-there, altered quotations, unfounded suppositions, false interpretations, and everywhere prejudice.

The result of these researches is contained in the present volumes, and put forth, as it appears to us, with as much impartiality as could well be compatible with the enthusiasm for his subject, and his anxiety to discover topics of justification, which he candidly admits were his incentives to the task.

Our limits do not permit us to follow the biographer of Rousseau in detail through his disquisitions upon his literary and philosophical pretensions. He, perhaps, over-rates them. Still, after making every deduction that severe criticism, or even the malice of his enemies and rivals may exact, the decried and ridiculed, and very often ridiculous Jean-Jaques will stand in the first class of the first thinkers and writers of his age.

The effects that Rousseau produced, and the extravagances, both of thought and conduct, into which he plunged-that is, his genius and his inconsistencies are it has always struck us, to be traced to one or two obvious singularities in his condition, which have not been sufficiently observed upon, either by his present historian, or by any of the preceding writers, whether friends or foes, who have laboured to explain or to expose the character of this extraordinary man. The most striking of these peculiarities was the utter want of coincidence between his theoretic maxims and his temperament and habits. His education was irregular and vicious. In his infancy he was turned adrift upon the world, with no other guides than the passions of his age, and the licentious examples that surrounded him. For many years he continued a vagabond and an adventurer, sometimes so needy as to pass the night without house or food-inevitably contracting the vices of each suc cessive mode of life upon which he chanced to be flung, but ever, as he has stated it himself, finding consolation, under the severest privations, in the ideal anticipations of a sensual imagination. Before his twentieth year, he had been successively "apprenti greffier, graveur, laquais, valet de chambre, séminariste, interprète d'un archimandrite, secrétaire du cadastre, maître de musique." (i. p. 41.) At that age he found a resting-place; but, as if it were fated that his morals were to be benefited by no change of fortune, the residence of his protectress became the scene where the last remnant of virtuous restraint, that had survived his wanderings, was to be sacrificed to her example and deliberate invitation. Such was the commencement and consummation of Rousseau's moral education; and it is little to be wondered at, if, in the result, he became, to every practical purpose, irretrievably enervated by the corrupt manners and habits amidst which his youth was passed. But his intellectual character was not so quickly decided. The growth of his faculties, it appears, was unusually slow; up to the age of thirtynine his talents were unknown to his friends, and almost to himself. He had previously, it is true, obscure intimations of his strength from visitations of ambitious reverie-the inquietude of genius was about him; but up to the very moment of the explosion of his mind, neither Rousseau himself, nor any who had known him, ever anticipated the career that was before him. At last he became an author, being now on the verge of forty. By this time his experience of life, in all its forms, had been great. He had been an acute, though a silent observer

of the varied scenes he had witnessed. He had, for the last ten years, been initiated in the mysteries of Parisian society, then at its most profligate period; and his quick and comprehensive understanding had seized the complicated system of vices, in all their disastrous consequences, with which it teemed. He saw that system, and, with the help of his imagination, in all its deformity. But Rousseau's aversion to the disorders that he afterwards signalized himself in denouncing, had this singularity, that it appears, in the first instance, to have been almost entirely an intellectual repugnance. Perhaps to assert that it was not a moral sentiment, may seem either a perversion of language, or at best a pedantic distinction; but when we remember the history and the habits, both previous and subsequent, of the man, it appears clearly to have belonged rather to that class of moral sentiments which result from the conclusions of a vigorous understanding (or more correctly speaking, perhaps, may be called those conclusions themselves), than to the instinctive movements of an habitually virtuous mind. Thus by the time that Rousseau's philosophical opinions were formed, his personal morals were gone; and it was his fate to commence his public career, inveterately attached, by taste and temperament, to many of the licentious indulgences against which he vehemently, and, we do think, very sincerely inveighed. This view, we imagine, will go pretty far towards explaining several of the singularities in his works and his demeanour. The first question upon which he employed his powers, was the moral effects of refinement upon society. Struck by the universal profligacy that surrounded him in a nation claiming to be the most refined, and very probably attracted by the novelty of his own speculations, he composed his celebrated discourse on the arts and sciences. His final conclusions are unquestionably wrong, but great truths are dispersed throughout it; and though neither this nor his subsequent writings will in themselves form a wise man, a wise man who consults them will find abundance of matter to suggest the profoundest meditations upon things the most important to human happiness. But, whatever may be thought of his general views, Rousseau had the merit-and it required no ordinary courage of "speaking out." He levelled his opinions at the corruption and frivolities of the age in language of unprecedented boldness. In the midst of a luxurious capital, to which he had emigrated in search of bread, and in defiance of philosophers, academies, theatres, saloons, and all that Paris held most dear, this daring innovator ventured to question the institutions upon which all their pretensions rested, and to eulogize, in terms that his bitterest enemies admitted to belong to the highest order of eloquence, a system of morals and manners which both he and they were too degenerate to adopt.

The success of his first work, and the immediate celebrity that it brought him, proved the crisis of his fate. Had it been allowed to pass off as a clever treatise, abounding with glowing passages and home. truths, but, as far as the main argument was concerned, demanding no serious refutation, Jean-Jaques might have gone on to live like ordinary men. But the cry was raised through France, that a watchmaker's son from Geneva was meditating no less than a subversion of that venerable system, which kept up a continual demand for courts and courtiers; for

tragedies, opera-dancers, fiddlers, bons-mots, made-dishes, academical discourses; for the Pompadours, du Deffands, Sophie Arnoulds, and the other legitimate unnecessaries of life; and forthwith the vindication of those sacred superfluities was gravely undertaken by nine stout literati* (as if each Muse had sent her champion), having in their ranks the anointed Majesty of Poland to throw in a stately syllogism for the endangered rights of his well-beloved cousins, and his priest of the chamber, the godly Pere Menou, to pledge the blessings of the church upon his gracious logic. Jean-Jaques intrepidly went forth to meet the embodied deputies from the fine arts, the King, and the Jesuit-and he beat them all. But the victory, if not the very contest, turned his brain. He not only contracted an affection for doctrines that procured him so much renown, but he took it into his head that (the eyes of Europe being now upon him) it was incumbent on him, as their author, to demonstrate by his conduct a capacity of practising those habits of simplicity, independence, and self-privation, which he had been fearless enough to extol. Accordingly he assumed the stoic-he simplified his costume, contracted his expenditure, retired from the saloons, renounced civil speeches, and became a "citizen of Geneva" and a copier of music. In all this there may have been (what his rivals and enemies insisted upon to be the ruling passion of his life) an affectation of singularity; but when we consider the whole of his extraordinary character, and weigh the case made for him by his present biographer, and supported throughout by strong documentary evidence, we incline to the opinion that there was a considerable mixture of sincerity, and that his motives were pretty much what he has explained them to have been in his Confessions. However, from whatever motive he acted, he was not to be diverted from prosecuting his plan; and neither the entreaties of his friends, nor the allurements of female admirers, nor the mockeries of Baron D'Holbach's corps of sneerers, could tear the irrevocable Jean-Jaques from his self-inflicted exile. He buried himself in the Hermitage; yet, though he had withdrawn his person from the world, his heart and imagination still lingered amidst its scenes. To give up, on a sudden, the habits and indulgences of forty years, proved a sacrifice beyond his strength; and if left to the re-action of his own feelings, or if temperately managed by his advisers, he would probably have seized the first plausible pretext of abandoning his scheme of absurd and unnecessary self-denial. But nothing could have been more inconsiderate than the means adopted by his friends. At one time they implored him to return to the world, as if human affairs could not go on without him; at another, they assailed him with predictions of the precise day upon which his newfangled stoicism was to die a natural death. They tormented or flattered him by weekly reports of what all Paris was saying in wonder at his unnatural desertion; and (the indiscreetest course of all) they secretly carried on miserable consultations and intrigues with the wretched woman, to whom, in every vicissitude of his fortune and humour, he seems to have clung with a strange fidelity, in order to se

* MM. Gautier, Borde, Le Roi, Boudet, de Bonneval, Formey, le P. Menou, le roi Stanislas, and Lecat.

cure her co-operation, and (it is also said) to make her the instrument of a plan of domestic annoyances that might the sooner disgust him with his retirement. These methods were little calculated to succeed with such a being as Rousseau-proud, vain, irritable, and suspicious. They only riveted him in his absurdities. He was determined to let all Paris and all Europe see, that he possessed more force of character than was allowed him; while the discovery that a secret committee was sitting upon him gave his sensitive imagination the alarm; and in the well-meaning, though imprudent importunities of his friends, or, at the worst, in their impertinent interference, he caught the first germ of a notion, which, fostered by his jealous fancies, and afterwards confirmed by real calumny and persecution, became matured into the conviction that there existed a dark and extended conspiracy against his fame.

Such appears to us to be the fair explanation of Rousseau's feelings and situation at the outset of his public career; and such the origin of those contradictions in his character, in which partly the shame of retracting, and partly the undue importance annexed to them by others, impelled him to persevere. Thus he was for ever at variance with himself. His theories and his habits never coalesced. He had been spoiled by the world, before he comprehended its vices and undertook to decry them. He attempted or affected to renounce them himself, but it was too late. His reformation was not only incomplete, but ridiculous. The philosophic citizen of Geneva and the effeminate Frenchman could never assimilate. In the one character, he accommodated his outward garb and manners to the severity of his theoretic views; in the other, he dispensed his senses and imagination from joining in the sacrifice. He fled from the corruptions and frivolities of polished life, and he took his mistress with him. The same inconsistency pervades his writings. His intellect, having attained its growth, was manly and comprehensive, but by this time his fancy and moral taste were depraved; and hence we find bold truths and virtuous lessons incessantly counteracted by sensual illustrations. As a moral teacher, this was his great intellectual failing, that he could never divest his imagination of the licentious associations of his youth. To them, with all his speculative austerities, he clung to the last-at once a stoic and a voluptuary; in the same breath licentious and sublime, he declaims against the passions in language that inflames them. In his most animated praises of virtue, he seems inspired by the intoxications of vice; just as if a veteran tippler should sit down to compose an exhortation against carousing, with a bottle at his elbow to stimulate his powers.

These observations, if founded, will answer one of the most popular charges against the memory of Rousseau; that the object of his writings, more especially of his celebrated romance, was to corrupt his readers. We believe, as we have stated on a former occasion, that his object in the "Nouvelle Heloise" was to move his readers by pictures of ideal virtue, and by impassioned descriptions of feelings and situations analogous to those through which he had passed himself; but that, in the progress of the work, becoming involved in new feelings and

No. IV. p. 396.