Rousseau, however, whose biographer has no such stories to tell as those
of Calas and La Barre, Sirven and Lally, but only tales of a maiden
wrongfully accused of theft, and a friend left senseless on the pavement
of a strange town, and a benefactress abandoned to the cruelty of her
fate, still was moved in the midst of his erotic visions in the forest
of Montmorency to speak a jealous word in vindication of the divine
government of our world. For him at any rate life was then warm and the
day bright and the earth very fair, and he lauded his gods accordingly.
It was his very sensuousness, as we are so often saying, that made him
religious. The optimism which Voltaire wished to destroy was to him a
sovereign element of comfort. "Pope's poem," he says, "softens my
misfortunes and inclines me to patience, while yours sharpens all my
pains, excites me to murmuring, and reduces me to despair. Pope and
Leibnitz exhort me to resignation by declaring calamities to be a
necessary effect of the nature and constitution of the universe. You
cry, Suffer for ever, unhappy wretch; if there be a God who created
thee, he could have stayed thy pains if he would: hope for no end to
them, for there is no reason to be discerned for thy existence, except
to suffer and to perish."[337] Rousseau then proceeds to argue the
matter, but he says nothing really to the point which Pope had not said
before, and said far more effectively. He begins, however, originally
enough by a triumphant reference to his own great theme of the
superiority of the natural over the civil state. Moral evil is our own
work, the result of our liberty; so are most of our physical evils,
except death, and that is mostly an evil only from the preparations that
we make for it. Take the case of Lisbon. Was it nature who collected the
twenty thousand houses, all seven stories high? If the people of Lisbon
had been dispersed over the face of the country, as wild tribes are,
they would have fled at the first shock, and they would have been seen