in d'Argenson's Journal that "the English nation is philosophical, it consists of men who think much and constantly; we may see it in their books." 1 These books, it is true, are destitute of art; their matter is disconnected, ex abrupto. But they contain "fresh ideas and great penetration," and they are "free from the commonplace." D'Argenson adds that the only men of real originality and individuality that he knew in France were those men of letters who had frequently visited England: namely, Voltaire-which is perhaps correct, and the abbé Le Blancwhich is paradoxical, to say the least.

But if the English were applauded for the independence of their thought, and if there was already a disposition to admit that "the English mind is a mind of a different stamp, created by itself," they were no less admired for their high spirit.

From England, the land of freedom, there blew, as d'Argenson said, "the breath of liberty." Voltaire had greatly admired the strength of the English middle class, Montesquieu the excellence of the constitution and of public morals. In Le Français à Londres the merchant Jacques Rosbif, puffed up with his own importance, assumed the character of a philosophising rustic who speaks his mind to the ruling classes: "What do I care for an imaginary nobility? The honest folk are the true nobles; nothing is really plebeian except vice." The terrible irony with which Voltaire handled the subject in his Lettres anglaises is only too well-known. He satirizes the country squires who come up from the depths of their province, a name ending in ac or ille their only fortune, and play the part of slaves in a minister's antechamber. He extols the honest merchant who, in the seclusion of his office, gives orders on Surat or Cairo and contributes to the happiness of the world. He does more; he dedicates Zaïre "to Mr Falkener, an English merchant." The idea seemed funny, and the Comédie Italienne put upon the stage "Mr Falkener, or the honest merchant." Voltaire took up the challenge, and, in a second dedication which, to his satisfaction, he was able to address to "M. le Chevalier Falkener, 1 Journal et mémoires, October 1747 (ed. Jannet, v. 232). 2 Garat, Mémoires sur Suard, vol. i., p. 70.

3 Letter x., Sur le commerce.

English Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte," had the pleasure of once more humbling the national pride, which could not conceive how a merchant could become a legislator, a good officer, or a public minister. Could the reader possibly find any difficulty in believing that the Royal Exchange in London was "a more respectable place than many courts?" Or could he really be so blind as not to acknowledge that the occupation of wool-merchant was the highest of all professions?

Voltaire's assertions, in which he possibly had no very strong belief, were substantiated by Montesquieu.-Imagine a nation of an unusual character,-unambitious of conquest, thinking nothing of military men, and a great deal of "civil titles "; imagine this people invested with the empire of the sea, situated in the centre of the commercial world of Europe, and bringing to its transactions a good faith and integrity never exhibited by others; imagine it blessed with a virtuous nobility, an active and charitable clergy, a well-informed and industrious populace; attribute to it further an ingrained habit of judging men solely by their real qualities, and of neglecting the false splendour of idleness in favour of solid worth; conceive, lastly, in the intellectual products of this nation-the work of men of meditation, "who have thought in solitude"-a "bold and original spirit of discovery,' the fruit of a certain fierce integrity of disposition—and would not such a nation be the happiest of all? In short, and here the author throws off the mask, "this is the nation which, more than any other, has succeeded in making the best use of three great possessions: religion, commerce and freedom.” 1

So magnificent a panegyric from such a pen set the seal decisively upon English virtue, which became one of the idols of the age. In vain a few obscure voices were raised in protest against the "astounding metamorphosis" which was turning every one's head. What! a nation formerly regarded as the incarnation of arrogance, jealousy, selfishness, and cruelty-the modern Carthage-was now represented as all that was generous, magnanimous and humane! "What a reckoning that great man,

the renowned, the illustrious Voltaire will have to pay before

1 Esprit des lois, book xix., ch. xxvii., and book xx., ch. viii.

God for the vast host of those whose heads he has turned ! But the infatuation was too strong: a journalist of the day, criticising one of Jean-Jacques' expressions, wrote: "As an untamed courser erects his mane, paws the ground, and struggles violently at the mere approach of the bit, whereas a horse that has been broken in patiently endures both switch and spur, so the Englishman refuses to bow his head beneath a yoke which the greater part of mankind endure without a murmur, and prefers the most stormy liberty to peaceful subjection." 2

The illusion was a gross one, or, to say the very least, the exaggeration was palpable. Looked at closely, eighteenth-century England appears anything but the privileged home of virtue and honour. Its nobility is brutal and dissolute, its clergy ignorant, its justice venal: Fielding's novels abound in characteristic and only too faithful touches which give us but a sorry idea of the upper classes at that time.3 Montesquieu himself observed that in England "money was held in sovereign estimation, while virtue was scarcely esteemed at all."4 Yet he too gave way before the general enthusiasm, which amazed even the English themselves. "We may be dupes to French follies," wrote Horace Walpole, "but they are ten times greater fools to be the dupes of our virtue."5

In truth, admiration magnified and transformed everything. The brutality of the English was a matter of common repute, but it was regarded as a sign of energy; "nature in England seems to be more vigorous and straightforward than among the French." "It is there that you will find true love of duty and respect, tender reverence for parents, unqualified submission to their will. . . . An English village maiden is a kind of celestial being." This is the tone taken by novels of the period. A certain survival of barbarism was not displeasing. Lord Carlisle

1 Préservatif contre l'anglomanie, Minorca and Paris, 1757.

2 Journal encyclopédique, April 1758.

3 An English critic, Mr Forsyth, has composed an entire picture of the period out of material supplied by its novels alone (Cf. Forsyth, Novels and Novelists).—See also Lecky.

4 Notes sur l'Angleterre.

5 Letters, vol. iv., p. 119.

6 D'Arnaud, Œuvres, vol. i., pp. xv.-xvi.

7 Ibid.

wrote from France: "They think we are very little altered since the days of Julius Cæsar; that we leave our clothes at Calais, having no further occasion for them," and that every Englishman conceals his nakedness by means of a sunflower, "like the prints in Clarke's Cæsar." This touch of barbarism gave additional flavour to insular virtue, and the Danubian peasant only preached the better for being a Danubian. The French were under the spell of the English sensitiveness, of that virginity of heart and senses by which the source of great emotions, exhausted in the gay youths of France by scepticism and pleasure, is kept unimpaired. "However vivid," it was said, "the colours in which Southern passions are painted, neither Italy nor Spain can produce examples as grand and tragic as those of England.” 2

Philosophical, contemplative, passionate such was the impression of the English produced on the mind of a French reader towards the middle of the century. Such too was the conception gathered of English literature: a literature produced by men of discernment and sombre disposition, dialecticians by nature and in the highest degree philosophical. All these features may be summed up in a single characteristic: individualism. In contrast to a people in whom all native originality has been obliterated by over-sociability, and all relief worn down by constant friction, England presented the spectacle of a lusty and vigorous nation, whose genius, like a freshly struck medal, still retained all its brilliant distinctness of outline.

III

ROUSSEAU shared the admiration of his contemporaries, and gave expression to it in the most eloquent form.

At Les Charmettes he had read the Lettres philosophiques with deep interest. There, too, he had discovered a few English books-the Essay on the Understanding and the Spectator,3-and

1 G. Selwyn and his contemporaries, by J. Heneage Jesse, vol. ii., p. 202.

2 Journal étranger, June 1755, p. 237.

3 See the Confessions: Euvres, ed. Hachette, vol. viii., p. 78.

had begun to study the English language. Mme. de Warens had taught him to love Bayle and Saint-Évremond: "Her taste, if I may say so, was of a somewhat Protestant character; she talked of no one but Bayle, and thought very highly of Saint-Évremond, who had died long before in France." From the latter Rousseau, too, may have derived a few ideas concerning England. He had certainly read the novels of Prévost, and especially Cleveland, with passionate interest.

At Paris, in 1744, he was brought into contact with all the literary men who were interested in English matters: Marivaux; Desfontaines, who assisted him with his counsel1; Saurin, the future author of a drama called Beverley, an imitation of Edward Moore; Grimm, a man of open mind and inquisitive with regard to foreign topics; Prévost, "a most amiable and simple character, the author of writings inspired by a warm disposition and well worthy of immortality," who was introduced to him in the house of Mussard, a fellow-countryman, at Passy; above all, Diderot, the anglophile, whose mind was already turned, as it remained throughout his life, to England, the land of his dreams. An atmosphere so propitious to everything that came from beyond the Channel did much to strengthen in Rousseau the sympathies which he afterwards expressed with such warmth.

3

He read the Esprit des Lois on its first appearance, and, in 1756, the Lettres sur les Anglais et les Français of Muralt, who was not only his fellow-countryman, but in more than one respect his precursor. The book was sent him by Deleyre; he had a great admiration for it and borrowed from it extensively; indeed most of his ideas concerning England were derived from Muralt. But he was also indebted to him for several reflexions in the Lettre sur les spectacles. "Virtue," Muralt had written, speaking of comedy, "is held up as a spectacle for popular curiosity; men relegate it to the theatre as its only appropriate sphere, and all these fine feelings seem to them as remote from ordinary life as

1 Cf. H. Beaudoin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. i., p. 154

2 Confessions, ii., 8.

3 Letter of 2nd November 1756 (f. Streckeisen Moultou; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ses amis et ses ennemis).