all its powers in giving a grace and nobleness to our natural appetites, and in raising them into a higher class and order than seemed justly to belong to them. Through Rousseau, your masters are resolved to destroy these aristocratic prejudices. The passion called love has so general and powerful an influence; it makes so much of the entertainment, and indeed so much of the occupation, of that part of life which decides the character for ever, that the mode and the principles on which it engages the sympathy and strikes the imagination, become of the utmost importance to the morals and manners of every society. Your rulers were well aware of this; and in their system of changing your manners to accommodate them to their politics, they found nothing so convenient as Rousseau. Through him they teach men to love after the fashion of philosophers; that is, they teach to men, to Frenchmen, a love without gallantry; a love without anything of that fine flower of youthful ness and gentility, which places it, if not among the virtues, among the ornaments of life. Instead of this passion, naturally allied to grace and manners, they infuse into their youth an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness; of metaphysical speculations blended with the coarsest sensuality. Such is the general morality of the passions to be found in their famous philosopher, in his famous work of philosophic gallantry, the Nouvelle Eloise. I have often wondered how this writer comes to be so much more admired and followed on the continent than he is with us. Perhaps a secret charm in the language may have its share in this extraordinary difference. . . . Not that I consider him as wholly destitute of just notions: he is sometimes moral, and moral in a very sublime strain. But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous; and the more mischievous for this mixture; for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcileable with eloquence; and the mind would reject and throw off with disgust a lesson of pure and unmixed evil. These writers make even virtue a pander to vice. However, I less consider the author than the system of the Assembly in perverting morality through his means. This I confess makes me nearly despair of any attempt upon the minds of their followers through reason, honour, or conscience. The great object of your tyrants is to destroy the gentlemen of France; and for that purpose they destroy, to the best of their power, all the effect of those relations which may render considerable men either powerful or even safe. To destroy that order they vitiate the whole community. By the false sympathies of this Nouvelle Eloise they endeavour to subvert those principles of domestic trust and fidelity, which form the discipline of social life. For the like end, they strive to destroy that tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees. Your despots govern by terror. They know that he who truly fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they aim to eradicate from the mind, through the writings of Voltaire, Helvetius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage. Their object is, that their fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe, but that which is inspired by their Committee of Public Safety, with its lanterne and its guillotine. THE END. |