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

  Ultimately, though, what distinguishes Rousseau most clearly from Montaigne, as he carefully reminds us, is that he is writing for himself. In other words, not only does he take himself as his subject, as Montaigne had done; he also takes himself as his own reader. This is what is radically new about the Reveries: the text is intended as a means of expression of his own self for his own self. Montaigne had observed in his chapter ‘On Repenting’ ( ‘Du repentir’, III. 2) that ‘my book and I go harmoniously forward at the same pace’;10 in Rousseau’s hands, by contrast, the writer, the text, and the reader form one, seamless whole. The unintended reader of the published text—for there is no evidence that Rousseau ever envisaged his Reveries being published—is thus implicitly constructed as a kind of voyeur. For some readers, that voyeurism is difficult to bear, even repugnant; for many others, however, their response has been, and continues to be, one of intense identification with Rousseau’s experience.

  It is precisely the power of the Reveries to provoke a sometimes visceral reaction in readers that explains the enduring appeal of the text and its discernible influence on generations of creative artists ever since. In the visual arts, Rousseau’s depiction of the solitary individual meditating in nature appears to have influenced nineteenth-century portrait painters like Antoine-Jean Gros, whose full-length posthumous portrait of Christine Boyer, wife of Lucien Bonaparte, painted in 1801, shows the young woman as a solitary walker in a dark and mysterious wood, lost in reverie, gazing at the stream flowing past her; and Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, whose large-scale portrait of the Empress Josephine, commissioned in 1805, shows Josephine sitting in the garden at Malmaison, lost in reverie. In twentieth-century art, perhaps the most disturbing echo of Rousseau’s text is to be found in the work of the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte: in his 1926 painting The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire), Magritte responds to his mother’s suicide in 1912, when he was only thirteen years old, by painting a bowler-hatted man, who was to become the iconic motif of his entire oeuvre and who effectively represents his alter-ego, with his back turned on his dead mother, who lies on a slab in the foreground. The sense of isolation expressed by Rousseau, whose own mother died when he was only a week old, is here translated into the haunting visual image of a profound psychological trauma.

  In music, the influential nineteenth-century Hungarian composer and pianist Stephen Heller, who spent most of his life in Paris and described himself as a solitary dreamer, wrote for the piano a series of three Walks of a Solitary (Promenades d’un solitaire, Op. 78, 80, 89) in the 1850s as well as Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Op. 101) in 1862. And in 2004, the contemporary London-based Macedonian composer Nikola Kodjabashia called his experimental, classical/jazz crossover album Reveries of the Solitary Walker, being inspired by Rousseau’s meditative text in writing his nine variations on a traditional Byzantine chant in honour of the Virgin Mary, the seventh of which is entitled ‘Seventh Walk’.

  But it is on writers that the Reveries have exerted the most powerful influence. Writers at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries were particularly inspired by Rousseau’s evocation of the relationship between walking and personal freedom. As an early example of this influence, the narrator of John Thelwall’s The Peripatetic (1793), Sylvanus Theophrastus, echoing Rousseau in and near Paris, goes on walks in and near London, and, pursuing his ‘meditations on foot’, writes brief chapters about the people and places he encounters along the way, though the satirical tone he adopts strikes a clear contrast with Rousseau’s text. William Hazlitt, for his part, who dismissed Thelwall as ‘the flattest writer I have ever read . . . tame and trite and tedious . . . a mere drab-coloured suit in the person of the prose writer’, wrote an essay on walking, ‘On Going on a Journey’ (1821), which shows the influence of Rousseau: much of the essay is about the relationship between walking and thinking, and he declares at the outset that solitude is better on a walk: ‘I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.’ And later in the nineteenth century, in his book Walden (1854), the American Henry Thoreau echoes Rousseau’s Reveries in leaving society in order to find himself in nature, in his case the woods of Massachusetts, where, he says, ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude’.

  Rousseau’s vision of the walker in nature, and particularly in mountainous landscapes, also had a particularly strong influence on what might be loosely termed Romantic writers. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) are a remarkable work of travel writing, in which, clearly echoing Rousseau’s Reveries, she seeks the source of human happiness in the breathtaking grandeur of the Scandinavian landscape, which occasions a series of brilliant reveries, ‘mild and enchanting as the first hopes of love’, though she subtly reorients her model by insistently engaging with, rather than distancing herself from, society. William Wordsworth, for his part, followed Rousseau more closely still: journeying across the Alps in 1790, his final destination, before heading back down the Rhine, was the Île de St Pierre, the natural paradise Rousseau describes in the Fifth Walk, to which he then alludes in the famous passage on the ‘one life’ in the peroration to Book 2 of The Prelude. This semi-autobiographical, ambulatory poem, which Wordsworth began writing in 1798–9 and in which he was also inspired by Wollstonecraft’s Letters, includes, in Book 9, the notion of ‘spots of time’, which echoes Rousseau’s remarks about writing and memory in so far as they are, for Wordsworth, past experiences through which he can trace his own development and which continue to resonate with new meanings many years after the events themselves. The intense beauty of Rousseau’s Fifth Walk is also evoked in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poems ‘To the Germans’ ( ‘An die Deutschen’, 1800), ‘Rousseau’ (1800), ‘The Rhein’ ( ‘Der Rhein’, 1801), and ‘Mnemosyne’ (1802), all of which refer to Rousseau drifting in his boat on the middle of the Lac de Bienne, and in Alphonse de Lamartine’s beautiful poem ‘The Lake’ ( ‘Le Lac’), published in his collection Poetic Meditations (Méditations poétiques, 1820), in which the poet walks alone at the lac du Bourget, recalling a walk there the previous year with his beloved, who is now ill, and asks the lake to hold into eternity the ephemeral trace of their past happiness. A similar attempt to recover the past is found in Gérard de Nerval’s remarkable novella Sylvie (1853), in which the newly rich narrator leaves Paris and returns to his native Valois region, north of the city, in search of ‘places of solitude and reverie’: echoing the Ninth Walk, he evokes country customs and festivals; he shares Rousseau’s interest in botany, and he even makes a kind of pilgrimage to Ermenonville, where Rousseau died.

  The power of reverie also appealed to a number of French novelists at the beginning of the nineteenth century who gave new embodiments to Rousseau’s solitary walker in their isolated, introspective, brooding, and anxious characters: Senancour’s Obermann (1804), Chateaubriand’s René (1805), and Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807) are all important in this respect. In England, meanwhile, Percy Shelley seized on Rousseau the visionary, describing him in a letter to Thomas Hogg of July 1816 as ‘the greatest man the world has produced since Milton’. Shelley was a keen reader of the Reveries: he set Claire Clairmont, his wife’s stepsister, the task of translating part of the text in August 1814; he drew on it as inspiration for the figure of the visionary poet in his poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816); and in his contemporaneous essay ‘On Life’, he describes how ‘those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being’. And in a slightly different vein, and despite being largely dismissive of Rousseau, Thomas De Quincey echoes the Reveries, as well as the Confessions, in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), in which he describes how he ‘often fell into these reveries upon taking opium’ an
d how, when in the drug’s ‘divinest state’, the opium-eater ‘naturally seeks solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature’.

  The image that the Reveries give of Rousseau as the wandering, observant, solitary man seems to foreshadow the famous flâneur of the nineteenth century, but with the crucial difference that the flâneur could only exist in the city, detached from the crowds but endlessly intrigued by them, whereas Rousseau wanted nothing to do with them or the urban experience as a whole. Unlike the flâneur, who, in Walter Benjamin’s famous description of him, goes ‘botanizing on the asphalt’, and unlike Søren Kierkegaard, who similarly likened to rural botanizing his urban tours around Copenhagen, observing his human subjects, the solitary Rousseau flees the urban in pursuit of the rural: only outside the city, in solitary communion with nature, can Rousseau really be himself. This distinction notwithstanding, it is striking that in 1862 Baudelaire considered giving the title The Solitary Walker (Le Promeneur solitaire) to what were to become his Little Prose Poems (Petits Poèmes en prose, 1869), most of which are about the Parisian metropolis, including ‘The Double Room’ ( ‘La Chambre double’), ‘The Crowds’ ( ‘Les Foules’), and ‘Solitude’ ( ‘La Solitude’), which recall the Second and Fifth Walks of Rousseau’s Reveries, and ‘The Old Clown’ ( ‘Le Vieux Saltimbanque’) and ‘The Cake’ ( ‘Le Gâteau’), which echo the Ninth. By contrast, the echoes in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) are more disturbingly ironic: written, in part, as an inspired polemic against Rousseau, the novel has at its heart a ‘lazy bones’ who makes a career out of his idleness and seeks comfort in a world of fantasy.

  The figure of Rousseau the solitary walker, communing with the natural world, has remained important into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rousseau’s influence can be seen in the life and work of the German writer and critic W. G. Sebald, for example. In The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn, 1995), a meditative work blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Sebald’s unnamed, solitary narrator travels through Suffolk and, from there, back in time. Sebald went on to write an essay on Rousseau in his collection Lodgings in a Country House (Logis in einem Landhaus, 1998), which also includes a deeply personal and reflective essay on the Swiss writer Robert Walser, entitled Le Promeneur solitaire; and in an interview with Arthur Lubow for The New York Times shortly before his untimely death in December 2001, he said that, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, the Île de St Pierre was the one place where he had felt truly at home. And like Sebald, the contemporary French writer Michel Butor, perhaps best known for his experimental novels of the 1950s, has also followed Rousseau to Switzerland, where, sharing his interest in botany, he has published his Botanical Wanderings: Sites of Memory (Errances botaniques: lieux de mémoire, 2003), a four-part account of walks in the Alps, offering, like the Reveries, a complex reflection on the links between nature and memory, and in which Butor’s words are combined with images by the Swiss painter and illustrator Catherine Ernst.

  The work of a great prose stylist and a controversial philosopher, the Reveries still appeal to modern readers because they are the enduring testimony of an alienated person who wants to know himself, rebel against the forces that constrain him, and live as an autonomous individual. They are the work of a person who is not afraid to lay bare his psychological fragility and human vulnerability. They give a window onto the soul of someone who is different, who does not fit in, an eccentric/ex-centric that cannot—or does not want to—find a place in conventional, supposedly civilized society. Rousseau is thus at once exceptional —the solitary walker who is, he says in the Seventh Walk, ‘completely at odds with other men’ (p. 74)—and exemplary, someone whose life is, as he puts it in the preface to the Neuchâtel edition of the Confessions, ‘a point of comparison’ for everyone else’s (p. 648). How he writes, what he writes about, and who and what he is all combine to make Rousseau a writer of his time, of our time, and of all times. As the twentieth-century French novelist François Mauriac pithily observed, referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in an appropriately familiar way: ‘It is not enough to say that J.-J. is close to us: he is one of us.’

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  ROUSSEAU wrote the Reveries between September 1776 and 12 April 1778, using as his starting point notes he took on playing cards while out walking.1 By the time of his death in Ermenonville, north of Paris, where he had been staying with the marquis de Girardin, in July 1778, he had completed a manuscript of the first seven of the Walks; a separate manuscript contained the last three, which remained in note form and, in the case of the Tenth Walk, incomplete. Following Rousseau’s death, the marquis de Girardin sent these manuscripts, together with the playing cards, to Rousseau’s friend and executor Pierre-Alexandre Du Peyrou in Neuchâtel, who ensured their publication. The Reveries were first published in Geneva in 1782 alongside the first part (Books 1–6) of the Confessions; it is the text of this edition that is given by Marcel Raymond in his edition for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard), which I have used in preparing this translation.

  The Reveries have long been known in England. The 1782 edition was reviewed as early as June that year in the Monthly Review, which playfully suggested ‘sublime ravings’ as a possible translation for the French term ‘rêveries’. It nevertheless argued that the Reveries were a more interesting text than the Confessions with which it was published: ‘Though they also contain many insipid and vulgar anecdotes, such as may happen to every barber’s boy who carries home the wig that his master has dressed, yet they exhibit entertainment of a higher kind . . . that will diminish the unfavourable impressions, which these Confessions may produce.’ The Monthly Review continued its critique the following September, quoting at length from the First Walk, ‘a rueful ditty’ which, it says, ‘seems to have been penned in a feverish fit’; it adds of Rousseau that ‘this honest man laboured, almost from his cradle to his grave, under a certain touch of insanity’. It concluded that ‘the best minds will find nourishment for their virtue, piety, and taste, in many passages of these Reveries, which resemble fruits and flowers, scattered here and there through a strange and romantic wilderness’.

  The first English translation of the Reveries, together with a translation of the first part of the Confessions, was published in April 1783 in London for J. Bew in Paternoster Row. The Monthly Review remained unimpressed the following August: ‘The general disapprobation which we expressed for the original, applies with still stronger force to the translation.’ The Critical Review, by contrast, argued in May 1783 that the Reveries ‘deserve our attention’, though it despaired of the anonymous translation, in which ‘the spirit and force of the original are seldom preserved’. The English Review for its part offered a tellingly ambivalent response to the text in the following October: noting that Rousseau’s belief that he was the victim of a conspiracy ‘appears gradually to have impaired his intellects’, it nevertheless argued that ‘his lamentations, though unmanly and ill-founded, are engaging and eloquent; his grief and expostulations affect his reader with tenderness, and we shut his book under the workings of a mingled sentiment of admiration, displeasure, and sorrow’.

  A second English translation appeared in November 1790, published for G. G. J. and J. Robinson and J. Bew, which the Critical Review welcomed much more warmly than the first, stating in March 1791 that it must have been undertaken ‘by some more competent author’ who has translated the text ‘with accuracy and fidelity’; it also commented on the magnitude of the challenge: ‘To translate Rousseau is a labour of difficulty, it is bending the bow of Ulysses, which few weaker hands can perform.’ A further edition of this 1790 translation appeared in 1796. Thereafter the English reader had to wait until 1927, when a translation by John Gould Fletcher, entitled The Reveries of a Solitary, was published in London by Routledge in their ‘Broadway Library of Eighteenth-Century French Lite
rature’ series; this translation was reprinted in 1971 by Burt Franklin in New York. And in 1979 two translations appeared: one by Peter France, published by Penguin, the other by Charles E. Butterworth, published by New York University Press, which was reissued in 2000 in the University Press of New England edition of The Collected Writings of Rousseau.

  Translating the Reveries is indeed a ‘labour of difficulty’, as the Critical Review described it in 1791, because that is precisely what writing was for Rousseau, as he admits in Book 3 of the Confessions: ‘I have turned some of my periods over and over in my mind for five or six nights before they were ready to be committed to paper’ (pp. 111–12). This might seem not to be the case in the Reveries, given that Rousseau dismisses his text in the First Walk as ‘merely a shapeless account’, adding: ‘I shall say what I have thought just as it came to me and with as little connection as yesterday’s ideas have with those of tomorrow’ (p. 8). However, this is not a disorderly text, but rather one shaped by the thought processes of a painstaking writer. The playing cards bear witness to this, with their physical evidence of Rousseau’s habit of writing and rewriting, first in pencil, then in ink. At the macro-structural level, each of the Walks is carefully ordered, and so too, at the micro-structural level, are all his sentences: they are very often long, elaborate, and sinuous; in them, Rousseau characteristically deploys thought-provoking symmetries and antitheses, evocative repetitions and cadences, and poignant exclamations and interrogations; and through them, he holds in delicate tension a range of different discourses and styles, from the philosophical to the personal, from the elevated to the everyday, and even from the tragic to the comic. The artful complexity and perceptible musicality of Rousseau’s prose are part and parcel of who he is: the manner and the matter are as one.