Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  Nobody was emerging well from the episode. The editor did not temper his outright condemnation of Walpole. His part in the affair “appears neither consistent with humanity nor with politeness.” It was altogether unworthy of him.

  Rousseau had champions in Britain. The Zurich-born painter Henry Fuseli published A Defence of Mr. Rousseau, against the Aspersions of Mr. Hume, Mons. Voltaire, and their Associates. 8vo. 1s 6d Bladon, which was scorned by the Monthly Review as “a bare-faced catch-penny job. The author is an impertinent intruder into a controversy of which he appears to know nothing more than what every reader might gather from the Concise Account.”

  Several readers, after digesting the contents of the Concise Account, were sufficiently up in arms to write in to the press, under pseudonyms, including Emilius, Crito, and A. Bystander. In the November 27–29 edition of the St. James’s Chronicle, a letter from “An Orthodox Hospitable Old Englishman” chided Hume. “If [his] heart had ever been indeed the friend of Rousseau, his philosophy and coolness might have treated Mr. Rousseau as a man under a strong and great mistake; this would have been more for Mr. Hume’s glory … to go on imputing all kinds of bad motives shows that a philosopher when provoked is not a better man at bottom than the poor mere bigot of religion.” AOHOE also rebuked Walpole for “an indecent and barbarous piece. …” He continues, “… humanity obliges me to wish that poor Rousseau may not be made uneasy here, but left in as much peace as possible.” Other correspondents also took up the cudgels for Rousseau: one recurring theme was the lack of hospitality and respect accorded the exile, which shamed the British nation. There was poetical support in the December 9–11 St. James’s Chronicle:

  Rousseau, be firm! Though malice, like Voltaire,/And superstitious pride, like D’Alembert,/Though mad presumption Walpole’s form assume,/And base-born treachery appear like Hume,/Yet droop not thou; the spectres gathering round,/These night drawn phantoms, want the power to wound./Fair truth shall chase th’unreal forms away,/And reason’s piercing beams restore the day;/Britain shall snatch the exile to her breast,/And conscious virtue soothe his soul to rest.

  A parody of this verse appeared in the next issue. Rousseau was mocked in a burlesque indictment that made the round of periodicals, while another correspondent asked what could be expected from such deists and infidels. Newspaper readers were clearly enjoying the affair—not quite the outcome Hume had in mind.

  Although he came in for as much abuse and reproof as Rousseau, in February 1767, Hume informed Mme de Boufflers that there had been “a great deal of raillery on the incident, thrown out in the public papers, but all against that unhappy man. … There is even a print engraved of it: M. Rousseau is represented as a yahoo, newly caught in the woods; I am represented as a farmer, who caresses him and offers him some oats to eat, which he refuses in a rage; Voltaire and d’Alembert are whipping him up behind; and Horace Walpole making him horns of papier mâché. The idea is not altogether absurd.” (It had been printed in the Public Advertiser in January 1767: in his Journal, Boswell stated that the design for the cartoon was his.)

  ACROSS THE CHANNEL, in Hume’s principal market for his dossier, outrage over Rousseau’s treatment of Hume was tempered by some hard assessments about Hume’s tactics and motives. Besides, Hume had ignored or misjudged the likelihood of his case simply being swept into the established pro- and anti-Rousseau factions.

  Turgot’s sense of decorum had plainly been offended. In September, he expressed his pity over Rousseau’s indictment, viewing it as more madness than villainy, telling Hume, “Your letter harmed him, his did not harm you.” Some of Hume’s circle, he noted, regretted that Hume had not simply composed a letter to Rousseau, rather than involving his friends in Paris.

  Turgot’s elegantly expressed reservations were not exceptional. In October, Grimm penned a mocking account of the quarrel—”excellent fodder for the idle.” A declaration of war between Europe’s two big powers could not have made more noise in Paris, he said, though in London, they were foolish enough to be occupied more with the change of ministry and Pitt becoming Earl of Chatham. Grimm continued:

  I do not know why it says in the preface that Mr. Hume, in making the process public, only conceded with a great deal of repugnance to the importuning of his friends. No doubt, he means Mr. Hume’s friends in England; because I know many who have written to him precisely to dissuade him from making this quarrel public. In effect, if you are forced to plead your cause in public, I sympathise with you with all my heart; if you take it into your head unnecessarily to make such a decision, I will think you a fool.

  Grimm then recounted his own breach with Rousseau nine years earlier: an affair “even sillier” than Hume’s. Rousseau’s was the only friendship he had lost in his life without any regrets. Nonetheless, he had always behaved with decency and respect toward Rousseau: not to do so would be against his nature. Anyone who read about the affair, he wrote, must feel “a deep pity for this unfortunate Jean-Jacques” and his life of “madness and painful tumult.” It was at this point that Grimm added percipiently, “Where can he end his days in peace? It seems plain that he takes with him a companion who will not suffer him to rest in peace.” In Paris, tracts, letters, pamphlets, proliferated in Rousseau’s defense, though Grimm recorded that they were “detestable, written by rascals one does not know, driven to write by idleness and perhaps hunger. No one has a single new fact to allege.”

  If Hume had hoped the published account would decisively swing the public to his side, he must have been disappointed. The character of Rousseau as an artist and a man, his standing as a hunted exile, his hurt at the King of Prussia letter, Hume’s coldness and extravagant reaction—all these were well understood by readers. Even when criticizing Rousseau in corrosive letters to the press, they were inclined to find fault on both sides. And, of course, Hume had succeeded in keeping the affair alive: it ran and ran.

  However, there were also serious repercussions in his personal relations. Hume’s ties with his passionate friend Mme de Boufflers were stretched to breaking point. In her fine letter of July 22 from Pougues-les-eaux, she had told him that his communicating first with d’Holbach had trenched on the friendship he had promised her. The public thought that in propagating the complaints and abetting Hume’s indignation, d’Holbach had rendered Hume a bad service. Why had Hume deprived himself of the noblest possible revenge on Rousseau, “… to wit, that of overwhelming him with your superiority, of dazzling him with the lustre of that very virtue, which he wilfully misconceives?”

  Mme de Boufflers then broke off the letter for three days to travel the sixty-four leagues to Paris. Although she nowhere states it explicitly, the impression she gives is that anxiety over Hume’s mania had driven her back to the capital to be closer to events. When this advocate of magnanimous spirit and zealous moderation picked up her pen again, anxiety had transmuted into fury. She could not counsel him. “You are too confirmed in your own opinion, too much engaged, too much supported in your anger, to listen to me.” With a note of disappointment, she pointed out how many in Paris would be only too happy to see him behave like an ordinary being. She had no energy to write more on this sad subject, other than what her conscience and friendship obliged her.

  Mme de Boufflers regarded the violation of the rules of civilized behavior as gross, and she did not let Rousseau escape unscathed. On July 27, she rebuked him for the disgraceful letter he had sent Hume: she had never seen anything like it. All his friends were in consternation and reduced to silence. What could be said on his behalf after a letter so unworthy of him? That Hume was a traitor was utterly implausible. Even if true, Rousseau had acted precipitously, had not justified his suspicions, had not asked the advice of anybody in France. He should never forget that Hume had rendered him real assistance. Quoting Rousseau back to himself, she reminded him that “the bonds of friendship are entitled to respect, even after they are rent asunder.” Conti, Luxembourg, and de Boufflers awaited an explanation. He
should not delay. “Let us know, at least, how we may excuse, if we cannot entirely exculpate you.”

  Rousseau did not counter Mme de Boufflers’s reproaches until a month later, and then in injured and truculent terms. Hume had compelled him to explain himself and he had done so in great detail. It was not a question of suspicions but of facts, not of judgment of Hume’s character but of his conduct. In his letter to Hume, he had been as mild as he could, considering how he suffered. As for Hume, “At the same time that in reply to this self-same letter he wrote to me in decent, even in courteous terms, he wrote to M. D’Holbach, and to the world at large, in terms rather different. He has filled Paris, France, the gazettes and the whole of Europe, with things which my pen is not competent to write, and which it never shall repeat.” True, the ties of friendship were to be respected even after they were broken. But what if they had never existed in the first place? If Hume’s services, which he had acknowledged, “were as much for display as reality, if they were nothing more than so many snares, which concealed the blackest designs, I do not see that they call for extraordinary gratitude.”

  Mme de Boufflers did not reply. Perhaps she recognized that some of his remarks about Hume were justified, but her silence must have hurt Rousseau. An even heavier blow was to follow—struck by his second father, Earl Marischal.

  The elderly earl’s deciding to confine his correspondence with Rousseau to essentials stemmed directly from the row. He was shocked by his “son” Rousseau’s conduct: henceforth, relations between them would be distant. Rousseau was bitterly upset and in agitated distress. As Christmas 1766 approached, he delivered a passionate appeal. Of all the misfortunes that had crushed him, this was the worst. Let Milord at least write once a month to say he was well. If the earl adhered to his “cruel decision,” Rousseau would die.

  Meanwhile, on August 12, Hume had finally responded to Mme de Boufflers’s fusillade. He opened with a fawning apology: “I kiss the rod which beats me, and give you as sincere thanks for your admonitions, as I ever did for any of your civilities and services.” He then attempted an excuse for not having alerted her to his quarrel with Rousseau first. He had believed her to be one hundred leagues from Paris. “I wrote to Baron D’Holbach, without either recommending or expecting secrecy: but I thought this story, like others, would be told to eight or ten people; in a week or two, twenty or thirty more might hear it, and it would require three months before it would reach you at Pougues. I little imagined that a private story, told to a private gentleman, could run over a whole kingdom in a moment.” But his main consideration from the outset was Rousseau’s forthcoming memoirs. If Hume had kept quiet about this, what other lies might his enemy concoct?

  This marked the end (perhaps welcomed by Hume) of their closeness, though the final straw came the following year when she realized that even if Hume returned to France, he had had no intention of lodging in the Temple in the bright, pretty apartment she had set up for him. Her letters appear to have been so spiky at this point that Hume threw them away. Correspondence continued in a desultory manner, but she was quick to find his letters irritating.

  Hume’s bond with Walpole was affected, too. Walpole was irked over the treatment of the statement he supplied Hume for use in the Exposé and he made his feelings, as well as the facts, clear in print, drawing up a narrative of his role in the quarrel, dated Paris, September 13, 1767. He had willingly supplied a letter that cleared Hume of involvement in the King of Prussia spoof, but had used the opportunity to spell out his strong opposition to Hume’s publishing. Hume had then selectively quoted:

  I am sorry to say, that on this occasion Mr. Hume did not act quite fairly by me. …. Could I imagine that Mr. Hume would make use of part of my letter, and suffer it to be printed—and even without asking my consent?

  In London, the reprinted French edition sold out while 750 copies of the English retranslation had been bought by mid-November. But none of this caused any real problems for the protagonists with their public. Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village was published in a translation as The Cunning Man by the composer, organist, and musical historian Dr. Charles Burney. The piece was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in late November to a generally favorable reception, though on the second night, Scottish supporters of Hume barracked it from the parterre, much to the exasperation of the English spectators. In all, The Cunning Man had over a dozen performances and would have had more but for the illness of the lead soprano.

  Hume returned to diplomacy in February 1767 as Conway’s undersecretary of state (deputy secretary). At Westminster, Rockingham had been sacked after barely a year, never having gained royal favor. In July 1766, he was replaced by Pitt, who went to the House of Lords as Earl of Chatham. The king was anxious to keep Conway in office throughout, telling the general that the government depended on his conducting the business of the Commons. Conway remained in the secretary of state’s office under Pitt/Chatham and his successor, Grafton, too.

  Hume’s invitation to serve Conway had come through Lord Hertford. He knew that Hume had resolved not to be occupied, but, at Walpole’s suggestion, asked Lady Hertford to try to change his mind. On March 1, 1767, Hume gave Mme de Boufflers a slightly contrived version of his return to public life. He had thought of declining the job, “but I own, I could not find terms to express my refusal of a request made by persons to whose friendship I had been so much obliged.” There was no danger of his being ensnared by Court favor and the pursuit of riches. On the contrary, “I feel myself at present like a banished man in a strange country; I mean, not as I was while with you in Paris, but as I should be in Westphalia or Lithuania or any place the least to my fancy in the world.”

  If that was true, he and his adversary had something in common. In far away Staffordshire, Rousseau and his gouvernante were feeling that Wootton had become the place least to their fancy in the world. Yet initially it had seemed the ideal retreat.

  19

  Friends in Arcadia

  I am commencing an undertaking without precedent.

  —The Confessions

  A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer.

  —DAVID HUME

  SETTLING IN TO Wootton, plots apart, and looking out over the wild Staffordshire countryside, Rousseau was conscious of his creative life being at a critical juncture. He had emigrated from the Republic of Letters for good:

  Authors, warrants, books, that acre fuming with glory that makes one shed tears, all such things are the follies of the other world in which I take no more part and which I shall hasten to forget … during the fifteen years that I have had the misfortune to exercise the melancholy art of being a man of letters I have not contracted any of the vices of that profession, envy, jealousy, the spirit of intrigue, and charlatanry have not once come near my heart. I do not feel myself even embittered by persecutions and by misfortunes, and I quit the career as whole of heart as I entered it.

  The message of his withdrawal from a life of letters was reiterated to Mme de Boufflers, who, he felt, had nagged him about abandoning his muse. “I wish to obey you in everything; but for heaven’s sake speak no more about writing books, or even about the people who write them. We have a hundred times more books on morality than is necessary, and we are no better off for them. You fear for the effect on me of idleness and boredom from my withdrawal from the world: you are mistaken, Madame, for I am never less bored or less idle than when I am alone.”

  Alone and in Arcadia, as the description of Wootton Hall he had sent to Mme de Luze on arrival made clear:

  At the bottom of the valley, which serves both as a warren and as a pasture, one hears the murmuring of a brook which comes running down from a neighbouring mountain and is parallel to the house, and its little turnings and waterfalls bear in such a direction that from the windows and the terrace the eye can follow its course a long way. The valley is lined, in places, with rocks and trees where one finds delicious haunts, and now and again the
se places are far enough away from the stream itself to offer some pleasant walks along its banks, sheltered from the winds and even from the rain, so that in the worst weather in the world I go tranquilly botanising under the rocks with the sheep and the rabbits.

  During fine weather, he could wander for miles in the limestone hills, following the course of the river Dove, through water meadows and by its sharp gorges and cascades. It was (and is still) one of the loveliest parts of Britain, rich in hazel and hawthorn, birch and osier. In summer, honeysuckle and wild roses sweeten the air. The steep-sided valleys—the dales—are carpeted with ash woods or bare to the skies with scrub or grassland. Perhaps, in his wanderings, Rousseau added to the richness of the flora. He was a collector of plants: an early-nineteenth-century guide to the region makes a claim that “the fickle and whimsical Rousseau” sowed “the seeds of some curious foreign flowers in the neighbourhood.”

  Rousseau was in two simultaneous worlds. In one, he was exposed to betrayal and conspiracy and trailed by the companion seen by Grimm, the second dog “who will not suffer him to rest in peace.” Safe within his other world, he was living the life he had long sought, a blissful existence in nature, away from the impurity, the competitiveness, the triviality, the lack of authenticity of the city that he always characterized by black vapors.

  On most of Rousseau’s walks, to his evident pleasure, he was unlikely to encounter another living soul. In any case, were he to, he could retreat behind a language barrier. The minister from Ellaston village stopped by early on to welcome the exile, and Rousseau reported to Hume, with apparent glee, the meeting’s discomforting silence. “Seeing that I would speak only French to him, he did not wish to talk to me in English, so that the interview passed with almost not a word spoken.” Even if he learned English, Rousseau told Hume, he would still speak only French to local people who knew nothing of the language. (In fact, he seemed to have a good passive knowledge, reading letters written to him in English by Hume and Davenport.) So far as Davenport’s servants were concerned, “Mlle Le Vasseur serves me as interpreter, and her fingers speak better than my tongue.”