The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 1850-1873, 1873-07-18
voltaire and Rousseau.

y
with Voltaire, from serious personages.
like Frederick the Great and Turgot,
down to the sorriest poetaster who sent
his verses to be corrected or be praised
Rousseau's debt to him in the DAYS of
his uniformed youth we have already
seen as well as the courtesies with which
they approached one another, when
Richelieu employed the struggling mu-
stefan to make some notifications in the
great mans uDconsidered court. piece.
Neither of them then dreamed that
their two names were destined to form
the great literary antithesis of the CEN
fury. In the ten years that elapsed be-
tween their first interchange of letters
and their first fit of GOODNESS, it must
have been tolerably clear to either of
them, if either of them gave thought
to the matter, that their dissidence was
increasing and likely to increase. Their
methods were different, their training
different, their points of view different,
and, above all these things, their tenn
peraments were different by whole
heavens breadth.
A great number of excellent and
pointed half-truths have been uttered
by various persons in illustration of all
these contrasts, as that the philosophy
of VOltaire is that of the happy, while
Rousseau is the philosopher of the I'M
happy that Voltaire steals away their
faith from those who doubt, while
Rousseau strikes doubt in the mind Of
the unbeliever that the gayety of the
one saddens, while the sadness of the
other consoles. If we pass from the
marked divergence in the tendencies of
the work of these two extraordinary
writer's, which is imperfectly limited at
in such sayings as these, to the diver
gence between them lin all the funda-
mental conditions of intellectual and
moral life, the variation which divided
the revolutionary stream into two chan
nels, flowing broadly apart, through I'M
like regions and climates, down to the
great sea, is Ineligible enough. Vol
taire was the arch-representative of all
those elements in contemporary thought,
its curiosity, irreverence, intrepidity,
righteousness, nationality, to which, as
we have so often had to say, Rousseau's
temperament and his Genevese spirit
made him profoundly antipathetic. He
was the great high-priest, robed In the
dazzling vestments of poetry, and phil
osophy, and history, of that religion of
knowledge and art which Rousseau de-
clared to be the destroyer of the felicity
of men. The glitter has faded away
from Voltaire's philosophical raiment
since those days, and his laurel-bough
lies little leahess. This cannot make
us forget that he was in his day and
generation one of the sovereign emanci-
pators, because he awoke one dormant
set of energies, just as Rousseau pre-
sently came to awake another set. Each
was a power, not merely by virtue of
some singular -eminence of under
standing or mysterious unshared in
sight of his own, but for the reason that
no partial and one-sided direction can
permanently satisfy the manifold aspi-
rations and faculties of the human
mind in the great average of common
speak, whom they influence, and by
whom, as a painter or dramatist is, they
are in turn influenced, depressed, or
buoyed up. Voltaire's mental constitu-
ton made him eagerly objective, a
seeker of true things, quivering for ac-
ton, admirably sympathetic with all
life and movement, a spirit restlessly
traversing the whole world. Rousseau,
far different from this, saw in himself a
reflected microcosm of the outer world,
and was content to take that instead of
the outer world, and for its truest YER
sion. He made his own moods the
premises from which he deduced a sys-
tenn of life for humanity, and, so far as
humanity has shared his moods or some
parts of them, his system was true and
has been accepted. To him the hustle
of the outer world was only hindrance
to that process of self-absorption, which
was his way of interpreting life. Ac-
cessible only to interests of emotion
and sense, he was saved from intellec-
tual sterility, and made eloquent, by
the vehemence of his emotion and the
fire of his senses. He was a master
example of sensibility, as Voltaire was
a master-example of clear-eyed pene-
tration.
This must not be taken for a rigid
piece of mutually exclusive division.
for the edges of character are not cut
exactly sharp, as words are. Especially
when any type is intense, it seems to
meet and touch its opposite Just as
Voltaire's piercing activity and sound
ness of intelligence made him one of
the humanest of men, so Rousseau's
emotional susceptibility endowed him
with the gift of a vision that carried far
into the social depths. It was very
early criticism on the pair, that Voltaire
wrote on more subjects, but that Rous-
seau was the more profound. In truth
one was hardly much more profound
than the other. Rousseau had the
sonorousness of speech which popular
confusion of thought is apt to identify
with depth. And he had seriousness.
If profundity means the quality of see
ing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau
had, in a general way, rather less of it
than the shrewd-witted crusher of the
infamous. What the distinction really
amounts to is that Rousseau had a
strong feeling for certain very impor-
tant aspects of human life, which Vol
taire thought very little about, or never
thought about at all, and that, while
Voltaire was concerned with poetry,
history, literature, and the more ridicu-
lous parts of the religious superstition
of his time, Rousseau thought about So
cial justice, and duty, and God, and the
spiritual consciousness of men, with a
certain attempt at thoroughness and
system. AS for the substance of his
as we have already seen in
the "Discourses, and shall soon have
an opportunity of seeing still more
clearly, it was often as thin and hollow
as if he had belonged to the company
of the epigrammatical, who, after ali,
have far less of monopoly of shallow
than is often supposed. The |
prime merit of Rousseau, in comparing
him with the brilliant chief of the ra-
tionalistic school of the time, is his |
reverence; reverence for moral worth |
in however obscure intellectual COM |
pany, for the dignity of human charac-
ter and the loftiness of duty, for some |
of those cravings of the human mind |
after the divine and incommensurable, |
which may indeed often be content with |
solutions proved by long time and slow
experience to be inadequate, but which
are closely bound up with the highest
elements of nobleness of soul.-"ROuS-
Se0u," 6y John Morley.
One of the most touching instances
If gratitude with which we are familiar
the other day. A little boy,
-ha child Of q WEALTHY ToOtbor tupoh1ad |