1915.

NOTES: 

[Footnote 6:  October 1915.]

THE ROUSSEAU AFFAIR

No one who has made the slightest expedition into that curious and fascinating country, Eighteenth-Century France, can have come away from it without at least one impression strong upon him—­that in no other place and at no other time have people ever squabbled so much.  France in the eighteenth century, whatever else it may have been—­however splendid in genius, in vitality, in noble accomplishment and high endeavour—­was certainly not a quiet place to live in.  One could never have been certain, when one woke up in the morning, whether, before the day was out, one would not be in the Bastille for something one had said at dinner, or have quarrelled with half one’s friends for something one had never said at all.

Of all the disputes and agitations of that agitated age none is more remarkable than the famous quarrel between Rousseau and his friends, which disturbed French society for so many years, and profoundly affected the life and the character of the most strange and perhaps the most potent of the precursors of the Revolution.  The affair is constantly cropping up in the literature of the time; it occupies a prominent place in the later books of the Confessions; and there is an account of its earlier phases—­an account written from the anti-Rousseau point of view—­in the Memoires of Madame d’Epinay.  The whole story is an exceedingly complex one, and all the details of it have never been satisfactorily explained; but the general verdict of subsequent writers has been decidedly hostile to Rousseau, though it has not subscribed to all the virulent abuse poured upon him by his enemies at the time of the quarrel.  This, indeed, is precisely the conclusion which an unprejudiced reader of the Confessions would naturally come to.  Rousseau’s story, even as he himself tells it, does not carry conviction.  He would have us believe that he was the victim of a vast and diabolical conspiracy, of which Grimm and Diderot were the moving spirits, which succeeded in alienating from him his dearest friends, and which eventually included all the ablest and most distinguished persons of the age.  Not only does such a conspiracy appear, upon the face of it, highly improbable, but the evidence which Rousseau adduces to prove its existence seems totally insufficient; and the reader is left under the impression that the unfortunate Jean-Jacques was the victim, not of a plot contrived by rancorous enemies, but of his own perplexed, suspicious, and deluded mind.  This conclusion is supported by the account of the affair given by contemporaries, and it is still further strengthened by Rousseau’s own writings subsequent to the Confessions, where his endless recriminations, his elaborate hypotheses, and his wild inferences bear all the appearance of mania.  Here the matter has rested for many years;