Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  Reveries of the

  Solitary Walker

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  RUSSELL GOULBOURNE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  REVERIES OF THE

  SOLITARY WALKER

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712–78) was born in Geneva, at that time an independent republic of which Rousseau would proudly call himself a citizen. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, died soon after his birth. His father, Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, left Geneva when his son was 10, leaving him in the care of relatives. In 1728 Rousseau decided to seek his fortune elsewhere. He served as a domestic in a prominent Turin family, but he found a new home in Chambéry with Mme de Warens, who acted by turns as his mother, mentor, and lover. He taught himself philosophy and literature, worked briefly as a tutor in Lyons, and in 1742 arrived in Paris, where he met Diderot and Condillac, as well as Thérèse Levasseur, his lifelong companion. After the success of his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750), which criticized the corrupting influence of civilization, he resigned his position as secretary in the wealthy Dupin family and from then on supported himself by his pen, although he continued to enjoy the hospitality of enlightened aristocrats. He wrote articles on music and political economy for Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, and an opera, The Village Soothsayer. The Discourse on Inequality appeared in 1755, and a polemical Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre in 1758.

  Rousseau’s novel, Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761), was greeted enthusiastically, but The Social Contract, his boldest political work, and his treatise on education, Émile (both 1762), were condemned as subversive. Fleeing arrest, Rousseau travelled in Switzerland, where he began his autobiographical Confessions (published posthumously), to England at the invitation of David Hume, and back to the French provinces, where, his mind increasingly troubled, he lived under a pseudonym. He was allowed to return to Paris in 1770, where he composed his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. He died at Ermenonville outside Paris in 1778.

  RUSSELL GOULBOURNE is Professor of Early Modern French Literature at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and has contributed to the new critical edition of Voltaire’s complete works. He has translated Diderot’s The Nun for Oxford World’s Classics.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER

  First Walk

  Second Walk

  Third Walk

  Fourth Walk

  Fifth Walk

  Sixth Walk

  Seventh Walk

  Eighth Walk

  Ninth Walk

  Tenth Walk

  Explanatory Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I AM grateful to the many colleagues and friends who have generously given me their help and advice, in particular David Coward, Alison Fell, Richard Hibbitt, Catherine Kaiserman, David McCallam, Nigel Saint, and Edward Welch. I should also like to thank Judith Luna for being an unfailingly patient and supportive editor. My greatest debt, though, is to Lisa Needham, who, in our rural retreat, has shown me that it really is better not to be a solitary walker after all: to her this volume is gratefully dedicated.

  INTRODUCTION

  AT the beginning of his poem ‘Sylvie’s Walk’ (‘L’Allée de Sylvie’, 1747), written nearly thirty years before he began the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire), Jean-Jacques Rousseau strikes a note that seems to resonate throughout his career:

  As I wander freely in these groves,

  My heart the highest pleasure knows!

  How happy I am under the shady trees!

  How I love the silvery streams!

  Sweet and charming reverie,

  Dear and beloved solitude,

  May you always be my true delight!

  Inspired by a walk beside the river Cher at Chenonceaux, where Rousseau was living with the Dupin family, for whom he worked as a secretary, the poem evokes the ecstasies of wandering, nature, solitude, and reverie—all of which anticipate the poetic prose of the Reveries. However, the poem has none of the later text’s invasive sense of anxiety, hostility, persecution, and torment. For as much as Rousseau’s early poem and his last work seem to have in common, the Rousseau who wrote
the Reveries was very different from the Rousseau who wrote ‘Sylvie’s Walk’: if the poem is the work of a self-taught musician-cum-writer, increasingly well-connected, if not terribly well known, making his way working for wealthy patrons and writing, amongst other things, articles on music to be published in Diderot and d’Alembert’s freethinking Encyclopaedia (L’Encyclopédie, 1751–72), the Reveries, by contrast, come from the pen of an international celebrity, a writer who had achieved overnight fame—and infamy—with an eloquent denunciation of the corrupting influence of celebrity-obsessed society.

  Everything changed for Rousseau with the publication in early 1751, when he was thirty-eight, of his first book, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts). Written in response to an essay competition set the previous year by the Dijon Academy, the text argues, paradoxically, that intellectual progress has fostered moral corruption and a decline in civic virtue. Here Rousseau launches upon a theme that will, in a variety of different guises, preoccupy him for the rest of his life: put simply, the relationship between self and other. From the 1750s onwards he will be centrally concerned with the problems of man in society and with the tensions between society and nature. These problems and tensions he explores in works as diverse as the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité, 1755), in which he argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process; the Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758), in which he argues that theatre is morally dangerous because it encourages audiences to cut themselves off from public society and indulge the most suspect of emotions; Julie, or the New Héloïse (Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), one of the century’s best-selling novels, a patriarchal idyll about the importance of transferring erotic longing into virtuous restraint; Émile, or On Education (Émile ou De l’éducation, 1762), a treatise on education which opens with a clear statement of Rousseau’s core vision of human agency’s corrupting influence: ‘All is good when it leaves the hands of the Author of all things, all degenerates in the hands of man’; and The Social Contract (Du Contrat social, 1762), Rousseau’s major work of political philosophy, in which he sets out his vision for a just and humane political community. With these works he adds powerful new brushstrokes to his sombre portrait of what has happened to humankind as a result of so-called progress and civilization, dissecting the forces at work that conspire to alienate humankind from their true nature. Rousseau, who proudly attached his name to all of these works (in contrast to his contemporary Voltaire, for instance, who had recourse to innumerable pseudonyms, as well as to anonymity, when publishing his controversial texts), was not afraid to take on dearly held Enlightenment convictions—such as the belief in progress—and show them to be mere assumptions and unproven contentions.

  Moreover, it is precisely Rousseau’s well-publicized and polemical views on society which brought him not only the celebrity he loathed but also the infamy that saw him, in his terms, driven into exile, unfairly rejected by his fellow men. In this respect, 1762 is a turning-point. Having left Paris and its literary scene in 1756, and having severed ties first with his patron Mme d’Épinay, the hostess of a famous salon, at the end of 1757 and subsequently with his sometime friends Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm, an intimate of Mme d’Épinay’s, in 1762 Rousseau was plunged into controversy by the publication of Émile, which, primarily because of the religious views Rousseau expressed in it, was condemned by the Paris parlement, who also issued an arrest warrant for its author. Rousseau now became convinced that there was a conspiracy against him, and this sense of persecution was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He renounced his citizenship of his native Geneva, whose authorities had also condemned him and his works, and the rest of the 1760s he spent in a kind of exile, leaving France for Switzerland, including his brief but idyllic stay on the Île de St Pierre in the Lac de Bienne, followed by an ill-fated journey to England in 1766, made at the invitation of the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, with whom Rousseau ended up quarrelling. He returned to France in 1767 and lived in the provinces, only returning to Paris in 1770.

  In response to the events of 1762 and their traumatic repercussions, Rousseau’s gaze turned inward and he wrote, if not a trilogy in the strict sense of the term, then a kind of triptych of autobiographical works. The first of these, the Confessions, which Rousseau started writing in 1764, are addressed to his contemporaries as he seeks to reshape the perception of his work and correct the misrepresentations of him. Determined to exonerate himself, Rousseau seeks to set out logically and systematically what he calls in Book 7 of the work the ‘chain of feelings’ that marked the successive stages of his being.1 Between November 1770 and May 1771 he gave readings from his work to aristocrats in Paris, though these so embarrassed Mme d’Épinay that she petitioned the police to ban them. The reaction he received to his reading at the home of the comtesse d’Egmont in 1771 was so remarkable that he ends the Confessions with it: ‘No one spoke’ (p. 642), he tells us on the last page.

  Beset by paranoia, Rousseau’s next step, it seems, was to divide himself in two and write, between 1772 and 1776, the three dialogues that make up Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues), in which ‘Rousseau’ and ‘a Frenchman’ discuss the life and works of Jean-Jacques (Rousseau himself ). The role played by the Frenchman in the text is crucial: so dismayed was he by his failure to win over the putative readers of his Confessions that Rousseau, through the Frenchman, effectively incorporates the reader in the Dialogues and has his alter ego, ‘Rousseau’, set about persuading him. The Dialogues also envisage the judgement of posterity, and, gripped by mental torment, Rousseau tried to place the manuscript of the Dialogues on the High Altar of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris, on 24 February 1776 but found his way was barred by a gate. His sense of alienation and persecution was all but complete.

  Having first been ignored and then divided himself in two, Rousseau finally turns in on himself in his Reveries, his last attempt to achieve some kind of mental and spiritual balance in his life. The turning-point seems to come with the death on 2 August 1776 of the prince de Conti, his sometime protector (and great-grandson of the prince de Conti who had protected Molière), if indeed this is what he is alluding to when he states in the First Walk that ‘an event as sad as it was unforeseen’ has shown him that his ‘earthly fate is irrevocably fixed for evermore’ (p. 5): with the prince de Conti’s death, it seems, dies Rousseau’s last hope of being rehabilitated. Whatever the event, it clearly triggered a change of mood and inspired Rousseau to write the Reveries, on which he worked from September 1776 to April 1778, leaving them unfinished at his death three months later; they were first published, like the Confessions, in 1782.

  The Reveries are a kind of continuation of, or appendix to, but not actually the planned third part of, the Confessions.2 It is true that they tell us some things about Rousseau’s life that the Confessions did not, such as the episodes with his cousin Fazy and his friend Pleince recounted in the Fourth Walk. But crucially the two works are different in character and scope. Whereas in the Confessions Rousseau seeks to explain himself to others, in the Reveries, by contrast, he makes a point of addressing only himself, since all he seeks, as he spells out in the First Walk, is to understand himself: ‘But what about me, cut off from them and from everything else, what am I? . . . I am devoting my last days to studying myself’ (pp. 3, 7). In the Reveries Rousseau eschews chronology and a narrative stressing cause and effect in favour of reflection, self-analysis, and meditation. His narrative is resolutely non-linear and profoundly introspective and personal, ‘the desire to be better known by people’, as he also remarks in the First Walk, having ‘died in [his] heart’ (p. 9).

  Whereas the Confessions enact a kind of moral vivisection—Intus, et in cute (‘underneath, and in the flesh’), as the epigraph from Per
sius puts it (p. 5)—the Reveries, by contrast, show Rousseau apparently accepting himself and endeavouring to give himself the space in which to express himself and feel as never before what it means to exist. This is, in principle at least, neither a confessional nor a polemical work; rather, it is a work in which, as he remarks in the First Walk, he gives himself over entirely to ‘the pleasure of conversing with [his] soul, for this is the only pleasure that [his] fellow men cannot take away from [him]’ (p. 7). And therein, for Rousseau, lies the crux of the text: it is intended as a poignant response to, and an extended rebellion against, those who have tried to control him. Rousseau says that he finds strength in indifference towards his enemies and persecutors, and happiness in solitude amidst nature. Long reflection on his plight as a victim of persecution leads Rousseau to conclude from the outset—hence the all-important ‘so’ in the very first sentence of the Reveries, suggesting a summing up of, and a conclusion to, previous reflection—that he must accept his fate, stop fighting against it, and be, as he claims in the First Walk, ‘at peace in the depths of the chasm, a poor, unfortunate mortal, but as impassive as God himself’ (p. 7). He appears to move from his earlier modes of confession, self-defence, and self-justification to a stoic, self-sufficient acceptance of his fate and thereby an apparent triumph over those who seek to control him: his introspection leads him to seek out and find a remedy for his sufferings in those sufferings themselves. In other words, he turns isolation and solitude to his own advantage. He revels in the fact that, in spite of themselves, his enemies have given him an opportunity he gladly embraces: the opportunity to be alone. As he says in the Seventh Walk: ‘This is my way of taking revenge on my persecutors: I can think of no crueller way of punishing them than to be happy in spite of them’ (p. 70).

  But is the Rousseau of the Reveries as happy as he claims to be? Has he really avenged himself of those whom he believes to be his persecutors? The text in fact gives no unambiguous answers to such questions. On the contrary, it gives voice to contradictions and obsessions which give us a very sharp sense of a Rousseau still working through the problems he claims to have overcome. Most obviously, this is a text shot through with such a vivid sense of there being widespread hostility towards Rousseau that it is difficult to accept that he is merely indifferent to misfortune and persecution. In addition, thoroughgoing self-analysis does not prevent Rousseau from engaging in more or less subtle self-defence, even self-exoneration: whereas, from the outset, his persecutors are characterized by their extravagant cruelty (‘in the refinement of their hatred they have continued to seek out the cruellest forms of torture for my sensitive soul’, p. 3), he praises himself, in contrast, as ‘the most sociable and loving of human beings’ (p. 3) and, later, as ‘the most trusting of men’ (p. 64) and ‘the most sensitive of beings’ (p. 84); in the Fourth Walk, Rousseau deftly embeds his passing, even self-pitying admission that he lied as a youth about the theft of a ribbon, and had a kitchen maid sacked to save himself, within a complex argument about the relativity of truth and falsehood, an argument that ultimately celebrates the man—implicitly Rousseau himself—who holds to truth to the point of self-sacrifice; and in the Ninth Walk, his oblique attempt to rationalize his decision to place in the Foundlings’ Hospital the five children he had between 1746 and 1751 with his long-time companion Thérèse Levasseur is set within an elaborate, self-justificatory illustration of how good he is with children. And lastly, whatever we may think of Rousseau’s view of himself and of others, it is difficult not to be moved by the suggestions in his text that he is not as happy as he claims to be: for instance, having noted at the end of the Seventh Walk, with now familiar but nevertheless striking recourse to hyperbole, that he is still ‘in the midst of the most miserable fate ever endured by a mortal’ (p. 82), in the Ninth Walk he goes on to give pained expression to his insatiable longing for happiness with other human beings: