Rousseau for the Present Age

Reviews Rousseau/or the Present Age To move from John Morley's Rousseau, which, probably more than any other work, has set the pattern of opinion about Jean-Jacques in the Englishspeaking world, to F. C. Green's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is to move from one age into another; from the simple, liberal, rational, optimistic Victorian past to the subtle complexities of the present period of uncertainty. (JeanJacques Rousseau: A Critical Study oj his Life and Writings. Cambridge: At the University Press [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited]. 1955. Pp. viii. 376. $5.50.) No doubt Professor Green is nearer to Morley in many of his views than this contrast suggests. He has a dislike for the moral lapses, the failings in character of Rousseau, as has John Morley but he writes about them with an open frankness quite impossible for the Victorian Englishman. He has comparable suspicions of lbe political dangers in Rousseau's theories but his fears have been sharpened and pointed by lbe events of the last forty years. Professor Green has seen the meaning of totalitarianism in Germany, in Italy, in Russia. But if the present biographer shares some of his predecessor's antipathies he has at the same time much more sympathy for, and a far greater understanding of his subject. To him Rousseau is far less a prophet, true or false-though, in fact, he is both-than a man, curious, complex, exciting, perfectly suited to the investigations of the psychologist-biographer. From one who is not only intimately and sympathetically conversant with eighteenth-century France, the world of Rousseau, but who has also given us a most acute and understanding appraisal of The Mind of Proust, who knows the Proustiao technique and outlook as do few others today, this approach to Jean-Jacques was to be expected. That it has been carried through with such a deft touch in this case is most gratifying. The result is a penetrating, balanced portrait of one of history's most controversial figures, such as has not existed in English before. The looking into Rousseau's mind, the probing of motives, the weighing of personality: this character surgery goes on throughout the book. A child deprived of his mother, a disordered youth, the idyllic affair of a young man with Mme de Warens and its cruel denouement, the searching trials of a poverty-ridden. insecure man seeking sympathy and a place in society. are all tactfully but surely explored. The mind behind lbe books that were, as Mme de ·Stael so aptly put it, "to inflame all," is regarded from every angle. The effect of the liaison with Therese Levasseur, for whom the author has 105 little good to say; the breaks between Rousseau and Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, Hume-how many others?-are all carefully considered. Especially acute and Dovel, it seems to me, is the treatment of Rousseau's last years, the fascinating yet poignantly terrible story of the breakdown of a fine mind. The book ends with one of the author's characteristic touches of sympathy when he pictures the aged, broken man in "the last of his solitary walks . . . travelling fast along familiar roads, homeward bound for Les Charmettes, Chambery, Annecy and the golden, radiant past." Combined with his perceptive delving into Rousseau's personality are highly useful analyses of his works. Of these, the ones concerning education, the Emile in particular, and the political writings are most fully treated. Having allowed for all contradictions and exaggerations Professor Green sees Rousseau's Emile as the greatest educational work of the eighteenth century, and points out that when men like "Basedow, Pestalozzi, Froebel and Montessori" saw its "true significance" in the next century "a new era in education" was opened. In dealing with the political writings the author carries on a running commentary upon the opinions of C. E. Vaughan, the editor of The Political Writings 0/ Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge, 1915). He is less inclined than Vaughan to see Rousseau as an advocate of etatisme, his "final impression" being that Rousseau "whilst reluctantly granting that nature intended man to lead a social existence, always privately believed that, in creating our species, she was...