The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Still, Rousseau, who refused to nurture his own children, held himself out as an expert on child-rearing. His Émile, or Education insisted that mothers breast-feed their children, and offered some little ways to help the individuality of each infant to blossom. Cultivation of the mind should be postponed while the emotions were fostered. He would guide John Dewey and other twentieth-century educationists who have shared Rousseau’s hostility to the rigid discipline of classical education. And Emile offered a perverse apology for his own callousness.

  Rousseau’s confessions would be an apology for his whole life. “Sincerity,” wrote La Rochefoucauld, “is a desire to compensate for one’s defects and even reduce their importance by winning credit for admitting them.” If admitting faults is a proper claim to respect, Rousseau should be among the most respected of modern men. It is perhaps appropriate that the prototype of modern “true” confessions was written by a madman.

  A publisher had solicited Rousseau to write his autobiography, but he produced only a few fragments. Voltaire provided him with the incentive to write an autobiography in self-defense by portraying Rousseau as a monster, enemy of Geneva and of Christ, and so sparking the “lapidation” of Rousseau at his Swiss mountain retreat. Increasing paranoia focused Rousseau’s writing, composed in lucid intervals. The first part of the Confessions was written at Wootten under Hume’s auspices, in 1766 during his English refuge from Swiss and French persecutors. The second part was written after his flight to France in 1766–70, this time in refuge from the imaginary conspiracy led by Hume. As Rousseau explained:

  I had always been amused at Montaigne’s false ingenuousness, and at his pretence of confessing his faults while taking good care only to admit to likeable ones; whereas I, who believe, and always have believed, that I am on the whole the best of men, felt that there is no human heart, however pure, that does not conceal some odious vice. I knew that I was represented in the world under features so unlike my own and at times so distorted, that notwithstanding my faults, none of which I intended to pass over, I could not help gaining by showing myself as I was. Besides, this could not be done without also showing other people as they were, and consequently the work could only appear after my death and that of many others; which further emboldened me to write my Confessions, for which I should never have to blush before anyone.

  (Translated by J. M. Cohen)

  Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the principal work of that title in the Western tradition, may have been in his mind, but Rousseau left it to his reader to make the comparison. While he never ceased to see himself as a martyr, he did not quite claim sainthood. But Saint Augustine’s is no confession in the modern mode, for he “confesses” to the infinite wisdom of God. “For love of Thy love I do it.” Rousseau “confesses” to the greatness and uniqueness of “myself.”

  Imagining himself the victim of malicious conspiracy by his contemporaries, Rousseau hoped by his Confessions at least to secure the esteem of posterity. But he was impatient. When he returned to Paris in 1770, he was a pitiful spectacle, afflicted with a painful bladder complaint, aged beyond his fifty-three years, haunted by hosts of nameless spies. Everywhere he went they seemed to follow him. His books were enriching only his publishers. In those days before the legal rights of authors, his own experience justified Voltaire’s description of printers as “pirates.” He eked out a living by returning to copying music at tenpence a page.

  Still sought after in the fashionable salons, Rousseau was eager for an audience to whom he could “defend” himself, though against whom or what was never quite clear. Though determined not to publish his Confessions, he entertained salon wits and courtesans with readings from them. Having given up his affectation of colorful Armenian costume, he wore a peasant’s drab gray as he intoned his sensational apologies for himself. His last reading was at the home of the comtesse d’Egmont, daughter of the maréchal de Richelieu. The poet Dorat (1734–1780) reported one of these sessions lasting from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock the following morning. To the last Book of the Confessions Rousseau appended his own account of his final words at the reading of his manuscript to Count and Countess d’Egmont, Prince Pignatelli, and other titled Parisians.

  “I have told the truth. If anyone knows anything contrary to what I have here recorded, though he prove it a thousand times, his knowledge is a lie and an imposture; and if he refuses to investigate and inquire into it during my lifetime he is no lover of justice or of truth.…”

  Thus I concluded my reading, and everyone was silent. Mme d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trembled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and remained quiet, as did the rest of the company. Such was the advantage I derived from my reading and my declaration.

  (Translated by J. M. Cohen)

  Mme. d’Épinay, one of his surviving liaisons, picked up the challenge and persuaded the lieutenant of police to order Rousseau to cease his readings. But the Confessions reached posterity in various forms with other works of self-revelation published (1781–88) after his death. And they were promptly translated.

  Rousseau’s Confessions, his most distinctive creation, marks a new era in literature, with a new form for the writer’s candor. And this first full-blown modern revelation of the self was written by a madman. Is there any better evidence of Rousseau’s madness than his belief that this work of boastful self-denigration could rescue his reputation? Modern “literature” would not simply use language for communicating but would become a self-regarding act. Authors would celebrate themselves by the mere act of self-revelation. Rousseau, a pathfinder for this modern literature, offers us a seductive if somewhat unpleasant adventure into the Rousseauan self. Although the Confessions is a new literary form, it is not quite as formless as the essay. While Montaigne’s essays are topical, Rousseau’s chapters are chronological, pursuing the miscellany of the author’s experience with the charm of surprise and disorder, the suspense of a stream of consciousness. Our interest is increased by our doubt that he is telling the whole story.

  Rousseau recounts in several places the episodes that made him think it necessary to write these confessions. When he was at Mme. de Vercellis’s he accused an innocent servant girl of stealing a little pink and silver ribbon, which he himself had taken. That, “the sole offense that I have committed … secured me for the rest of my life against any act that might prove criminal in its results. I think also that my loathing of untruth derives to a large extent from my having told that one wicked lie.” Another was his disgraceful abandonment on the streets of Lyons of a friend and fellow musician who had fallen in an epileptic fit.

  Having made for himself in literature a secular equivalent for the confessional, he felt free to write with abandon passages that were sometimes omitted from popular editions or bowdlerized in translation. Incidentally he recorded the last words of his patroness, Mme. de Vercellis, which have been undeservedly forgotten:

  I watched her die. She had lived like a woman of talents and intelligence, she died like a philosopher.… She only kept her bed for the last two days, and continued to converse quietly with everyone to the last. Finally, when she could no longer talk and was already in her death agony, she broke wind loudly. “Good,” she said, turning over, “a woman who can fart is not dead.” Those were the last words she spoke.

  (Translated by J. M. Cohen)

  Though pretending to full revelation, he still does not confess as vividly as became customary in the twentieth century.

  His inhibitions appear in the episode that he says “plainly reveals my character” and will give the reader “complete knowledge of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In Venice he visited the attractive young Giulietta. “I entered a courtesan’s room as if it were the sanctuary of love and beauty; in her person I saw the divinity.… No sooner did I recognize from our first familiarities the value of her charms and caresses than, fearing to lose the fruit prematurely, I tried to make haste and pluck it. Suddenly, instead of
the fire that devoured me, I felt a deathly cold flow through my veins; my legs trembled; I sat down on the point of fainting, and wept like a child.” He gives us the shocking explanation. “Just as I was about to sink upon a breast which seemed about to suffer a man’s lips and hand for the first time, I perceived that she had a malformed nipple. I beat my brow, looked harder and made certain that this nipple did not match the other.” He was frozen in horror. “I saw as clear as daylight that instead of the most charming creature I could possibly imagine I held in my arms some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men, and love.” He told Giulietta his horror. First she took his comment as a joke, blushed, adjusted her clothes, and walked about the room fanning herself. “Finally she said to me in a cold and scornful voice: ‘Gianetto, lascia le donne, e studia la matematica.’ ” (“Johnny, give up women, and study mathematics.”) Jean-Jacques still asked her for another appointment, but when he arrived three days later she had left for Florence. He confessed and regretted what must have been her “scornful memory of me.” Again and again he reports his similar dismay at being displaced by others from the bed of his successive patronesses.

  As we witness Rousseau’s painful effort to reveal his true self he reminds us how elusive is this person whom he imagines himself to be, transformed by the very process of being revealed. You cannot know the later self, he explains, without knowing the earlier self. And he prefaces the second half of the Confessions: “What a different picture I shall soon have to fill in! After favouring my wishes for thirty years, for the next thirty fate opposed them and from this continued opposition between my situation and my desires will be seen to arise great mistakes, incredible misfortunes, and every virtue that can do credit to adversity except strength of character.” We join Rousseau’s adventure in search of himself.

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  The Arts of Seeming Truthful: Autobiography

  ONE of the most famous writings by Benjamin Franklin was the epitaph he wrote for himself in 1728, at the age of twenty-two: “The Body of B Franklin Printer, (Like the cover of an old Book Its contents torn out and stript of its Lettering & Gilding) Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be lost; For it will (as he believ’d) appear once more, In a new and more elegant Edition Revised and corrected, by the Author.” This epitaph proved appropriate to a life filled with personal events that survived in what Franklin printed about them. His momentous discoveries in electricity were printed as letters. His political tracts were commonly written as episodes of life. His Poor Richard, sometimes called the first famous character of fiction created by an American, is really an alter ego chronicled in the first person whose maxims are Franklin’s personally tested prescription for his own success. In his Autobiography Franklin repeatedly characterized the missteps in his life as Errata, items to be corrected in a printed record.

  Some have wondered that this man who invented so many other things did not invent a new form of literature. But they have underestimated Franklin. For his Autobiography—probably the most widely read work by an American, after the Declaration of Independence—did create a new and decisively modern form of literature, the success saga. It is a chronicle, a credo, and a scenario for self-made men. It is a tale hard to imagine taking place in any but an urban capitalist society with a rising middle class. Benvenuto Cellini two centuries earlier had written his boastful memoirs of an artist-picaro. But his account, unlike Franklin’s, could not be a model for the lives of modern readers. And unlike Franklin’s “Art of Virtue,” Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is hardly a handbook for the urban citizen.

  Franklin’s life, a parable of New World possibilities, abounded in novelties. “The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the Attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over,” Franklin wrote in 1743 proposing an American Philosophical Society, “and there are many in every Province that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common stock of Knowledge.” His own life would document his open-ended list of “new discoveries” and inventions. The bare facts of his career needed no embellishment to become the success saga of a self-made man. Born in Boston in 1706, he attended grammar school and a school for writing and arithmetic. At ten he helped in his father’s business making tallow candles and boiling soap. From twelve to seventeen he served as apprentice in his brother’s printing shop, till they quarreled and he ran away to Philadelphia in 1723. There the affable young Franklin found work as a printer and attracted the attention of the governor, Sir William Keith, who promised to set him up in a printing business with assurance of government contracts. When Franklin went to London to secure the equipment, Keith never delivered on his promise and a disappointed Franklin returned to Philadelphia.

  By 1730, with thrift and the aid of influential citizens, he set up his own printing establishment and began publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette. “The Business of Printer being generally thought a poor one, I was not to expect Money with a Wife unless with such a one, as I should not otherwise think agreeable. In the mean time, that hard-to-be-governed Passion of Youth had hurried me frequently into Intrigues with low Women that fell in my Way, which were attended with some Expense & great Inconvenience, beside a continual Risk to my Health by a Distemper which of all Things I dreaded, tho’ by great good Luck I escaped it.” He prudently married Deborah Read, the daughter of the respectable family with whom he had been lodging.

  Franklin prospered in business and became a leading citizen by promoting every imaginable kind of improvement. He proposed to make the streets safer by a police force, to make them more passable by paving and cleaning and lighting. He organized a volunteer fire department, promoted a city hospital and a circulating library, an academy for youth and a university for the promotion of learning. The Junto, the debating club he founded in 1727, flourished anew in the American Philosophical Society, which became the forum for botanists, physicians, natural historians, and philosophers from all the colonies. He made his own basic discoveries in electricity, speculated on earthquakes, and devised practical inventions like his lightning rod and his Franklin stove, which have not been much improved since.

  His public services—first in trying to make the separation unnecessary, then in winning Independence, and finally in creating the new nation and shaping its government—led some to call him, even before Washington, the father of his country, later emended to grandfather of his country. His last public act was a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery. He seems not a mere individual but, as his biographer Carl Van Doren says, a whole committee.

  Although an American ambassador and a versatile high priest of the European Enlightenment he was somehow not a literary man. Unlike his younger friend Thomas Jefferson, he was notoriously uninterested in the beauties of nature or of literature, and not stirred by poetry, architecture, or the romance of history. “Many people are fond of accounts of old Buildings and Monuments, but for me I confess that if I could find in my travels a receipt for making Parmesan cheese, it would give me more satisfaction than a transcript from any inscription from any Stone whatever.” He generally made his own writing, as he prescribed, “smooth, clear, and short,” and he always persuaded his readers to a practical (and often benevolent) purpose. Franklin’s “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress” was simply: “Prefer old Women to young ones!” His reasons concluded “8th and Lastly. They are so grateful! (1745).” His “Rules by which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One” (1773) exposed the follies of George III. His writings, like his American Philosophical Society, aimed at “promoting useful Knowledge.”

  It is surprising that Franklin’s famous literary creation, his Autobiography, the record of so well-organized and forethoughtful a life, would be so fragmentary, so incomplete, and so accidentally composed. It was not divided into chapters, nor even into a clear chronology. Yet the inchoate work survived and became popular through the centuries and across the world, a model for a whole genus of modern writ
ing.

  The incentive for Franklin came not in Philadelphia but when he was in England in August 1771 during his mission of reconciliation for the colonies. While enjoying the convivial family life of the pro-American bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Shipley, and his wife and five small daughters at their country house in Twyford near Winchester, Franklin entertained them with anecdotes of his early life in Boston and Philadelphia. The bishop’s wife, learning it was the birthday of Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, celebrated the occasion with a dinner where “among other nice things, we had a floating island,” and all toasted the grandson and the grandfather. In such amiable circumstances, “expecting the enjoyment of a week’s uninterrupted leisure,” Franklin was stirred to begin his autobiography (he always called them his Memoirs) in the form of a letter to his son.

  During these thirteen days in “the sweet retirement of Twyford where my only business was a little scribbling in the garden study,” he wrote the whole first part, in a room that the Shipley family later called Franklin’s Room. He probably read parts of the book to the family of assembled daughters nightly as he wrote them. He was at home and still fluent as a letter-writer, as he had been some twenty-five years before in describing to Peter Collinson his “Experiments and Observations on Electricity.” This first part of the Autobiography, which finally was nearly half the whole manuscript of his unfinished work, brought the story down to 1730, when he was only twenty-four. He recounted his youth in Boston and Philadelphia, his trip to England under the misleading auspices of Governor Keith of Pennsylvania, his return to Philadelphia, his marriage to Deborah and the launching of his own printing business, and the first of his Philadelphia projects, “the Mother of all the North American Subscription Libraries, now so numerous.”