the ideal woman,' whom Rousseau calls Sophie. In treating of her, he appears as the strenuous opponent of the rights-of-woman' sort of thinkers, who consider women capable of performing all the political offices of a man, and as unjustly kept in a state of subjection. He objects even to the influence which ladies had already obtained in the fashionable circles of Paris; he objects to their presiding over society; to their giving opinions on matters of philosophy and literature: teaching that domestic life is the proper sphere of woman, and that the secondary position assigned to her, is the result not of prejudice, but of the natural order of things. When Rousseau thinks calmly, there is nothing of what may be called the socialist' in his composition. Politically he is an ultra-revolutionist, but with regard to social laws he is strictly conservative.

The

The

The cause of the storm that was created on the publication of 'Emile' was the Profession of Faith of the Vicaire of Savoy' which appears as a mere episode of the work. This insidious 'profession' is remarkable for its display of natural piety. declarations of faith in a supreme Being, and in the immortality of the soul, are made with the greatest appearance of devoutness; but while the doctrine of a future state is 'proved' by arguments singularly unconvincing, the ground work of every positive religion is assailed with remarkable tact and acuteness. evidence by miracles,-in short any sort of evidence that would make of Christianity any thing but a mere system of morality,-is assiduously controverted; and though the doctrines of Rousseau are such as in the present time might obtain him no severer name than that of a 'rationalist,' he was in his day a complete infidel as far as regarded any established creed. The catholics of course did not like him: the Calvinistic Genevese, whom he had vainly tried to flatter by a few compliments in this very profession,' joined in the abhorrence: and lastly the material philosophes, disgusted at his advocacy of a future state, loved him no better than the orthodox. The tempest broke out in more places than one, the parliament of Paris threatened him with imprisonment, the council of Geneva caused his book to be burned by the hands of the executioner. From Montmorenci he was obliged to fly, and he vainly sought shelter in several places in Switzerland. His 'Letters from the Mountain,' which he wrote as a sort of defence to the objectionable part of his Emile,' only served to increase the violence of his enemies. Great polemic talent is exhibited in these letters.' If he cannot refute the danger against himself, he shows the nicest skill in placing his adversaries in a false position. With dexterity availing himself of an argument long in vogue among the catholics, he dares his Genevese opponents, who as protestants

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found their faith on the right of private judgment, consistently to prevent his interpreting the scriptures his own way. Then leaving the abstract theological ground, he attacks on constitutional principles the acts of the Genevese council, which was the executive power, and was composed of the aristocratic portion of the republic. In revenge for his persecution, he shows how that council has exceeded the limits prescribed by the constitution, how it has encroached on other members of the state: and to the arguments which he used on this occasion are to be ascribed the revolutions in favour of a more popular form of government, which afterwards happened in Geneva. At the time, the position he took drew upon him little else than persecution, and if he occasionally found an asylum, he was soon obliged to leave it to avoid personal risk. The ignorant populace, excited by their pastors, believed him to be Anti-Christ; and he with that perverse love of notoriety which ever distinguished him, chose to walk out in an Armenian costume, and thus in a measure to support the opinion of the bigoted Swiss, that he was at any rate something not quite right. From this persecution, which he says put him in peril of being stoned to death, but which some believe he greatly exaggerated, he took refuge by his journey to England, in company with David Hume. With his departure from Switzerland on this occasion, ends the book of 'Confessions.'

Over the rest of his life, in which we have no longer his own voice to guide us, we may pass very briefly. England did not suit him: there was no chance in this island of a shout of AntiChrist,' nor of his windows being demolished with brickbats: but what was worse, people did not seem to care much about him. His life was in perfect safety, but he found himself an object of ridicule. He quarrelled with his friend Hume, and with this country altogether; and returned once more to France, where his fame having become established, he was received in the most flattering manner. At Paris his eccentricities took the form of madness; he lived a prey to the most frightful mental anguish; he even seemed to luxuriate in his own horrors, and loved to repeat a stanza of Tasso* which reminded him of his own situation. His face was so distorted by convulsions, that those who had been

* "Vivro fra i mei tormenti, e fra le cure,

Mie giuste furie, forsennato errante.
Paventero l'ombre solinghe e scure,
Che 'l primo error mi recheranno avante;
E del sol che scoprì le mie sventure,
A schivo ed in orrore avrò il sembiante:
Temerò me medesmo, e da me stesso
Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre oppresso."

Gerus. lib. xii.

On

familiar with his countenance could reconcile it no more. the 3rd of July, 1778, he died suddenly, at the chateau of a friend at Ermonville, not without suspicion of suicide.

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There is something sublimely tragic in this last madness of Rousseau. The man could not at last find any thing really to love in this world: it was a something to him mysterious and unholy, and he peopled it with awful phantoms. He uttered his imprecations against it: but he was not a strong man, he could not weather the storm, and the curses, like young chickens, returned home to roost. Probably he at first assumed misanthropy in a kind of morbid freak, and declared himself the enemy of civilization for the sake of supporting a paradox: but he nurtured this position till it became more and more a real thing-to himself terribly real. To separate the acted from the true is, as we have said, difficult to the reader of the Confessions;' but we must have faith in the sincerity of that maniac misanthropy of which we hear so little, and which came after the period we have attentively examined.

nation

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In spite of the weakness of the Man, the strength of the Word was felt. The young, the enthusiastic, the dreamers of the last century, followed the dictates of Rousseau, and his words became the gospel of revolutionists. If his nature was not quite natural, it was natural enough to move those who had only gazed at the mere artificial. Truly it is a great sight to see this Rousseau, this creature of feeble purpose, constructing what he believed to be the natural man out of such strange materials as society presented him, and out of such a weak self. The man of his imagigrew to maturity in the Emile,' and there is no doubt he was as dear a companion to his preceptor as if he had been a reality. He would have marred his idol by a projected work, called Emile and Sophie:' a work of which only a few chapters were written, and which promised to be one of immense power: but the ideal man was to have risen triumphant from his imaginary misfortunes. Pygmalion-and Jean Pygmalion and Jean Jacques wrote a Pygmalion-created an ideal, saw it realized, and was blessed: Rousseau erected likewise an ideal, but he saw the impossibility of its realization in the world, he gnashed his teeth at actualities, and sunk into despair and madness.

VOL. XXXII. NO. LXIII.

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ART. II.-Schwedische Geschichten unter Gustav dem Dritten, vorzüglich aber unter Gustav dem vierten Adolf. (Sketches of Swedish History under Gustavus III. and Gustavus IV., Adolphus.) Von E. M. ARNDT. Vol. I. 8vo. Leipzig. 1839. THE history of Sweden from the beginning of the sixteenth century downwards is a remarkable proof how brilliant a thing it is, and how dangerous, for a country to be governed by a race of kings in whose blood genius, and to it closely allied madness, is hereditary. Men of business proverbially have an instinctive distrust of genius: Jove's thunder, they say, is a thing always more sublime than safe, useful indeed, nay necessary at certain critical seasons for shaking and purifying the morbid overladen atmosphere, but on common occasions dispensable. Not that genius is a thing essentially bad in itself; the men of business are not so uncharitable as to say that; it is a thing essentially good, but good for the most part in excess or in disproportion to the occasion. There lies the evil. It overshoots the mark. Like old Acestes in the Æneid, it does not shoot the pigeon, but the clouds; and the clouds burn and blaze, and stars shoot across the sky, and all men cry a miracle; but with all this the proper mark of the archer was the pigeon, and not the cloud.

spur

There is, indeed, a sort of calm, mild, well-toned, contemplative genius, which is perfectly safe. In the world of books there are many such, a Sophocles, a Jeremy Taylor, a Goethe; but wisdom with a sword in her hand is rare. The genius of soldiership is dangerous on a throne. A conqueror who knows how to stop conquering, like Frederick of Prussia when he had finished the Silesian business, is one out of a hundred. Charles XII. did not know where to stop; Napoleon did not know where to stop. A king ought to sit upon his throne; but military geniuses like Napoleon and the Swede, are not to be made to sit anywhere. They must and drive on with or without a rational aim. Did not Charles, when at Bender, ride three strong horses weary every day? Could he have existed otherwise? To move about the world, and drive down all opposition, with a leathern belt about his loins, and a sharp sword in his hand, booted and spurred, and gloved, was it not the very life, and breath, and being of the man? Was it not the very life, and breath, and being of Napoleon also? Could he have existed otherwise? Could the Corsican or the Swede, being as they were the most fulminant of soldiers, be for the countries which they respectively governed any thing but bad kings? The reign of the one was to France, after the necessary good of self-preservation had been obtained,

altogether a brilliant blunder; and though the other was cut short in his career, the extraordinary obstinacy of his charactera feature equally remarkable in Napoleon-leaves little ground for hoping that he would have been able to secure more favourable terms of peace than those which his successors were contented to receive two years after his death, at the fatal peace of Nystadt (1721) which opened the Baltic to Russia. Thus all the gain of Narva and of Charles the Twelfth's military genius to Sweden was a splendid loss.

But let us not look exclusively at one side of the picture. The men of business are quite right when they do not pray Heaven to send men of genius to keep their daily ledgers and to collect their yearly rents; but kings have sometimes extraordinary work to do; and then a genius will do great things. When we take a survey of the long line of intellectually gifted Swedish sovereigns, (concerning whom Arndt justly remarks, that in such close succession no European country has any thing parallel)—Gustavus Wasa, Charles IX., Gustavus Adolphus, Christina, Charles X. Gustavus, Charles XI., Charles XII., and Gustavus III.—we shall find that though the country over which these men reigned may have some reason to blame them for having forced it by violent and premature efforts to assume a position which it had no innate strength to maintain, yet, on the whole, by the combined might of genius, and outward chances (to which all are subject), it still takes among European powers a place not below what naturally seems to belong to it; a place higher, perhaps, than amid the storms and changes of three centuries mere safe mediocrity might have secured; and then there is, in addition to this, that glorious bequeathment of genius to a nation-the memory of noble deeds and high enterprizes. For what man that is not a mere Economist will say that the lives of Gustavus Wasa, Gustavus Adolphus, and Charles XII. (to name no more), are not worth to Sweden a whole Iliad and an Odyssey, and something more?

There are some persons who will say that Sweden has not accomplished its destiny among European nations, because the Czar Peter was not hindered from setting down Petersburg at the head of the Gulf of Finland in 1703, and Barclay de Tolly was allowed to march over the Baltic ice from Wasa to Umea in 1809 ? But would our Russophobia have been any thing more moderate, if Petersburg had then or a few years afterwards been planted on the Black Sea or the Sea of Azof, as near Constantinople as it now is to Stockholm? For a sea-metropolis it is manifest Russia must have had, either on the Black Sea or the Baltic, if it was to be a civilized and a European power at all. As for Sweden, who can doubt for a moment (looking only to results)