(65. Du courage.) Le vrai courage est une des qualités qui supposent le plus de grandeur d'âme. J'en remarque beaucoup de sortes: un courage contre la fortune, qui est philosophie; un courage contre les misères, qui est patience: un courage à la guerre, qui est valeur; un courage dans les entreprises, qui est hardiesse; un courage fier et téméraire, qui est audace; un courage contre l'injustice, qui est fermeté; un courage contre le vice, qui est sévérité; un courage de réflexion, de tempérament, etc.

Il n'est pas ordinaire qu'un même homme assemble tant de qualités. Octave, dans le plan de sa fortune élevée sur des précipices, bravait des périls éminents; mais la mort, présente à la guerre, ébranlait son âme. Un nombre innombrable de Romains qui n'avaient jamais craint la mort dans les batailles, manquaient de cet autre courage qui soumit la terre à Auguste.

II. RÉFLEXIONS ET MAXIMES.

(10) Il est rare qu'on approfondisse la pensée d'un autre; de sorte que, s'il arrive dans la suite qu'on fasse la même réflexion, on se persuade aisément qu'elle est nouvelle, tant elle offre de circonstances et de dépendances qu'on avait laissées échapper.

(12) C'est un grand signe de médiocrité de louer toujours modérément.

(17) La prospérité fait peu d'amis.

(35) Personne ne veut être plaint de ses erreurs.

(79) Il faut entretenir la vigueur du corps pour conserver celle de l'esprit.

(109) Les esprits légers sont disposés à la complaisance.

(160) Le prétexte ordinaire de ceux qui font le malheur des autres est qu'ils veulent leur bien.

(189) Qui sait tout souffrir peut tout oser.

(200) Le fruit du travail est le plus doux des plaisirs.

(214) Le sot qui a beaucoup de mémoire est plein de pensées et de faits; mais il ne sait pas en conclure: tout tient à cela.

(227) Il est faux que l'égalité soit une loi de la nature. La nature n'a rien fait d'égal. La loi souveraine est la subordination et la dépendance.

(229) On est forcé de respecter les dons de la nature, que l'étude ni la fortune ne peuvent donner.

(234) Nous aimons quelquefois jusqu'aux louanges que nous ne croyons pas sincères.

(264) Il est aisé de critiquer un auteur, mais il est difficile de l'apprécier.

(269) Il nous est plus facile de nous teindre d'une infinité de connaissances, que d'en bien posséder un petit nombre.

(371) Pour savoir si une pensée est nouvelle, il n'y a qu'à l'exprimer bien simplement.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU.

SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORKS.1

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in 1712 at Geneva, where

his father was a watchmaker. His education was much neglected: he spent several years without reading anything but Plutarch's Lives and an enormous number of novels. This last food for the mind gave him utterly false notions of life, which experience and reflection could never thoroughly eradicate. His father having been compelled to leave Geneva, he was left as a boarder with a Protestant minister, who taught him a little Latin. He was articled to the Clerk to the Magistrates, but sent away as utterly incompetent. Next he was apprenticed to an engraver, where he proved idle and disobedient, and being harshly treated by his master, he ran away and at the age of sixteen began to roam at large about the world.

Having reached Annecy in Savoy, young Rousseau was taken in by Mme de Warens, a lady who had become a convert to RomanCatholicism. She sent him to Turin with some letters of introduction, which caused him to be admitted into the Hospice des Catéchumènes. There he changed his religion and having become a Roman-Catholic without any conviction, he roamed about the streets of Turin for some time, till want compelled him to go into service. He first obtained a situation in the house of the countess Vercellis2 and after her death became valet to the count de Gouvon. There his talents were accidentally discovered, and his master undertook to have him educated; but Rousseau rewarded his kindness with such ingratitude and insolence, that he was obliged to turn him off. In 1730 he returned to Mme de Warens, who received him with motherly kindness, and being an educated and accomplished woman, she set him to read the best French authors and subsequently sent him to the Seminary. But there also he turned out good for nothing and was soon sent away. Having taken a few lessons in music, without much profit to himself, he set about teaching it at Lausanne3 and Neuchâtel, and then took again to his roving life. He was for some time interpreter to an adventurer, who called himself the archimandrite of Jerusalem and had the impudence to go about collecting money for the Holy Sepulchre. At Soleure Rousseau was arrested; but the French ambassador procured his release and sent him to Paris. There he vegetated for some time and finally sought a refuge again with Mme de Warens, who was then living at Chambéry. She got him a small appointment, which he threw up after a year, when he once more turned music-master; he was not more successful with a tutorship, which Mme de Warens had procured for him at Lyon.

In 1741 Rousseau came to Paris for the second time. He brought with him a method he had invented for noting music with figures, an invention on which he had built the greatest hopes, but which

Taken from J.-J. Rousseau's Confessions, his life in the Biographie universelle and a series of articles published by Saint-Marc_Girardin in the Revue des deux Mondes (1852, 1853) under the title J.-J. Rousseau, sa

Vie et ses Ouvrages. 2 V. p. 372. * V. p. 374. V. p. 376.

met with very little success. However he gained some patrons and saw Buffon, Voltaire and other celebrated men. In 1743 his friends got him appointed secretary to the count de Montaigu, French ambassador at Venice, but his pretentious vanity soon caused his dismissal. He returned to Paris in 1745. There, at the age of thirtythree, he formed an acquaintance with Thérèse Levasseur, a worthless woman without a shred of education or refinement, whom he subsequently married. He now obtained a clerkship in the office of M. Dupin, a tax-farmer,' and became intimately connected with Diderot."

In 1749 a prize - question set by the Academy of Dijon: Has the progress of Science and Art done more to corrupt or to improve our morals? revealed to Rousseau and the world his literary genius. He determined to write for the prize, and following his innate love of paradox and Diderot's advice, he contended in his essay against the beneficial influence of Science and Art, and civilization generally. He won the prize notwithstanding, and this success proved the foundation of his fame. From a love of independence he threw up his clerkship and, to gain a livelihood, took to copying music. His spare-time he employed in more congenial work. He composed the text and the music of an operette, Le Devin de village (1752) which gained the applause of the court at Fontainebleau, and published his Lettre sur la musique française, in which he advised. the French to give up composing music and be content with the works of the Italians. In 1753 Rousseau published his Discours sur l'inégalité des hommes. In the following year he went on a visit to Geneva, where from a wish to recover his rights as a citizen, he abjured the Roman-Catholic faith and returned to the bosom of the Reformed Church. He had thoughts of settling in his native city, but the fear that Voltaire, who was living at Ferney, close by, would sooner or later corrupt his republic, caused him to abandon them and return to Paris. There he made the acquaintance of Mme d'Épinay, who had the Ermitage built for him in the valley of Montmorency.

It was there he wrote his Lettre à d'Alembert on the stage. This letter provoked Voltaire's most stinging sarcasms, and from this time he affected to treat Rousseau as a madman. It was also at the Ermitage that Rousseau composed (1757-1759) the Nouvelle Héloïse, a novel in an epistolary shape, which met with marvellous success and in a very short time procured for its author a worldwide celebrity. At Paris people raved about it; the booksellers hired it out not by the day, but by the hour. We cannot, in our own day, understand the wonderful popularity of a book which, in spite of its beautiful language, is never read now by any one except those who make a study of the works of J.-J. Rousseau. As a work of art it is disfigured by serious blemishes: the plot is ill-contrived, the arrangement faulty, the characters are nearly all of them exaggerated and given to preaching. It has been said, not without truth that in this novel there is a deal of virtue in words and of vice in deeds. The author discusses the highest questions of morality with undoubted eloquence, but he upholds with equal ability the 1 V. p. 266, n. 2. Diderot, v. p. 380 of this Manual.

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most antagonistic opinions and argues for and against the morality of suicide with the most impartial persuasiveness.

In 1758 Rousseau quarrelled with his benefactress Mme d'Épinay, with Diderot, Grimm1 and other friends of the same coterie, left the Ermitage, and came to live in a house at Montmorency. It was about this time that he became possessed with the fixed mania that the world had conspired to persecute him.

In 1762 he published the Contrat Social, in which he undisguisedly maintained the principle of the sovereignty of the people, proclaiming absolute equality and founding, society on the basis of an imaginary contract; next followed the Emile, a treatise on education, which proved almost as popular as the Nouvelle Heloise. This work started and cleverly developed some very healthy ideas; it has the merit of having led primary education back to natural ways; but, when he pushed this principle too far and denied the child any other teacher than nature, Rousseau fell into absurdity and proposed an absolutely impracticable scheme of education. It may not be amiss to recall the fact that the author of these excellent educational precepts, who reminds parents so eloquently of the duty they owe to their children, left his own to be taken care of by public charity, for he sent them to the Hospice des Enfants trouvés.

The Emile, in which he had attacked all positive systems of belief, brought down the authorities on Rousseau. His arrest was decreed by the parliament of Paris; but his patrons the prince de Conti and the maréchal de Luxembourg obtained that he was allowed to leave the country unmolested. He retired to Switzerland, but when he reached Yverdun, he learnt that at Geneva the Émile had been burnt by the common hangman and that there also he was liable to imprisonment. So he took refuge at Motier-Travers, in the principality of Neuchâtel, whose governour, marshal Keith, generally known as Milord Maréchal, declared himself his protector. In this retreat Rousseau lived in the strangest manner, making laces and wearing an Armenian costume. There he composed in defence of the Emile his Réponse au mandement de l'archevêque de Paris, which generally goes by the title of Lettre à monseigneur de Beaumont and the Lettres écrites de la montagne, which were directed against the Council of Geneva. When compelled to leave Motiers-Travers, Roussseau retired to the island of St.-Pierre, situated in the Lac de Bienne. He was driven out from thence by the Senate of Bern and accepted the hospitality offered to him in England by David Hume, the philosopher. He went to live at Wootton in Derbyshire, but after a few months quarrelled with Hume, whom he accused of being in league with his enemies. He returned to France, where, owing to the protection of the prince de Conti he remained unmolested. After having been a sojourner in various places, he came

1 Grimm (Frédéric-Melchior, baron von) was born in 1723 at Regensburg; he came to Paris very young and became intimate with the most famous philosophers and writers of the period. He is best known by the Literary Correspondence he kept up from Paris with the empress Catherine II, which was published at Paris in 1812. Grimm died at Gotha in 1807.

back in 1770 to Paris, where he became an object of public curiosity, owing to his fantastic Armenian dress and other eccentricities.

In 1778 Rousseau accepted an invitation from M. de Girardin, who offered him a retreat at Ermenonville. There he died suddenly two months after, in the 66th year of his life. His remains, which were at first buried in the Ile des Peupliers at Ermenonville, were taken up and transferred to the Panthéon in 1793, by decree of the National Convention.

After his death, Rousseau's Confessions, which he had left in Ms., were published. In this work he relates the history of his life and opinions, with an almost cynical candour; and yet vanity and a lively imagination caused him to distort the truth in more than one respect. The influence which Rousseau's works exercised on an age, which was striving to free itself from every fetter of authority, both in religion and politics, was as great and perhaps as pernicious as that of Voltaire himself. Time has passed sentence on the numerous errors propagated by him side by side with a few great truths, and the barrenness of his theories, the shallowness of his knowledge of history and politics are nowadays established facts. Considering him as a writer, we must confess that the freshness and truth of his colouring, his lively imagination, his attractive details, in a word the perfection of their literary form, assign his works a foremost place in the history of French literature.

The works of J.-J. Rousseau, who has, with some truth been called the most eloquent of sophists, require, to read them with advantage, a judgment ripened by experience; they are not therefore well adapted, as a whole, for the study of the young. We reprint only a few isolated extracts.

I. LE LAC DE GENÈVE.

(NOUVELLE HÉLOÏSE, IV, 17.)

Au lever du soleil nous nous rendîmes au rivage; nous prîmes un bateau avec des filets pour pêcher, trois rameurs, un domestique, et nous nous embarquâmes avec quelques provisions pour le dîner. Nous passâmes une heure ou deux à pêcher à cinq cents pas du rivage.

Nous avançâmes ensuite en pleine eau; puis, par une vivacité de jeune homme dont il serait temps de guérir, m'étant mis à nager, 1 je dirigeai tellement au milieu du lac, que nous nous trouvâmes bientôt à plus d'une lieue du rivage. Là j'expliquais à madame de Wolmar toutes les parties du superbe horizon qui nous entourait. Je lui montrais de loin les embouchures du Rhône, dont l'impétueux cours s'arrête tout à coup au bout d'un quart de lieue, et semble craindre de souiller de ses eaux bourbeuses le cristal azuré du lac. Je lui faisais observer les redents des montagnes, dont les angles correspondants et parallèles forment, dans l'espace qui les sépare, un lit digne du fleuve qui le remplit. En l'écartant de nos côtes,

1 A term used by the sailors on the lake of Geneva for: to hold the oar, which serves as a rudder; but French sailors use nager instead of ramer.

B. Platz, Manual of French Literature.

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