The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (104 page)

The flood and variety of essays and essayists increased with the multiplication of magazines and newspapers. The essay provided a versatile and appealing form for the literary criticism and moral reflections of Dr. Johnson and Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), for the political and philosophical speculations of John Locke and the Federalist papers, for the labored whimsies of Charles Lamb. Emerson (1803–1882) made the essay his own vehicle for an American substitute for a philosophy. And the essay was providentially suited to the existential philosophy of Camus, the random insights of Lafcadio Hearn, the tentative judgments of Thomas Mann, the opinions of G. K. Chesterton, the fantasies of George Orwell, the playfulness of E. B. White.

While the essay became a respectable form, its novelty was in its celebration of the self. Its reason for being was the belief that the thoughts, feelings, uncertainties, certitudes, and contradictions of a person merited statement and then attention by others. Experience of the doubting self became more intriguing than the fervency of belief. “When I play with my cat,” Montaigne asked, “who knows if she does not amuse herself more with me than I with her.”

E
XPERIMENTAL
and incomplete, the modern creations of the self were an ever-changing subject looking at an ever-changing object. The two classic autobiographies we explore here were never finished by their authors, and not published till years after their authors’ death. Yet both live on to entertain us and show how hard it is to tell the truth. They remind us that every effort of the self to describe the self must be no more than what Montaigne called it—an “essay,” a try.

The vast spectrum of modern accounts of the self is suggested in the pioneer creations of two spectacular characters, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), who, though contemporaries, were opposite in almost every way. Each encouraged countless imitators; one offered his confessions, the other his success story. Both, like Montaigne, purported to tell the truth about themselves. Both tantalize us by what they leave untold.

For modern moralists Rousseau has become an anti-Christ, champion of the amoral “purely exploratory attitude towards life,” “the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues.” Whatever we think of Rousseau’s morals, we can see in him a spokesman of the modern search for the unique and the new, a pathfinder in the exploration of the self.

In self-imposed exile in England in 1766, Rousseau wrote the opening sentences of his
Confessions:

Rousseau’s
Confessions
was written in self-defense against an imaginary conspiracy. A by-product of this self-defense was a new concept of literature, in which the subject was the author.

How Rousseau transformed himself into such a subject and how he came to think that he needed so impassioned a self-defense is an intriguing though not a pleasant story. If he had never written his confessions he would still merit a place among the shapers of modern thought. But while his other works carried new messages on education and government in the familiar form of the essay or the novel, his
Confessions
created a new kind of literature. The “confessions” of Saint Augustine were chapters in hagiography, an intimate story of conversion to Christianity. But Rousseau’s life was anything but saintly, and his life was in need of whatever modern alternative could be found for the confessional.

“My birth,” Rousseau wrote, “was the first of my misfortunes.” A few days after his birth in Geneva in 1712 his mother died. In the library of his father, a watchmaker with literary tastes in belligerently Calvinist Geneva, Jean-Jacques read widely and passionately. He reports how he immersed himself every night and “until we heard the morning larks,” in classics, novels, histories, Plutarch’s
Lives
, whatever was at hand. “Plutarch … was my especial favorite, and the pleasure I took in reading and re-reading him did something to cure me of my passion for novels.” “I felt before I thought: which is the common lot of man, though more pronounced in my case than in another’s.… In a short time I acquired by this dangerous method, not only an extreme facility in reading and expressing myself, but a singular insight for my age into the passions. I had no idea of the facts, but I was familiar with every feeling. I had grasped nothing; I had sensed everything.”

His life changed abruptly at the age of ten when his irritable and quarrelsome father had to flee Geneva after a brawl. Jean-Jacques was sent to the countryside to live with the pastor Lambercier “to learn Latin and all that twaddle as well that goes by the name of education.” There he acquired his first taste for rural delights. Incidentally he learned something about himself from the pastor’s unmarried sister, Mlle. Lambercier, as he explained in his
Confessions:

This episode was a fitting prologue to a life of masochism.

Passionately in need of love, Rousseau was torn between a desperate quest for independence and an equally desperate search for someone who would accept his dependence. It was not surprising that this internal conflict ended in madness. But in his
Confessions
he left us his plea for affection and respect, while producing one of the first vivid portraits of modern man’s tussle with himself. After only two years in the country he returned to Geneva, where he served as apprentice to an engraver. Then in 1728 he began the vagabondage of a lifetime. He escaped the Calvinist capital with the aid of an underground run by the Savoy clergy seeking converts. They directed him to Annecy and to “a good and charitable lady, whom the King of his bounty, has empowered to save other souls from the error under which she once laboured herself.”

So at the age of nineteen he began his first bondage to a patron, Mme. de Warens, then twenty-eight, who had left her husband to become a Catholic. She sent Rousseau to Turin, where he passed a brief unpleasant stint as a convert in a monastery. He then returned to this woman to whom he remained attached for ten years. “Her manner was tender and caressing, her gaze was very mild, her smile angelic, her mouth small like mine, her hair, which was ash blond and extraordinarily plentiful, she wore with an affected negligence that increased her attraction. She was small in stature, almost short, and rather stout, though not in an ungainly way but a lovelier head, a lovelier throat, lovelier hands, and lovelier arms it would have been impossible to find.” She found him a job in the tax office in Chambéry, where he worked briefly before going to Lyons, where he made his living as a tutor. By 1742 Rousseau was in Paris trying to make his fortune with his new scheme of musical notation. He wrote an opera, a play, dabbled in chemistry, and gained the confidence of a wealthy banker, whose wife he tried to seduce. His employment as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice ended in a protocol quarrel over Rousseau’s right to be invited to a state dinner. Then back to Paris, where he formed his association with the encyclopédistes and especially their leading spirit, Denis Diderot. He
eked out a living as secretary to the wealthy banker Dupin, and as research assistant to him and his wife.

Rousseau first came to public notice when he entered the essay competition of the Dijon Academy in 1750. The question was whether the progress of the arts and sciences had purified or corrupted morals. His paradoxical thesis, designed to shock the academy, was that the savage man was superior to the civilized. He argued that the sciences and the arts had been instruments of oppression, securing wealth for the wealthy and riveting poverty on others. “Virtue!” he concluded, “sublime science of simple minds.… Are not your principles graven on every heart? Need we do more to learn your laws, than examine ourselves and listen to the voice of conscience, when the passions are silent?” He had tactfully omitted from the printed version his more shocking original passages attacking kings and clergy. What remained was still shocking enough to make him an enfant terrible in the learned world.

The next year he elaborated his subversive notions. “Wealth inevitably leads to luxury and idleness;” he now insisted, “luxury permits the cultivation of the arts, and idleness that of the sciences.” These evils have a still-deeper cause explained in his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men
(1755). “The greater part of our ills are of our own making, and … we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to that simple, uniform, and solitary manner of life which nature prescribed.… I venture to declare that a state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and that a thinking man is a depraved animal.” The disposition to think, together with the discovery of iron and wheat, created private property, war, and the need for laws.

But somehow Rousseau more than many of his contemporaries suffered from the depravity of thought. He wrote the articles on music for the epoch-making
Encyclopédie
, and composed an opera, along with an essay on political economy. At the same time he undertook a “great reform” in his own life. He would support himself as a music copyist. During a brief visit to Geneva he reconverted to Calvinism and so recovered his Genevan citizenship. Then he found another patroness, Mme. d’Épinay, who offered him lodging for the next two years (1756–57) at l’Ermitage, her idyllic country house near Montmorency. When after a quarrel he moved out in a huff, he transferred to a nearby country house owned by his friend the maréchal de Luxembourg where he had five years’ free lodging. There he wrote
Émile
, his seminal work on education, which never lost its influence and in the twentieth century became a basis for the progressive education movement. There, too, he wrote his famous
Social Contract
(1762), a plea for “civil religion” and popular sovereignty, which became the sacred text of the French Revolution of 1789 and the reason why the revolutionaries would move his remains with those of Voltaire to the Pantheon in Paris.
Rousseau, ever since 1753, had been under surveillance by the Paris police for his subversive views. When his latest works brought him condemnation by the Parlement of Paris in 1762, he sought refuge in Switzerland. Forbidden to remain in Geneva, he settled in a village in the heart of the Jura mountains, in the canton of Neuchâtel, then a territory of the tolerant Frederick the Great of Prussia. There he luxuriated in the beauties of the countryside, received the sacraments from the Protestant pastor and, to mollify the authorities, promised that he would never write anything more. Promptly violating his promise, he wrote his
Letters from the Mountain
, a bitter polemic against the Geneva authorities who had burned his works. His fame brought him an invitation from the Corsican patriot Pasquale di Paoli to write a constitution for his island, and a visit from James Boswell. In 1764 an anonymous pamphlet (actually written by Voltaire) appeared in town, and after the pastor denounced Rousseau in a strident sermon, the citizens began throwing stones at his home. It was this episode that Rousseau and his friends magnified into a monstrous life-threatening “lapidation.” Again he fled, this time under the patronage of the generous David Hume, who had been awed by Rousseau’s writings and who accompanied him to England in January 1766. Hume set him up in a comfortable house for a nominal rent at Wootton in Derbyshire.

But by June 23 Rousseau had succumbed again to his delusions of persecution. He wrote Hume a contemptuous letter accusing him of a dire conspiracy, swearing never to write him again or to have “further commerce with him.” The gentle Hume was thunderstruck. Without thanks or apology Rousseau then unaccountably disappeared, and finally turned up in France in May 1767. The next years were a time of more flight and panic. Haunted by the imaginary conspiracy against him, and the delusion of omnipresent spies, he took an assumed name and sought refuge in a village outside Paris, then in another village near Lyons, then back to the heart of Paris in 1770, where he remained off and on until his death in 1778.

The vagabondage that kept Rousseau’s erratic spirit from settling anyplace also prevented him from committing his affections to a person. He swore on many occasions that Mme. de Warens was his only true love, and he made the same oath to Mme. de Houdetot and uncounted others. His amorous attentions shifted with his place of residence and his needs for a sheltering patron. Mme. de Warens was preceded by Mme. Basile and Mme. de Vercelles, to mention two—and followed by a long list, among whom we know prominently Mme. d’Épinay and Mme. de Houdetot. After he was sent away by Mme. de Warens his definitive attachment was to Thérèse le Vasseur, whom he met in Paris in 1744. “What I needed to replace my stifled ambition was a strong affection to fill my heart. What I needed, in short, was a successor to Mamma [de Warens].” Luckily, he
found waiting on the table at his Paris hotel the very person he needed. “The first time I saw this girl appear at table I was struck by her modest behavior and even more, by her bright and gentle looks, of which I had never seen the like before.” “She was shy and so was I. Yet the intimacy which our common shyness seemed to preclude was speedily formed. Our landlady noticed it and became furious. But her unkindness only improved my position with the girl.…” “She believed she saw in me an honorable man, and she was not mistaken. I believed that I saw in her a girl with feelings, a simple girl without coquetry; and I was not mistaken either. I declared in advance that I would never abandon her, nor ever marry her. Love, esteem, and simple sincerity were the agents of my triumph, and since her heart was tender and virtuous, I did not need to be bold to be fortunate.”