Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  22

  The Truth Will Out

  A man is not a rogue and rascal and lyar because he draws a false inference.

  —HUME

  Rousseau was not a wicked man; he was an unfortunate, a distracted, a deeply sensitive, a strangely complex creature; and above all else, he possessed one quality which cut him off from his contemporaries, which set an immense gulf betwixt him and them: he was modern.

  —LYTTON STRACHEY

  AT THE END of his long tribute to “our most excellent, and never-to-be-forgotten friend,” Adam Smith put David Hume forward as the exemplar of as “perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” If so, why, in the quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did Hume act so far out of character?

  The answer must begin with Paris. Paris was the one arena where Hume had been an unmitigated triumph. In Paris, he had been treated with “perfect veneration,” esteemed by the philosophes, swooned over by salon hostesses. After a career marked by official hostility, qualified success, and outright disappointment, France was the country in which he had been embraced and acclaimed, and not just for his work but for his character. He was le bon David, decent, honest, virtuous, just, wise. When Mme de Boufflers, the woman who led the field in passionate reverence for Hume, begged him to save this persecuted and distressed author, Rousseau, how could le bon David possibly let her down? Hume’s early, effulgent letters of love for Rousseau are quite out of keeping with his normal plain, direct style: he was visualizing himself through the gaze of others (an instance of what Rousseau would call amour propre).

  Nonetheless, a single man with no dependents and few obligations, Hume had neither wanted nor expected to chaperone Rousseau to safety. Perhaps, if Rousseau had traveled to England without him, as Hume intended, the Scot would have absented himself entirely, just as he had from Mme de Boufflers on her visit to England. No clinging devotee then, no clinging exile now. And, indeed, it was not just the bothersome Rousseau; with Le Vasseur and Sultan in tow, Hume suddenly acquired responsibility for a family. He had also passed from being the celebrated Mr. Hume to being the escort for the celebrated John James Rousseau, and in the city where this Scotsman was always uncomfortable and would never receive his due.

  There is evidence that Hume’s attitude to Rousseau was already colored by scorn. After all, he was probably the author of the central quip in the King of Prussia letter, and even before Rousseau’s departure to Wootton, he had delivered several cutting dissections of his character. There was more than a hint of animosity in all this, attended by the thought that Rousseau’s character—his professed desire for solitude, his primitive existence, his “illness,” his “virtue”—was a bundle of affectations. That might explain, for example, Hume’s investigation into Rousseau’s finances and the evident desire to expose the simple man of feeling as a fraud. Hume’s letter urging Mme de Boufflers to contact Rousseau’s banker showed his motivation clearly enough: “For, even if the fact should prove against him, which is very improbable, I should only regard it as one weakness more, and do not make my good opinion of him to depend on a single incident.”

  This is why, of all those who read Rousseau’s letter delaying the pension, Hume alone took it as a rejection, and on that basis rushed to tell his friends how Rousseau was unaccountable, blamable, extravagant. He condemned Rousseau’s extreme sensibility. Rousseau was exhibiting a selfish disregard toward those who had helped him: to Hume, Rousseau’s behavior had provided confirmation of his true nature.

  Imagine, then, Hume’s state of mind as he opened a letter from Rousseau, anticipating a salute for his extra efforts over the pension. Instead, he was confronted by the 341 words of the mortifying charge leveled by the man to whom he had devoted so much time, and for whom he had, au fond, so little time. Moreover, his French coterie had been proved right. Hume’s foolish raptures over Rousseau had been shown up for the froth they were. Worst of all, these charges might soon be reproduced in the exile’s memoirs, set out with a rhetorical flair that readers would find impossible to resist. But Rousseau had perpetrated something still more provocative. Hume had been hunting for proof that Rousseau was a fraud. Suddenly the quarry had put Hume’s virtue in question. Lye, lye lye, scribbled the Scot frantically in the margin of the ensuing full indictment, simultaneously incensed and terrified. Lye, lye lye.

  It was at this point that a disjunction in their intellectual personalities ensured that the division between them would be unbridgeable. Rousseau conceived a bold conclusion, and then filled in the details. Hume operated in the other way—starting with the facts, and using these to build a case. So Rousseau imagined the deadly and extensive conspiracy against him, before unearthing his corroborative evidence. Hume, in contrast, went straight to that evidence. By examination of each piece, he sought to discredit his attacker’s nightmare thesis, to persuade the public that there were more reasons to disbelieve than to believe it. Rousseau’s reliance on intuitive imagination disoriented and enraged his erstwhile benefactor.

  All this goes some way to explaining why Hume erupted so violently when he saw Rousseau’s allegations, and why he made such frenetic efforts to limit any damage from what was plausibly the most potent and destructive pen in Europe, for he never lost sight of Rousseau’s genius. But the unremitting brutality of Hume’s reaction put his reputation in Paris more at risk than any claim of Rousseau’s: in effect he exchanged roles with his accuser in his search for vengeance. He also demonstrated how little he had assimilated the manners of the salons in which he was feted. Perhaps he had not been offered the opportunity to study the Rule of Life on Mme de Boufflers’s bedroom wall.

  MORE PERPLEXING IS Hume’s persistent mendacity—his utter falsehoods, his economies with the truth, his deviousness.

  Before the “plot” coalesced, these included the false impression he gave that he was ignorant of the King of Prussia letter; his holding back its authorship from Rousseau, then telling him that Walpole had intended it to remain secret; his not forwarding letters to Rousseau from de L’Espinasse and (later) d’Alembert; the exaggeration of his role in winning Rousseau’s pension.

  The affair of the faux retour chaise is illuminating. Biographers have traditionally skirted over Rousseau’s sense of humiliation at being treated as a beggar living on alms, dismissing it as a typical overreaction from the hypersensitive Genevan. At the time, the benevolent Davenport must have been taken aback. Surely this was subterfuge with the purest of motives, for he was both supporting the indigent and concealing the charity.

  Hume was just as unlikely to give the ploy a second thought. When it came to the truth, he had an instrumentalist outlook, telling his publisher, Sir William Strahan, in August 1770: “You see I am a good casuist, and can distinguish cases very nicely. It is certainly a wrong thing to deceive any body, much more a friend; but yet the difference must still be allowed infinite between deceiving a man for his good and for his injury.”

  That attitude, to Rousseau, was anathema. As so often, there are puzzling inconsistencies in Rousseau’s pronouncements, but his gut instinct was to recoil at any form of deception. For Rousseau, a white lie was still a lie, an act that both slighted its target and sullied its creator. Even if Hume was not the originator of the trick over the chaise, his awareness of it, in Rousseau’s eyes, made him complicit; his private judgment as to what was in his guest’s best interest was both condescending and contemptuous.

  In the Fourth Walk of the Reveries, where he confesses to having sometimes lied out of shame or embarrassment, he writes, “The lies we call white lies are real lies, because to act deceitfully in one’s interest or that of others is no less unjust than to act deceitfully against the interests of others.” Rousseau saw himself as the apostle of truth: for him, the truth was of paramount importance, for him his “horror of falsehood outweighed all other things.”

  There were other Hume lies. Following the retour chaise debacle, and after Rousseau exposed the “plo
t,” Hume persistently gave misleading information to his supporters, for instance, his assertion that Rousseau had called him le plus noir de tous les hommes; the bald statement that he had proof that Rousseau had plotted against him for two months, proof he never produced; the assertion that Rousseau had provided no sign of his distrust of Hume—not so, if we accept that Rousseau mentioned the word traitor in Lisle Street. There were his claims that Conway and Hertford had advised publication and that his French friends had “extorted” his consent to publish the Concise Account; his tricky exchanges with Walpole over the editing of Walpole’s letter in the French Account; his wrongly describing Davenport as disliking Le Vasseur. An observer in possession of the full facts could have identified at least twelve lies, apart from little embellishments, committed by the Scot. Particularly mystifying are his deceptions of Mme de Boufflers—not only over the Rousseau affair but over personal matters such as his plans to return to Paris. Of all people, she was the one who deserved his candor.

  PERHAPS THE MORAL of the whole sad encounter is that while sane men cannot make madmen sane, madmen can make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau’s complaint: that though Hume had carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit. Rousseau expected his friends to be entirely straight with him, to open their heart, to be motivated purely by love. Friendship required a special form of understanding. He warned Mme d’épinay: “My expressions rarely have the usual significance, for it is always my heart that communes with you, and some day maybe you will realise that its language is not that of other hearts.”

  The nature of friendship is something Rousseau returns to time after time. In the Confessions, he reveals the bar of suspicion potential friends had to hurdle.

  Some friendships … are very dear to me. They have often caused me to regret that happy obscurity, when those who called themselves my friends were really such, and loved me for myself, from pure goodwill, not from the vanity of being intimate with a well-known man, or from the secret desire of thus finding more opportunity of injuring him.

  Rousseau had a visceral grasp of Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics: “What is just is not the same for a friend towards a friend as towards a stranger.” Friendship involves a basket of mutual emotions—respect, trust, warmth, a desire for that person’s happiness and success, a desire to be in that person’s company—reinforced by action. And friendship is sustained over time. Do not expect friendship to ripen too quickly, Rousseau admonished young François Coindet in 1758. Friendship “is something that must mature slowly over the years, so that true friends are friends long before they use the word ‘friend.’”

  Hume was baffled by Rousseau’s fondness for Sultan, “his affection for that creature is above all expression or conception.” But Rousseau’s relationship with the canine gives us some insight into Rousseau’s relationship with his fellow humans. Friendship for Rousseau was achievable only by equals, who were independent of each other. A true friend had every claim on his heart but none on his liberty. During Boswell’s pilgrimage to Rousseau in Môtiers, Rousseau maintained that a person’s attitude to cats was a vital test of character. Those of a despotic nature “do not like cats because the cat is free and will never consent to become a slave.” A relationship with a dog, too, should not be one of ruler and subject. About the predecessor to Sultan, Rousseau wrote, “My dog himself was my friend, not my slave: we always had the same will, but it was not because he obeyed me.” As for Sultan, though he was a source of endless trouble, he could never be mendacious; he could never be disingenuous, insincere, hypocritical, or patronizing. Sultan was incapable of disloyalty.

  Watching Rousseau converse with his lugubrious neighbor Bernard Granville, or botanize in the Dove valley, one might have spotted nothing amiss. But forever scurrying beside the exile was that second dog—the one forewarning of betrayal and conspiracy—its bark echoing in the solitude of Wootton. Although Rousseau’s enemies were not chimeras, there was no conspiracy. The “plot” was the fruit of Rousseau’s paranoid imaginings. Yet why did he put Hume at the nucleus of it?

  Perhaps it was the simple consequence of Hume’s inability to fulfill Rousseau’s criteria for friendship. But Rousseau, that apostle of truth and shrewd observer of motivation and personality, could equally have identified some characteristics in his savior that led him to recoil: some lack of commitment to the truth, a certain looseness in Hume’s respect for others. In particular, he may have intuited Hume’s fundamental disdain for him. And that lay behind the word traitor on their last evening together, in Lisle Street.

  Hume was no plotter. However, the prolonged aggression of his counterattack (and his final insistence on Rousseau’s needing a keeper) was surely fueled by the knowledge that he was not guiltless: he had contributed to his charge’s discomfiture and had acted behind his back. In this light, it is hardly surprising that, once it was over, he would do his best to erase the row from his personal history. Although they had preoccupied a year and a half of his life and demonstrated his benevolence, in My Own Life his dealings with so prominent a figure as Jean-Jacques Rousseau merit not one mention.

  The image of le bon David has endured. That is how Hume is portrayed in philosophy and history books, and by biographers. Of course, in Rousseau’s case, he did much to warrant it. But how ironic that his going to Rousseau’s aid put that image at risk. And it was precisely le bon David’s attempt to preserve his reputation that brought him so close to tarnishing it.

  With his rigorous reasoning, Hume had punctured the Enlightenment’s inflated claims on behalf of reason. So there was irony, too, in his overwrought response to the assault by Rousseau, the man of sensibility. When, in the summer of 1766, Hume jettisoned a lifetime of moderation, he seemed fixed on demonstrating that reason was indeed the slave of the passions.

  Chronology of Main Events

  1711

  David Hume born in Edinburgh on April 26, 1711 (“old style”—i.e., before 1752, when Britain changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar).

  1712

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau born in Geneva on June 28, 1712.

  1758

  Rousseau writes Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater, bringing worsening relations with d’Alembert, Voltaire, and Diderot. He becomes convinced of a plot against him involving Mme d’épinay, Grimm, and d’Alembert, leading to a severance of relations with them. He moves to Montmorency under the wing of the Duc and Duchesse de Luxembourg and lives at Mont-Louis. He meets Mme de Boufflers.

  1759

  Rousseau’s initial antipathy for Mme de Verdelin warms into fondness.

  1760

  George III ascends British throne.

  1761

  Rousseau settles into Montmorency. Mme de Boufflers initiates contact with Hume.

  1761–62

  Rousseau publishes La Nouvelle Héloïse, On the Social Contract, and Émile. The last part of Émile, the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” brings widespread condemnation from the religious establishment in France and Switzerland.

  1762

  MAY

  In Britain, John Stuart, earl of Bute, becomes first lord of the treasury.

  JUNE 9

  Warned that the Paris parlement has issued a warrant for his arrest, Rousseau goes into exile in Switzerland.

  MID-JUNE

  Mme de Boufflers informs Hume of Rousseau’s plight and that she has advised him to go to England. Hume responds with the offer of his house in Edinburgh and the first mention of a possible pension for Rousseau from George III.

  The Geneva ruling council resolves to burn Émile and On the Social Contract and to arrest Rousseau if he returns to the city. Bern follows suit.

  JULY 10

  Rousseau moves into Môtiers under the wings of Earl Marischal and Frederick the Great.

  JULY

  Rousseau resigns his ci
tizenship of Geneva over its refusal to allow his Letter to Beaumont (archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont) to be published.

  1763

  FEBRUARY 10

  Treaty of Paris concludes the Seven Years’ War.

  APRIL

  The Earl of Hertford invited to become ambassador to France, and asks Hume to accompany him to act as his secretary.

  APRIL 6

  Bute resigns as first lord of the Treasury, succeeded by George Grenville.

  APRIL 17

  Mme de Boufflers travels to England but fails to meet Hume.

  AUGUST

  Grenville consolidates power. Bute dismissed from Court.

  AUTUMN

  In Geneva, prosecutor general Jean-Robert Tronchin publishes anonymously Letters from the Country, undermining the opposition Représentants (the Party of Liberty).

  OCTOBER 18

  Hume arrives in Paris as assistant secretary to Lord Hertford.

  1764

  APRIL 4

  Hertford’s brother, General Conway, dismissed from Court and regiment following his vote against general warrants.

  DECEMBER 3

  Rousseau publishes Letters Written from the Mountain in support of the Party of Liberty in Geneva; copies circulated in Geneva throw the oligarchy into disarray, but ironically the upheaval causes the Party of Liberty to make peace overtures to the oligarchy.

  Boswell arrives in Môtiers to meet Rousseau.

  DECEMBER

  Views of the Citizens on Letters Written from the Mountain published anonymously, with scurrilous comments on Rousseau. Voltaire is accepted as having been the author.