Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Review of The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity by Maurice Cranston)

This is volume three of the late Maurice Cranston’s magisterial and definitive biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Volume one appeared in 1983, volume two in 1991 and now the grand project is completed. Alas, Maurice Cranston did not live to see the final volume published but those of us who have been impatiently reading and waiting over the last fourteen years will not be disappointed. All of Cranston’s scholarly and writerly credentials are on full display: the vast learning, quietly incorporated, the feel for the eighteenth century in all its social, cultural and intellectual aspects and, most importantly for the non-academic reader, a prose of limpid readability, a dry and worldly sense of humour and the ability to fix a character or a place or a moment with apparently effortless skill.

Volume three begins in 1762 in Switzerland with Rousseau at the height of his fame and notoriety. The Social Contract had been written, his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse has enjoyed wild success throughout Europe, turning him into a cult figure, and his treatise on the education of children, Emile, has fomented acclaim and hysterical derogation in equal measure. In fact it was the spiralling controversy over Emile that led the French parlement to order the burning of the book and the arrest of the author.

So Rousseau fled to the land of his birth seeking exile and asylum, but this last phase of his life was to prove as unsettled and disturbing as anything that his earlier career had witnessed. The fifty-year-old Jean-Jacques cut an eccentric figure: still living with his slatternly common-law wife Thérése Levasseur, he was plagued by urinary problems that necessitated use of a catheter and the wearing of an Armenian kaftan to make him more comfortable (he had need of a chamber pot every few minutes, he claimed). He settled in Môtiers in the canton of Berne trying to write his biography and going for long botanizing walks in the mountains. But a quiet life was always to be denied Rousseau, however arduously he tried to create one: he had powerful friends to protect him but also many enemies determined to make his life difficult. Also his renown was such that however reclusive and anonymous he sought to be admirers would beat a path to his door for audiences. One of the most amusing and best detailed of these was with the young James Boswell (who introduced himself as “I am a Scottish laird of ancient lineage”).

Rousseau was never wholly secure or at ease in Switzerland — the cantonal governments saw him as a dangerous dissident — and his few years there were fraught with vain lobbying to confirm his residential status. Rousseau’s paranoia grew, not unjustifiably, and he saw himself as dogged by malevolent enemies and persecutors. Voltaire, malignity personified, the arch rival, published an anonymous pamphlet recounting the scandal of Rousseau’s children by Thérése, all of whom he had left at the gates of an orphanage. Thus stimulated, local clerics stirred up their congregations with claims of heresy and depravity and Rousseau’s house was stoned by a mob on one memorable and terrifying night. He came to loathe the village and the canaille who inhabited it, longing to find a country where he could be left in peace.

The philosopher David Hume, then living in Paris, invited him to England and Rousseau reluctantly accepted his offer. Hume, another well-disposed Scot, was a genuine admirer of Rousseau but the history of their relationship ended badly — in typical Rousseauesque fashion. Rousseau was a man of spontaneous impassioned emotion and illogical mood swings. Hume records a moment when Rousseau, in a bad temper, suddenly “rose up and took a turn about the room: but judge of my surprise, when he sat down suddenly on my knee, threw his hands about my neck [and] kissed me with the greatest warmth.” It was not to last. In 1766 Hume accompanied Rousseau to London and a wealthy patron installed him in his house in Derbyshire. Boswell escorted Thérése thither separately from Switzerland, during which journey they had a brief, energetic affair (Boswell noting in his journal “gone to bed very early and had done it once. Thirteen in all”). And all for a while was well until Rousseau got it into his head that Hume was the author of a satirical letter published in the English press (in fact it was by Horace Walpole) and he accused Hume of betrayal and of covertly opening his mail. Rousseau’s affection and gratitude had turned immediately to passionate vilification and disdain. Hume was hurt and baffled and eventually equally outraged at the accusations. So the English period of Rousseau’s life ended on this tone of mutual defamation and aggrieved self-justification. He and Thérése returned to France where, finally, at Ermenonville near Paris, another wealthy patron provided the philosopher with a rural retreat and he passed his last years in some form of comfort and peace, dying of a stroke on 2 July 1778.

His greatest work, and his lasting monument, was published posthumously. The Confessions is a truly astonishing autobiography, a beguiling mix of total candour, self-abasement, vainglory and special-pleading. Hume had encouraged Rousseau to write his memoirs and Rousseau told him the work was already underway. Rousseau said, “I shall describe myself in such plain colours that henceforth everyone may boast that he knows … Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” Hume commented sagely, “I believe he intends seriously to draw his own picture in its true colours; but I believe at the same time that nobody knows himself less.” This is the key to Rousseau’s abiding fascination in the modern age — he is one of the great characters of history, an absorbing psychological case study, of which we have, mercifully, copious documentation. Rousseau may not have known himself well but, thanks to Maurice Cranston’s exemplary labours, we have in these three volumes of biography (to be read alongside The Confessions, ideally) a chance to make the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques, in all his maddening and endearing complexities, ourselves.

1997