Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13 | Page 6

novels. It was not until Sir Walter Scott arose with his wholesome manliness that the embargo against novels was removed.
The life which Rousseau lived at the Hermitage--reveries in the forest, luxurious dinners, and sentimental friendships--led to a passionate love-affair with the Comtesse d'Houdetot, a sister-in-law of his patroness Madame d'��pinay,--a woman not only married, but who had another lover besides. The result, of course, was miserable,--jealousies, piques, humiliations, misunderstandings, and the sundering of the ties of friendship, which led to the necessity of another retreat: a real home the wretched man never had. This was furnished, still in the vicinity of Montmorenci, by another aristocratic friend, the Mar��chal de Luxembourg, the fiscal agent of the Prince de Cond��. And nothing to me is stranger than that this wandering, morbid, irritable man, without birth or fortune, the father of the wildest revolutionary and democratic doctrines, and always hated both by the Court and the Church, should have found his friends and warmest admirers and patrons in the highest circles of social life. It can be explained only by the singular fascination of his eloquence, and by the extreme stolidity of his worshippers in appreciating his doctrines, and the state of society to which his principles logically led.
In this second retreat Rousseau had the _entr��e_ to the palace of the Duke of Luxembourg, where he read to the friends assembled at its banquets his new production, "��mile,"--a singular treatise on education, not so faulty as his previous works, but still false in many of its principles, especially in regard to religion. This book contained an admirable and powerful impulse away from artificiality and towards naturalness in education, which has exerted an immense influence for good; we shall revert to it later.
A few months before the publication of "��mile," Rousseau had issued "The Social Contract," the most revolutionary of all his works, subversive of all precedents in politics, government, and the organization of society, while also confounding Christianity with ecclesiasticism and attacking its influence in the social order. All his works obtained a wide fame before publication by reason of his habit of reading them to enthusiastic and influential friends who made them known.
"The Social Contract," however, dangerous as it was, did not when published arouse so much opposition as "��mile." The latter book, as we now see, contained much that was admirable; but its freedom and looseness in religious discussion called down the wrath of the clergy, excited the alarm of the government, and finally compelled the author to fly for his life to Switzerland.
Rousseau is now regarded as an enemy to Christian doctrine, even as he was a foe to the existing institutions of society. In Geneva his books are publicly burned. Henceforth his life is embittered by constant persecution. He flies from canton to canton in the freest country in Europe, obnoxious not only for his opinions but for his habits of life. He affectedly adopts the Armenian dress, with its big fur bonnet and long girdled caftan, among the Swiss peasantry. He is as full of personal eccentricities as he is of intellectual crotchets. He becomes a sort of literary vagabond, with every man's hand against him. He now writes a series of essays, called "Letters from the Mountain," full of bitterness and anti-Christian sentiments. So incensed by these writings are the country people among whom he dwells that he is again forced to fly.
David Hume, regarding him as a mild, affectionate, and persecuted man, gives Rousseau a shelter in England. The wretched man retires to Derbyshire, and there writes his "Confessions,"--the most interesting and most dangerous of his books, showing a diseased and irritable mind, and most sophistical views on the immutable principles of both morality and religion. A victim of mistrust and jealousy, he quarrels with Hume, who learns to despise his character, while pitying the sensitive sufferings of one whom he calls "a man born without a skin."
Rousseau returns to France at the age of fifty-five. After various wanderings he is permitted to settle in Paris, where he lives with great frugality in a single room, poorly furnished,--supporting himself by again copying music, sought still in high society, yet shy, reserved, forlorn, bitter; occasionally making new friends, who are attracted by the infantine simplicity of his manners and apparent amiability, but losing them almost as soon as made by his petty jealousies and irritability, being "equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention."
Rousseau's declining health and the fear of his friends that he was on the borders of insanity led to his last retreat, offered by a munificent friend, at Ermenonville, near Paris, where he died at sixty-six years of age, in 1778, as some think from poison administered by his own hand. The revolutionary National Assembly of France in 1790 bestowed a pension of fifteen