Discrepancies in Character.

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so deep a root. No intolerant admirer of feudal government or priestly influence ever preached against enlightenment with more warmth than the Genevese Republican.

And what sort of man was he that spoke the strong word? He was, as Mr. Carlyle says in his lectures on 'Hero-worship,' not a strong man. Great was the speech that was uttered, small was the speaker. The age was vain; it was distinguished by an empty love of praise from small people; yet none were vainer, none had a more girlish fondness for laudation, than Jean Jacques Rousseau. The age liked, as we have said, to deduce virtue from selfishness, and Rousseau hated that deduction: yet where was creature more morbidly selfish? If egotism was the ignis fatuus that misled his contemporaries, with him it was more: it was the disease that fed upon his vitals, that forbad him to have one healthy feeling. Nay, striking as were the truths which he uttered amid a maze of fallacy, so much does he exhibit of that egotism, that vanity, that love of notoriety, that we can hardly tell where the real thinker begins, and the lover of self-display leaves off. He is a difficult person to unravel, this Jean Jacques Rousseau. He has left us a book of Confessions, which seems to surpass in candour all the books that were ever published, and in which he seems most liberal in the proclamation of his transgressions, decent and indecent; and yet we have a kind of uneasy notion that we have not quite got at the truth, and that we know a deal more about many people who have not been half so frank, than we do about that confessing Genevese. He tells us at the very commencement, "Let the trumpet of the last judgment sound when it will, I will present myself before the sovereign Judge, with this book in my hand, and I will say aloud, ' Here is what I did, what I thought, and what I was.' This sounds imposing: we ought to be awe-struck, but we confess that we are not all-believing: no, not even when Madame Dudevant tells us that he is a father of the church to come. We cannot help thinking of an ugly old maxim of Rochfaucauld, to the effect, that we prefer talking of our faults to not talking of ourselves at all; and when we look at these faults of Rousseau-wretched, disagreeable faults as they are-in short, just those sort of faults that, above all others, we should keep to ourselves-we feel that they are somehow very dexterously tinselled over, and that if the enormity be great, there is a good measure of accounting cause and interesting repentance to overbalance its effect. We set aside all the statements let loose by the professed enemies of Rousseau, all the hostile histories; we take him as he shows himself, and we consent to disbelieve every other authority; but still we say, he is the most puzzling creature. What can we be

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lieve him to be? Shall we suppose him sincere? A host of little meannesses, and vanities, and timidities, a strange mixture of braggadocio and flinching, are at hand to shake our faith. Shall we believe him a mere vain man, whose only desire was for notoriety, who snarled at the world to make it frown upon him, and who ran away from it simply because he hoped it would follow him? If we turn to certain hostile anecdotes, we shall find reason for such belief: but then the earnestness, the truthfulness of Emile' rise in a sort of majesty before us, and will not allow us to think that all was a trick. Shall we believe, to account for his eccentricities, that he received some unlucky hurt in his infancy, which affected his brain? If we would foster such belief, there are accounts to support us: but there is abundance of quiet, calm, unenthusiastic sense to refute us: there is the 'Contrât Sociale,' which, unpleasant as its doctrines may be to some, is a fine specimen of logical deduction from assumed premises. Nay, in his entire works there is a sort of consistency, as if the thinker never changed, though the man might occasionally waver: and yet-and yet there come the signs of weakness, of the being 'not strong,' that make us hesitate. Perhaps after all it is we ourselves who are unjust to this Genevese, in wishing to pin him to some well-defined category. Perhaps it is on account of the great quantity of accurate information concerning him, that we think we know so little. Maybe we know too much. The artistical biographer may remove this deformity, and heighten that perfection, and we shall have a very conceivable sort of personage. But when the very man is revealed, may he not always seem inexplicable, and may we not ascribe to his want of candour, what is our own dimness of perception? May not all present the same want of harmony between theory and practice, between thoughts and actions, as poor Jean Jacques?-Reader, if thou be a writer also, think within thyself if this is not possible.

To the new edition of Rousseau's Confessions,' which forms the head of this article, Madame Dudevant (George Sand) has written a very pleasant and ingenious preface, with only the fault of soaring a little too far into the regions of mysterious signification. Thus, having settled that Jean Jacques is to be a saint of the future, she bids us observe how completely the work more immediately before us, is one of primitive Christianity-namely, the publication of a confession. A truly agreeable and goodnatured turn to give to an act in which disappointment, and vanity, and egotism had so large a share! George Sand is willing to admit the many faults of the Saint, but he may take his place by the 'publican Matthew' and the 'persecutor Paul!' Nay, the time is not far distant when Saint Rousseau' shall be no more

The 'forts' and the 'grands.'

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tried at the bar of opinion than Saint Augustin. All this is meant to sound wonderfully fine, but nevertheless, the words 'Saint Rousseau' will not ring musically in our ears.

To assign to Jean Jacques a place more definite than that of mere saintship, Madame Dudevant with much acuteness divides the eminent men of an age into two classes, the 'strong men' (les hommes forts) and the great men' (les hommes grands). The former men are those who belong to the present, and who act in the present. Their feet are set firmly on stable ground, and they can strike out with vigour. They include the great warriors, the great statesmen, even the great manufacturers, men who do brilliant deeds, and have brilliant successes. Voltaire, Diderot, and the negative philosophers of the last century, with whom Rousseau could never amalgamate, but whom he approached only to fly off again, leaving a feeling of contempt on one side, and loathing on the other, belong to the class of 'hommes forts.' They sapped the foundations of established things, they shook creeds, they disorganized society, but they had no view of the far distant. It was because they were of the present, that they could attack it so vigorously. These 'hommes forts' are, according to George Sand, the sappers and miners of the moving phalanx of humanity; they clear the road, they break down rocks, they penetrate forests. The 'hommes grands,' on the other hand, are not versed in the science of present facts; they find themselves in a strange region— too strange to allow of their acting, and they therefore occupy their minds with uneasy meditations. A pure ideal is before them, with which nothing that surrounds them will accord. Hating the present, they may seek their ideal in the past or the future; they may look forward to the time when man shall have reached his perfection, or they may sigh over a golden age. Rousseau, who belongs to this category of hommes grands,' not having faith in the future, was one of the sighers over the past; though, nevertheless, he had an instinctive feeling of progress, as he showed by writing Emile' and the Contrât Sociale." These two classes of the forts' and the 'grands' are perpetually at war with each other, although they are more really allied than they think, and are both equally necessary to the advancement of mankind. The 'forts' working by corrupt means in a corrupt region, become necessarily corrupted, and hence they do not satisfy the purity of the grands.' The latter, contemplating their ideal, have too exalted notions to admit of their acting with force on the bad men of their age. They are therefore despised by the 'forts' as mere dreamers-empty theorists, who have no genius for practice, but who pass a life completely useless to themselves and others. Nevertheless, these grands are the creators,' the

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originators of all actions, although they seem but mere dreamers in their lifetime. For the meditators of one age strike out thoughts which are realized by the forts' in the next, these thoughts having now become a solid basis for practice. The circumstance that the 'grands' can only create without acting, while the 'forts' can only act without creating, of itself explains their mutual utility and their mutual dislike. When a better age than the present shall come, the distinction between the forts' and the grands' will vanish: as, mankind having become purer, there will be no longer any need of a semi-vicious agent to carry out good thoughts, but the 'grands' will see their plans accepted by society, and the 'forts,' not being so completely involved in a fierce struggle, will have room for meditation. Till then the 'homme grand' must consent to be a sort of martyr.

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Such is George Sand's classification of the 'hommes grands' and the 'hommes forts.' There is a great deal of truth in this division, considered in the abstract; but whether it is quite right to place Jean Jacques in the category of the grands,' as distinguished from the forts,' is another matter. He had indeed that restless dislike of the present, the longing after something distanthe scarcely knew what, and therefore placed it in primitive America -which are the marks of the grands;' but certainly he acted immediately, both in and on the present, and therefore though not a strong man in an English sense of the word, he was most assuredly a 'homme fort in the Dudevant phraseology. Let us turn over the whole works of Voltaire, with all their scoffs and wicked pleasantries, and we doubt whether we shall find a harder hit at existing creeds than the Profession of faith of the Vicaire of Savoy,' though the latter is written by Rousseau with all the show of diffidence, and a pretended veneration for every description of church. True, our Genevese did not take his mace in his hand, and thunder away at all institutions like the Robber Moor: true, he rather whined than bawled his sentiments: but he was an eminently practical man in his way notwithstanding.

Let us look at him a little closer. Jean Jacques is more alluded to in general terms than surveyed minutely now-a-days, and it will be not altogether lost time to follow (briefly, of course) the career of a man who made so great a noise in his epoch, and whose influence is likely to be more permanent than most of his contemporaries. Rousseau had a positive side; he had a constructive as well as a destructive theory; and therefore does he rightly belong to the Dudevant category of 'grand,' as an originator, although we would not, on that account, exclude him from the predicament of' fort.'

Childhood.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, born in the year 1712, was in his youth one of those persons, whom godfathers and godmothers do not highly esteem. He was a shuffling, unsatisfactory sort of a boy, who seemed destined not to thrive. Bind him to

one trade, and he would fancy another, with a still greater predilection for doing nothing at all: these amiable propensities being accompanied by a most unlucky taste for petty larceny. Money, it is true, he did not love to steal, there was something too commercial and business-like in having to lay it out. He liked immediate enjoyment. Spartan in contrivance, epicurean in luxury, the ripe fruit, the glittering bauble, were for him the tempting baits. He had every 'sneaking' vice, with little of ill-nature or malice: and these characteristics of his juvenile years, however he might afterwards affect the bearish misanthrope, seem to have cleaved to him pretty firmly during nearly the whole of his life. His mother died at his birth: he was the idol of his father, a Geneva clockmaker, and of the neighbours, who looked upon him as an infant prodigy. With reading of all sorts, ecclesiastical history, Plutarch, La Bruyère, and the old ponderous romances, did the youthful republican store his mind, and his parent gazed on him with admiring horror when he saw him put his hand over a chaffingdish to imitate Mutius Scævola.

Happy were the first years of Jean Jacques Rousseau, when all caressed, and none opposed, and when the dreams of futurity, nurtured by a warm imagination, only gave an additional zest to the enjoyment of the present. He tells us himself, he was 'idolized' by all around, yet never spoiled.'-Is not this a distinction without a difference, Jean Jacques? And were you not in infancy nurtured in all that love of having your own way, in all that waywardness, in all that effeminate sensitiveness, which were so conspicuous in your future career, and which, perhaps, were the origin of all your-greatness? Well,-thus did childhood pass pleasantly; but directly it was gone, and there was a necessity for the youth adopting some means of getting a living, then came the disagreeables of life. This business would not suit, and that master was too cross; and, one night, stopping out beyond the walls after the gate was shut, and dreading harsh treatment from the engraver to whom he was apprentice, he ran away altogether. His father, having got into a scrape, had been obliged to leave Geneva long before, and poor Jean Jacques, at the age of sixteen, set out on a long walk from his native town, without any visible means of finding a place of rest. Fortunately there is no evil in the world without a corresponding portion of good, and religious dissensions, which have been the greatest scourges ever known to the world, proved of great utility to Jean Jacques. There were