Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  [his] work may be regarded as a table of the human passions, stripped of all disguise, laid naked to the eye, and dissected by the masterly hand of a curious artist. We see actions traced up to their first springs and actuating principles, in so natural a manner, that we cannot avoid giving our assent to Mr. Hume’s conclusions, even when they disagree with those we should have formed from a perusal of the simple facts.

  But this eulogy was a few years in the waiting. The first volume of the History, covering the reigns of James I and Charles I, was a commercial dud. Hume, who expected much from his evenhanded dealing with the issues of king and Parliament, prerogative and liberty, church and state, England and the other British nations, was assailed on all sides. As he noted, “English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, Churchman and Sectary, Freethinker and Religionist, Patriot and Courtier, united in their rage. … I scarcely, indeed, heard of one man in the three kingdoms, considerable for rank or letters, that could endure the book.”

  He diagnosed several causes: the spirit of irreligion in the work, Whig ministers’ decrying it, and London booksellers’ conspiring against him because it was published by an Edinburgh bookseller. The Monthly Review (vol. 12, 1755) gave it a twenty-three-page appraisal, opening with a condescending: “The history of his own country is the last he ought to have attempted.” The reviewer praised Hume’s orderly and elegant narration and command of character, but questioned his impartiality, and ended with a stern rebuke:

  [On religion] he seems to be of the opinion, that there are but two species of it in all nature, superstition and fanaticism; and under one or other of these, he gives us to understand, the whole of the Christian profession is, and ever was, included.

  The year 1756 saw Hume choose a London bookseller to publish the second part of the History, covering the period from the execution of Charles I to the 1688 revolution. The Monthly Review thought it more satisfying: it had none of those indecent excursions on the subject of religion which must have given offense to every candid reader.

  In the summer of 1758, Hume departed for London to stay with Annie and Peggy Elliot, who ran a boardinghouse for Scottish gentlemen in quiet, narrow Lisle Street, near what is now Leicester Square. Socially, London proved frostier than cozy Edinburgh for this Scottish purveyor of contentious theological and political opinions. Samuel Johnson snubbed him. David Garrick introduced him to Edmund Burke, who claimed he had spoken to Hume only because the present liberal state of society required it.

  Hume also ventured into political high society, meeting a number of Whig grandees. With some significant politicians he did not get on well, among them George Grenville, soon to be prime minister. Grenville and his Whig allies were all enemies of Bute, then the politically powerful tutor to the future George III, who described the Scottish earl as his “dearest friend.” The Whig belief that Bute was imbuing George with dangerous ideas of monarchical government stoked anti-Scottish sentiment. This probably contributed to the antagonism toward Hume, who, furthermore, was seen as a Tory sympathizer.

  Hume completed the two volumes of the History of the House of Tudor in 1759. “The clamour against this performance was almost equal to that against the History of the first two Stuarts.” Horace Walpole thought it “hasty,” inaccurate, and careless. Dividing his time between London and Edinburgh, Hume then labored until November 1761 on what would prove to be the final part of his marathon series, covering the period from Julius Caesar to Henry VII.

  The History series, ultimately, if belatedly, brought Hume respect, rewards, and renown. Certainly his command of prose and his philosophical insight combined to present history as it had never been presented hitherto. He could move the reader with his set pieces and penetrating character studies while deploying his gifts as a philosophic historian to explain the wider significance and motive of what was narrated. His use of satire, parody, and irony; his ability to shift effortlessly from factual statements to cleverly observed description; his command of language to create effect—all these enabled him to turn historical events and analysis into a seamless and compelling narrative. His compassionate portrayal of the death of Charles I made readers weep; his near-burlesque vision of Archbishop Laud at Communion made them cry with laughter.

  Controversy was inevitable, however. For Hume had involved himself in a fundamental political divide. What attitude should be taken to the Stuart kings and their overthrow? And historically, had the governance of England been based on an absolute or a limited monarchy? Tories believed, broadly, in an absolutist inheritance of English government grounded in and exercising power through the royal prerogative. Equally broad, the Whig concept was of a prerogative conventionally limited by the traditional liberties of the people expressed through Parliament.

  Hume congratulated himself on arriving at a balance between both interpretations. “My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.” But as Hume also understood, his readers were more influenced by his character studies, and so saw him as writing from a Tory viewpoint. “Nothing can so much prove that men commonly regard more persons than things, as to find that I am commonly numbered among the Tories.”

  However, Hume always regarded himself as standing above political divisions, and in his writings Whigs could detect support. At the end of the History, while stressing the fragility and flux of the constitution, he claimed that the Glorious Revolution broke irrevocably with the past. “It gave such an ascendant to popular principles as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy. … We, in this island, have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”

  The History made Hume moderately prosperous. On Whitsunday 1762, he announced his purchase of the third story facing south (and the sixth facing north, as it was built on a slope) of James’s Court in Edinburgh, with magnificent views over Edinburgh and across the Firth of Forth. Katherine Home and the maid Peggy joined him, and he bought a chaise.

  WITH THE LAST volume of the History, Hume had come to the end of his creative work; from now on, he would only be dealing with the devious behavior of his booksellers, reediting, and revising.

  How had Hume’s latest career petered out and his intellectual output dried up? To the Earl of Shelburne, an Irish intellectual and future prime minister, Hume likened himself to a Hottentot who flees the cultivated life and returns to his companions in the woods. A man accustomed to retreat and study, he told the earl, was unfit for the commerce of the great world and it was wise for him to shun it. But behind the rational phrases lay umbrage and bile. Although he now had an enviable reputation and a circle of friends in London, Hume was bitter at the scant regard given to men of letters by men of riches and power. Literature was appreciated in Scotland. This was not so among “the barbarians who inhabit the Banks of the Thames.”

  Indeed, he seems to have returned to Edinburgh estranged from the English, almost seeking refuge. The London “barbarians” were rife with anti-Scottish prejudice. In September 1764, Gilbert Elliot, an old Edinburgh chum and M.P., wrote to Hume, then in Paris, exhorting him to “love the French as much as you will; but above all continue still an Englishman.” In his resentful reply, Hume mused on his future:

  I believe, taking the continent of Europe from Petersburg to Lisbon, and from Bergen to Naples, there is not one who ever heard of my name, who has not heard of it with advantage, both in point of morals and genius. I do not believe there is one Englishman in fifty who if he heard I had broke my neck tonight would be sorry. Some because I am not a Whig; some because I am not a Christian; and all because I am a Scotsman. Can you seriously talk of my continuing an Englishman?

  He contemplated taking the reigns of William of Orange and of Anne as his next subject. Nonetheless, he told Andrew Millar, his publisher, “I have an aversion to appear in the capital till I see that more justice is done me with regard to the preceding
volumes. … The general rage against the Scots is an additional discouragement. I think the Scotch Minister [Bute] is obliged to make me some compensation for this.”

  This might have been a pleasantry. If he was genuinely expressing his hopes of a government pension or a place, he was in for another disappointment. Bute was indeed thinking of public office for a Scottish historian—but not for Hume. William Robertson was appointed historiographer royal for Scotland on July 25, 1763, with an increased stipend, of £200. Hume was put out. “I have been accustomed to meet with nothing but insults and indignities from my native country: But if it continues so, ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis.” In the words of the victorious Roman general Scipio Africanus, “Ungrateful fatherland, you shall not even have my bones.”

  Thus in 1763 we find Hume at the height of his literary powers and acknowledged as one of the finest minds of his generation. He has broken new ground in philosophy, politics, economics, historiography. Yet his considerable achievements have not brought him unalloyed success, contentment, or even peace of mind. Rather, at each step of the way, success has been dogged by failure, setbacks, and public hostility. Only the beneficence of his character has won widespread recognition.

  At the age of fifty-two, he is about to embark on another change of career and become a diplomat in the European capital of culture. It was much more than a new job—it was an escape to Elysium.

  4

  Plots, Alarums, and Excursions

  No character in human society is more dangerous than that of the fanatic.

  —HUME

  Cities are the abyss of the human species.

  —ROUSSEAU

  EARLIER, WHILE HUME was still in Edinburgh writing his History in the Advocates Library and making merry at the Poker Club, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had resolved on an escape to solitude.

  However bafflingly to his contemporaries, Rousseau was determined to put Paris behind him. In 1756, aged forty-four, he accepted the hospitality of Louise-Florence d’Épinay, a wealthy noblewoman who had rejected her husband—a philandering, dissolute tax farmer—and whose family château stood on the edge of the forest of Montmorency. In her diary she described Rousseau as seeming “ignorant of the ways of society, but it is clear enough that he is exceedingly able. His complexion is dark and his face is lit up by very burning eyes. When he talks he appears good-looking. But when one recalls his face afterwards one thinks of him as plain.” Rousseau was always lucky in his patrons: Mme d’Épinay would become, for a time, a loyal supporter.

  Rousseau, with Mlle Le Vasseur and her infirm mother, moved to the dwelling Mme d’Épinay had renovated for him, the Hermitage, a short distance from her château—though only after a sharp exchange with his hostess in which he obdurately asserted his financial self-sufficiency. In the Hermitage, he enjoyed, in Mme d’Épinay’s words, “five rooms, a kitchen, a cellar, an acre and a quarter of kitchen garden, a spring of running water, and the forest for a garden.” She had even ingeniously reconstructed the fireplaces so that one fire heated several rooms.

  By this time, the German-born Friedrich Grimm, a hard-up aristocrat who was editor of the cultural newsletter Correspondance littéraire, had become Mme d’Épinay’s latest amour, and he was a fixture at the château, as was Mme d’Épinay’s sister-in-law, Countess Sophie d’Houdetot, with whom Rousseau would fall unbearably in love.

  In Paris, Rousseau’s departure from the capital was derided and there were confident predictions of his speedy return. But for Rousseau, the adjustment from town to country signaled a self-conscious sloughing off of his Parisian skin, a bid for independence and authenticity, and a denial of the philosophes’ approach to life that privileged reason above feeling. He was convinced that the seething immorality of the big city had dripped poison into his spirit. Following this escape, “I recovered my own true nature.”

  His own true nature was ready to embrace Nature itself. The atmosphere in Paris had become abhorrent to him. The triumph of his opera, he mused in the Confessions, “sowed the seed of those secret jealousies which did not break out till long afterwards.” Even by 1756, he observed in literary men, including Grimm and Diderot, a distinct absence of their previous cordiality. When he was invited to the soirées given by the richest member of the philosophe circle, Baron Thiry d’Holbach, the other guests, regular members of the baron’s coterie, whispered in one another’s ears while Rousseau was ignored. Later, in 1757, when Diderot composed a play, The Natural Son, he included a line which Rousseau knew was aimed at him: “The good man lives in society; only a wicked man lives alone.” He was deeply hurt.

  Rousseau had entered a period of psychological transformation that he recorded in exalted terms. In the Confessions, he portrayed himself as having become intoxicated with virtue: an intoxication which started in his head but flowed to his heart. It “was the origin of my sudden eloquence, and of the truly celestial fire that burned in me and spread to my early books.” He also experienced a surge in confidence in his dealings with others. The effect of these changes on Rousseau can be seen in his 1758 Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater—a clash with Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert that involved both Diderot and Voltaire. D’Alembert, Diderot’s coeditor on the Encyclopédie, was a pioneering mathematician and theoretical astronomer, a sparkling conversationalist and talented mimic. He was generally held to have a lovable character, free of extreme passions—except for his invincible ambition.

  Following an excursion to Geneva, in the course of which he visited Voltaire, d’Alembert wrote an article on the city for the Encyclopédie. Among other darts aimed at the Calvinist structure, and incited by Voltaire, he advocated the establishment of a theater in Geneva, belittling the fears of the city fathers that it would corrupt morals. The resulting uproar threw the future of the Encyclopédie itself into doubt.

  Calm was just returning when Rousseau published a defense of Geneva, including a condemnation of the theater and all forms of drama. A theater, Rousseau fulminated, would be a vehicle for degeneration, immorality, and fake passion. He strongly objected to the theater’s artificiality, believing people should generate their own entertainment.

  The essay was not directed solely at d’Alembert. Obviously, Voltaire was a target; at that time he was known primarily as a dramatist, and his plays had been produced privately at his Geneva home. To d’Alembert, Voltaire denounced Rousseau as “that bastard of Diogenes’s dog.” But Diderot was also hoping to make his name as a playwright. Later, Diderot noted, “[Rousseau] is a monster. … He said he hated all those he had reason to be grateful to and he has proved it.”

  Diderot and d’Alembert were not the only victims of Rousseau’s belligerence. Between 1756 and 1758, Rousseau became possessed with suspicion of “a vast and diabolical conspiracy” against him. One altercation—so tangled that it is impossible to discern where the truth lies—led to a complete break with both Mme d’Épinay and Grimm.

  According to Rousseau, they also plotted to besmirch his reputation. Mme d’Épinay was going to Geneva for treatment by the eminent Dr. Théodore Tronchin. A jowly, broad-faced, broad-shouldered man, pompous and long-winded, if well-meaning, Tronchin was a pioneer of vaccination and a medical innovator. (Rousseau should have approved of him as a medical man, as Tronchin prescribed fresh air and a country life.) Rousseau was asked to escort his benefactress—and refused. Whether she was ill or simply pregnant by Grimm is debatable, though illness seems more likely. However, Rousseau, who was himself unwell, concluded that the conspirators intended him to be seen parading in Geneva as her lover, responsible for her state.

  Grimm pressed him to do his duty toward his patron. Rousseau replied in blunt, ungracious terms that he owed her nothing: “If Mme d’Épinay has shown friendship to me, I have shown more to her. … As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, and I owe no thanks for any that people might burden me with by force…. After making one sacrifice to friendship [keeping her company], I must now make another to gratitude.�
� Grimm boiled over. “If I could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of your conduct from my mind.”

  Inevitably, Rousseau moved out of the Hermitage. When Diderot came to see him just before he left, the reunion ended in tears. The encyclopedist wrote that he had parted from a madman, and that Rousseau had given him a glimpse across the abyss to the devil and hell. In the twentieth century, Lytton Strachey would depict the breach between these two comrades in more abstract terms—between the old rationalist world and the new world “of self-consciousness and doubt, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart.”

  Once again, prosperous benefactors came to Rousseau’s aid. In accepting largesse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the evangelist of equality and simplicity, had progressed from the provincial Mme de Warens to the patronage of wealthy tax farmers’ wives to the pinnacle of French society—in the form of Charles-François-Frédéric de Montmorency-Luxembourg, duc de Luxembourg and maréchal of France, a distinguished soldier; and his wife, Madeleine-Angélique.

  Happily, Rousseau sensed an affinity with the maréchale. When young, she had led a strikingly debauched life, but at this period it was said by one of her former lovers that she provided “a rare example of a pretty woman’s victory over time, of an immoral woman’s victory over opinion, and that of a friendless woman over friendship.” Horace Walpole’s appreciation was just as double-edged, “She has been very handsome, very abandoned, and very mischievous. Her beauty is gone, her lovers are gone, and she thinks the devil is coming.” She presided over an eminent salon, was an arbiter of manners and taste—and was a staunch backer of Rousseau’s. For his part, when he set eyes upon her in 1759, according to the Confessions, he immediately became her “slave.”