ROUSSEAU IN ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
BURKE, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), although he called Rousseau an "eccentric observer of human nature," had not attempted to deny his penetration. He wrote of him, already without sympathy, as one who for the sake of playing upon that love of the marvellous which is inherent in man, desired extraordinary situations, "giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals." But he gave the Genevese philosopher credit for nothing worse than levity; he had raised up political and social paradoxes in the spirit in which a story-teller, eager to arouse the attention of an idle audience, evokes giants and fairies to satisfy the credulity of his hearers. And Burke has the indulgence to admit that, "I believe, were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the fanatical frenzy of his scholars, who … are servile imitators; and even in their incredulity discover an implicit faith."
But when events had rapidly developed, and Burke came to write the flaming sentences of his great Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), the importance of Rousseau's influence in bringing about the events which Burke so passionately deplored had greatly widened and deepened. He saw that the very blood of Rousseau had been transfused into the veins of the National Assembly of France. "Him they study," he wrote, "him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of Polyclitus; he is their standard figure of perfection." Burke felt obliged to denounce, with his unparalleled wealth of picturesque eloquence, the fatal character of the fascination exercised by the author of the Lettres de la Montague and the Confessions.
To Burke, thus brought face to face with what he believed to be the very Ragnarok of the gods, the ruin of all which made life in Europe worth living, it now became a religious duty to expose the malefic character of the charming, exquisite pleadings of the revolutionary of Geneva. He declared that the virtue propounded by Rousseau was not virtue at all, but "a selfish, flattering, seductive, ostentatious vice." This was a theory new to Englishmen, a theory which had, of course, in faltering accents, been here and there suggested by opponents, but never before deliberately and logically asserted by a great master of English oratory. Burke spoke, not merely with the immense prestige of his position, but as one who had been subjected to the personal charm of Rousseau, and who had studied him in his lifetime, not merely without prejudice, but with sympathy and admiration. His grave censure of the philosopher came with unction from the lips of one who was known to have been in communication with him, during his first visit to London, almost from day to day.5 Burke spoke with authority to a large section of the public when he stated that he had gradually become persuaded that Rousseau "entertained no principle either to guide his heart, or to guide his understanding, but vanity." He did not deny the charm of Rousseau's writing, or pretend to depreciate his incomparable talents, but he pronounced him to be deranged and eccentric, and to have gloried in the illumination of the obscure and vulgar vices. He described the Confessions, over which the English world had bowed in transports of emotional adulation, as the record of "a life that, with wild defiance, he flings in the face of his Creator." Violence carried Burke so far as to describe Rousseau as a man, by his own account, without a single virtue. There can be no question that this diatribe, prominently brought forward by the first of English orators, in a work which was read by every educated man in Great Britain, sapped the reputation of Rousseau amongst our countrymen, and led to the gradual decline of his fame in England all down the nineteenth century.
The attack on Rousseau, contained in many fulminating pages of the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, is extravagant and unjust. We read it now with a certain indignation, tempered by a mild amusement. It should have been injured by its absurd denunciation of Frenchmen and of the French nation, in whom Burke saw little but a furious congeries of dancing-masters, fiddlers, and valets-de-chambre. But there were already in England, in the reaction of terror brought about by the French Revolution, many who were delighted to accept this grotesque perversion of the truth, and Burke, with all his powers of speech, all his knowledge of his countrymen, knew how to play upon the alarms and the ignorances of the English. He had, at all events, the dangerous gift of unqualified statement, and when he solemnly declared, as if by reluctant conviction, that "the writings of Rousseau lead directly to shameful evil" both in theory and practice, there were thousands only too ready to accept the warning.
We may observe, too, that Burke was the earliest English critic of weight who suggested that the exquisite literary art of Rousseau had its limitations. His remarks are worthy of being quoted at length, since they contain the germ of the English attitude through the whole of the nineteenth century: —
I have often wondered how he comes to be so much more admired and followed on the Continent than he is here. Perhaps a secret charm in the language may have its share in this extraordinary difference. We certainly perceive, and to a degree we feel, in this writer, a style glowing, animated, enthusiastic; at the same time that we find it lax, diffuse, and not in the best taste of composition; all the members of the piece being pretty equally laboured and expended, without any due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too much on the stretch, and his manner has little variety. We cannot rest upon any of his works, though they contain observations which occasionally discover a considerable insight into human nature.
The attacks of Burke upon their idol were not accepted tamely by the Whigs, or by the Radical wing of their party, which included most of the intellectual men of the time. It was recognized that Burke spoke with excessive violence, and that his emotion was largely provoked by political apprehensions which were not shared by the more enlightened of his countrymen. It was easily pointed out that the great orator's objection to Rousseau was founded on a predilection for aristocracy, a dread of innovation, an abhorrence for abstract politics, rather than on a serious and philosophical consideration of Rousseau's contributions to literature. There were many indignant replies to his denunciation, the most effective being those contained in Sir James Mackintosh's famous Vindiciæ Gallicæ. Mackintosh, with less eloquence but far more knowledge, denied the responsibility of Rousseau for the excesses of the Revolution, and suggested that Burke had not made himself acquainted with the Contrat Social. Rousseau was vindicated as one of the immortal band of sages "who unshackled and emancipated the human mind," and he was assured a place in eternal glory, by the side of Locke and Franklin.
All that was generous, all that was enthusiastic in English opinion, was still marshalled on the side of Rousseau, but Burke's measured attack, so universally considered, was the gradual cause of an ever-increasing defection. For the time being, however, this was confined to the more timid and the less intelligent part of the community. Burke had assailed in Rousseau the politician and the moralist, but although it was evident that he was out of sympathy with the imaginative writer, his diatribe did little at first to weaken the spell of the sentimental and literary writings. There was no sign, in 1800, that the Nouvelle Héloïse had lost its magic for English readers, though it may be doubted whether these were so numerous as they had been twenty years earlier. The famous romance had been the direct precursor of the school of romantic-sentimental novels in England, but it would take us too far back to consider in any detail its influence on Holcroft, whose Hugh Trevor dates from 1797; on Bage, in such romances as Hermsprong (1796); on Mrs. Inchbold, in Nature and Art (1796); and on Charlotte Smith. But it must be remembered that these popular novelists lived well on into the nineteenth century, and that their romances were still widely read, and by advanced thinkers warmly accepted, long after our period begins. Moreover, in William Godwin (1756-1836), once known as "the immortal Godwin," we have the most pronounced type in English literature of the novelist started and supported by a devotion to the principles of Rousseau. Caleb Williams (1794) is still a minor English classic, and Fleetwood (1804) is an example of a Rousseau novel actually written within the confines of our century. But with these names the list of the novelists directly inspired by the Nouvelle Héloïse, and in a much lesser degree by Emile, practically ceases, and the advent of Walter Scott gave them their coup de grâce.
The excessive admiration of Englishmen for the imaginative writings of Rousseau was already on the wane, or rather it was beginning to be old-fashioned. That very remarkable work, The Diary of a Lover of Literature, by Thomas Green (1769-1825), gives us a valuable insight into the critical opinions of the opening years of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1810, but it reflects the feeling of a slightly earlier time. It represents the views of an independent and transitional thinker, remote from all the literary cliques, who read extensively in his hermitage at Ipswich, and it mirrors the mind of the average educated Englishman between 1795 and 1805. We discover that there were persons of cultivation in England at that time who did not hesitate deliberately to pronounce that Rousseau was, "without exception, the greatest genius and the finest writer that ever lived." This opinion the judicious Green is by no means able to endorse; but he makes a very curious confession which throws a strong light on the best English opinion in 1800. The Lover of Literature says that Rousseau is a character "who has by turns transported me with the most violent and opposite emotions of delight and disgust, admiration and contempt, indignation and pity." He points out, with great acumen, the peculiar conditions of Rousseau's "distempered sensibility," and says that his wrath against evil-doing burns "in consuming fire." Green's analysis of Rousseau's genius is very ingenious and glowing, but he sees spots in the sun, and thus, at the immediate opening of the new century, we meet with high critical commendation, but also with the faint beginnings of reproof.
It is necessary to note that the earliest objections made to Rousseau's influence by Englishmen were political. They were not directed against the Nouvelle Héloïse, nor Emile, nor the Confessions, but against the Contrat Social. The name of Rousseau was used, in connexion with this work, to justify the horrors of the French Revolution, the jacqueries, the September massacres. Serious English people, whom Burke had originally awakened to suspicion, became more and more persuaded that it was the doctrine of Rousseau which had conducted Louis XVI to the scaffold. The book itself was never much read in England, but it formed part of a tradition. It was understood to have consecrated the violent acts of the Revolution, and English people began to shrink from a name so tainted with blood. This view found a striking exponent in the opening number of the Edinburgh Review, where Jeffrey, reviewing Monnier's Influence attribuée aux Philosophes, warned his readers with earnest unction against "the presumptuous and audacious maxims" of Rousseau, which had a natural tendency to do harm. The arguments of the Contrat Social were exposed by the Whig critic as unsettling the foundations of political duty, and as teaching the citizens of every established Government that they were enslaved, and had the power of being free. Whatever influence Rousseau still had, and in 1802 it was already waning, the Edinburgh Review solemnly declared to be "unquestionably pernicious."
By English politicians of the Tory type, Rousseau was now regarded with growing suspicion. They looked back to first causes, and found him at the end of the vista. They blamed him all the more because they still lay under the spell of his style and his sentiment. He was beginning to be regarded with more disapproval than other and more definitely revolutionary philosophers, than Condorcet, for instance, as being more presumptuous and less logical, more "improvident," to use the expression of an early English critic. There was no considerable desire in England for the subversion of monarchy, and it was only in countries where there was a wish to believe that kings were toppling from their thrones that the political writings of the arch-firebrand could expect to find a welcome. All such speculation had been pleasant enough before the great revolution set in in France, but England, thrilled for a moment by Quixotic hopes, had turned into another path, where Rousseau had not led her, nor could ever be her companion. He appeared as a demagogue and a disturber of the public peace, as an apostle of change and crisis and unrest. In England everyone, or almost everyone, craved a respite from such ideas, and his prestige began to sink. Let us note, then, that beyond question the earliest objection to Rousseau came from the political side.
The personal character of the Genevese philosopher was still little known. It was revealed, in certain unfavourable aspects, by several collections of memoirs, which now began to be published. Those of Marmontel, in 1805, were widely read in England, and were recommended to a large circle of readers by Jeffrey in a famous essay. The anecdotes, so amusing and often so piquant, appeared to the Scotch critic and to his British audience more discreditable than Marmontel, who belonged to an earlier and looser generation, had intended them to seem. From 1805 began to arise in England the conception of a Rousseau full of cruel vanity, implacable, calumnious, and wholly wanting in that frankness and bluff candour upon which John Bull delights to pride himself. But the splendour of his writings was still uncontested. In 1809, the Edinburgh Review said of the Contrat Social that "it contains some deep observations, and many brilliant and elevated thoughts, along with a good deal, we admit, of impracticable and very questionable theory." The Confessions was not much read, but the precise Jeffrey did not hesitate to recommend it, in 1806, as in some respects the most interesting of books, and in 1807 Capel Lofft declared, "If I had five millions of years to live upon the earth, I would read Rousseau daily with increasing delight."
It would take us too far to consider how the sentimental Pantisocracy of the youthful Lake Poets coincided with the direct influence of Rousseau. That movement, moreover, belongs to the eighteenth, not the nineteenth century, since it was all over by 1794. But so far as it was an outcome of the teaching of Rousseau, the reaction which followed it was not favourable to the prestige of works which now came to seem almost hateful to the Lake Poets. Wordsworth branched away irrevocably, and his account of the Saturnian Reign in The Excursion (finished in 1805) would have given little satisfaction to Rousseau. Southey was early, and permanently, disgusted with himself for having supposed that the millennium would be ushered in from Geneva. But perhaps the best example of the revulsion of opinion which followed the juvenile raptures of the Lake Poets is to be found in the pages of The Friend (1809-10), where Coleridge derides
Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs; shy of light as the mole, but quick-eared, too, for every whisper of the public opinion; the teacher of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct.
Yet this was premature, as an expression of general critical disapprobation. In November, 1809, the high Tory organ, the Quarterly Review,6 spoke, without a shade of disapproval, of "the tremendous fidelity" of the picture of life in the Confessions. In 1812, the same severe periodical, then forming the most dreaded tribunal of British intellectual taste, devoted several pages to an examination of the moral character of Rousseau, and the result was by no means unfavourable. The writer was John Herman Merivale (1779-1844), who declared that "Rousseau's system of morality is as little practicable as would be a system of politics invented by one who had always lived in a state of savage independence," and suggested, but without bitterness, that portions of the Nouvelle Héloïse betrayed "a certain lack of just moral taste and feeling." The Confessions are described in faltering terms which suggest that Merivale had not read them with any attention. On the whole, we find, up to this point, no difference between the views of Englishmen and of similarly placed Frenchmen. Even Shelley, in his Proposals for an Association (1812), blames the tendency of some of Rousseau's political writings in exactly the conventional Continental tone.
But a brief and limited, though splendid revival was now approaching, the last which the reputation of Rousseau was to enjoy in England. We must note the sphere within which this esoteric celebration of his genius was confined; it was not an explosion of national enthusiasm, but the defiant glorification of a power which had already begun to decline; it was not a general expression of approval, but the effort of a group of revolutionaries. It was roused, no doubt, by the attitude of the official critics who were affecting to think that the influence of Rousseau was exploded. The Quarterly had said in 1813, "As it is probable that we may not soon be again in the company of this extraordinary man, we would willingly take leave of him in good humour," and though it was quite unable to keep up this attitude of dignified dismissal, and returned to the attack in April, 1814, nevertheless that was the tone adopted towards Rousseau, as of a man played out, and rapidly being forgotten.
The publication of the voluminous Correspondence of Grimm, which was much read in England, led Englishmen to review the subject of the character and writings of Rousseau, and in the remarks which contemporaries made in 1813 and 1814 we may trace a rapid cooling of their enthusiasm. The scorn of all French habits of thought and conduct, which immediately succeeded the anxious and wearisome period of the Napoleonic wars, makes itself particularly felt in the English attitude towards Rousseau, who was regarded as the source from which all the revolutionary sorrows of Europe had directly proceeded. The Quarterly Review for April, 1814, pronounced a judgment upon Rousseau, of which a portion must be quoted here, since it may be considered as the original indictment, the document which served to start the unfavourable opinion which now became more and more that which sober and conservative Englishmen were to adopt during the next fifty years. The opening lines give a new warning, which was to gain more and more in emphasis, while the end repeats praise which was conventional in 1814, but was already fading, and was soon to disappear.
It says: —
A writer who professes to instruct mankind is bound to deliver precepts of morality. But it is by inflaming the passions, and by blotting out the line which separates virtue from vice, that Rousseau undertakes to teach young ladies to be chaste, and young men to respect the rights of hospitality. His heroine, indeed, in conformity to his own example, is always prating about virtue, even at the time when she deviates most essentially from its precepts; but to dogmatize is not to be innocent. Yet, with all its defects, there are numerous passages in this celebrated work which astonish by their eloquence. Language, perhaps, never painted the conflicts of love in colours more animated and captivating than in the letter written by St. Preux when wandering among the rocks of Meillerie.
Unfortunately, the name of this critic is unknown.
But the charm was not to be broken without a violent effort being made to restore to Rousseau his earlier supremacy. It came from the group of brilliant Radical writers, who had not accepted the Toryism of the ruling classes, to whom the discredited principles of the Revolution were more dear than they had ever been, and who pinned their attractive and enthusiastic æsthetic reforms to the voluptuous ecstasy of the Nouvelle Héloïse and the chimerical sentiment of Emile. Already, in The Round Table (1814), Hazlitt had recommended the Confessions as the "most valuable" of all Rousseau's writings; he was presently in his Liber Amoris (1823) to produce the work which of all important books of the English nineteenth century was to reproduce most closely the manner of the Genevese master. Two years later, having made a very careful examination of the works, Hazlitt published his essay On the Character of Rousseau, which was not surpassed, or approached, as a study of the great writer until the appearance of Lord Morley's monograph, nearly sixty years afterwards.
Hazlitt exposes the baneful effect of Burke's attacks, while acknowledging that from his own, the Tory point of view, Burke was justified in taking the line that he did. It is perfectly true that "the genius of Rousseau levelled the towers of the Bastille with the dust," but Hazlitt, an intellectual revolutionary, exults in the admission. Hazlitt allows, nevertheless, that the exaggerated hopes founded upon such books as the Contrat Social have been followed by inevitable disappointment. It was, however, not the fault of Rousseau, but of his sanguine and absurd disciples, that Europe, or particularly England, has "lost confidence in social man." Ecstatic admirers of his inspired visions had expected the advent of Rousseau to bring in a millennium, and in the disappointment founded on the excesses of the French Revolution they had turned, with ingratitude, upon the pure and Utopian dreamer who had drawn things as they should be, not as it was humanly possible that they ever could be. The writings of Rousseau, he declares, are looked up to with admiration by friends and foes alike as possessing "the true revolutionary leaven," but it needs political foresight and a rare capacity of imagination to perceive that this operates, through temporary upheaval and distraction, to produce an ultimate harmony and a beneficent beauty. In the course of his writings, Hazlitt frequently quotes Rousseau, and always with admiration. He is the most illuminating and the most thoughtful of all his early English critics.
In the summer of 1816 the two young poets of the day who displayed the most extraordinary genius in England, or perhaps in Europe, made acquaintance with one another for the first time, and instantly determined to travel together. They met in Switzerland, intoxicated with the unfamiliar beauty around them, and Byron took the Villa Diodati, close to Geneva, where he and Shelley steeped themselves in the Nouvelle Héloïse under the shadow of Mont Blanc. In June they started together round the lake on a journey, which turned into a pilgrimage. In Shelley's Letters may be read the enthusiastic account of the poets' visit to Meillerie. Shelley refrained from gathering acacia and roses from Gibbon's garden at Lausanne, "fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau, the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in his heart for mortal things." As they sauntered along the shores of the enchanted Leman, the friends "read Julie all day." They lived, with the characters of the great romance, in an endless melancholy transport. Byron's enthusiasm took the form of the famous stanzas in "Childe Harold III," beginning:
Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau.
It is a remarkable instance of the complete decline of the prestige of Rousseau in England that Byron's editor of 1899 is astonished that Byron and Shelley "should not only worship at the shrine of Rousseau, but take delight in reverently tracing the footsteps of St. Preux and Julie." He is so completely disconcerted that he can only exclaim, "But to each age its own humour!" The age of 1899 was certainly not in the humour for Rousseau, but it was almost to go beyond the boundaries of reason to denounce, as this editor did, in the face of Byron's raptures, "the unspeakable philanderings" of Rousseau. Such was not the poet's judgment when, in a trance of pleasure, he visited all the scenes of the Nouvelle Héloïse. To Byron the long-drawn loves of St. Preux and of Julie seemed "most passionate, yet not impure," and he vivaciously proclaimed their creator as the one prophet of Ideal Beauty. The five or six stanzas mentioned above are so well-known as to be positively hackneyed. We no longer set on them any very high poetical value; we see that none of them are good as verses, and that some of them are bad. But the whole passage retains its full interest for us. It is a perfectly logical statement of the author's unbounded admiration for Rousseau, and in particular for the "burning page, distempered though it seems," upon which are celebrated the devouring loves of Julie and St. Preux.
Further on, in the same poem, Byron rose to far purer heights of style. The invocation to Clarens, in the texture of which the result of his recent intercourse with Shelley may be plainly perceived, is probably the most impassioned tribute ever paid by one great writer to the literature of another.
All things are here of him; from the black pines,
Which are his shade on high, and the loud roar
Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines
Which slope his green path downward to the shore,
Where the bow'd waters meet him, and adore,
Kissing his feet with murmurs, and the wood,
The covert of old trees, with trunks all hoar,
But light leaves, young as joy, stands where it stood,
Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude.
A populous solitude of bees and birds,
And fairy-form'd and many-colour'd things,
Who worship him with thoughts more sweet than words,
And innocently open their glad wings,
Fearless and full of life.
This was a challenge, addressed by the most powerful poet of the day, and couched in idolatrous language, which it was not possible that those in England who were opposed to the influence of Rousseau could fail to take up. Nor did Byron pause here. Writing from Diodati, July, 1816, his famous Sonnet to Lake Leman, Rousseau's was the first illustrious name he mentioned in the brief roll of "Heirs of Immortality." Enthusiasm for the Nouvelle Héloïse led directly to the composition of The Prisoner of Chillon. Byron discussed and repudiated, with Stendhal in 1817, his mother's old dream that he closely resembled Rousseau. All that prevented his embracing this notion, and insisting on being considered an avatar of the philosopher, was his perception of something turbid in the character of Rousseau, hostile to the fiery ideal of 1816. The English poet preferred to be thought to resemble "an alabaster vase lighted up within." But all his life the memory of Jean Jacques continued to haunt him; he recollected the ranz des vaches when he was writing The Two Foscari (1821) and la pervenche in the fourteenth canto of Don Juan (December, 1823). When Byron died at Missolonghi the latest and the most passionate of Rousseau's English admirers passed away with him.
The rapture of the sentimental poets was not allowed to pass unrebuffed. In October, 1816, no less an authority on romance, no less sane and typical, and yet moderate and sound exponent of English feeling than Sir Walter Scott took up his parable against the sentimentality of the disciples of Rousseau. In reviewing "Childe Harold III" in the Quarterly, Walter Scott takes Byron severely to task for his exaggerated praise of Rousseau. He says of himself that he is "almost ashamed to avow the truth – he had never been able to feel the interest or discover the merit of the Nouvelle Héloïse… The dulness of the story is the last apology for its exquisite immorality." It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this utterance of Walter Scott, who was at that very moment bringing forth the amazing series of his own novels, which were to destroy the taste of his countrymen for all such works of the imagination as Rousseau had produced. Scott is no less condemnatory of the political influence of the philosopher. Deeply blaming the French Revolution, he styles Rousseau "a primary apostle" of it. "On the silliness of Rousseau," on the subject of political equality, "it is at this time of day, thank God! useless to expatiate." This was a counter-blast, indeed, to the melodious trumpetings of Byron and Shelley.
To a reputation already much reduced, the publication, in 1818, of the Mémoires et Conversations of Madame d'Epinay was a serious blow. These were very much discussed in England, and Jeffrey called the special attention of his readers to the lady's revelations of Rousseau's "eccentricity, insanity, and vice." This produced a painful effect. It was urged by English critics that Jean Jacques, who had been held up as a portent of almost divine moral beauty, seemed, on the contrary, to have claimed, "as the reward of genius and fine writing, an exemption from all moral duties." Jeffrey called indignant attention to the "most rooted and disgusting selfishness" of Rousseau, and quoted with approval the boutade of Diderot, "Cet homme est un forcené." The publication of Madame de Staël's Œuvres Inédites, brought out by Madame Necker Saussure in 1820, further lowered the English estimate of the "selfish and ungrateful" Rousseau. He was still praised for his "warmth of imagination," but told that he was vastly inferior to Madame de Staël in style. The Edinburgh Review now proclaimed, as a painful discovery, that Rousseau's affection for mankind was entirely theoretical, and "had no living objects in this world," and blushed at the "very scandalous and improper" facts about his private life which were now more and more frequently being revealed.