the language in which they were couched, that this extraordinary success was owing. Surrounded as the Parisians were with the vices and the corruptions of a highly artificial mode of life, the language of nature, the fervour of unsophisticated affection, fell on them with inexpressible charms. It was like the sudden mania with which the votaries of fashion, half a century later, were seized for the melodramatic corsairs of Lord Byron. What particularly distinguished Rousseau's works, and gave them a decided superiority over all of a similar kind which had preceded them, was the brilliant and highly-coloured descriptions of nature, and genuine bursts of passion, with which they abounded. His pencil was literally "dipt in the orient hues of heaven." If his works had stopped here, they would have been only interesting as a picture of the times, and a step in the progress of literature, and have deserved little attention in general history. But they went a great deal further; and in the fundamental doctrine of Rousseau's philosophy is to be found both the antagonist principle, in every age, of the Christian faith, and the spring of revolutionary convulsions all over the world. This is the doctrine of HUMAN INNOCENCE and SOCIAL PERFECTIBILITY. CHAP. II. 54. It was his constant affirmation that the human mind was born innocent, and with dispositions only to goodness; Foundation of his phithat the hunter and the savage were the model of every losophical virtue; and that all the subsequent vices and miseries of principles. man were owing to the tyranny of kings, the deception of priests, the oppression of nobles, and the evils of civilisation. Property, he argued, was the grand abuse which had ruined mankind; reason the source of all iniquity. * "L'homme qui raisonne est l'homme qui pêche," was his favourite maxim. Rousseau and Diderot openly proclaimed the doctrine, that Property was the origin of all the social evils, and that a remedy for them could be found only in its abolition:-" Le premier qui dit," said Rousseau, "Ce champ est à moi,' introduisait dans la société le germe de toutes les calamités; une voix courageuse devait lui crier-'Ces fruits sont à tous, et la terre à personne.'" "La propriété," said Diderot, "est la cause générale et permanente de tous les désordres; par elle tout est bouleversé. Voulez-vous régénérer le monde ? II. CHAP. This doctrine, which ever will be agreeable to the visionary, and ever condemned by the experienced of mankind, was received with unbounded acclamations by a generation which, itself immersed in frivolity, corruption, and sensuality, gladly embraced any principles which laid the whole consequences of these indulgences on others, and proclaimed that, in a state of nature, every inclination and desire might be gratified, alike without danger and without criminality. These doctrines lie at the root of Rousseau's social contract; they are the foundation of the scheme of education which he developed in his Emile; they breathe in the Letters from the Mountains, and received their practical development in the fervour of the Nouvelle Héloïse. It did not require the glowing pages of his eloquence, nor the brilliant colours which he lent alike to virtue and vice, to give popularity to a system which proclaimed impunity to passion and innocence to gratification; which dignified indulgence with the name of freedom, and profligacy with that of happiness; which stigmatised selfcontrol as a violation of nature, and denounced restraint as an inroad on the benevolence of the Almighty. 55. ceding de these great men. The preceding detail, minute as it is, and trifling as to Importance some it may appear, will not, by the reflecting reader, be of the pre- deemed misplaced, even in a work of general history. It tail as to is thought, not physical strength, which really rules mankind; it is to the masters of mind that it is alone given to open the cavern of the winds. More even than by Mirabeau and Danton, the French Revolution was brought about by Voltaire and Rousseau; their dominion over the opinions of men has been more durable than that of Robespierre and Napoleon over their bodies. The Encyclopedists, who openly professed the principles of Laissez pleine liberté aux vrais sages d'attaquer les erreurs et les préjugés qui soutiennent l'esprit de propriété. J'indique le coup qu'il faut porter à la racine de tous les maux de plus habiles que moi réussiront peut-être à persuader.”— See CAPEFIGUE, L'Europe pendant la Révolution Française, i. 54. The doctrines of the followers of Babœuff in France in 1797, and of the Socialists and Chartists in England in 1840 and 1841, were nothing but the practical application of these principles. II. atheism; the Democrats, who commenced that great CHAP. convulsion; the Jacobins, who carried it on, merely pushed to their natural and unavoidable result the principles of these mighty magicians. It is well to see the private life of those by whom thrones are overturned; it is sometimes instructive to trace out the self-reform of the men who undertake to purify the world. Nothing, too, is so characteristic of the state of society in the French capital at that period of that unparalleled mixture of polish of manners with thirst for indulgence; of talent in conversation with frivolity of conduct; of elegance in habit with baseness in inclination; of sentiment in writing with selfishness in conduct; of taste in feeling with corruption in practice; of freedom of thought with servility of action; of declamations on liberty with dispositions to slaveryas the lives of those extraordinary men. And little was to be expected of a revolution which commenced with a library bequeathed to a young infidel by an old courtesan, and was fanned by the declamations on parental affection of a libertine father who had consigned his five children to a foundling hospital. opinions are still further As with other great changes in the current of human 56. thought, the doctrines of these powerful intellects were The new pushed by their successors beyond what they themselves carried out had intended. Like all profound and original writers, by their sucthey were followed by a crowd of imitators, who carried cessors. to the verge of extravagance at once their excellences and their defects. So powerful did the society of Men of Letters at Paris become, in the latter years of the reign of Louis XV., that they openly aspired to effect a total revolution in almost all the subjects of human thought, and remould the world, its institutions, habits, and opinions, after a model of their own. To effect this object, they combined all their strength in that immense undertaking, the Encyclopédie-the first work of that description which had ever been attempted, and which, by the combination of talent which it embraced, and its II. CHAP. extending to every branch of human knowledge, aimed at spreading its influence through all classes of the next generation. Its principles, sometimes just, in part generous, were always seductive, at least to a superficial generation. They denounced external restraint and severity of every kind; denied the rigours and asceticism of religion; declaimed against torture, and all the frightful cruelties of ancient punishment, and inveighed against the powers and fetters of the feudal system; loudly claimed entire liberty of conscience in matters of belief; supported freedom of commerce and action of every kind; and proclaimed a certain remedy for all imaginary grievances, in the general adoption of representative governments and popular institutions. But, amidst so many philanthropic projects, there was one fatal defect which rendered them all, when applied to practice, entirely nugatory. They made no provision for coercing the selfish passions of our nature; amidst all their reforms, they forgot the one on which they all depend the reform of the human heart. They tried to solve the problem, of all others the most insoluble, "Given a world of knaves, to produce happiness out of their united actions."1 Against religious influence, which alone has ever proved adequate to that herculean work, they declared the most envenomed hostility: they trusted to the united virtue of mankind for a safeguard against all the temptations which arise in the course of extensive changes in society-and the French Revolution was the consequence. Carlyle. 57. D'Alembert. In the warfare against the church, which formed so Raynal, Di- remarkable a characteristic of French literature in the derot, and latter part of the eighteenth century, many able and learned men took an active part. The Abbé Raynal, in his philosophical history of the two Indies, laboured by all the powers of eloquence, and the charms of historic painting, to portray the supposed innocence and virtue of primitive man, and the unbounded calamities which the II. bigotry of priests and the thirst for gold had brought into CHAP. the regions of his unsophisticated abode. D'Alembert, Helvetius, and Diderot took bolder ground, and, without stopping short at oblique insinuations, openly denied the existence of God, and ascribed the whole material and moral universe to the fortuituous concourse of atoms, the inherent and immutable laws of matter, or the not less rigorous and compulsory subjection of mind to the laws of necessity. These frightful doctrines, which tended at once to extinguish all feeling of moral responsibility, and all motive to self-control in men, and to reduce society to a mere game of chance, where success was the only test of excellence, were rendered the more dangerous by the admirable and lucid talent with which the first of these highly gifted men traced out the deepest mysteries of the modern analysis, and the prodigious and varied industry, as well as graceful taste, with which the two last touched equally on the lightest and most fascinating, as on the deepest and most abstruse branches of literature. 58. doctrines of rialists. These really eminent and able, though dangerous and deluding writers, were followed by a crowd of others, Pernicious whose names have already sunk into oblivion, but whose the Matewritings exercised at the time, and for long after, an unbounded sway over public thought in France and great part of Europe. Openly supporting the doctrines of materialism, denying the existence of a Supreme Being and a future state, they applied all the energy of their talent to add to the force of present passion, and minister to the variety of sensual gratification. The novels of Crébillon and Laclos, Louvet's memoirs of Faublas, and innumerable madrigals, belong to this class. Licentious adventures, highly painted scenes of voluptuousness, erotic poems, or undisguised obscenity, were the stimulants which they incessantly applied to emancipate man. To gain money, which might purchase such enjoyments, was held forth as the only rational object in existence. Future punishment was not to be thought of; it was a mere |