every great educational reformer since the eighteenth century. Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Madame Montessori are its offspring, and it may safely be said that at the present time there is scarcely an edueational theory or method which cannot in some way be traced to the author of Émile.
Émile to-day
The influence of this work, however, has extended far beyond the confines of education; its effect upon the ideas of several generations has covered a much wider sphere. Rousseau’s work, which, as we said above, possesses an abstract coherence, may also be considered from another standpoint as the personal vindication of a mind in search of happiness; and this is particularly noticeable in Émile. Educationists may consider it lacking in reference to concrete experience, but its fictional character is constantly enlivened by the author’s own experience of life. Here, almost as clearly as in the Confessions, we see Jean-Jacques opposed to a cultural tradition which he regarded as having betrayed mankind; we find him seeking to establish, in the sole light of his conscience, new and truer relations between the senses and the heart; passion and virtue, reason and faith. Émile thus became one of the major text-books of the French Revolution and of European Romanticism, and Mirabeau ranked it among the masterpieces of that age. ‘If one could read no more than five works in the whole of Literature, Émile would be one of them.’ So wrote the young Chateaubriand in 1707. In Germany, before his time, the philosophers and poets of the Sturm und Drang, e.g. Kant and Fichte, Schiller and Goethe, all drew inspiration from it.
There is no doubt that to-day Émile, like the Nouvelle Héloïse, no longer possesses the same power to sway its reader. Rousseau, indeed, continues to exert a lively influence upon present-day ideas; but it is chiefly through the Confessions and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire that he obtains a hearing. There are in his philosophy certain trends that are closely akin to contemporary thought, and those are nowhere more evident than in Émile. It was Rousseau’s aim to restore man to the basic principles of existence and compel him to find all that is really worth while within its somewhat narrow limits that condition would impose. His approach is particularly well illustrated in Émile: even at its most artificial the book represents the blue-print of a conscious ideal based on its elementary impressions and impulses. Accordingly this treatise on education, having inspired both the Revolution and Romanticism, finds a distinct echo in existential philosophies. Thus the author’s originality continues to prove inexhaustible; in the words of Amiel, his fellow countryman, he is ‘a forerunner in everything.’
A. Boutet de Monvel.
