In fact, he was not seen fuddled once only. Try as he might, he could not conceal his contempt for religion and its superstitions. The religious fanatic was a peculiarly dangerous animal, thought Hume, and clerics were hypocrites. He admitted that “the church is my particular aversion.”
His deconstruction of religion followed a familiar strategy, the first stage of which was to examine whether there was any logical reason to believe in God. Take the claim that God reveals Himself through “revelation”: truths about the divine apparently shown in empirical/historical sources, such as miracles. In section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s painstakingly constructed case can be summed up in one sentence: We always have more reason to disbelieve a miracle than to believe in it. If a person claims to have witnessed an act which defied a law of nature—such as that Queen Elizabeth was seen walking and talking five days after her death—then we should ask ourselves whether there are other explanations. We should speculate about the person’s motivation, inquire whether there were other witnesses and whether these witnesses were truly independent, and so on. In reality, there was never testimony that has met these stringent criteria. (He thought it no coincidence that sightings of miracles tended to occur “among ignorant and barbarous nations.”) His chapter “On Miracles” ends with a lacerating summary. “So that upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity.”
Hume’s critique of natural religion, in which conclusions reached about God’s existence are allegedly based on reasoning, is systematically laid out in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Composed as conversations between various characters, and published only posthumously, it is often said to be the most important book on the philosophy of religion ever published. Hume scholars tend to concur that Philo, the skeptic, is closest to the voice of the Scotsman.
Having shown—to his satisfaction at least—that received arguments for believing in God were wretchedly inadequate, Hume questioned why it was that so many people persisted in their beliefs. Once more he located the explanation in the psychological rather than the rational. In particular, he believed that religion was the crutch for our apprehensions and anxieties. We have a fear of the unknown, Hume surmised, a fear of those external events that derail our lives, a fear of the erratic and unpredictable. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 had provoked much theological head-scratching. How reassuring to believe that some Greater Being was making sense of these events, imposing some (hidden) order on apparently random fortune or misfortune.
HOST AND GUEST could hardly have had outlooks less in sympathy. The instant relationship between them inevitably had shallow foundations: respect for each other’s achievements, Hume’s compassion for the dispossessed, Rousseau’s need for a haven, some mutual friends, the courtesies of the age. There was little else to create any affinity between these two cerebral beings.
In terms of a philosophical dialogue, they could not agree about religion, human nature, the good life, politics, or economics. However, what truly parted them, and held them apart, was the profound disjunction in their intellectual characters.
Hume was all reason, doubt, and skepticism. Rousseau was a creature of feeling, alienation, imagination, and certainty. In Émile, the Savoyard vicar states that his “love of truth” is “his whole philosophy” whose method “exempts me from the vain subtlety of arguments.” He would “accept as evident all knowledge to which in the sincerity of my heart I cannot refuse my consent.” Observing the heart was not easy: it had to be perceived through opaque rather than clear glass. “We see neither the soul of the other, because it hides itself, nor our own, because we have no mirror in the mind.” But introspection was crucial. The most powerful validation for his beliefs came from his heart.
Once the man of sensibility was settled, he and the man of rational skepticism had no reason to keep in touch. In this context, Hume was the last person who might fulfill Rousseau’s dream of friendship, and the decision not to correspond becomes comprehensible. Of course, Hume had never planned to look after Rousseau from day to day, and we can sense the relief when he later told Blair that Davenport had assumed charge of him.
12
An Evening at Lisle Street
I think I could live with him all my life in mutual friendship and esteem. I am very sorry the matter is not likely to be put to a trial! I believe that one great source of our concord is, that neither he nor I are disputatious.
— HUME to Blair, March 11, 1766
To tell a man that he lies, is of all affronts the most mortal.
—ADAM SMITH
IT WAS AGREED with Davenport that Rousseau would leave for Wootton on Wednesday, March 19, 1766, with the two beings whose attachment to him was unconditional, Le Vasseur and Sultan. Hume must have counted the days like a prisoner whose release date comes in sight.
On the afternoon of March 17, Hume passed on to Rousseau and Le Vasseur an invitation from Conway and his wife “to do them the favour” of dining with them the next day. Hume professed complete indifference to Rousseau’s decision, assuring him that, “If you decline this invitation, from whatever reason, I shall endeavour to make your excuses. It is not necessary, that you constrain yourself the least in this affair.” Was he really so unconcerned—considering Conway’s political rank, his connection to the king, and his importance to Rousseau’s financial security?
On Monday evening Rousseau indeed asked Hume to make his excuses: he was ill and not in a fit state to present himself; as for Mlle Le Vasseur, she was “a very good and estimable person but not at all made to take her place amidst grand company.” (Yet, as we have seen, he had insisted on it with others and she had joined him often enough with the French nobility.)
On Tuesday, March 18, Rousseau’s little party came up from Chiswick in Davenport’s coach to sleep overnight at Hume’s lodgings before departing the next day for Wootton. Four or five days earlier, Hume had written to Rousseau to convey a piece of luck: Davenport had learned that a post chaise was returning empty to Ashbourne, near Wootton, and so he had secured a bargain for the travelers. This was a white lie, designed to save Rousseau’s purse. The kindly Davenport had hired the chaise and planned to pay the difference between the full and return fares.
That evening, as Hume and Rousseau sat together, their worlds collided. Rousseau had mused on the cut-price chaise and seen through the subterfuge, concluding it was too much of a coincidence—a retour chaise to so obscure a part of the country on the very day he was in need of one. At this point, we proffer only Hume’s epistolatory version of events, and a scene narrated a week later by Hume to Hugh Blair:
He communicated his doubts to me, complaining that he was treated like a child, that tho’ he was poor he chose rather to conform himself to his circumstances than live like a beggar, on alms, and he was very unhappy at not speaking the language familiarly, so as to guard himself against these impositions. I told him that I was ignorant of the matter and knew no more of it than I was told by Davenport. Never tell me that, replied he, if this be really a contrivance of Davenport’s, you are acquainted with it, and consenting to it; and you could not possibly have done me a greater displeasure. Upon which he sat down very sullen and silent and all my attempts were in vain to revive the conversation and to turn it to other subjects: he still answered me dryly & coldly. After passing near an hour in this ill-humour, he 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, kissed me with the greatest warmth, and bedewing all my face with tears exclaimed, Is it possible you can ever forgive me my Dear Friend: After all the testaments of affection I have received from you, I reward you at last with this folly & ill behaviour: But I have notwithstanding a heart worthy of your friendship: I love you, I esteem you; and not an instance of
your kindness is thrown away upon me.
Hume was pleased with his sensitive reaction to this outpouring of feeling, aware of a reputation for being cold and detached. “I hope you have not so bad an opinion of me as to think I was not melted on this occasion: I assure you I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a plentiful effusion of tears. I think no scene of my life was ever more affecting.”
Hume reprised the episode to Mme de Boufflers, desiring her to restrict the news of this altercation to the ladies in her circle, because “I scarce know a male who would not think it childish.” But he asked her to transmit it on to Mme de Luxembourg, Mme de Barbantane, “and such of her female friends as you think worthy of it. … Ask Mme de L’Espinasse whether she can venture to tell it to d’Alembert.” Short of his placing an advertisement in the Brussels Gazette, it is hard to think how he might have publicized the encounter more widely.
Hume acknowledged to Mme de Boufflers that he had not replied to a letter from Mlle de L’Espinasse in February. He did not add that he had failed to pass on to Rousseau her suggestion (in very complimentary terms) that he should write the late dauphin’s eulogy, as he would bring to it just the right sensibility. The dauphin, shortly before his death, had praised Rousseau and regretted his persecution, she said. And a tribute from Rousseau “would help to ease [his] return to France and to his friends.” It is unlikely that Rousseau would have responded positively to such an idea from someone so close to d’Alembert. But Hume’s keeping to himself such superficially heartwarming news is distinctly odd.
Hume remained doubtful about Rousseau’s sticking it out in Derbyshire, writing to Jean-Charles Trudaine de Montigny, “If it be possible for a man to live without occupation, without books, without society, and without sleep, he will not quit this wild and solitary place, where all the circumstances which he ever required seem to concur for the purpose of rendering him happy. But I dread the weakness and inquietude natural to every man, and, above all, to a man of his character. I should not be surprised that he had soon quitted this retreat.”
They had known each other for only four months and would not meet again.
13
The Fashionable Mr. Walpole
In Borgia’s age they stabbed with daggers, in ours with the pen.
—HORACE WALPOLE
He loved mischief, but he loved quiet; and he was constantly on the watch for gratifying both his tastes at once. —T. B. MACAULAY ON WALPOLE
ON MARCH 22, the chaise bearing Rousseau, Le Vasseur, and Sultan trundled through a wooded valley and up the long, steep, muddy drive that led to Wootton Hall and the seclusion for which the exile yearned. Wootton Hall was set on a lonely eminence—the village of Wootton a little above it, the village of Ellaston a little below—in a wild, remote part of Staffordshire, just across the border from Derbyshire and nestling in the Weaver hills. Its isolation accounts for the local saying “Wootton-under-Weaver, where God came neever.” (The Hall was demolished in 1931; in the past few years a new mansion, in classical style, has been constructed on the site.)
Rousseau’s impressions of Wootton Hall were recorded in a letter to Mme de Luze in Neuchâtel.
Imagine a solitary house, Madame, one not very large but very suitable, built halfway up the side of a valley whose slope is broken enough to permit of walks on the level over the loveliest lawn in the universe. The front of the house is ruled by a great terrace whence the eye sweeps, in a semi-circle of several leagues, a landscape composed of meadows, trees and scattered farms, some houses more ornate, and the whole bordered, like a basin, by rising land on each side which agreeably limits one’s view when it cannot reach farther.
It is intriguing that Rousseau should have depicted Wootton Hall as “not very large” and, later, as “small but very habitable and well designed.” Either he was being disingenuous and eager to promote his image as a simple hermit, or else he had been spoiled by the ostentatious magnificence of the French aristocracy. In fact, Wootton Hall was a substantial home, its main castellated block three stories high.
One of its features was a curving, expansive staircase with an elaborate oak balustrade leading to a projecting wing with a view on three sides. There, Rousseau claimed for himself “only” two rooms, just above his host’s apartments, where there was a drawing room and “a kind of vestibule or antechamber which is very strange, lighted by a large glass lantern in the middle of the roof.” Above were the servants’ quarters.
Although the calendar indicated spring, a bitterly cold spell was closing in. It snowed within a day of the exiles’ arrival and the estate was entirely cut off from the outside world. After the bright lights of London and even the comparative bustle of rural Chiswick, what would have struck Rousseau was the utter stillness of the area—what he professed to want—and at night the darkness, which had always made him jumpy and afraid.
Nonetheless, he had few regrets about his decision. The countryside was beautiful but sad, he wrote. Nature here was “sluggish and lazy.” He missed the sound of nightingales. The trees, to his chagrin, had no leaves. He complained that the vegetables lacked flavor and the game had none at all. Ultimately, though, Wootton afforded “a commodious, agreeable, and solitary habitation, where the master provides everything, and nothing is wanting: I am quiet and independent.” There was no one to disturb him.
He seemed genuinely content—even cheery. He turned down his landlord’s offer of more reading material, though he requested from Du Peyrou that his botany books be forwarded, and his music books, too, for in Wootton he had use of a spinet.
Contacting Hume was one of his first acts. “As you can see from the date of the letter,” I have arrived, Rousseau informed his cher patron. The letter was almost all gratitude. “If I live in this agreeable asylum as happy as I hope to do,” he told Hume, “one of the greatest pleasures of my life will be, to reflect that I owe them to you. To make another happy is to deserve to be happy one’s self. May you, therefore, find in yourself the reward of all you have done for me!” He went on to say that for the reasons they had discussed—presumably to do with cost—he wished not to receive anything by post. When Hume had to write to him, could he send it via Davenport?
But what he saw as the slight of the pretended retour chaise was still gnawing at him, and, interestingly, he blamed Hume more than Davenport, penning a stiff reprimand to his patron. “The affair of the carriage is not yet adjusted, because I know I was imposed on; it is a trifling fault, however, which may be only the effect of an obliging vanity, unless it should happen to be repeated. If you had a hand in it, I would advise you to give up, once for all, these little stratagems, which cannot have a good motive, when changed into snares for simplicity.”
He closed with an oracular salutation. “Je vous embrasse, mon cher Patron, avec le même Coeur que j’espère et désire trouver en vous.” (I embrace you, my dear patron, with the same love I hope and desire to find in you.) It is unlikely that Hume stopped to consider the phrasing.
Rousseau also immediately wrote to his new landlord, Davenport, gently reproving him, and pointing out that it could not have been a return chaise if the driver was going back to London with his mail. (Davenport gave the game away by instructing the driver to wait.)
Another warm note to Hume followed a week later. “It is freezing here since I arrived; it has snowed every day; the wind cuts one’s face; yet in spite of these things I would rather live in the hole of one of the rabbits in this warren than in the finest apartment of London. Good-day, my dear patron, I embrace you and love you with all my heart.” In a P.S. he mentioned that one of Mr. Fitzherbert’s servants had accompanied them on the Derby-to-Ashbourne leg after their chaise had an accident—the driver was drunk.
HOWEVER, ROUSSEAU HAD much preying on his mind beyond the affront of the retour chaise. He had begun slowly to work out the details of a plot against him. In his imagination, a vast conspiracy was taking shape in which Hume loomed up as the central figure.
A
central piece of evidence was that spoof letter in the name of the king of Prussia, mentioned earlier. Rousseau seems to have read it early in April when it appeared in the London press, after having made the rounds in Paris in the new year.
My Dear Jean-Jacques,
You have renounced Geneva, your native soil. You have been driven from Switzerland, a country of which you have made such boast in your writings. In France you are outlawed: come then to me. I admire your talents, and amuse myself with your reverie; on which however, by the way, you bestow too much time and attention. It is high time to grow prudent and happy; you have made yourself sufficiently talked of for singularities little becoming a truly great man: show your enemies that you have sometimes common sense: this will vex them without hurting you. My dominions afford you a peaceful retreat: I am desirous to do you good, and will do it, if you can but think it such. But if you are determined to refuse my assistance, you may expect that I will say not a word about it to any one. If you persist in perplexing your brains to find out new misfortunes, choose such as you like best; I am a king and can make you as miserable as you can wish; at the same time, I will engage to do that which your enemies never will, I will cease to persecute you, when you are no longer vain of persecution.
Your sincere friend,
Frederic.
That the satire was the invention of that mad jester, that fou moqueur, Horace Walpole, was common knowledge in the Republic of Letters. The spoof was conceived and composed by him, and then polished by his French acquaintances, between December 12 and 27, 1765, and was in circulation probably from December 27, certainly from January 1, 1766. Walpole became the talk of Paris, and described the effect in a cluster of self-congratulatory letters to England, such as this to Conway, on January 12, 1766.
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