There were times when the weather was bad, and the whole settlement would sink into melancholia. These people were on the bleak hillside, facing the sea. Back of them, hedging them close, was the forest, dim, dark and mysterious. In this wood were bears, wolves, panthers, which in Winter, lured by the smell of food, would occasionally enter the village to the great danger of life. At nightfall the settlers would go inside, bar the windows and doors, and look to their matchlocks, which in emergency might be needed.
Now and again came Indians, proud and painted, and paraded through the village threateningly, and innocently helped themselves to whatsoever they saw which they needed. Mrs. Hutchinson's power of healing had gone abroad among these red men, and now and again an Indian mother would stop at her door with a stricken papoose, and such were never turned away.
The houses were small, ill-ventilated, overcrowded, and the singing, praying and exhortation were not favorable to the welfare of the sick, nervous or tired. The long severe Winter was a cause of dread and apprehension. This was weather to which English people were not used, and they had not grown accustomed to battle with the snow and ice. Instead of facing it, they went into their houses to protect themselves against it. So there was much idle time, when only prayer and praise for a God of wrath filled the hours. Not a family was free from disease, not a house but that upon the doorposts were marks of blood.
The word "psychology" had never been heard by Mrs. Hutchinson, but the thing itself she knew. She sought to relieve the people of gloom, to stop introspection and self-analyzation. They quarreled, strife was imminent; and when, with the dread of Winter, came the added fear of a Pequot uprising, the whole place was treading the border-land of insanity. It is doubtful whether Anne Hutchinson knew that insanity was infectious, and that whole families, communities, can become possessed of hallucinations—that towns can go mad, and nations have a disease.
But this we know, she challenged the eight ministers who were there in the Colony by calling meetings of women only, and teaching a gospel which was at variance with what the eight learned men upheld. Her theme was the Covenant of Grace. Get His spirit in your hearts and you will not have to trouble about details. All your anxious care about your children, your fear of disease, and horror at thought of death, will disappear. This fear is what causes your sickness.
"You think some of your acts have been displeasing to God, and therefore you suffer; but I say, if you but have the Grace of God in your souls, and have transcendent minds, you can never displease Him."
It will be seen that this is the pure Emersonian faith which has not only been applied to life in general, but to the arts. Anne Hutchinson was the mother of New England Transcendentalism. Self-consciousness is fatal to the art of expression; he who fixes his thought on the movements of his hands and feet is sure to get tangled up in them; good digestion does not require the attention of the party most interested; and he who devotes all of the time to his spiritual estate will soon have the whole property in chancery. Man is not a finality— he is not the thing—the play's the thing: life is the play and the play is life. Man is only one of the properties. Look out, not in; up, not down, and lend a hand. And these things form the modern application of the philosophy of Anne Hutchinson.
The ministers got together in secret session and decided that Anne Hutchinson must be subdued. She was a usurper upon their preserve, a trespasser and an interloper. Fear was the rock upon which they split. And I am not sure but that fear is the only rock in life's channel. Mrs. Hutchinson had told them that sermons, prayers and hymns were mere "works," and that a person could do all that they demanded and still be a thief and a rogue at heart, and that this close attention to conduct meant eventual hypocrisy. On the other hand, if your mental attitude was right, your conduct would be right.
"Even though it is wrong?" asked the Reverend Mr. Wilson.
And Anne Hutchinson replied, "Aye, verily."
"Then you say that you can commit no sin?"
"If my heart is right, I can not sin."
"Is your heart right?"
"I am trying to make it so."
"Then you can commit any act you wish?"
"Whatever I wish to do will be right, if my heart is right."
"But suppose, now—" and here these clergymen asked questions which no gentleman ever asks a lady.
These men had a fine faculty for misunderstanding, misinterpreting, and misrepresenting other people's thoughts.
John Cotton tried to pour oil on the troubled waters by explaining that the idea of a Covenant of Grace was general, and to make it specific was unjust and unreasonable. Then they turned on Cotton and said, "So, you are one of them?"
Anne Hutchinson was ordered not to speak in public.
She still held meetings at her own house, and claimed she had the right to ask her friends to her home and there to talk to them.
She it was who instituted the Boston Thursday Lecture, which was taken up by John Cotton and carried by an apostolic succession to the crowning days of its success, when Adirondack Murray reigned supreme. Mrs. Hutchinson spoke to all the women the house would hold. The Colony was divided into two parts: those who believed in a Covenant of Grace and those who held to a Covenant of Works.
John Cotton seemed to be the only clergyman of the eight who realized that both sides were right. Anne Hutchinson quoted him, told what he had said in England, as well as here—and then John Cotton had to defend himself. He did it by criticizing her, and then by accusing her of taking his words too literally. He feared the mob.
The breach widened—he denounced her. Winthrop was against her, and Cotton saw defeat for himself if he longer stood by her. She was a good woman, but she must be suppressed for the good of the Colony. With the consent of Cotton, and Wilson, his colleague, these two men, being joint ministers to the Boston church, made formal charges of heresy against her.
Sir Henry Vane, a youth of twenty-four, noble both by birth and by nature, was elected Governor of the Colony. He sided with Mrs. Hutchinson, and sought to bring commonsense to bear and stem the tide of fanaticism. They turned on him, and his downfall was identical with hers, although he was to return to England and make his own way to success: to love Peg Woffington and elbow his way to place and power, and also to London Tower, and lay his head upon the block in the interests of human rights.
Mrs. Hutchinson was tried by an ecclesiastic court and found guilty. In the trial, which covered several months, Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself at great length and with much skill; but what the clergymen demanded was an absolute retraction, and a promise that she would no longer usurp their special function of giving public instruction.
All this time the Colony was rent by schism. Up at Salem was a Baptist preacher by the name of Roger Williams, who was much in sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson, personally, although not adopting all of her ideas. He thought that in view of the great usefulness of Mrs. Hutchinson as a nurse and neighbor, she should be allowed to speak when she chose and say what she wished, "because if it be a lie, it will die; and if it be truth, we ought to know it." Roger Williams would have done well to have kept a civil tongue in his head. There was a rod in pickle for him, too, and his words were duly noted and recorded by witnesses.
Then there was Mary Dyer, wife of William Dyer, who came to Boston in Sixteen Hundred Thirty-five, when the Hutchinson trouble was beginning to brew. Mary Dyer is described by John Winthrop as "a comely person of ready tongue, somewhat given to frivolity." But the years were to subdue her. She became much attached to Mrs. Hutchinson, and whenever Mrs. Hutchinson spoke in public Mrs. Dyer was always near at hand to lend her support. In the journal of Winthrop there are various references to Mrs. Dyer. The man was interested in her, but one of these references reflects most seriously on the mental processes of this excellent man. When the charges of heresy were brought against Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Dyer stood by her boldly, and was threatened by the clergymen with similar proceedings. Winthrop says Mrs. Dyer was so wrought upon by the excitement that she was taken with premature childbirth. She was attended by Mrs. Hutchinson, and the child, "being not human," was despatched. This horrible story was related throughout the Colony, and both women were regarded as being in league with the devil. School-children used to run and hide when they saw Mrs. Dyer coming. A little later the Reverend Cotton Mather was to cite the case of Mary Dyer as precedent for his pet belief in witchcraft.
Mrs. Hutchinson was found guilty and expelled from the church. She was then again tried by the General Court, wherein all of her judges in the Ecclesiastic Court also sat. After a long, laborious and insulting trial, with no one but herself to raise a voice in her defense, pitted against the eight clergymen, she ably defended her cause and actually put them all to rout—an unforgivable thing, and an error in judgment on her part.
There is much literature surrounding the case, and one of the ministers, Thomas Welde, wrote a pamphlet explaining his part in it, quite forgetful of the fact that explanations never explain. The more one reads of Welde, the greater is his admiration for Mrs. Hutchinson. Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Anne Hutchinson, edited the journal of Winthrop, and gives a remarkably unprejudiced account of the sufferings of his great maternal ancestor.
Being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mrs. Hutchinson found refuge in Rhode Island, where she was welcomed by Roger Williams, the first person, I believe, who lifted up his voice for free speech in America. Mrs. Hutchinson was followed by her own family and eighteen persons from Boston who sympathized with her. Included in the party was Mary Dyer.
At Providence, Mrs. Hutchinson drew around her a goodly number of people, including Quakers and Baptists, who listened to her discourses with interest.
The ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony evidently felt that they had made a mistake, for they got together and delegated three of their number to go down to Providence and acquaint the renegades with the news that if they would recant all belief in a Covenant of Grace, they could return. Mrs. Hutchinson met the delegates with dignity and kindness. The conference lasted for two days, and the committee returned reporting the matter hopeless.
There were several desertions from Boston by those who sympathized with Mrs. Hutchinson, and some of those people Mrs. Hutchinson prevailed upon to go back. There were threats that the Massachusetts people were coming down to capture them all by force. This so preyed upon the Hutchinsons, who had suffered severely, that they packed their now scanty goods upon a raft, and with improvised sails headed for the Dutch settlement of Manhattan.
They were kindly received and given title to a tract of land on Long Island, near Hell Gate. There, in a little clearing, on the water's edge, they began to build a house. Ere the roof was on they were attacked by Indians, who evidently mistook them for Dutch, and all were massacred.
So died Anne Hutchinson.
* * * * *
Anne Hutchinson was mourned by Mary Dyer as a sister, and she preached a funeral sermon at Providence in eulogy of her. Mrs. Dyer also went back to Boston and made an address in praise of Anne Hutchinson on Boston Common, to the great scandal of the community. Mrs. Dyer had now become a Quaker, principally because Quakers had no paid priesthood and allowed women who heard the Voice to preach.
Mary Dyer heard the Voice and preached. Her attention was called to the law, which in Boston provided that Quakers and Jews should have their ears cut off and their tongues bored.
She continued to preach, and was banished.
She came back, and was found standing in front of the jail talking through the bars to two Quakers, Robinson and Stevenson, who were confined there awaiting sentence. She had brought them food, and was exhorting them to be of good-cheer. She was locked up, and asked to recant. She acknowledged she was a Quaker, and not in sympathy with magistracy.
She was sentenced by Governor Endicott, on her own confession, with having a contempt for authority, and ordered to be hanged. The day came and she was led forth, walking hand in hand with her two guilty Quaker brothers.
The scaffold was on Boston Common, on the little hill about where the band-stand is at the present day.
Mrs. Dyer stood and watched them hang her friends, one at a time. As they were swung off into space she called to them to hold fast to the truth, "for Christ is with us!" Whenever she spoke or sang, the drums that were standing in front and back of her were ordered to beat, so as to drown her voice.
After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut down.
It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with rawhide.
"Do you renounce the Quakers?" "Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His handmaiden—we live by truth!".
"A reprieve! a reprieve!!" some one shouted. And it was so—Governor Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to frighten the woman thoroughly.
Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet, and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.
In a few months she was back in Boston, to see her two grown-up sons, and also to bear witness to the "Inner Light."
Being brought before Governor Endicott, she was asked, "Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?"
"I am the same Mary Dyer."
"Do you know you are under sentence of death?"
"I do, and I came back to remind you of the unrighteousness of your laws, and to warn you to repent!"
"Are you still a Quaker?"
"I am still reproachfully so called."
"Tomorrow at nine o'clock I order that you shall be hanged."
"This sounds like something you said before!"
"Lead her away—away, I say!"
At nine the next morning a vast crowd covered the Common, the shops and stores being closed, by order, for a holiday.
Mr. Wilson again attended the culprit. "Mary Dyer, Mary Dyer!" he called in a loud voice as they stood together on the scaffold. "Mary Dyer, repent, oh, repent, and renounce your heresies!"
And Mary Dyer answered, "Nay, man; I am not now to repent, knowing nothing to repent of!"
"Shall I have the men of God pray for you?"
She looked about curiously, half-smiled, and said, "I see none here."
"Will you have the people pray for you?"
"Yes; I want all the people to pray for me!"
Again the light was shut out from her eyes, this time forever. Her hands were bound behind her with thongs that cut into her wrists, her feet were tied. She reeled, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson kindly supported her. The noose was adjusted.
"Let us all pray!" said the Reverend Mr. Wilson. So they hanged Mary
Dyer in the morning.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
When the service of the public ceases to be the principal concern of the citizens, and they would rather discharge it by their purses than their persons, the State is already far on the way to ruin. When they should march to fight, they pay troops to fight for them and stay at home; when they should go to council, they send deputies and remain away; thus, in consequence of their indolence and wealth, they in the end employ soldiers to enslave their country, and representatives to sell it. So soon as a citizen says, What are State Affairs to me? the State may be given up for lost. —Rousseau
[Illustration]
Who is the great man?
Listen, and I will tell you: He is great who feeds other minds. He is great who inspires others to think for themselves. He is great who tells you the things you already know, but which you did not know you knew until he told you. He is great who shocks you, irritates you, affronts you, so that you are jostled out of your wonted ways, pulled out of your mental ruts, lifted out of the mire of the commonplace.
That writer is great whom you alternately love and hate. That writer is great whom you can not forget.
Certainly, yes, the man in his private life may be proud, irritable, rude, crude, coarse, faulty, absurd, ignorant, immoral—grant it all, and yes be great. He is not great on account of these things, but in spite of them. The seeming inconsistencies and inequalities of his nature may contribute to his strength, as the mountains and valleys, the rocks and woods, make up the picturesqueness of the landscape.
He is great to whom writers, poets, painters, philosophers, preachers, and scientists go, each to fill his own little tin cup, dipper, calabash, vase, stein, pitcher, amphora, bucket, tub, barrel or cask. These men may hate him, refute him, despise him, reject him, insult him, as they probably will if they are much indebted to him; yet if he stirs the molecules in their minds to a point where they create caloric, he has benefited them and therefore he is a great man.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a great man. We are still reading him—still talking about him—still trying to clap label upon him—still hunting for a pigeonhole in which to place him.
If a man were wholly crude, rude, ignorant and coarse, and if he did nothing but shock and irritate us, we would quickly cast him aside. But in addition to shocking us the great man fascinates us by his insight, his subtlety, his imagination, his sympathy, his tenderness, his love. Behind the act he sees the cause, and so he excuses and forgives. Knowing the present he is able to forecast the future, for he, of all men, knows that effect follows cause. He does what we dare not and says what we would like to if we had the mind. So in one sense the man is our vicarious self—"I am that man." His very faultiness brings him near. His blunders make him to us akin.
* * * * *
To answer the arguments of Jean Jacques by references to his private life were easy and obvious. He did not apologize for his life, and perhaps we would do well to follow his example.
The fact that with his own hands he carried five of his offspring to foundling asylums as they came into the world does not alter or change the fact that he was also the author of "Emile," in which book, let it be remembered, the idea of substituting natural for pedantic methods in the training and developing of the physical, mental and moral faculties of the growing child first found expression.
The book furnished Froebel with the fund of ideas for his experiments with children which resulted in the Kindergarten, an institution that has profoundly influenced the educational methods of every enlightened country in the world.
Without a doubt this man who abandoned his own children became one of the great instructors of the age.
But a fair understanding of the situation demands that we should realize that things for which we blame him most occured before he was thirty-eight years old. And the writings of his that really influenced humanity were not written until after he was thirty-eight. To confound the reasoning of the mature man, by pointing to what he did at twenty-two, is, I submit, irrelevant, immaterial, inconsequent, unrelated and uncalled for. When a critic has nothing to say of a man's work, but calls attention to the errors of the author's youth, he is running short of material.
That Rousseau revised his mode of living and reformed his reasoning in his later years, viewing his early life with bitter regret, should be put forward to his credit and not be used for his condemnation. The facts, however, are all that his harshest critics state. But fact and truth are often totally different things. Untruth enters when we reason wrongly from our facts.
We have been told by both the friends and the enemies of Rousseau that to him the French Revolution traces a direct lineage. For this his friends give him credit, and his enemies blame. The truth is, that revolutions are things that require long time and many factors to evolve. A revolution is the culmination of a long train of evils. Rousseau saw the evils and called attention to them, but he did not exactly cause them—bless me! His little love-affairs with elderly ladies, and grateful, should not be confused with the atrocious cruelties and inhumanities that existed in France and had existed for a hundred years and more.
A wise man of the East was once eating his dinner of dried figs, and at the same time explaining to an admiring group the beauty and healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.
"Look at your figs through this," said a scientist present, handing the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were covered with crawling microbes.
He handed the microscope back and said, "Friend, keep your glass—the bugs no longer exist."
Jean Jacques handed the peasantry of France a reading-glass; Voltaire did as much for the nobility.
* * * * *
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland, which land, as all folks know, has produced her full quota and more of reformers. The father of Jean Jacques, quite naturally, was a watchmaker, with mainspring ill-adjusted and dial askew, according to the report of the son, who claimed to be full-jeweled, but was not perfectly adjusted to position and temperature. Jean Jacques tells us that his first misfortune was his birth, and this cost his mother her life. He was adopted by Time and Chance and fed by Fate. When the lad was ten the father fled from Geneva to escape the penalty of a foolish brawl, and never again saw the son who was to rescue the family-name from oblivion.
Kinsmen of the mother gave the boy into the hands of a retired clergyman who levied polite blackmail on his former constituents by asking them to place children, their own and others, in his hands that they might be taught the way of life—and that the clergyman might live, which, according to Whistlerian philosophy, was unnecessary.
That the boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service—he was fighting for existence.
Knowledge comes through desire, but where desire comes from no man can say. It surely is not a matter of will.
Jean Jacques had a hunger for knowledge, and this, some wise men say, is the precious legacy of mother to son. He wanted to know!
And it was this desire that shaped his career.
He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were on friendly terms with God.
To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious zeal. Where religion begins and sex ends no man can say—the books are silent and revelation is dumb. Indeed, there be those who are so bold as to say that art, love and religion are one.
Leaving this to the specialists, let us simply say that the love of learning landed Jean Jacques, aged seventeen, poetic and philosophic vagabond, into the precious care of Madame De Warens, who kept a religious retreat for novitiates intent on the ideal life.
The religion of Mohammed made converts in numbers like unto the sands of the desert, because they were promised a Paradise peopled by dark- eyed houris. Orthodoxy got its hold by a promise of rest, idleness and freedom from responsibility. The heaven into which Jean Jacques slipped was a combination of all that Allah, Gabriel and the seductive dreams of Moody, Sankey and such could provide. Science founded on truth can never be popular until mankind further evolves, since it offers nothing better than toil and difficulty, and after each achievement increased work as a reward for work. This condition stands no show when compared with a heaven that gives harps that never require tuning, robes that need not be laundered, and mansions that demand no plumbing.
Jean Jacques lived an ideal existence; he was the guest, pupil, servant and lover of the Religious Lady who kept the Religious Retreat. Also, he was immune from responsibility. But Paradise has one serious objection—the serpent. This time the serpent was jealousy. Whenever the Religious Lady had guests of quality, the snake sank its fangs deep into the quivering flesh of her valet-lover. Thus does the Law of Compensation never rest.
"What is your favorite book?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson of George
Eliot.
And the answer was, "Rousseau's 'Confessions.'"
And Emerson's counter-confession was, "So is it mine."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning nibbled at the same cheese. But the belief now is that Rousseau's "Confessions" is largely constructive truth, as differentiated from fact, and constructive truth is the thing which might have happened, but did not. Rousseau's "Confessions" is a psychological study of hopes, desires, aspirations and hesitations, flavored with regrets. All literature is confession—vicarious confession. The gentle reader has the joy of doing the thing, and escaping the penalty.
* * * * *
Rousseu's first literary effort to attract attention was written in his thirty-ninth year. It was merely an exercise penned with intent to show that so-called civilization had really polluted mankind and done more harm than good.
The essay was a subtle indictment of the times, with the French Government in mind, all from the standpoint of a Swiss. And it convinced at least one man—the author—of the truth of its allegations.
At this time there were in France more than a hundred offenses punishable with death. In the coronation oath of the King was a clause promising that he would exterminate all heretics. Just how this was to be done, the King left to experts. The "lettre de cachet," or secret arrest, was in full swing and very popular among princes and church officials high in authority. Any suspected man could be removed from family and friends as though the earth had swallowed him. He went out to drive, or to walk, or to work, and was seen no more. Search was vain and inquiry useless—aye, worse, it might involve the inquirer. The writ of habeas corpus was as yet a barren hypothesis.
Common people had no rights: they were merely granted privileges, one of which was the privilege to live until the order went out that the man should die.
Confessions were wrung from men and women by the use of the rack, twistings, blows, indignities, an exact description of which could not be printed. These details were left to priests, sanctimonious men who did their work with pious zeal and therefore were not accountable. Church and State were wedded. To doubt Scripture was to be in league against the State. Heresy and treason were one. To laugh at a priest might be death. To fail to attend mass and pay was to run a risk.
Lords and bishops held vast estates and paid no taxes. Grain was not allowed to flow from parish to parish, but was held in check by prohibitive tariffs. The King, himself, speculated in breadstuffs and banked on famine, for royalty was exempt from all tariff law. Thus was food made a monopoly. To petition was construed as an insult to the crown and was treated accordingly.
Most estates held serfs who were not allowed to leave the premises of their lord on penalty of death—they belonged to the land.
Officers in the army had the right to beat their soldiers, and if the soldier raised a hand to protect himself, he could be legally killed.
All skilled labor was in the hands of the guilds. These guilds got their charters from the crown. They fixed prices, regulated the number of apprentices, and decided who should work and who should not. To work at an art without a license from the guild was punishable by fine and imprisonment; to repeat the offense was death. Citizens could neither sell their labor nor buy the labor of their neighbors or families, without permission. The guild was master, and the guild got its authority by dividing profits with a corrupt court. Thus a few laborers received very high wages, but for the many there was no work. The guild made common cause with the priest and the peer. The collection of taxes was farmed out to the "farmers-general," who kept half they got. When the yearly contract was signed, the Secretary of State was given a present called "The Bottle of Wine," by the successful bidders. This present was in cash and varied anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand francs. Where the custom began, no one knew; but it ended with Turgot, who turned in to the government treasury a perquisite that had been made him of seventy thousand francs, and issued an order that no official should accept a present of money from a government contractor.
Needless to say, Turgot was regarded as an unsafe person, and his official career was cut short.
Thomas E. Watson, in his most interesting book, "The Story of France," says:
The Catholic church was a huge religious monopoly. Its hierarchy was
entrenched in a power before which the king himself was a secondary
potentate. Then followed those consequences which have always
followed when too much power is granted to any set of men. The
Catholic church absorbed much of the wealth of the land. The higher
priesthood became an aristocracy, imitating in every respect the
feudal aristocracy, which was rich, idle and licentious. Just as the
State regarded the subject from the standpoint of taxpayer only;
just as the State imposed upon the common people all the burdens of
government while denying them the benefits; so the nobility of the
Catholic church lived sumptuously, lazily, licentiously—shirking
their duties, forgetting the responsibilities of their sacred
calling, neglecting the flock committed to their care, allowing
ignorance and superstition to take full possession of the minds of
the common people.
In the records of the human race there can be found no evidence more damming to absolutism and the union of Church and State than is to be found in the degraded, besotted condition of the common people of France immediately proceeding the French Revolution.
All France was orthodox. The masses believed. With boundless credulity they knelt at the foot of the priest.
Yet what had the priest done for them? Had he introduced books among them? No. Liberal ideas? No. Schools? No. Information upon such matters as concerned their material welfare? No. Had the Church ever pleaded the peasant's case at the bar of public opinion? No. Ever besought the king to lighten the weight of his heavy hand? No. Ever protested against feudal wrongs? No. Ever shown the least desire that the condition of the masses should be improved? No.
Royalist writers dwell scornfully upon the ignorance, brutality and prejudice of the lower orders in France at the time of the Revolution —let them write ever so scornfully, the lower they degrade the peasant, the higher mounts the evidence and the indignation against those who had been his keepers!
This government of France had been absolute. The State and the Church, the king and the priest, had had entire control. The people had no voice, no vote, no power. They had never been consulted. The entire responsibility had been assumed by the monarch and his privileged few —and here was the result. Theirs was the tree, theirs the fruit. "Whatsoever a man sow, that also shall he reap"; and the crimes, the ignorance, the brutality, the poverty, the misery of the masses of the French people in Seventeen Hundred Eighty-nine, stands as a permanent judgment of condemnation against the ruling classes, who were responsible for the material, mental and spiritual condition of a people who had so long been under their absolute control.
* * * * *
Rousseau, the subtly silent, the handsome, the bewitchingly melancholic, lived his subterranean life until he was forty-two. Then he was dogged out of Paris by the police, and soon after appeared in his native Geneva after an absence of twenty-five years. He was accompanied by his wife Therese, her mother, and his dog Duke.
This mating between Jean Jacques and Therese was a happy one. She could neither read nor write, nor did she care to. Yet she had an idolatrous regard for her liege, and every evening he read aloud to her and to his mother-in-law what he had written during the day. At every pause in the reading, the old lady, without understanding a word of it, would interject, "This is very fine!" And Therese would skilfully transform a yawn into a sigh of delight, roll her eyes in a transport of joy, and say nothing.
This was just what was required, and all that was required, save a chronic quarrel with influential friends, to keep Rousseau in good literary fighting form.
"A wife who is in competition with her husband, or who has just enough mind to detect his faults, is the extinguisher of genius," said Goethe, who lived up to his blue china and referred to his wife as a convenient loaf of brown bread, which he declared was much more nourishing than cake, having tried both.
Just outside Geneva, at Les Delices, Voltaire had built his private theater, where he used to invite the favored children of Calvin to witness the drama. Voltaire being a playwright and without prejudice in the matter, had even suggested a municipal theater for Geneva. This brought forth from Jean Jacques a scorching pamphlet on the seductive deviltry of the drama, wherein it was pointed out that the downfall of every nation that had gone by the boards had begun its slide to Avernus in its love of the play. In this essay Rousseau expressed the view of orthodox Geneva, where the traditions of Calvin still survived. "The theater stands for luxury, idleness, sensuality and all that is feverish and base; private theaters are private bagnios," wrote Rousseau. Probably Rousseau, when he began to write, did not care anything about the matter one way or the other. But Voltaire had neglected to invite him to a "first night," and now he was getting even. As he wrote he convinced himself.
"He is like an oven that is too hot," said Voltaire; "it burns everything that is put into it." Then when Voltaire found that Rousseau's pamphlet was really making a splash in the sea of books, he got mad and called Rousseau a "dog of Diogenes," "that Punchinello of letters," the "fanfaron of ink," and other choice epithets.
Every knock being a boost, then as now, Rousseau found himself lifted into the domain of successful authorship. His income was less than a hundred pounds a year (Voltaire's was two or three thousand pounds). but he had all he needed, and things were coming his way.
Voltaire represented the nobility—Rousseau stood for the people. And Geneva being but a big village—twenty-four thousand inhabitants—the battle of the giants was watched by the neighbors with interest.
Rousseau was a member of the Protestant Church; Voltaire called himself a Catholic—so little do labels count.
Voltaire lived in a palace and rode in a coach with outriders; Rousseau trudged on foot alone. Solitary, he would take his piece of dry bread and grape-leaf full of cherries, and wander to the woods or on the mountain-side, stopping and sitting on a boulder to write on his ever-faithful pad when the thought came. "I have to walk ten miles to get a thousand words," he said.
In Geneva at this time lived Diderot and D'Alembert, literary refugees, busy at that first encyclopedia. They ran a kind of literary clearing-house, and gave piecework to everybody who could write and had two ideas to jingle against each other. Both Rousseau and Voltaire, whenever they were in the mood, wrote for the encyclopedia. Finally Voltaire started a dictionary of his own.
Geneva at this time must have been a very attractive place in which to live. There were men there who wrote like geniuses and quarreled like children. Father Taylor said that if Emerson were sent to hell, he would start emigration in that direction. The refugees from France made Geneva popular, and all the bickering added spice to existence and made exile tolerable.
Rousseau persistently flocked alone and made much dole because his friends forsook him. Then when they went to see him he complained because they would not leave him alone. Diderot accused him of insincerity because he changed the name of his dog from "Duke" to "Turk," for fear of offending Madame d'Epinay, who gave him a cottage rent-free. "He is a dwarf, mounted on stilts," said Baron Grimm.
And all the time Jean Jacques wandered on the mountain-side, ate his brown bread and cherries, talked to himself and wrote, and got back home in the twilight to present the day's catch of ideas to Therese and the fat mother-in-law, who at the right time always said, "This is very fine!" And Rousseau, full-jeweled, but unreliable as a horologe, loved them both, second only to his dog, Turk, who lay at his feet and occasionally pounded his tail on the floor to prove that he was still awake and that the sentiments were his, and that he agreed with the old lady—"This is very fine!" The quarrels of Jean Jacques with all three were only a quarrel with himself.
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Having entertained Voltaire for a year, Frederick the Great shot this winged arrow, "If I had a province to punish, I would give it to a philosopher to govern."
Rousseau is flowery and often over-sentimental. But it can be assumed that he himself always knew what he meant. Yet he has given rise to much loose thinking. His references to the "Book of Nature," for instance, were worked overtime by zealous converts. It will be recalled how Chief Justice Marshall paralyzed a poetic attorney in mid-flight, who referred to the "Book of Nature," by looking over his glasses and saying, "One moment, please, while I take down the page and paragraph of that passage in the volume to which counsel has just kindly referred us."
It is the penalty of all original thinking that it inspires fools to unseemliness as well as wise men to action.
Napoleon Bonaparte said, "Had there been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution."
And George Sand said, "To blame the 'Social Contract' for the
Revolution is like blaming the Gospels for the massacre of Saint
Bartholomew."
George Sand is literary, but wrong, since Marat, Mirabeau, Robespierre, got their arguments directly from Rousseau, and no one I have ever heard made an appeal to Scripture as a defense for murdering thirty thousand men, women and children. Mirabeau quotes this from Rousseau in self-defense: "No true believer can be a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law inflicted death on an atheist, I should begin to put it into execution by burning the first man who should accuse or persecute another."
Jefferson and Franklin both read the "Social Contract" in the original French, and quoted from it in giving reasons why it was not only right, but the duty, of the Colonies to separate from Great Britain. Rousseau fired the heart and inspired the brain of Thomas Paine to write the pamphlet, "Common-sense," which, more than any other one influence, brought about the American Revolution.
Jefferson especially was fascinated by Rousseau, and in his library was a well-thumbed copy of the "Social Contract." marked and re- marked on page and margin. Paine and Jefferson were the only men connected with the strenuous times of Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six who had a distinct literary style—who worked epigram and antithesis. And the style of each is identical with the other. That Paine wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence needs no argument for the literary connoisseur—he simply says, "Read it." But while we know that both Paine and Jefferson fed on Rousseau for ten years, it is not so clear that they collaborated. They got their information from the same source—one in England and the other in America—and met with minds mature.
As Victor Hugo gave the key to the modern American stylists, so did
the stylists—and precious few there were—of Seventeen Hundred
Seventy-six trace to Jean Jacques. The man who wrote the "Junius
Letters" had only one model.
That opening phrase of the Declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." is a literal translation from Jean Jacques.
The Reverend Joseph Parker once said to me, "I always begin strong and I end strong, for only your first phrase and your last will be remembered, if remembered at all, by the average listener."
Jean Jacques begins strong. The first words of the "Social Contract" are, "Man is born free, but is everywhere enslaved."
Does not that remind you of the not-to-be-forgotten opening words of
"The Crisis": "These are the times that try men's souls"?
Rousseau says, "Every individual who opposes himself to the general will ought to be restrained by the whole body, which signifies nothing else than that they force him to be free." That is, he is no longer fit to receive the benefits of the social contract since he refused to pay the price.
The argument of the "Social Contract" is that, in all and every form of government, the people enter into an agreement with the prince or ruler, agreeing to waive the mutual right of freedom in consideration of his seeing to it that laws shall be passed and enforced giving the greatest good to the greatest number.
And this led to that shibboleth of the Revolution, "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." Only when it was written by Jean Jacques twenty years before it ran thus, "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality—or Death." The final word was too strong for even his fiery followers to digest. But once understood it means that if either prince or pauper refuses to sign the Social Contract and live for all, death then must be his portion. For and in consideration of this interest in the peace and welfare of all, the prince is given honors and is allowed to call himself "a ruler." If, however, at any time the prince should so forget his sacred office as to work for private gain or for a favored few, then he is guilty of a breach of the contract, and the people owe to themselves the duty of deposition or revolution. Just as Nature, when a man's body is no more fit for service, kills the man, so must we kill the office and begin anew.
And this was to cause Thomas Paine to say in the Chamber of Deputies, when the execution of Louis the Sixteenth was under discussion, "I vote to kill the kingly office, not the man."
The following passages taken at random from Jean Jacques might safely be attributed to either Paine, Jefferson or "Junius":
Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it is impossible that it should not have some civil effect; and so soon as it has, the sovereign is no longer sovereign even in secular matters: the priests become the real masters, and kings are only their officers. Whoever dares to say, Beyond the Church there is no salvation, ought to be driven from the State.
I perceive God in all His works; I feel Him in myself; I see Him all around me; but as soon as I contemplate His nature, as soon as I try to find out where He is, what He is, what is His substance, He eludes my gaze; my imagination is overwhelmed. I do not therefore reason about Him, for it is more injurious to the Deity to think wrongly of Him than not to think of Him at all.
By equality we do not mean that all individuals shall have the same degree of wealth and power, but only, with respect to the former, that no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another, and that none shall be so poor as to be obliged to sell himself.
Almost everything conspires to deprive a man brought up to command others of the principles of reason and justice. Great pains are taken, it is said, to teach young princes the art of reigning; it does not, however, appear that they profit much by their education. The greatest monarchs are those who have never been trained to rule. It is a science of which those who know least succeed best; and it is acquired better by studying obedience than command.
Did there exist a nation of gods, their government would doubtless be democratic; it is too perfect for mankind.
The individual by giving himself up to all gives himself up to none; and there is no member over whom he does not acquire the same right as that which he gives up himself. He gains an equivalent for what he loses, and a still greater power to preserve what he has. If, therefore, we take from the social contract everything which is not essential to it, we shall find it reduced to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and his power under the superior direction of the general will of all, and, as a collective body, receives each member into that body as an indivisible part of the whole.
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Rousseau was born in Seventeen Hundred Twelve, and died in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-eight. He wrote four books that are yet being read. These books are the "Confessions," the "Social Contract," "Emile," and the "New Heloise." I give the titles in order of popularity. It is easy to say that people read the "Confessions" for the same reason that they read "Peregrine Pickle" and "Tom Jones," it being one of those peculiar books labeled by our French friends "risque." But its salacious features are only incidental, and of themselves would not have kept it afloat upon the tide of the times. The author, dead over a hundred years, must have said something to keep men still reading and discussing him.
Rousseau dealt with the elemental impulses of men and women. His cry, "Back to Nature," is still the shibboleth of a great many good men, from Parson Wagner to Theodore Roosevelt. Between the nobility and orthodox Christianity, Nature was in a bad way in Rousseau's time. The nobles thought to improve on her, and the preachers told the people that what was natural was base. God was good, but Nature and the devil were playing a game and the stakes were the souls of men. There are many people still haunted with the hallucination that to trust your impulses is to be damned.
Rousseau described human nature, and being truthful, some of it he pictured as rude, crude and course. But on the other hand he showed much that was redeeming—traits of beauty, truth, gentleness, consideration, worth and aspirations that reached the skies. To trust humanity, he thought, was the only way humanity could be redeemed. He believed that blunders were sources of power, since by them we came to distinguish between right and wrong. He was the first man to say, "That country is governed best which is governed least." He gave Horace Walpole the cue for the mot, "When the people of Paris speak of the Garden of Eden, they always think of Versailles."
Rousseau is the first man of modern times to show us the beauty of Nature in her wild and uncultivated attire. And he, more than any other man who can be named, turned the attention of society towards nature-study as a refining force. Read this from "Emile": "It was Summer; we arose at break of day. He led me outside the town to a high hill, below which the Po wound its way; in the distance the immense chains of the Alps crowned the landscape; the rays of the rising sun struck athwart the plains, and projected on the fields the long shadows of the trees, the slopes, the houses, enriching by a thousand accidents of light the loveliest prospect which the human eye could behold." Rousseau is the spiritual ancestor of John Burroughs, Thompson-Seton, and all our scientific, unscientific and sentimental friends who flood us with Nature stories—fiction, fake or fact.
In his "Emile" he outlines our so-called pedagogic new-thought methods. Birds' nests, bumblebees, hornets' nests, leaves, buds, flowers, grasses, mosses, are schoolroom properties to which he often refers. To a great degree he replaced the ferule, cat-o'-nine-tails, dunce-cap, musty, dusty books, tear-stained slates, awful examples and punishments of a hundred lines of Vergil, by wholesome good-cheer and limpid forgetfulness of self in drawing pictures of spiders and noting the difference between a wasp and a bee, a butterfly and a moth, a frog and a toad, a mushroom and a toadstool. And so the reason Rousseau is read is because there is much in his work that is essentially modern. No thinker writes on political economy without quoting the "Social Contract," either for the sake of bolstering his own argument, or to show the folly of Jean Jacques. And I submit that as long as we feel it necessary to refute an author, Andrew Lang may expect letters from him any time, for, although dead, he yet lives.
SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF GREAT REFORMERS," BEING VOLUME NINE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD; EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; BORDERS AND INITIALS BY ROYCROFT ARTISTS, AND PRODUCED BY THE ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOPS, WHICH ARE IN EAST AURORA, ERIE COUNTY, NEW YORK. MCMXXII