Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3b.pdf/111

ROU then, as secretary, Marshal Tallard to London. On his return he obtained a situation in the department of finance. Accused of writing some satirical poems which offended numerous and notable persons, he tried, in order to clear himself, to render suspected those whom he know to be innocent. For this disgraceful conduct, which was unfortunately by no means exceptional in his career, he was in 1712 banished from France. He lived in Switzerland; then for a season at Vienna, having been introduced to Prince Eugene; then at Brussels; and then in England. Through the intercession of patrons and friends the decree of banishment was revoked, though not in terms complete enough to flatter Rousseau's vanity. He declined, therefore, to avail himself of the revocation. Nevertheless, he went in disguise to Paris in 1738. Having, after a year or two, again sought Brussels, he died in the neighbourhood of that city on the 17th March, 1741. Rousseau was long one of the most famous French poets, though he wrote what is unreadable to every one but a Frenchman. It is singular that while the French of the eighteenth century proclaimed him the greatest lyrical genius of France, and perhaps of the world, a French critic of our own day has pronounced him to be the least lyrical of all poets at the least lyrical of all epochs. Rousseau pretended to write sacred poems, but he was more at home in licentious epigrams. It is admitted, however, that, though destitute of inspiration, he gave a harmony and a finish to the French ode which it had not formerly possessed.—W. M—l.  ROUSSEAU,, was born at Geneva on the 29th of June, 1712. He was the son of a watchmaker, a man excellently educated, of great sense and intelligence, and of a vigorous, joyous, and honourable character. Rousseau's mother died in giving birth to him. She was a gifted woman, had the faculty of improvisation, and her son, in his more genial moods, was fond of repeating verses which she had made. A sister of Rousseau the elder bestowed on the motherless child a tenderness altogether maternal, and in her old age Rousseau gratefully, generously, succoured her. As soon as Rousseau had learned to read, romances became his principal amusement; but they were equally to the taste of his father, and the boy and the man were in the habit of perusing them together, especially when the latter was at work. Rousseau strikingly resembled his mother. The father often asked the son to speak of the wife—the mother—so deeply mourned; and then father and son wept together. If romances were the food of Rousseau's imagination, and saddest, sweetest speech about his buried mother, the food of his heart, Plutarch, after a while became the food of his soul, and he sometimes said that there was a time when he knew the streets of Athens better than those of Geneva. Rousseau's father had a quarrel with a military officer belonging to one of the chief patrician families. In consequence thereof he was obliged to leave his native city. He was nearly a hundred years old when he died. A brother of Rousseau had gone, at the age of seventeen, to push his fortune in the Indies; he was never more heard of. Rousseau had once himself, in his youth, the opportunity of going to the Indies, and he regretted that he had not embraced it. Rousseau's education was eminently that of circumstances; his mind had been enriched with many impressions and ideas, but it had not been moulded and chastened by discipline. Music seems to have been the only thing which he had regularly learned; and music was more for him than a pleasure—it was to furnish him for many years with the chief means of support. First an apprentice to a notary, and then to an engraver, Rousseau did not apply himself diligently to either occupation, and at last, when about fifteen, he ran away. From that hour he was a wanderer. The puritanism of Geneva had passed into Rousseau's nature, and not higher without were the mountain peaks on which he had so often gazed than the great men of Plutarch within, on whom he had so often meditated. But his immediate experiences fell far below his memories, his darings, and his dreams. Whosoever hath read the most eloquent, the most enchanting, but in parts the most repulsive book of the eighteenth century, "The Confessions of Rousseau," is familiar with his early adventures. He found at Annecy a protector in Madame de Warens, a woman as frail as she was generous. She first turned him into her lover, and then procured for him a situation at Turin. But he soon again seized the pilgrim's staff, and we sometimes find him in Lombardy, sometimes in France, sometimes in Switzerland, sometimes at Venice, and sometimes anew in Savoy; and, always vagabond, he is by turns lackey, seminarist, tutor, teacher of music, secretary of embassy. To improve his morals, which Madame de Warens had enfeebled, and evil communications in Italy had endangered, he turned catholic. In 1745, having fixed his abode in Paris where he had several times already been, he took as companion of his household, Thérèse Levasseur, a woman about nine years younger than Rousseau, and who survived till 1801. Rousseau treated this vile, vulgar, ignorant creature as servant, as mistress, as wife, according to convenience or caprice. The children that were the fruit of the unfortunate union Rousseau sent to the foundling hospital, a step which no one in after years more warmly condemned than himself. Though Rousseau ascribed his power as a writer to his truthfulness as a man, yet long before he was famous he had studied literary art with persistency and care. Racine, Voltaire, Cicero, Horace, Tacitus, were his teachers; but Virgil was pre-eminently his model. He tried also to cultivate his mind afresh by history, by philosophy, by mathematics. The academy at Dijon offered a prize for a dissertation on the influence of the arts and sciences on morality. Rousseau was the successful competitor. This essay, in which he denounced the arts and sciences as fatal to virtue, was published. The paradox startled the world less than the brilliancy and energy wherewith it was propounded and advocated. The revelation that France had acquired one great writer more, was perhaps less sudden and overwhelming to hosts of admiring readers than to Rousseau himself. But the moment glory for Rousseau began, persecution began too. Rousseau's foes were often imaginary, but unless he had had many real, Rousseau could never have dreaded imaginary foes. The author, gifted and renowned, was envied: the man, honest and earnest, was hated. Rousseau obtained a second prize from the academy at Dijon for his discourse on inequality among men, which excited deeper attention and provoked stormier criticism than even the dissertation on the arts and sciences. To escape the tumult, alike of danger and of admiration, he took a journey to Geneva, and formally returned to the faith of his protestant fathers. Resuming his residence in France, the happiest, the most glorious years of his life then followed. Madame D'Epinay built for him in 1755 that hermitage in the valley of Montmorency, which enabled Rousseau to indulge so many of his tastes, especially his love for botanizing. From this paradise Rousseau was driven by the malice of Grimm, whom, however, when Grimm was young and friendless, Rousseau had introduced to his literary friends at Paris. Three of Rousseau's principal works, the "Nouvelle Heloise," the "Contrat Social," the "Emile," came in rapid succession. The "Emile" incited the parliament of Paris to an act of foolish bigotry. Along with the condemnation of the book, the imprisonment of Rousseau was decreed. Rousseau sought, in 1762, an asylum in Switzerland. Lord Keith, elder brother of the famous Field-marshal Keith, killed at the battle of Hochkirchen, was governor of the principality of Neufchâtel. In this canton, with Lord Keith's protection and friendship, Rousseau enjoyed for several years the peace he so much needed. But the bigoted clergy maddened the ignorant peasantry against him, and at the end of 1765 he entered that France where he had so many ardent worshippers, but so few real friends, and where the order for his apprehension was still in force. David Hume was then at Paris. Rousseau's misfortunes kindled Hume's commiseration. Hume invited the Genevese philosopher to accompany him to England. Rousseau accepted, and in passing through Paris was the object of the people's marvelling homage. Rousseau's sojourn in England was the most singular episode in his episodical life. The two friends soon quarreled, and Rousseau renounced a pension of a hundred guineas a year, which the king of England had bestowed upon him. Hume had been generous to Rousseau, but after the foolish dispute, the blame of which must perhaps mainly fall on Rousseau, Hume did not show himself magnanimous; for he knew Rousseau's diseased susceptibilities, and ought to have pardoned his childish resentments. Probably the wretched woman with whom Rousseau lived was the cause of this and of many more of Rousseau's embroilments; for a main grievance which Rousseau complained of was, that Hume refused to sit at the same table with Thérèse. Again the fugitive had to seek a home which, on abandoning that England he had always disliked for that France he had always passionately loved, was opened to him in the chateau of the Prince de Conti. From 1770 till 1778 his abode was Paris. In the fourth story of the Rue Plâtriére he and the unworthy Thérèse occupied small apartments. Here he 