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It was to me always a puzzle that, even in the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as the St.
It is extraordinary that a writer who attributes so much importance to Rousseau, and who gives us so ample an account of his political ideas, should not have traced these ideas to their source, nor even told us that they had a source wholly outside of France.
Thus united, but strangely dissimilar, the two parties converged on the Lake of Geneva, where the poets met for the first time. Shelley, though jarred by Byron's worldliness and pride, was impressed by his creative power, and the days they spent sailing on the lake, and wandering in a region haunted by the spirit of Rousseau, were fruitful.
I entered the drawing-room, fearful lest Edmee should have retired to her bed-room; for there I could not have followed her. She was sitting near the fire and amusing herself by pulling out the petals of the blue and white asters which I had gathered during a walk to the tomb of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope, discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him forth for an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only a misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in: he has a touching faith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of sweet simpleness.
This is, properly, the first epoch of his life. Before then he is nothing more than he was before he was born; he has not a sentiment, not an idea; he scarcely has sensations; he does not feel even his own existence. It is useless to enlarge upon the absurdity of this theory, and upon the flagrant contradiction into which Rousseau allows himself to fall.
In Rousseau then, we have one of the finest individual expressions of the amateur spirit in painting, taking actually a place among the examples of paintings, such as those of the Kwakiutl Indians, or the sculpture of the Congo people, partaking of the very same quality of directness and simplicity, and of contact with the prevailing image chosen for representation.
When Hobbes says that "to the laws which the sovereign maketh, the sovereign is not subject, for if he were subject to the civil laws he were subject to himself, which were not subjection but freedom," his notion of sovereignty is exactly that expressed by Rousseau in his unexplained dogma of the inalienableness of sovereignty.
As for M. Chebe, who prided himself on being as fond of nature as the late Jean Jacques Rousseau, he did not appreciate it without the accompaniments of shooting-matches, wooden horses, sack races, and a profusion of dust and penny-whistles, which constituted also Madame Chebe's ideal of a country life.
He sang as he worked, and loved his fellowmen all the time; but most of all, he loved his sister. "Rousseau is an eagle," he used to say in speaking of his fellow artist. "As for me, I am only a lark, putting forth some little songs in my gray clouds." It has been noted that most great landscape painters have been city-bred, a remarkable fact.
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