iputians. In
other mouths Rousseau's sentiment, more fully interpreted, became
unequivocally misanthropical. Byron, if any definite logical theory were
to be fixed upon him, excluded the human race at large from his
conception of nature. He loved, or talked as though he loved, the
wilderness precisely because it was a wilderness; the sea because it
sent men 'shivering to their gods,' and the mountains because their
avalanches crush the petty works of human industry. Rousseau was less
anti-social than his disciple. The mountains with him were the great
barriers which kept civilisation and all its horrors at bay. They were
the asylums for liberty and simplicity. There the peasant, unspoilt as
yet by _trinkgelds_, not oppressed by the great, nor corrupted by the
rich, could lead that idyllic life upon which his fancy delighted. In a
passage quoted, as Sainte-Beuve notices, by Cowper, Rousseau describes,
with his usual warmth of sentiment, the delightful _matinee anglaise_
passed in sight of the Alps by the family which had learnt the charms of
simplicity, and regulated its manners and the education of its children
by the unsophisticated laws of nature. It is doubtless a charming
picture, though the virtuous persons concerned are a little
over-conscious of their virtue, and it indicates a point of coincidence
between the two men. Rousseau, as Mr. Morley says, could appreciate as
well as Cowper the charms of a simple and natural life. Nobody could be
more eloquent on the beauty of domesticity; no one could paint better
the happiness of family life, where the main occupation was the
primitive labour of cultivating the ground, where no breath of
unhallowed excitement penetrated from the restless turmoil of the
outside world, where the mother knew her place, and kept to her placid
round of womanly duties, and where the children were taught with a
gentle firmness which developed every germ of reason and affection,
without undue stimulus or undue repression. And yet one must doubt
whether Cowper would have felt himself quite at ease in the family of
the Wolmars. The circle which gathered round the hearth at Olney to
listen for the horn of the approaching postman, and solaced itself with
cups 'that cheer but not inebriate,'[19] would have been a little
scandalised by some of the sentiments current in the Vaudois paradise,
and certainly by some of the antecedents of the party assembled. Cowper
and Mrs. Unwin, and even their more fas