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Eventually he turns the scenery into cash, covering it with dear hotels and cheap advertisements. In Europe the process has long been systematised. Lake Leman was once a spot which inspired poets with a new feeling for romantic landscape. What Rousseau or Byron could find inspiration on that lake to-day?
"That stupid servant!" squealed Madame Rousseau, hugging the baby to her breast in frantic relief. "Oh, what a fright I have had. Take the baby, Jean. Mon dieu! Do not let it fall! Oh, m'sieur, madame, you will never know how I was anguished. I thought I had lost my darling, my adored one. The black-hand what-you-call-him non, non, the kidnapper. My baby!
For without these the final purpose of realising man's rational nature would remain unfulfilled. This is Kant's answer to Rousseau. The full realisation of man's rational nature is possible only in a "universal civil society" founded on political justice. The establishment of such a society is the highest problem for the human species.
The former seems to have been a loyal and homely soul; the latter, restless, imperious, penetrating, unamiable. Their dealings with Rousseau were marked by perfect sincerity and straightforward friendship. They gave him a convenient apartment in a small summer lodge in the park, to which he retreated when he cared for a change from his narrow cottage.
Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, Mirabeau himself had gone there to naturalise their writings in this land of publicity. The mask of concealment which these writers assumed in Amsterdam deceived no one, but it effected their security. All the crimes of thought were there inviolable; it was at the same time the asylum and the arsenal of new ideas.
The aim of the Jacobin minority, inspired by the doctrines of the Contrat Social of Rousseau, was to found a democratic state based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people.
He and Theresa were on profoundly uncomfortable terms about this time, and Rousseau is not the only person by many thousands who has deceived himself into thinking that some form of words between man and woman must magically transform the substance of their characters and lives, and conjure up new relations of peace and steadfastness.
Yet there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs as the worst of injuries. "I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him sincerely," says Rousseau, "and I counted with entire confidence upon the same sentiments in him.
When, in the eighteenth century, minds became emancipated from the narrow restrictions of religious discipline, and when method was introduced into the study of scientific problems, Nature took her revenge as well in literature as in all other fields of human thought. Rousseau it was who inaugurated the movement in France, and the whole of Europe followed in the wake of France.
"You old Lumignon," said Stidmann, "you remind me of the publisher before the Revolution who said 'If only I could keep Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau very poor in my backshed, and lock up their breeches in a cupboard, what a lot of nice little books they would write to make my fortune. If works of art could be hammered out like nails, workmen would make them.
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