28 June: Boreham on Jean Jacques Rousseau

Apostle of Reconstruction
It was on the twenty-eighth of June that one of the most massive and most mountainous figures in human history first appeared on this planet. It is difficult to mention the name of Jean Jacques Rousseau without being oppressed by his sheer tremendousness. In childhood he seemed destitute of a shadow of a chance. His mother died when he was a fortnight old; his father took no interest in him; and so Jean, realising that he was responsible to nobody and that nobody was responsible for him, took matters into his own hands. Running away from such a home as he had, he carved out for himself a destiny in accordance with his own desires.

His isolation and solitariness were conducive to original thought. With absolute candour he committed to paper the bold ideas that he audaciously conceived and the startling novelty of his theories made an extraordinary appeal. France has never known an enthusiasm comparable to that which was awakened by the publication of "La Nouvelle Heloise." The booksellers were helpless. They found it impossible to cope with the bewildering demand. Fabulous prices were offered for a single hour's perusal. Rousseau revolutionised by his singular witchery everything that he touched. The stage, the platform, the school, the home, and even the dress of the period and the style of the garden changed their form and character beneath the magic of his wand. Although Carlyle felt no special fondness for Rousseau, he was compelled to recognise his vast historical signficance and to welcome him to a place of honour in his famous gallery of heroes.

Pioneer Of The New Education
The more we scrutinise the history of that fevered time the clearer it becomes that the French Revolution did not begin with the fall of the Bastille. The volcanic upheaval that caused all nations to tremble and all thrones to totter was the fruit of an abstract idea; and it was Rousseau more than any other who evolved that idea and planted it in the hungry mind of his generation. Robespierre's may have been the hand that overturned a civilisation and wrecked an ancient dynasty; but Rousseau was the brain by which that hand was directed, controlled, and restrained. Rousseau's "Emile" is indisputably the most epoch-making treatise on education that has ever shattered the serenity of the schools. With a ruthless hand he brushed aside the old, mechanical, stereotyped, and passionless methods of teaching. Michelet claimed that the children who passed through the French schools when the vogue of "Emile" was at its height were distinguished by a superior spirit and animated by a flame of genius.

It is true that, when we turn from the public and historic element in Rousseau to the private and purely literary aspects of his life, a dark and difficult problem confronts us. The most sure-footed adventurer may well pause before attempting to tread the tortuous maze of so intricate and perplexing a personality as that of Rousseau. After one has made all possible allowance for the malice of his detractors, and has rejected as spurious all questionable documents, he is still driven to confess much in the character of his hero to which he would fain be a little blind. The page is sadly smudged, and it is a trifle surprising that one who owned to so blurred a record should have been found so irresistibly charming. Macaulay accounts for it by linking him with Byron and Petrarch as one of the world's most amiable egotists. But is there not a deeper reason?

Beauty Lurking Behind Gnarled Exterior
The most eloquent tribute that has ever been paid to the personality of Rousseau lies in the fact that Whittier, the Quaker poet, whose sense of goodness was infallible, made him the hero of a striking poem:

In Mount Valerien's chestnut wood
The chapel of the hermits stood:
And
thither, at the close of day,
Came two old pilgrims, worn and grey.

The two old pilgrims were St. Pierre and Rousseau. In vindication of the surprising phase of Rousseau's character exhibited in the poem, Whittier quotes from St. Pierre's own record. When the hermits had chanted their beautiful litanies of Providence, Rousseau turned to St. Pierre, and with deep emotion exclaimed: "At this moment I experience what is said in the gospel: Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I." "I derived inexpressible satisfaction from the society of Rousseau," says St. Pierre. "What I prized even more than his genius was his probity. He was one of the few literary characters, tried in the furnace of affliction, to whom you could, with perfect security, confide your most secret thoughts. Even when he deviated, and became the victim of himself or of others, he could forget his own misery in devotion to the welfare of mankind." This is all as gratifying as it is astonishing. But St. Pierre goes even farther.

Rousseau, he says, was ever the advocate of the wretched. "There might," he says, "be inscribed on his tomb those affecting words from that book of which, during the last years of his life, he always carried with him some selected passages: 'His sins, which are many, are all forgiven; for he loved much.'" Whittier's poem simply sets all this to music. A man must be judged in the light of his upbringing and in the light of ethical standards of his time. Rousseau has taken his place as one of the flaming prophets of human progress. "He was," as Carlyle admits, "in earnest if ever man was." Trevelyan ranks his confessions with the confessions of St. Augustine and the Journal of John Woolman as the three most palpitating autobiographical documents in our possession. Rousseau refused to be turned from his purpose, either by relentless persecution or by royal patronage. He proclaimed his new doctrines fearlessly; he bore exile with cheerfulness and poverty with dignity; and he has engraved his name indelibly among earth's bravest anals.

F W Boreham

Image: Jean Jacques Rousseau