Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism: Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation 9781474250665, 9781474250696, 9781474250689

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins
1 Rousseau and British Romantic Women Writers Stephen C. Behrendt
2 ‘Rousseau’s Ground’: Locating a Refuge for the Libertarian Man of Feeling in Julie, or the New Heloise and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Helen Stark
3 ‘The Columbus of the Alps’: Rousseau and the Writing of Mountain Experience in British Literature of the Romantic Period Simon Bainbridge
4 Rousseau and Romanticism in Wales Heather Williams
5 Enchanted Ground? Rousseau, Republicanism and Switzerland Patrick Vincent
6 Reading Rousseau in the Anti-Jacobin Novel Pascal Fischer
7 ‘The Scene Itself’: Rousseauvian Drama and Roman Space in Shelley’s The Cenci Rebecca Nesvet
8 Rousseauvian Vision and Anthropology in Percy Shelley’s Alastor Thomas Roche
9 Rousseau’s Boat: The ‘Fifth Walk’, Romanticism and Idleness Rowan Boyson
10 Rousseau, Emile and Britain Frances Ferguson
11 Rousseau and the Romantic Essayists Gregory Dart
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

Also Available from Bloomsbury Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien, Michael Tomko Blake, Wordsworth, Religion, Jonathan Roberts Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety, James Rovira Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England, 1796–1817: Coleridge’s Responses to German Philosophy, Monika Class

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation Edited by Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Russell Goulbourne, David Higgins and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5066-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5068-9 ePub: 978-1-4742-5067-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction  Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins Rousseau and British Romantic Women Writers  Stephen C. Behrendt 2 ‘Rousseau’s Ground’: Locating a Refuge for the Libertarian Man of Feeling in Julie, or the New Heloise and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  Helen Stark 3 ‘The Columbus of the Alps’: Rousseau and the Writing of Mountain Experience in British Literature of the Romantic Period  Simon Bainbridge 4 Rousseau and Romanticism in Wales  Heather Williams 5 Enchanted Ground? Rousseau, Republicanism and Switzerland  Patrick Vincent 6 Reading Rousseau in the Anti-Jacobin Novel  Pascal Fischer 7 ‘The Scene Itself ’: Rousseauvian Drama and Roman Space in Shelley’s The Cenci  Rebecca Nesvet 8 Rousseauvian Vision and Anthropology in Percy Shelley’s Alastor  Thomas Roche 9 Rousseau’s Boat: The ‘Fifth Walk’, Romanticism and Idleness  Rowan Boyson 10 Rousseau, Emile and Britain  Frances Ferguson 11 Rousseau and the Romantic Essayists  Gregory Dart

vi vii 1

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Bibliography Index

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51 75 91 113 131 149 167 187 209 232 251

Contributors Simon Bainbridge, Lancaster University, UK Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA Rowan Boyson, King’s College London, UK Gregory Dart, University College London, UK Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago, USA Pascal Fischer, University of Bamberg, Germany Russell Goulbourne, King’s College London, UK David Higgins, University of Leeds, UK Rebecca Nesvet, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, USA Thomas Roche, University of Georgia Press, USA Helen Stark, Queen Mary University of London, UK Patrick Vincent, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland Heather Williams, University of Wales, UK

Acknowledgements We are very grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association for their generous financial support for this project. Our thanks also go to Lucy Arnold and Alys Mostyn for their assistance with copy-editing. Finally, we would like to thank David Avital and Mark Richardson at Bloomsbury Academic for their efficiency and forbearance throughout the publishing process.

Introduction Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins

William Hazlitt’s great essay ‘The Fight’ (1822) recounts the author’s experience of travelling to and viewing a prize-fight near Hungerford in December 1821. Pugilism was enormously popular in Britain during the early nineteenth century and strongly associated with a discourse of nationalistic masculinity. The  opportunities for homosocial bonding offered by Hazlitt’s uncomfortable journey and the violent spectacle of the fight itself gave him the material out of which to fashion an autobiographical persona based around muscular, manly virtue. However, the original version of the essay contained a number of sentimental and confessional passages resulting from his troubled infatuation with Sarah Walker, the eighteen-year-old daughter of his landlord, an episode that resulted in the highly Rousseauvian Liber Amoris (1823) and which continues to be something of an embarrassment to Hazlitt scholars. These ‘effeminate’ sections (to use the language of the period) were mostly cut in the published version of the essay, although their residue remains. At the start of the published text, Hazlitt addresses directly his readers, whom he imagines as women suspicious of an article on the disreputable subject of prize fighting: ‘Think, ye fairest of the fair, loveliest of the lovely kind, ye practisers of soft enchantment, how many more ye kill with poisoned baits than ever fell in the ring.’1 But the essay’s apparent opposition between sentimental effeminacy and manly virtue – to some extent symbolized by the contrast it draws between the two pugilists, Thomas Hickman and Bill Neat – is undercut by a kind of deus ex machina towards the end. Travelling back to London with ‘Jack Pigott’, Hazlitt observes that his friend is carrying a small book that he reads when the conversation falls silent: ‘I inquired what it was, and learned to my particular satisfaction that it was a volume of the New Eloise. Ladies, after this, will you contend that a love for the FANCY is incompatible with the cultivation of sentiment?’2 This invocation

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of Rousseau’s famous sentimental novel, Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), attempts to resolve the tension between sensibility and manliness that informs the entire essay.3 In ‘The Fight’, Rousseau’s manifestation in the form of a smuggled book brings out the essay’s wider concern with the relationship between a sentimental and confessional mode of writing conventionally associated with French (or Frenchified) literature and an aggressively English mode of pugilistic rhetoric. And yet in other Romantic-period texts, the lack of any explicit reference to Rousseau is equally telling. Found books play a crucial role in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a seemingly endless mine for scholarship focused on allusion and intertextuality. The Creature’s discovery of Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Volney’s Ruins of Empire offers, as Gregory Dart puts it, ‘a kind of introduction to the history of European republicanism’.4 Frankenstein also makes a number of explicit allusions to other texts, but not to any works by Rousseau. However, this should be read not as a sign of absence, but as a testament to his deep significance to the novel. It is no coincidence that Victor and Jean-Jacques are both citizens of Geneva. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings are echoed in the novel’s narrative form, with its three first-person confessions, and in the alienated rhetoric of its narrators. Its depiction of the Creature’s (mis) education engages with some of the key concerns of Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762), while the Creature’s biographical trajectory from an autonomous state of nature to a troubled amour-propre draws on the speculative history of humanity in the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755).5 The portrayals of Alphonse and Victor Frankenstein echo details from Julie.6 Zoe Beenstock has recently argued that ‘through the bodies of the monster and his planned partner, Shelley constructs a dark allegory of Rousseau’s social contract theory’.7 And the Creature’s learning of language has been productively connected to Rousseau’s Essay on the Origins of Language (Essai sur l’origine des langues, 1781).8 Finally, in its depiction of paternal neglect, the novel engages not just with Rousseau’s works but also with him as a controversial public figure widely censured for the fact that he had voluntarily given up five of his children to a foundling hospital.9 These two brief case studies give some sense of the central aim of this book, which is to offer a nuanced and wide-ranging analysis of the complex and manifold ways in which British Romantic writers engaged with Rousseau. One might not want to go as far as W. J. T. Mitchell, who argues in the course of a discussion of the ‘repression’ of Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–9) in William

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Wordsworth’s The Prelude that ‘no one had to read Rousseau to be “influenced” by him; simple literacy was enough’.10 But Mitchell’s point is an important one: Rousseauvian ideas and rhetoric permeated British Romantic discourse to an extent that went beyond whether or not individual writers had read particular texts by him. One of the challenges of engaging with the relationship between Rousseau and British Romanticism is to find productive ways of reading absence as well as presence. As Gregory Dart puts it in his chapter in this book, Rousseau’s ‘literary influence is at once everywhere and nowhere, pervasive and yet difficult to pinpoint, a parasite in the blood’. The concept of ‘influence’, of course, has a long and complex history, and the chapters in this book understand it in a variety of different ways, encompassing forms of connection, transmission, revision, disavowal and appropriation.11 What emerges is not so much ‘influence’ or even intertextuality as collaboration or ‘confluence’: a powerfully creative coming together of Rousseau’s works with the ideas and concerns of British Romantic writers.12 This book builds on important earlier work. Two major studies of Rousseau’s relationship to British literature were published by French scholars in the 1950s. Henri Roddier’s survey of Rousseau’s reception in eighteenth-century England includes some authors from the early Romantic period, notably William Blake, William Godwin, Edmund Burke and Charlotte Smith,13 while Jacques Voisine’s wide-ranging account of Rousseau’s reception by British Romantic writers goes into some detail on figures like Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Hazlitt.14 While Romantic studies has changed a great deal since these books were published, they remain valuable, not least because there are no Anglophone equivalents. Despite its promising title, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism is primarily an attack on what he sees as the ‘emotional naturalism’ and primitivism of Rousseau and the writers whom he influenced, in particular Percy Shelley.15 Blending erudition with a peculiarly moralistic methodology, Babbitt’s book demonstrates that, much as he did in the Romantic period, Rousseau has a tendency to inspire critical polemic rather than balanced discussion. Similarly, Thomas McFarland’s more recent book, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau, has surprisingly little to say about Rousseau’s ‘heritage’, being concerned more with offering a general account of British Romanticism to support an attack on New Historicism and its supposed neglect of the question of literary value.16 The most successful studies of Rousseau and British Romanticism are rather more focused than these. Gregory Dart’s Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism offers a valuable account of the politics of confession across a

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range of texts, while Edward Duffy’s Rousseau in England provides a useful survey of Rousseau’s reception, with a particular focus on the canonical male poets, as the basis for a more detailed discussion of the Genevan’s influence on Percy Shelley.17 Monika Lee astutely develops the historical work of Voisine and Duffy in her analysis of ‘the psychological and theoretical ramifications of Shelley’s interest in Rousseau’,18 while the recent volume of essays edited by Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent helpfully revisits the close association in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers’ minds between Rousseau, Romanticism and Switzerland, with contributors resituating Rousseau in his Swiss context and addressing a Rousseauvian Switzerland, whose landscapes provoked a variety of responses amongst British Romanticperiod writers and travellers.19 And yet, the range and complexity of Rousseau’s impact on British Romanticism has still not been fully grasped. This book offers a more extensive and detailed account than has hitherto been available of the various ways in which Rousseau’s writing permeated British Romantic discourse. Following the critical work of the last thirty years, we now have a richer and more capacious idea of British Romanticism than was the case when earlier general studies of Rousseau’s influence were written. By ranging across different genres and by focusing on the transnational and Francophilic aspects of British Romanticism, this book contributes to the ongoing process of redefinition. Critics have often looked to German philosophy for the contours of British Romantic thought, but there can be no doubt that Rousseau’s impact was at least as important and certainly more wide-ranging. So it follows that this book addresses traditionally canonical authors, such as Byron, Percy Shelley and William Wordsworth, but also shows the depth and extent of Rousseau’s impact across a wide range of Romantic literature, including anti-Jacobin fiction, educational works, familiar essays, nature writing and political discourse. By offering nuance and careful contextualization rather than polemic and generalization, the book constitutes something of a response to W. J. T. Mitchell’s call for a properly historicized understanding of Rousseau’s ‘influence’.20 What emerges is a new understanding of the sometimes surprising ways in which British Romantic writers engaged with – and in some cases reshaped – Rousseau’s ideas for their own purposes. Our subtitle, ‘Gender and Selfhood, Politics and Nation’, points to the broad scope of Rousseau’s impact. One of Rousseau’s most important contributions was to connect personal, ‘private’ experience to political, ‘public’ life: he did not necessarily distinguish between the articulation of private sensibility

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and the construction of public virtue. Likewise, the chapters in this book range across the topics of gender, politics, nation and selfhood, reflecting the fluidity of Rousseau’s thought. The first two take gender as their starting point. Stephen Behrendt’s opening chapter examines the ambivalent relationship that Romantic women writers had with Rousseau, admiring his political ideas while deploring his dualistic approach to gender in Emile and Julie. ‘Feminist thinkers’, he argues, ‘had to refashion Rousseau’s essentialist claims about women and gender by situating them within a socially and politically altered delineation of the female citizen’. By examining ‘the concentric rhetorical and ideological “rings” that radiated outward’ from Rousseau’s construction of gender difference, Behrendt addresses the wide extent of his impact on women writers that went beyond explicit allusion to his writings. In Chapter 2, Helen Stark offers a new perspective on Rousseau and gender by focusing on his construction of masculinity, and particularly the idea of ‘the man of feeling’ who refuses national boundaries. Her chapter examines the significance of Julie to the depiction of Switzerland in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and argues that Rousseau’s novel does not appear as ‘a monument to sensibility past’. Rather, it enables Byron to imagine Clarens and its environs as ‘a refuge for the man of feeling in post-Waterloo Europe’. Byron’s poem shows a profoundly creative engagement not only with Julie, but also with the figure of Rousseau himself as (in Byron’s words) ‘a self-torturing sophist’. The impact of Rousseau’s sentimental novel is also the focus of Simon Bainbridge’s chapter, which shows how Julie influenced British Romantic writing on mountains to the extent that ‘many of the most famous accounts of ascents can be seen as being in dialogue with the Genevan philosopher’. Rousseau associated mountaineering with personal and political transformation by relocating human beings ‘within a realm of heightened sensation’. This notion of transformation is reflected in a range of Romantic responses to mountains, ranging from William Wordsworth’s rejection of climbing’s revolutionary associations to Byron and Mary Shelley’s more ambivalent accounts of the capacity of mountain ascents to transform selfhood. Like Stark, then, Bainbridge is concerned with how Rousseau’s writing about a particular place in Julie and an associated sense of liberty inflected the experience of later writers. The following chapters broaden out this idea of place by considering Rousseau, nation and politics. Heather Williams contrasts Rousseau’s ‘direct impact on the lives of the cultural and social elite in Wales’ with his ‘indirect, mediated influence on Welsh radicalism’. She shows how Rousseau’s work was an inspiration for the landscape gardening of elites in North Wales and for

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radical writers such as Iolo Morganwg and Tomos Glyn Cothi. Rousseau’s contribution to British Romantic ideas of liberty is also the subject of Patrick Vincent’s chapter, which argues that Rousseau initially ‘helped popularize Switzerland both as a seat of republican virtue and as a source of liberal selfhood among progressive-minded travellers’. However, following the British reaction to the French Revolution, both conservatives and radicals attempted to detach Rousseau’s political ideas from their Swiss origins. Vincent’s chapter demonstrates that ‘the correspondences between Rousseau, Switzerland and republicanism helped the Romantic generation to articulate many of their most important political and moral concerns’; it also shows the extent to which Rousseauvian ideas were contested and reinterpreted by British writers for their own purposes. That his interest went beyond radical writers is further evidenced by Pascal Fischer’s account of how conservative novelists of the late 1790s drew on Rousseau in an attempt to ‘discredit radical doctrine as phantasmagorical, impractical and duplicitous’ in the context of the period’s ‘culture wars’. But in so doing they were not necessarily constructing a revolutionary bogeyman but rather embarking on a serious engagement with his ideas. Rebecca Nesvet’s chapter connects Rousseau’s political ideas to his aesthetics, in particular his belief that ‘ancient performance forms’ (as opposed to indoor theatres) could ‘support self-government in Geneva or any other Republican state’. She shows that Percy Shelley’s play The Cenci ‘functions as a Rousseauvian drama specifically by celebrating Rome’s republican political history, calling for the reanimation of the Roman Republic’, and perhaps also for a future British revolution. Rousseau’s creative significance to Percy Shelley is also the subject of Thomas Roche’s chapter on Alastor, which analyses how the two dream visions that the poem’s protagonist experiences allude to two key passages in Rousseau’s Confessions that describe respectively the genesis of the Discourse on Inequality and Julie. Roche argues that Shelley draws on Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre in order to address ‘destructive forms of self-love’ in the poem. Roche ends his chapter with a brief comparison with the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1782), which is the focus of Rowan Boyson’s chapter. In particular, Boyson demonstrates the importance to Hazlitt, William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, of Rousseau’s valorization of ‘the pure sentiment of existence’ in the celebrated account of idly drifting on the Lac de Bienne by the Île de St Pierre in the ‘Fifth Walk’ of

Introduction

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the Reveries; Boyson also shows just how troubled British Romantics were by Rousseau’s emphasis on idleness. Roche and Boyson consider Rousseau’s significance to British Romantic self-fashioning, a topic which is also addressed by our final two contributors. Frances Ferguson’s chapter considers the significance of Emile to Dissenting educational writers. By emphasizing the need to focus on ‘the developing capacities of the child’, Rousseau challenged the epistemological authority from which education was supposedly conducted. Ferguson shows that Anna Letitia Barbauld understood ‘Rousseau’s reasons for insisting that a child should derive his understanding from his own experience rather than from authority’, but saw this as impractical and responded by understanding education as more broadly societal than Rousseau did. Barbauld’s writings for children show a concerted and creative engagement with Rousseau, in particular his concern with ‘the problems of communication between adults and children’. Our last chapter, by Gregory Dart, analyses the impact of the Confessions on Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey. Dart argues that these writers took up the ‘naturalness and intimacy of Rousseau’s written voice’, but at times resisted his emphasis on the importance of sincerity, ‘hence their penchant for autobiographical equivocation and framing irony’. Their confessional texts, therefore, construct selves that draw on Rousseauvian tropes such as solitude and guilt, but do not share his attempt to obscure the rhetoricity of autobiography. It would be impossible to encompass within a single book the manifold ways in which Rousseau’s ideas and language permeated British Romanticism. More work needs to be done in many areas: for example, on the construction of Rousseau in Romantic periodicals, on his significance for writers across the political spectrum, on his contribution to British philosophical understandings of selfhood and on how ‘Romantic ecology’ drew on Rousseauvian ideas of nature.21 This book, we hope, will stimulate new scholarship by giving some sense of the range and extent of the British Romantic engagement with Rousseau. It is perhaps not so surprising to see this engagement across political, educational and autobiographical writing, but this book shows that he also has a tendency to crop up in unexpected places: a prize fight in rural England, a landscape garden in North Wales (Williams), the top of a Lake District fell (Bainbridge), a Norwegian bay (Boyson), the North American wilderness (Fischer), a family estate in Devon (Dart). We need to be attentive to such Rousseauvian incursions, as well as those moments, as in Frankenstein, in which his absence speaks volumes.

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Notes 1 2 3

4

5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12

13

William Hazlitt, ‘The Fight’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), 17:72. Ibid., 17:84–5. For a fuller discussion of Hazlitt’s essay, see David Higgins, ‘Englishness, Effeminacy, and the New Monthly Magazine: Hazlitt’s “The Fight” in Context’, Romanticism 10, no. 2 (2004): 170–90. Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 6. Paradise Lost, of course, also provides Frankenstein with its epigraph and extensively informs the novel’s treatment of creation, responsibility and the causes of evil. On the importance of the Discourse on Inequality to Frankenstein, see James O’Rourke, ‘“Nothing More Unnatural”: Mary Shelley’s Revision of Rousseau’, ELH 56, no. 3 (1989): 543–69. On Shelley’s novel and Emile, see Alan Richardson, ‘From Emile to Frankenstein: The Education of Monsters’, European Romantic Review 1, no. 2 (1991): 147–62. See David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), chap. 6. Zoe Beenstock, ‘Lyric Sociability: The Social Contract and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 2 (2015): 406. In addition to Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, chap. 6, see Peter Brooks, ‘Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein’, New Literary History 9, no. 3 (1978): 591–605. See O’Rourke, ‘“Nothing More Unnatural”’, 557. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History: Rousseau’s Confessions and Wordsworth’s The Prelude’, ELH 57, no. 3 (1990): 648. For useful discussions of influence and intertextuality, see Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000); Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). We have borrowed the term ‘confluence’ from Lucy Newlyn, ‘Confluence: William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1798’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (2011): 227–46. Henri Roddier, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle: l’œuvre et l’homme (Paris: Boivin, 1950). On translations of Rousseau in eighteenth-century England, in particular those published in the 1760s by William Kenrick, see Peter France, ‘Voltaire and Rousseau’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 3: 1660–1790, ed. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 386–9.

Introduction 14 Jacques Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques et la légende (Paris: Didier, 1956). 15 Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919). 16 Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 17 Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism; Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 18 Monika Lee, Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 11. 19 Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 20 Mitchell, ‘Influence, Autobiography, and Literary History’, 660–1. 21 Jonathan Bate usefully discusses Rousseau and Romantic ecology in Chapter 2 of The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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Rousseau and British Romantic Women Writers Stephen C. Behrendt

In the wake of the French Revolution, the proto-Jacobin Rousseau was widely derided in the popular reactionary British press and by the public alike as a selfindulgent and immoral profligate, as Edmund Burke and others painted him, in part to distract readers from his revolutionary republican politics, in part to ‘expose’ that same politics by associating it with the emotional volatility of high sensibility. Even Mary Wollstonecraft found her admiration for the political Rousseau of the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755) much dampened when she turned to Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762), which seemed to her to offer up little more than an essentialist treatment of women by an unredeemed and chauvinistic sensualist. Emile was in fact widely decried both in Britain and on the continent, and among women writers especially, for the exaggerated domesticity of women’s ‘place’ that it prescribed: an unenlightened, gendered attitude towards women for which it was nevertheless frequently invoked – both directly and indirectly – among a variety of spokespersons for a reactionary male establishment bent on enlisting Rousseau’s ideas in service to their own efforts to legislate women’s behaviour. Wollstonecraft claimed that equality is the inherent condition of nature, but critical discussion has nevertheless typically underestimated the implications of the rhetoric through which Romantic-era women writers both resisted and participated in the cultural vassalage for which Rousseau came to serve as a figurative lightning rod. This chapter examines some of the concentric rhetorical and ideological ‘rings’ that radiated outward from Rousseau’s essentialist treatment of women (and gender) in support of what were quite obviously divergent agendas. Some of the more ‘indirect’ examples do not address Rousseau explicitly but instead illustrate how gendered rhetoric served in a variety of works, on the one hand,

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to reinforce the essentialist thinking he represented and, on the other hand, to subvert it, redeploying it in the service of a more assertive and empowered view of women’s role and status within the ultimately egalitarian modern world that they envisioned. According to Adriana Craciun, ‘Rousseau had revolutionized philosophy by placing domestic and sexual critiques at the centre of philosophical enquiry, using sentimental and confessional genres’,1 as he does, for example, in treating Julie’s extramarital sexuality in Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761). But because, as Susan Wolfson has noted, ‘for liberal women, it was galling that such forward thinkers as Rousseau could be so retrograde on gender’,2 feminist thinkers had to refashion Rousseau’s essentialist claims about women and gender by situating them within a socially and politically altered delineation of the female citizen. One strategy, according to William Stafford, involved asserting that ‘the wife who manages her family, educates her children and assists her neighbours while her husband is employed in any of the departments of civil life is also an active citizen’.3 In other words, many feminist thinkers opted to read, in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s words, ‘what is dangerous or reprehensible’4 in Rousseau’s fiction less in terms of those familiar gendered assumptions (and proscriptions) about women’s nature and socio-civic roles than in terms of a much more expansive and inherently political understanding of the morally independent ‘original thinker’,5 the woman who functions as an informed and active citizen. This distinction becomes especially clear in the writings of Wollstonecraft, who, according to Saba Bahar, ‘insists first on women’s moral autonomy and only then on their political participation’;6 it is also evident among other British women writers during the early part of the Romantic era, as the following discussion illustrates. According to Jean Elshtain, ‘Rousseau believed that women already possessed power on so many levels vis-à-vis men and children, simply by virtue of being what they were, that they neither “needed” nor could be trusted with power of a public, political sort. Women were volatile and must be reined in, forced to be content to wield their power “privately”’.7 Elshtain’s observation foregrounds the later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Rousseauvian notion of ‘what women are’ or – to be faithful to Elshtain’s verb – ‘what women were’. Essentialist attitudes concerning gender were of course intricately involved in the era’s seemingly limitless and compulsive fascination with what is ‘natural’: the word is omnipresent in discourse on politics, economics, science in all its branches (including ‘natural’ history), society and, of course, gender. Rousseau’s writing inevitably reflected his own

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assumptions about what is ‘natural’ to women specifically as the consequence of their gender, assumptions that are nevertheless inseparable from the social, political, economic and religious attitudes of broader French Enlightenment culture. Little surprise, then, that Rousseau’s agenda for female behaviour – for what is often called ‘the proper lady’ – was widely censured on both sides of the English Channel by feminist women writers and thinkers who were his contemporaries and successors. What does occasionally surprise, however, is the ambivalence that emerges from these oppositional writings about just how ultimately ‘dangerous or reprehensible’ Rousseau actually is and about precisely where the danger lies. Writing about Rousseau and his era’s sexual politics, Mary Seidman Trouille, for instance, observes that Germaine de Staël and Mary Wollstonecraft were themselves ‘passionate admirers’ of that same Rousseau of whom they were also severe critics. Trouille associates these two authors’ ‘curious lack of self-insight’  – their seeming blindness to the contradictions at the heart of their ambivalence about Rousseau – with ‘their lifelong ambivalence toward themselves as women writers’.8 And yet, as Jacqueline Pearson observes, Julie is itself ‘conflicted’ in that in the novel Rousseau appears determined to ‘make philosophical ideas accessible to women’, while at the same time pronouncing his own work ‘unfit for them’.9 The ‘ambivalence’ of women writers – and indeed of ‘public’ women generally – is tied to changing cultural attitudes about gender in an age that was gravitating towards more egalitarian thinking, both in the politics of the nation-state and in the politics of the nuclear family that so often provided the metaphorical trope for the nation-state. Women writers had begun during the last quarter of the eighteenth century to emerge as significant social, cultural and political commentators whose revisionist views of gender relations and gender roles increasingly required of their contemporaries – male and female alike – a broader cultural reassessment of social structures (and social infrastructure). Women writers played a particularly important role in this cultural shift, in part because their collective questioning of male authority (especially as represented by Rousseau) lent them increased confidence in the validity of their alternative, oppositional views while revealing to them their shared membership in an evolving public female literary heritage. Consequently, as Trouille remarks, their writing ‘functions simultaneously as a historical record of their oppression and a mark of their defiance’.10 The widespread influence throughout Europe of Emile and Julie, coupled with his more explicitly political writings, made Rousseau a particularly useful touchstone for polemicists on both sides of this revisionist controversy.

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That Edmund Burke had directly linked Rousseau’s ideas about sensibility and enthusiasm with the political principles of the French Revolution merely added fuel to the fire that was already burning. In Britain, the anti-revolutionary fires were eagerly stoked further still by reactionary writers of both genders – including Hannah More, Sarah Trimmer, Jane West, John Gregory, T. J. Mathias and Richard Polwhele  – who mounted a vigorous ‘moral’ campaign against what they perceived as the danger to the family, the state and society as a whole of permitting women to venture beyond the gendered boundaries defined by culturally conditioned expectations about ‘proper’ female – or ‘womanly’ – behaviour. The intersection of socio-economic politics with gender politics ensured that partisans on both sides of the issue – and of both genders – addressed their respective readers with a particular sense of urgency. In both Emile and Julie, Rousseau argues that woman’s primary duty is to attend to the comforts of her male partner, submitting entirely and willingly to his inclinations and desires (in part by anticipating them) while nurturing a humbly subordinate but infinitely supportive behaviour that is grounded in her own innate physical and imaginative beauty and sensitivity. This affected posture was, of course, intimately involved in what came to be called ‘sensibility’, one hallmark of which was that supposedly instinctive female demurral to male desire and male prerogative that accompanied a calculated image of physical fragility and moral and emotional delicacy. Of course, such demurral was neither ‘instinctive’ nor ‘natural’; it was entirely conditioned, learned behaviour, and it was also heavily inflected with the circumstances of social class that had, as Mary Hays suggested in the Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), increasingly ‘enslaved, enervated and degraded woman’11 within the framework of what Edmund Burke called the ‘beautiful’. Rousseau’s (and Burke’s) ‘proper lady’ is by definition a member of the privileged classes whose comfortable circumstances afford her both the leisure and the means to maintain this affected posture. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke had explicitly linked the beautiful and the ‘feminine’, even observing that woman’s ‘beauty’ effectively ensures her subjugation by that very male (and masculinist) society that professes to admire her and value her precisely for that beauty which is grounded in submissiveness to what may be termed male desire: ‘We submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance.’12 According to Anne Mellor, Burke’s formulation suggests that the ideal, Rousseauvian woman is ‘one who engages in a practice of what today we would call female masochism, willingly obeying the dictates of her sublime master’.13

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Indeed, R. S. White reads in Rousseau’s position an ‘addiction’ to ‘male sexual satisfaction at the expense of female autonomy’.14 Of course, what Burke and Rousseau were talking about was not abject powerlessness, despite their chauvinistic language. Both were fully aware of the political – or sociopolitical – implications: the beauty that both associate with the feminine was a potentially powerful weapon in the arsenal of the woman adept at wielding it. Both appreciated, too, that wielded maliciously it was a lethal weapon – hence the Romantic-era anxiety about both fictional and actual femmes fatales.15 Burke fully appreciated men’s eminent susceptibility to that flattery which manipulates them into ‘compliance’. His comments reflect the male anxiety that the artless insouciance of the beautiful woman may be a deliberate and seductive ploy in a potentially deadly game of male entrapment. Especially among Rousseau’s male and female detractors in revolutionary-era Britain, the notion of seductive gender relations intersected repeatedly with intimations of comparably seductive and undeniably transgressive political behaviours. By the 1790s, Rousseau’s works were widely associated with both political and religious ‘enthusiasm’, and his political prophecies adapted and adopted into Jacobin discourse, including novels by female authors like Mary Hays.16 This discourse places a special premium on female enthusiasm, a distinctively Rousseauvian phenomenon that draws in roughly equal measure upon radical politics, revolutionary social engineering and millenarian discourse. This fact was not lost on Wollstonecraft, Rousseau’s most censorious British female commentator, nor on other culturally revisionist women. Neither was it lost on those reactionary writers of both genders who remained heavily invested in the familiar old hierarchies, including both the sociopolitical and the explicitly sexual or gendered. Women were increasingly engaged in the political sphere, learning and experimenting with both hortatory rhetoric and civic activism in culturally sanctioned causes like abolitionism, which was widely regarded as a ‘safe’ outlet for that compassionate benevolence for which women were traditionally lauded so long as it involved non-confrontational humanitarian causes. From such early engagements they were cultivating a fuller appreciation of activism’s power. Across the Channel, socio-civic political actions like the women’s bread riots in France and their march on Versailles further awakened British women (including writers) to the potential for empowerment and real influence that lay beyond their historically circumscribed roles in the masculinist society that looked with growing alarm at what they were learning – about themselves and about power.

16

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

Rousseau’s views about women’s ‘natural’ state (and status) were grounded in familiar eighteenth-century notions about the physical differences between the sexes and what he regarded as the distinctive moral differences inherent in the two sexes. Women’s apparent physical ‘weakness’ was linked to their capacity both to bear children and, by extension, to raise, nurture and educate them. Rousseau considered women to be constitutionally predisposed towards excessive emotion (both positive and negative) and the behaviours that follow from that excess, for which liabilities he predictably prescribes moderation, modesty and, of course, subordination to men and their establishments, both in domestic life (the home) and in public, civic life (the community). Those British men and women – such as Mathias, John Gregory or Thomas Gisborne and Hannah More, Hester Chapone, Jane West or Maria Edgeworth – who enlisted Rousseauvian concepts in one way or another in order to maintain and reinforce enculturated norms of female subordination and female demurral argued in turn that women were, ‘by nature’, predisposed towards volatility and therefore required both personal restraint and social constraint. The trigger mechanism that threatened to loose upon the world the consequences of that volatility was, of course, sensibility, which needed above all else to be strictly regulated and directed into more ‘useful’ (i.e. culturally sanctioned) pursuits, such as nurturance of all sorts (including domestic and social caregiving), education and personal and domestic grooming (including cosmetic adornment and behavioural modification to suit male expectations and assuage male desire). Sensibility was, for reactionary thinkers, especially culpable – morally, socially and politically – because it seemed to them to be quintessentially selfindulgent. Owing to their supposed volatility of mind and feeling, women were understood to be unusually susceptible to sensibility and its attendant contagions, including the seductive blandishments of self-gratification. Hence Elizabeth Hamilton, writing in 1801, juxtaposes to the acquired ‘thirst for power and glory’ that are ‘the stimulants of a man’s ambition’ the comparably acquired female tendency to make ‘vanity the sole operating principle in the mind of woman’. And on what fuel does this destructive fire feed? ‘It is for the gratification of vanity alone’, she observes, ‘that a female, educated on the principles of Rousseau and his followers, can desire riches or power; and the gratification of the same vanity must constitute her sole notions of glory’.17 Hamilton’s apparently deliberate ambiguity with her gender terminology in this passage is telling: while power and glory may motivate a man, vanity motivates ‘woman’ – not an individual (who may or may not be ‘typical’ of

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others) but rather the entire sex, taken collectively. Rhetorical ambivalences and indeterminacies like these reveal the sweeping generalizations specifically about women (the whole sex) that appear regularly in the words of writers who typically take care in those same writings to particularize about men (individuals). In much the same way, those who attacked Rousseau and his influence particularized Rousseau (the individual man) while universalizing those women (‘woman’ taken collectively) whom they regarded as the mass of (female) humanity constitutionally vulnerable to his seduction. This vulnerability was enhanced for such thinkers by the fact that Rousseau’s objectionable vision of gender relations was central to his novels. For, as Mary Waters writes, ‘fundamentally social, novels shape not just the private individual tastes and values, but the most public aspects of society as well, even the intellectual discourses of the power elite – art, literature, philosophy, aesthetics, science, law and, so important in the two decades [1789–1809] that had just passed, politics’.18 It was not lost on writers of either sex that literature – and indeed writing in general – was an increasingly powerful instrument for social control, as both religious and secular evangelists – from Hannah More to John Thelwall, to name only two – were making abundantly clear during these years when literacy was expanding at an exponential rate. It is useful, in this context, to recall Jane West, the self-educated novelist and protégée of the protean evangelical writer Sarah Trimmer. Usually regarded as an unabashedly conservative writer, West was actually less doctrinaire than unsympathetic critics have often concluded. William Stafford observes that one of West’s consistent aims was to remind her readers of the ‘down-to-earth and the everyday’ that is the lot of the great majority of her contemporaries: ‘People do not come perfectly good or utterly evil; they come mixed. Unalloyed happiness … is unattainable in this sublunary sphere.’19 Women need to see things as they actually are, West believed, and that meant basing both their behaviour and their expectations not on the fanciful world that novels of sensibility offered but, instead, on the quotidian reality of ordinary life. Significantly, when West describes the dangers to which a woman – ‘the fair adventurer in the voyage of life’ – seems most susceptible, she employs a remarkable nautical metaphor: She carries with her a rebellious crew of passions and affections, which are extremely apt to mutiny, especially in times of extraordinary peril. The perishable commodity of female fame is embarked in a slight felucca, painted and gilded, indeed, and externally both convenient and beautiful; but by no means fitted

18

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism for those distant voyages, and rough encounters with winds, seas and enemies, which afford navigators of the other sex a welcome opportunity of showing their skill and magnanimity; yet the delicacy of the merchandise, joined to the fragility of these adorned vessels, imposes constant anxiety and labour on their commanders; not only lest their precious cargo should lose either its polish or its purity, but from fear of falling into the hands of pirates, who are ever on the watch to pillage or destroy them. … I cannot, therefore, think it expedient that these fragile barks should venture to do more than sail coastwise, till they are taken in tow by some stouter vessel; especially as they are totally destitute of all materials to remedy the misfortunes incident to shipwreck.20

Being ‘taken in tow by a stouter vessel’ is, of course, a transparent refashioning of the doctrine of female subordination in this passage, which turns on the incapacity of a woman to function independently, to defend herself both against extra-domestic ‘pirates’ and her domestic ‘commander’ (spouse) and against her own ‘passions and affections’, which pose the constant threat of ‘mutiny’. Indeed, West’s image of women as ‘adorned vessels’ ironically highlights the characteristic Rousseauvian objectification of women to which feminists among her contemporaries objected so strenuously, for it defines women as ‘containers’ for ‘cargo’ that is loaded onto – and into – them from the outside. The woman’s incapacity is further underscored in her vulnerability to the depredations of both the ‘rebellious crew of passions and affections’ that reside within and the ‘pirates’ that operate outside her. Rendered rhetorically and metaphorically without agency or inherent strength, she must be ‘taken in tow by some stouter vessel’ lest her ‘cargo’ lose either its ‘polish’ or its ‘purity’, this latter term pointedly fraught with gendered implications. Many of the novels published by British women during the 1790s and early 1800s reflect the debilitating consequences of the broader cultural conditioning about gender that informs West’s brief passage, as is evident in the fates that befall female protagonists created by well-known writers like Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Mary Hays, Amelia Opie and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as by the numerous lesser-known writers who filled the shelves (and the coffers) of publishers like the Minerva Press with cautionary tales deploring the dangers of unrestrained female sensibility. Pam Perkins notes, for instance, that Burney’s Camilla (1796) offers in the eponymous character ‘a critique of Sophie’s education’, seeing the massive novel as ‘a more complex and tragic version of the comic story’ that she presents in Evelina (1778). Perkins sees Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) as another exposé of the perils of a woman’s blindly self-destructive devotion to providing a universe of domestic bliss:

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Virginia St. Pierre (the renamed orphan, Rachel) is conditioned – trained – by Clarence Harvey in a stifling fantasy of vestal chastity and submission whose ultimate consequence is that ‘at best, she can be a helpless dependent and at worst, that she will promptly be destroyed by ordinary social life’.21 For Perkins, this sort of overdetermined plot suggests Rousseauvian sensibility run amok, snuffing out any natural ‘enthusiasm’ in protracted acts of deadly self-deception undertaken in fealty to male desire. Conduct books of the 1790s and early 1800s are filled with countless metaphorical and rhetorical variations on this central theme.22 William Stafford concludes that Mary Ann Radcliffe spoke for many of her contemporaries of both sexes concerning the ‘real’ rights of women when she claimed in The Female Advocate (1799) that ‘what women want, or should want, is not power, but men’s protection in return for obedience’.23 Anna Letitia Barbauld had earlier approached the dilemma from another direction in her ironic and evidently unpublished poem, ‘The Rights of Woman’ (1792), which responds at least in part to Mary Wollstonecraft’s slighting reference to her in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).24 After enumerating the supposed insults endured by newly militant feminists, Barbauld cautions these ‘courted idol[s] of mankind’ to chart an alternative course, counselling women to be both ‘subduing and subdued’: Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought, Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move, In Nature’s School, by her soft maxims taught, That separate rights are lost in mutual love. (29–32)

For Barbauld, what is at stake here is not an inevitably destructive gender-based power struggle in which dominance is the objective, but rather a mutually supportive relationship, a partnership informed by ‘Nature’s School’. It is hard to accommodate such a view to Rousseau’s thinking, however, particularly as it is evidenced in his profoundly influential Emile and Julie; in Book 5 of Emile, for instance, he requires women always to be subordinate to their husbands: ‘As she is made to obey … she ought to learn early to endure even injustice and to bear a husband’s wrongs without complaining.’25 The oppositional strain is not exclusive to women writers, though. Indeed, even as famously masculinist a writer as Byron seems to have been engaging Rousseau in the character of Donna Julia in his Don Juan, where, according to Nicola Watson, we witness scenes ‘based upon the conventional sentimental plot, specifically upon the novel [Julie] that was held to distil it in a particularly

20

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

revolutionary and deleterious form’.26 Writing in 1820 to John Murray, Byron opined that, like his then favourite, the Countess Guiccioli, women seemed to dislike Don Juan because of the poet’s strategy there for undermining the ornate fantasy of sentimentality: their objection, Byron writes, ‘arises from the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions – & to keep up the illusion which is their empire. – Now D. J. strips off this illusion – & laughs at that & most other things’, Byron’s proto-nihilist satire deliberately targeted Rousseau, for, as he continues to Murray: ‘I never knew a woman who did not protect Rousseau … when brought out naturally.’27 While it has long been customary to read Rousseau as advocating that variety of female education and experience that is centred wholly on ‘beautiful’, chaste and self-sacrificing devotion to the comfort and desires of a male superior, it is undeniable that a great many writers (of both sexes) recognized the dangers to both sexes of such emotional and behavioural extremism, something that his more perceptive contemporaries occasionally credited Rousseau with having himself appreciated. In Chapter  3 of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft identifies the critical error that, for her, disqualified Rousseau from pronouncing on female education when she explains that ‘people are never respected, though filling an important station, who are not respectable’.28 Wollstonecraft argues that respect and respectability are the first and principal casualties of that ‘libertine’ persona produced by the sort of female education that Rousseau advocates in Emile and Julie. That education, Elizabeth Fay writes, is ‘a male-imposed education’ that is forced upon women by male educators who ‘insist that women are innately destined to be preoccupied by dress and ornament, and to need artifice and affectation to attract male attention’.29 Rousseau’s scheme creates a perfect double bind: women’s innate (‘natural’) behaviour is fundamentally un-natural, according to Rousseau, who prescribes instead an artificial, gendered educational regimen that emphasizes replacing what is actually natural (untutored, unaffected, spontaneous) behaviour with behaviour that is instead affected, calculated and genuinely unnatural. The occasional inconsistencies evident in the responses to Rousseau of wellknown feminists like de Staël and Wollstonecraft are not surprising when we consider the entirety of Rousseau’s œuvre. He began, after all, as a champion of equality among men (and women), making his mark in 1755 with his Discourse on Inequality. There Rousseau first fully articulated his notions of the ‘state of nature’, in which, in its purest (i.e. its ‘earliest’, or least elaborately developed) form, there simply is no inequality, precisely because there is neither an articulated civil ‘society’ nor, consequently, anything that might be strictly

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termed personal (or private or exclusive) property. In this primordial egalitarian state, gender differences are not yet inflected as they will subsequently be by social stratification and a hierarchy increasingly determined by the private possession of goods or services. For Wollstonecraft, though, what Rousseau seemed to have begun nobly in the Discourse on Inequality went awry when he failed to go far enough, as she observes in Chapter 1 of the Vindication: ‘Had Rousseau mounted one step higher in his investigation, or could his eye have pierced through the foggy atmosphere, which he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of true civilization, instead of taking his ferocious flight back to the night of sensual ignorance.’30 Like her melioristic partner William Godwin, Wollstonecraft predicated any ultimate human ‘perfection’ upon a fruitful convergence of intellect and morality within the individual, whether male or female, as a prerequisite to societal improvement. This moral and intellectual compatibility and creative partnership became a leitmotif in Wollstonecraft’s writings, and it is inextricably linked with her ideas on education in general and female education in particular. Unlike Rousseau, who attributes civilization’s decline to the social competitiveness brought on by personal property and its attendant greed, Wollstonecraft blames the exclusion from education – and consequently from both intellectual opportunity and social parity – that is inevitably implicated in the stifling social hierarchy produced by private property. In an Enlightenment society driven by property and status that regarded the ‘natural’ state of women (whose own property rights were minimal at best) as that of ‘vessels’, women’s cultural valuation depended upon external appearances and learned (i.e. culturally conditioned) behaviours. Not merely ‘vessels’, they are also, inevitably, vassals: ‘a humble servant or subordinate; one devoted to the service of another’.31 In Chapter 13 of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft writes: I agree with Rousseau that the physical part of the art of pleasing consists in ornaments, and for that very reason I should guard girls against the contagious fondness for dress so common to weak women, that they may not rest in the physical part. Yet, weak are the women who imagine that they can long please without the aid of the mind, or in other words, without the moral art of pleasing. But the moral art, … when alluding to the grace which is an effect of virtue, and not the motive of action, is never to be found with ignorance; the sportiveness of innocence, so pleasing to refined libertines of both sexes is widely different in its essence from this superiour [sic] gracefulness.32

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

That Wollstonecraft here ascribes an explicitly moral dimension to what she calls ‘the moral art of pleasing’ underscores her clear-sightedness about the degree to which ‘pleasing’ is, for both sexes, not an inherently ‘natural’ behaviour but, rather, one that involves calculation and artifice – strategy and subterfuge, in other words – in achieving its desired effects. Her insistence on this moral dimension informs the distinction that she draws between the insipid devotees of superficial pleasure she names ironically here (the ‘refined libertines’) and the implied but unnamed superior beings capable of appreciating the deeper and therefore presumably moral pleasures that derive from virtue. In associating weak women’s fondness for costume and appearance with disease (‘contagious’), Wollstonecraft echoes the many writers in the 1790s and early 1800s who routinely castigated what they opposed – whether moral, political, social or religious – in terms of contagion or poison and consequently deserving of the most severe means of eradication.33 What Wollstonecraft is talking about here is a very different woman from those, like Sophie and Julie, that Rousseau had drawn, the ideal and ‘proper’ woman whose role is drawn exclusively as daughter, lover, wife or mother: ‘one who’, in Anne Mellor’s words, ‘exists only to serve the interests of male children and adults, and whose value is equated with her beauty, submissiveness, tenderness and affection’.34 Wollstonecraft envisions the companionate partner, the newly empowered post-Enlightenment woman most publicly visible in the woman as writer and, by extension, the woman as public activist. She envisions an educated partner, one whose mental agility contributes to a relatively egalitarian partnership with her male counterparts. Like Catherine Macaulay, Wollstonecraft understood that an appropriate education (for women as well as for men) includes a moral component for whose apprehension and employment both sexes are fully suited. In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau had argued that humans are driven by two principal motivations: self-interest and compassion. In her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), Macaulay takes the first element of Rousseau’s scheme but implicitly dismisses the taints of sensualism and sensibility it subsequently acquired, drawing a firm connection instead with morality: Independent of those pleasurable sensations which attend the refined affections, and the elevated sentiments and passions, there is a principle of rational agency, which corresponds with the precise admeasurement of every action, with a rule of right; although the conduct it directs, militates against natural inclination, against the interest of natural affection, and where every pleasurable sensation

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is sacrificed to the conviction of judgment, and to the rigid dictates of a well informed understanding.35

Rather than dismissing ‘pleasurable sensations’, to which Rousseauvian acolytes claimed women were constitutionally too susceptible, Macaulay links them with ‘rational agency’, which ascribes to individuals (of both sexes) the mental stamina to judge correctly and to act appropriately. Moreover, this mental agility is essential for women even within the boundaries of their roles as educators, for the motherly educator, in Pam Perkins’ words, ‘must be able to reason about what associations it is vital to encourage in order to reinforce the blossoming virtuous instincts and train them in the right direction’.36 Simpering simpletons will not do when it comes to educating young citizens of either sex.37 Both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft were aware of Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758), in which, in the course of castigating contemporary French theatre, Rousseau proposes that women ought to be the primary agents for morality, in part because, by modelling within society the character of the chaste, nurturing wife and mother, they contribute to the moral stability of men, who, Rousseau argues, naturally and instinctively prefer this sort of woman to the gaudy mistresses they too often pursue. Nevertheless, in the Letter, Rousseau argues that a life of the mind is counterproductive for women and therefore dangerous to society: women, he insists, must not come to believe that independence ought to be their lot.38 He writes in Book 5 of Emile: The whole education of women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honoured by them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet – these are the duties of women at all times.39

Macaulay’s response to this agenda of separate and unequal spheres, especially as it appeared in Emile, was fierce: He [Rousseau] sets out with a supposition, that Nature intended the subjection of one sex to the other; that consequently there must be an inferiority of intellect in the subjected party; but as man is a very imperfect being, and apt to play the capricious tyrant, Nature, to bring things nearer to an equality, bestowed on the woman such attractive graces, and such an insinuating address, as to turn the  balance on the other scale. Thus Nature, in a giddy mood, recedes from her  purposes, and subjects prerogative to an influence

24

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism which must produce  confusion and disorder in the system of human affairs. Rousseau saw this objection; and in order to obviate it, he has made up a moral person of the union of the two sexes, which, for contradiction and absurdity, outdoes every metaphysical riddle that was ever formed in the schools. In short, it is not reason, it is not wit; it is pride and sensuality that speak in Rousseau, and … lowered the man of genius to the licentious peasant.40

Like Wollstonecraft, Macaulay advocated educational equality and not a gendered system grounded in the fallacy of female inferiority. Wollstonecraft went further, though, arguing that women’s first duty was to themselves as rational creatures and as citizens, a duty that would, paradoxically, make them better wives and mothers, as Melissa Butler notes: ‘By being independent of men they could acquire the strength of affection needed by good wives and mothers; dependence produced cunning, mean and selfish women. Only through legal and financial independence could women become virtuous.’41 More than their continental contemporaries, Romantic-era British women writers associated women’s education and legal status with issues of class, recognizing that the walled-in and subservient female domestic partner – vestal virgin that she may have been expected to be – must always endure vassal status until she secured the intellectual, legal and economic independence that would reduce and even obviate the terms of her gendered indenture. Women’s educational status was, of course, central to the debate over the ‘natural’ abilities of both sexes, and Rousseau’s influence is evident in much of the educational literature written for British children. Much of this writing is grounded in the Bible and reflects the strong moral conservatism we see in Hannah More and other writers associated with the Cheap Repository tracts of the 1790s. Donelle Ruwe has examined the prototypical role of the anti-Jacobin Sarah Trimmer in advocating women and girls as ‘teachers and students of biblical knowledge’, for which roles as ‘active spiritual leaders’ Trimmer finds them especially well suited.42 Already in 1780, in her popular Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature, and Reading the Holy Scripture, Trimmer offered a thoroughly woman-centred narrative that both explicitly and implicitly refutes Rousseau’s contention in Emile that girls must acquire religious and scriptural knowledge through rote memorization because, as Ruwe puts it, ‘as adult women, they would be incapable of mature theological reasoning’.43 Specifically, Trimmer is concerned about the dangers to vulnerable children (and child readers) inherent in gaining their biblical knowledge from ‘Rousseau’s system given to us by Emilius’, in which the male child pupil is tutored ‘in a new principle from which Christianity [is] banished’, as she wrote when reviewing William

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Godwin’s Bible Stories (1803) in The Guardian of Education (1802–6), which she edited.44 Writing in the first issue of the periodical, Trimmer warned against radical republican French writers – and Rousseau especially – whom she believed were ‘endeavouring to infect the minds of the rising generation’ particularly through the medium of books intended for children.45 Unlike more enlightened educators like Richard and Maria Edgeworth, Trimmer was entirely content to distort the truth (whether about social, natural or religious matters) to children or even deliberately to lie to them ‘for their own good’.46 Like other reactionary writers of the period, Trimmer and her associates linked Rousseauvian ideas about nature, gender and society with contagion and infection against which a vulnerable, sensibility-weakened public (particularly a female public) had to be inoculated. Ironically, in presenting girls (and younger women) as active moral thinkers – their doctrinaire inflexibility notwithstanding – Trimmer offered an alternative to the submissive model of girlhood, a more intellectually active alternative that reflected many of the progressive themes that were emerging in early anti-Rousseauvian feminist discourse. This progressive swerve in gender is evident in many of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels of education published by British women. For instance, Anne Mellor observes that Jane Austen replaces the Rousseauvian ‘women of passionate sensibility’ with women of ‘sense’, such as Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot, who ‘refuse to be overcome by sexual passion’: for Mellor, all of Austen’s novels are counterRousseauvian novels of education in which ‘an intelligent but ignorant girl learns to perceive the world more accurately, to understand more fully the ethical complexity of human nature and society, and to gain confidence in the wisdom of her own judgment’.47 Indeed, as Fiona Price notes, Mary Wollstonecraft proposes that women might best counter that ‘blanket feminization of social corruption’ about which Rousseau complains by developing ‘original thought’.48 This ‘original thought’ is, in fact, just what reactionary writers, taking their cue from Rousseau himself, hoped to place off limits to women, lest their vulnerability to the influences of sensibility expose them to the heady whiff of radical, revolutionary social and political thought – and action. Writing about Mary Hays, for example, Miriam Wallace observes that, despite her acknowledgement of the power and insight of William Godwin’s philosophy, Hays nevertheless places him in a line from philosophical antecedents like Rousseau. Even well-intentioned and politically radical men, Wallace writes, have ‘monopolized knowledge and reason in the same way as kings, aristocrats, and slave-holders have oppressed other men’.49

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

The rise, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature, of the ubiquitous female tutor (as nursemaid, governess or teacher) itself represented a deliberate departure from the role of the male tutor as presented in Rousseau’s Emile; Wollstonecraft’s Mrs Mason (Original Stories, 1788) represents only one such figure, while Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1801), in which a mother teaches her son in age-appropriate terms, presents another. Even in the field of botany, interestingly, we encounter a deliberate inversion of a Rousseauvian model in Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany, in a Series of Familiar Letters (1796), which employs the dialogical model of familiar letters between two sisters but in which Wakefield replaces the familiar male tutor with a female mentor who supervises one of the sisters, Felicia, who engages in an extensive correspondence about botany with her absent sister, Constance. Wakefield’s pedagogical model is a sociable, companionate one in which, according to Sam George, ‘knowledge is imparted gradually, by degree’, and the ‘interesting and pleasant’ lessons are ‘not undertaken out of a sense of duty’.50 Only a year later, in 1797, Charlotte Smith, too, revealed her knowledge of Rousseau’s thoughts about botany and the natural world. In a letter that accompanied the proof copy of the new edition of her Elegiac Sonnets soon to be published by Cadell and Davies, she complained that the additions that she had made to her note on her ‘Sonnet to the Goddess of Botany’ had not been inserted: ‘I wish they had been inserted as they had a direct & particular reference [sic] to the subject & were a beautiful specimen of Elegant French [sic].’51 The additions, which were in fact subsequently reinstated, included several sentences from Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1782). Romantic-era British women writers’ relationship with Rousseau was characterized by a conflict between attraction and repulsion. While they found much to admire in his social and political republicanism, they also found much to deplore in his oppressive opinions about gender. Mary Wollstonecraft was herself seriously conflicted about these matters. Writing about Wollstonecraft, Saba Bahar points out that the Vindication aggressively contests the gendered social programme that informs so much of Rousseau’s writing, even as early as the Discourse on Inequality. What Wollstonecraft desires, Bahar contends, is an independence of mind and spirit that is nevertheless fully engaged in a productive social and political existence and that is not delineated by gender: ‘By insisting on independence, Wollstonecraft is clearly aligning herself with the image of the self-determining, self-reliant and virtuous man that is … a cornerstone of civic humanism. It is also the ideology of manhood that both Defoe’s Crusoe and Rousseau’s Emile promote.’52

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I have explored here the often both conflicting and conflicted responses to Rousseau among later eighteenth-century and early Romantic-era British women writers because they helpfully trace the larger questions about women’s evolving role and function in post-Enlightenment society which women and men alike had begun to address. Increasingly, women turned away from Rousseau’s essentialist notions about gender and conduct, dismissing them out of hand or appropriating and reformulating them for their own rhetorical purposes in arguing for women’s rights, dignity and socio-economic legitimacy, often deliberately subverting them in the process by highlighting the extent to which contemporary society had begun to move beyond such reductive essentialism. I return to Wollstonecraft in closing, then, for among her female British contemporaries she particularly addressed the terrible burden placed upon insufficiently educated women by the hierarchical masculinist cultural establishment that had historically denigrated women for lacking that intellectual (and therefore personal) independence of mind and spirit that Rousseau and his advocates explicitly sought to deny them and that, had it been cultivated rather than denied, might have yielded the companionate parity in gender relations that ought to have been the legacy of the Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft appreciated that the Rousseauvian privileging of superficial ‘beauty’ had reduced women to a state of degrading vassalage, as she observes in Chapter 2 of the Vindication: He [Rousseau] wished to stop the progress of reason in both sexes, for if men eat of the tree of knowledge, women will come in for a taste; but, from the imperfect cultivation which their understandings now receive, they only attain a knowledge of evil . … [Women] must return to nature and equality, if they wish to secure the placid satisfaction that unsophisticated affections impart.53

As Wollstonecraft’s coordinating conjunction suggests, the inherent condition of ‘nature’ is ‘equality’; that is the riposte that she and her female contemporaries would continue to make to what Barbauld had characterized as Rousseau’s ‘reprehensible’ claims.

Notes 1 2

Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 30. Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 6.

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William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex’d and Proper Females (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 165. 4 Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing’, in British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of Their Literary Criticism, ed. Mary A. Waters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 26. 5 Fiona Price, Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818: Women Writers and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 66. 6 Saba Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 8. 7 Jean Elshtain, Public Man, Private Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 159. 8 Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 193–4. For Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Rousseau, see also Nancy Yousef, ‘Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and the Revision of Romantic Subjectivity’, Studies in Romanticism 38 (1999): 537–57. 9 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74. 10 Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment, 313. 11 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39. 12 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 103 (Part 3, Section 13). 13 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108–9. 14 R. S. White, Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 81. 15 See Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 16 See Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 55–62. 17 Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801), 367. 18 Mary A. Waters, British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 53. 19 Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s, 88. 20 Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, in Which the Duties and Characters of Women Are Considered, Chiefly with a Reference to Prevailing Opinions, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), 1:24–6 (emphasis in original). 21 Pam Perkins, ‘Planting the Seeds of Virtue: Sentimental Fiction and the Moral Education of Women’, in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 3

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1780–1840 (2001), 6, http://www.romtext.org.uk/articles/cc06_n02/ (accessed 1 August 2016). 22 See, for instance, the examples collected in Conduct Literature for Women, 1770–1830, ed. Pam Morris, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). 23 Mary Ann Radcliffe, The Female Advocate, quoted in Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s, 80. 24 The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 121–2. McCarthy and Kraft observe that, despite this apparent disagreement, Barbauld and Wollstonecraft had in fact been ‘political allies’ in several social activist causes and that Wollstonecraft had elsewhere praised Barbauld in print (289). 25 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 13:546; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Émile, Éducation, Morale, Botanique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:710–1. 26 Nicola J. Watson, ‘Trans-figuring Byronic Identity’, in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist and Materialist Feminism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 192. 27 Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 1821: ‘Born for Opposition’ (London: J. Murray, 1978), 8:147–8. 28 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 5:117. 29 Elizabeth A. Fay, A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 162. 30 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Todd and Butler, 5:87. 31 ‘Vassal, n. and adj.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2016 (accessed 1  August 2016). 32 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Todd and Butler, 5:258–9. 33 See Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 34 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 109. 35 Catherine Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (London: A. Hamilton, 1783), 129. 36 Perkins, ‘Planting Seeds of Virtue’. 37 It is worth noting here that pedagogy was of particular interest to later eighteenthcentury and Romantic-era British women writers, who were beginning to explore the intersections of the educational, the moral and the political in pedagogical

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writing, particularly for women. Writing for children had become a boom industry by the 1790s, and educational books of all sorts (from the intellectual to the behavioural and the religious) went through remarkable numbers of editions: Ann and Jane Taylor’s Original Poems, for Infant Minds (1804), Rhymes for the Nursery (1806) and Hymns for Infant Minds (c. 1809) each went through some thirty editions by 1835. Wollstonecraft herself tried this market with her Original Stories from Real Life (1788); following her death, William Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom he published several works for children in their ‘Juvenile Library’. 38 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, trans. Allan Bloom, ed. A. Bloom and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans. A. Bloom, Charles Butterworth and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004), 10:325–30; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Jean Rousset, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 5:92–8. 39 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 540; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 703. 40 Catherine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790), 205–6. 41 Melissa A. Butler, ‘Eighteenth-Century Critics of Rousseau’s Views on Women’, in Rousseau and Criticism/Rousseau et la critique, ed. Lorraine Clark and Guy Lafrance (Ottawa: North American Association for the Study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1995), 136. 42 Donelle Ruwe, ‘Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau: Sarah Trimmer, William Godwin, and the Pedagogical Periodical’, Children’s Literature 29 (2001): 10. See also Matthew O. Grenby. ‘“A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things”: Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education’, in Culturing the Child, 1690–1914: Essays in Memory of Mitzi Myers, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 137–61, and The Child Reader, 1700–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 43 Ruwe, ‘Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau’, 10. 44 Sarah Trimmer, review of William Scolfield [William Godwin], Bible Stories. Memorable Acts of the Ancient Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings. Extracted from Their Original Historians. For the Use of Children, 2 vols (London: R. Phillips, 1803), in Guardian of Education 1 (1802): 244–64, quoted in Ruwe, ‘Guarding the British Bible from Rousseau’, 6. Bible Stories is dated 1803, but it actually appeared late in 1802. 45 Sarah Trimmer, ‘Introduction, Containing Some Observations on the Instruction of Children and Youth’, Guardian of Education 1 (1802): 2.

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46 See Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 163. 47 Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, 52–3. 48 Price, Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818, 74. 49 Miriam L. Wallace, ‘Mary Hays’s “Female Philosopher”: Constructing Revolutionary Subjects’, in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 248. 50 Sam George, ‘Epistolary Exchange: The Familiar Letter and the Female Botanist, 1760–1820’, Journal of Literature and Science 4, no. 1 (2011): 14. 51 The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Phillips Stanton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 277. 52 Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy, 162–3; emphases mine. 53 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Todd and Butler, 5:89–91.

2

‘Rousseau’s Ground’: Locating a Refuge for the Libertarian Man of Feeling in Julie, or the New Heloise and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Helen Stark

Writing to John Murray from Ouchy in Switzerland on 27  June  1816, Byron described how he had ‘traversed all Rousseau’s ground – with the Heloise before me’.1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) is ‘before’ him both physically – in his hands, between him and Meillerie, Clarens, Vevey and Chillon Castle – and also in a broader, figurative sense. Julie shapes his responses to the landscape: it overlays the places he encounters. In acknowledging this, Byron tacitly gestures towards the ways in which Julie is ‘before’ the poem he had very nearly completed: the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816).2 But while Rousseau’s Julie is a key intertext of Canto 3 – ‘before’ the poem as a literary ancestor and mediating Byron’s depiction of Switzerland – Byron’s treatment of Rousseau and Julie in Canto 3 has, for the most part, received only passing attention from scholars.3 Indeed, Diane Piccitto goes so far as to pass over altogether the composition of Canto 3 in Switzerland and the centrality of both that locale and Rousseau to the poem, commenting that Manfred was ‘the major literary production – alongside The Prisoner of Chillon – to emerge from Byron’s stay in Switzerland during the summer of 1816’.4 It is surprising that Byron’s depictions of Rousseau and Julie in Canto 3 have been largely overlooked since they are a crucial component of his response to the Battle of Waterloo (1815). Canto 3 portrays the battle as a contest between two tyrannical forces and demonstrates the extent to which the second and final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the restoration of the European monarchs had amplified Byron’s anti-nationalist and libertarian stance. In the aftermath of Waterloo, men like Byron, his protagonist, Childe Harold, and the

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poem’s narrator are marginalized and isolated as a result of their rejection of patriotic and nationalistic narratives. These men are instead preoccupied with defending liberty against tyranny – and this libertarianism takes precedence over, and subverts, nationalism. The poem is in part concerned with finding a space for this libertarian masculinity; Byron locates this refuge in the sites of Rousseau’s novel. Like Stephen Cheeke, I place ‘the figure and landscapes of Rousseau’5 at the centre of my analysis of Canto 3. But Cheeke, by contrast, is concerned with the tension between the material world and nature, arguing that ‘what Byron seems to be attempting to do in Clarens … is momentarily reconcile the canto’s conflicting urges on the one hand to replace the inscriptions of human history with the natural signs of a cult of sensibility; and on the other to read the landscape in terms of spots of historical significance’; in order to unite these two impulses, Clarens becomes, Cheeke contends, ‘an historical monument to sensibility’.6 I will argue, instead, that Clarens and its environs provide a refuge for the man of feeling in post-Waterloo Europe, not a monument to sensibility past. Rousseau and Julie are central to Canto 3 in two ways. First, Rousseau is invoked as a man of feeling and a member of an imagined community of men which includes Harold, the poem’s narrator, and Byron as author.7 These temporally and spatially dislocated men are united by their shared sensibility and their rejection of society’s dictates. Rousseau is a central example of this paradigm of isolated masculinity: he is strongly associated with an idealized model of male behaviour that privileges love. And secondly, Byron presents the novel’s environs as a refuge for this type of masculinity. While, as Andrew Billing has observed, scholars have disagreed on the extent to which the ‘Clarens domain [can] be interpreted as the model for a utopian political society’,8 Byron evidently read Clarens and its environs as such. As Jeffrey Cox notes, for Byron, ‘Rousseau’s quest for an ideal does not end in the futile, inward-turning creation of a dream girl, for he imagines out of his love a political ideal’.9 In Canto 3, then, Byron draws on Rousseau’s depiction of the interrelatedness of love and utopian political communities to create a space for the libertarian man of feeling which is outside the oppressive structures of monarchism and nationalism resurrected by Waterloo, and which crosses national boundaries. Rather than follow the cues given in exclamations such as ‘Clarens! sweet Clarens, birth-place of deep Love!’ (923), this chapter argues that it is both Clarens and its surrounding locales, especially Meillerie, which Byron presents as a refuge for the libertarian man of feeling. He casts Rousseau as part of a group of isolated, creative and ambitious men of feeling and the novel’s sites

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as a place for this type of masculinity. Significantly, this sanctuary for the man of feeling extends out of Switzerland into Meillerie (now in France but then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia): Byron’s idealized refuge for libertarian men crosses national boundaries. We might read Canto 3, then, as seeking to establish a locale for the man of feeling which resists ideologies of nation and national identity by refusing to acknowledge national boundaries. This space is defined first and foremost as ‘Rousseau’s ground’: literature can positively interact with physical spaces to provide sanctuary for men who have no place in society. I first consider the trope of the man of feeling before illustrating the alignment of Rousseau with this paradigm and the importance of Clarens and its environs as a locale to which the man of feeling can retreat.

The ‘self-torturing sophist’: Rousseau as man of feeling Rousseau is vital to Canto 3 as an isolated man of feeling, one of an imagined community of such men. Typically a middle- or upper-class white male, the man of feeling is charitable and virtuous and, crucially, displays the ‘emotional susceptibility’ which, according to Janet Todd, defines sensibility.10 When the narrator of Canto 3 observes ‘Yet must I think less wildly: – I have thought/ Too long and darkly’, he alludes to the characteristic excess and melancholy of the man of feeling (55–6, Byron’s emphasis). Due to society’s constraints, these men suffer mental stultification, are often unable to form viable relationships with the opposite sex and chafe at the sense of imprisonment they experience. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic sentimental novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Werther asks: ‘Why does the river of genius so seldom burst its banks … on both banks are the dwelling-places of placid gentlemen whose summerhouses, tulip beds, and vegetable plots would be destroyed and who therefore in good time ward off the future danger by damming and diverting.’11 For Werther, bourgeois society values the status quo over the radical potential of its men of genius, who are constricted by this neatly ordered world. When Harold is described as the ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (20), it is clear that his attitudes isolate him, locating him, like Werther, on the margins of society. Byron presents Rousseau as likewise constrained by society’s expectations: ‘all fire’, a ‘self-torturing sophist’, uncontainable and ‘wild’ (an adjective also used to describe Napoleon), he displays the intellectual and emotional unrest that characterizes the man of feeling (719, 725, 326). Rousseau’s ‘desire/Was to be glorious’, but, tortured by his intellect, he was ‘wretched’ from his first breath

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(722–3, 729). The  persecution that the creative man of feeling faces from himself and from society is apparent in the assertion that ‘Kindled he was, and blasted’ (736). Byron also aligned himself with this model of masculine behaviour. In his Alpine Journal, written for his sister, Augusta Leigh, three months after Canto 3, he seems to allude to the strain of his marriage and recent separation when he writes on September 19: ‘I am so tired – for though healthy I have not the strength I possessed but a few years ago.’12 The implication is that he has been a victim of a debilitating event – his brief marriage to Annabella Milbanke. Reflecting on the Alpine Tour in the journal’s final entry, he is more explicit: The recollections of bitterness – & more especially of recent & more home desolation – which must accompany me through life – have preyed upon me here – and neither the music of the Shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment – lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory – around – above – & beneath me.13

What is apparent here is the man of feeling’s inability to escape even temporarily his melancholy by seeking solace in nature. And the trope is manifest in Canto 3: the version of Byron in the poem, his narrator, and his protagonist Harold and Rousseau are all men of feeling.14 The trope recurs partly because all these figures (and Napoleon) are in effect doubles of Byron, who serve to legitimate aspects of his own behaviour and character.15 But the relationship is more complex still than this: Simon Bainbridge describes Byron’s public merging of his own history with Napoleon’s as ‘a highly polemical, political act’.16 Although in Canto 3 the man of feeling trope does function to legitimize a version of masculinity that Byron is personally invested in, I also want to consider here the wider political resonances of his treatment of male sensibility: by presenting Rousseau as a similarly ‘tormented’ man of feeling, Byron emphasizes the relationship between this model of male behaviour and libertarian politics and creativity. Rousseau’s derangement is implied in the description of his concept of ‘ideal beauty’ as ‘distempered’ (740, 742). His insanity appears to be caused by his love for Comtesse d’Houdetot, widely accepted as the inspiration for Julie. His portrayal of ideal beauty ‘teems/Along his burning page’ (741–2). ‘Burning’ connotes fever, an association reinforced in the reference to the ‘fevered lip’

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(746) with which Rousseau would kiss d’Houdetot. The narrator’s assertion that Rousseau’s love of beauty ‘became/In him existence’ (740–1) suggests it consumed him. Moreover, it ‘breathed itself to life in Júlie, this/Invested her with all that’s wild and sweet’ (743–4). The recurrence of ‘wild’ links the masculinity of the ‘wild Rousseau’ (725) with his creative output and connects Rousseau to Napoleon whose ‘wild name’ (326) suggests that he cannot be controlled, despite his imprisonment. Cumulatively, then, this portrayal binds together Rousseau’s exile, sensibility, insanity and love, creating an important foundation for Byron’s depiction of Clarens, later in the canto. In stanza 80, however, the focus changes. Byron presents Rousseau as suffering from paranoia: His life was one long war with self-sought foes, Or friends by him self-banish’d; for his mind Had grown Suspicion’s sanctuary, and chose For its own cruel sacrifice, the kind, ’Gainst whom he raged with fury strange and blind. But he was phrenzied, – wherefore, who may know? Since cause might be which skill could never find; But he was phrenzied by disease or woe, To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show. (752–60)

Illness functions in quite a different way here. Rousseau’s life was dominated by self-sabotage; he ‘self-sought foes’ and ‘banish’d’ his friends (752, 753). His mind was ‘Suspicion’s sanctuary’ and its ‘sacrifice’ (754–5) was those who attempted to help him. Although, two stanzas earlier, Julie was characterized as ‘ov’rflowing’ with love (741), here the excess is of anger: ‘he raged with fury strange and blind’ (756). The suggestion of madness is reiterated: Rousseau was ‘phrenzied’ (757), ‘phrenzied by disease or woe,/To that worst pitch of all, which wears a reasoning show’ (759–60). The magnitude of this supposed mental illness is emphasized by the repetition of ‘phrenzied’ and in the suggestion that it is incurable: ‘wherefore, who may know?/Since cause might be which skill could never find’ (757–8). Despite the convoluted syntax, there is an informal conversational tone to the latter statement, which, combined with the rhetorical question, suggests that the speaker is ventriloquizing popular opinion. This brings to mind Edmund Burke’s gibe in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): ‘I believe, that were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical phrenzy of his scholars.’17 Clearly the question of Rousseau’s – and the

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man of feeling’s – insanity and the extent to which it was contagious had cultural currency. However, that what constitutes madness is constructed by society and therefore changeable is reinforced in the following lines, which refer to the reception of Julie: Yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and cast O’er erring deeds and thoughts, a heavenly hue Of words, like sunbeams, dazzling as they past The eyes, which o’er them shed tears feelingly and fast. (729–33)

Applying the religious and natural imagery of ‘heavenly’ and ‘sunbeams’ to ‘erring deeds’, Byron illustrates that insanity and transgression can be rewritten. In Julie, Rousseau created a space where the man of feeling – his protagonist, Saint-Preux – was freed from society’s condemnation, and this affirmation was replicated by the novel’s reception, which provoked tears of sympathy for the doomed couple. Rousseau’s ‘phrenzied’ conduct, caused by love and his creative spirit, similarly contravened the boundaries of acceptability. Like the self-exiled Harold, the speaker, and Byron, he is located on the margins of society, but the condition of being separated from society is necessary to creative men: there is a need for a space dedicated to types of masculinity which defy society’s regulations. Rousseau’s position on the boundary between insanity and sanity, and therefore on the edge of society, facilitates his creativity and revolutionary potential. This is revealed in the claim that when wearing ‘a reasoning show’ (760): Then he [Rousseau] was inspired, and from him came, As from the Pythian’s mystic cave of yore, Those oracles which set the world in flame, Nor ceased to burn till kingdoms were no more: Did he not this for France? (761–5)

Byron politicizes Rousseau’s debilitating paranoia, presenting him as having razed the monarchy and released France from ‘the inborn tyranny of years’ (766). It is not unusual, of course, for Rousseau’s writings to be depicted as a factor instigating the French Revolution. What is significant here is that he is a libertarian man whose writings felled a dictatorship – a man whose writing

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changed Europe. Even when the tone is characteristically equivocal – Rousseau ‘roused up’ the revolutionaries ‘to too much wrath’ (769) – it testifies to the value of literature as a political conduit. Not only has Byron united libertarianism and sensibility with active, ambitious masculinity, he also illustrates that writing can have political power – and that this is at least in part dependent on being peripheral to society. This characterization incorporates Rousseau into a community of male exiles of which Byron is a member: to a certain extent they are self-exiled yet, ‘envied’ (385) and thus estranged, they are also exiled by society. The portrayal of Rousseau functions to sanction a particular kind of masculinity with which Byron aligns himself. The depiction of Rousseau suggests that when Byron describes the novel’s environs as infused with love, this love is not merely an abstract concept, for love has been used in his portrayal to draw together creativity, libertarianism, mental instability and revolutionary impulses. Clarens and its environs are represented as a locale which, because they are imbued with love, can provide a space for libertarianism in contemporary Europe.

‘Love’s recess’: Clarens and Meillerie If Rousseau is important in Canto 3 as an example of the isolated man of feeling, then Julie represents a potential location for this type of man. In stanzas 99–104 Byron engages directly with the novel, portraying the relationship between the man of feeling and place as mediated by love. In doing so, he builds on the importance of love in binding Saint-Preux to the community at Clarens. The role of love as a social tie is evident in Part 4, letter 6, when Saint-Preux returns to Clarens after travelling the world. Initially the response to the homeland seems fairly typical. When he exclaims that the ‘sight of my country, … the air of the Alps so wholesome and pure; the sweet air of the fatherland … threw me into transports I cannot describe’,18 his delight in the familiarity of the lie of the land and the smell of the air is surely recognizable to those who have left, and then returned to, a landscape to which they feel attached. That this reaction is utterly dependent, however, on his relationship with Julie is evident when he observes: ‘For me the world is never divided into more than two regions, the one where she is and the one where she is not. The first expands when I go away, and shrinks as I come closer, like a place I am never to reach’ (344; 419). As he approaches Julie, then, each locale is first appreciated as ‘where she is’ and then, as he passes it, rejected as ‘where she is

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not’: ‘When I spied the crest of the mountains my heart pounded in my chest, as I said to myself, she is there’ (344; 419). He reacted the same way, he writes, ‘at sea upon sighting the coasts of Europe’, and his anticipation intensifies as he approaches and then passes through Switzerland: at the centre of his reflections, he insists, is ‘that charming abode like nothing I had found in circling the earth’ (344; 419). This echoes his claims in Part 4, letter 3 that ‘I have been all the way around the globe and have not been able to escape you one moment’ (338; 412) and ‘what I have not seen in the entire world is someone who is like Claire d’Orbe, like Julie d’Étange’ (340; 415), strongly suggesting that the ‘charming abode’ he refers to is Clarens. Eventually, the space he identifies with is ‘limited to the walls of her room’, whereas ‘all the rest of creation is empty’ (344; 419). Saint-Preux’s attachment to place is conflated with his love for Julie, and it is this love which binds him to the community at Clarens. In Canto 3 communion between the landscape and the individual is similarly predicated on surrender to the overwhelming influence of love. For Jock Macleod, Byron is seeking, not any kind of earthly community, but ‘an abstraction divested of any physicality whatsoever’.19 In the Julie stanzas, as Byron puts it in the notes which accompany the canto, love is idealized as ‘the great principle of the universe’,20 but it is dependent on a geographical locale: ‘He who hath loved not, here [at Clarens and Meillerie] would learn that lore’ (959). There is a tension between geographic specificity and the desire to transcend the landscape: here, Byron writes in the notes, ‘we lose our individuality, and mingle in the beauty of the whole’.21 All things are ‘of him [Love]’ (941, emphasis Byron’s). The ‘gush of springs,/And fall of lofty fountains’, the ‘bend/Of stirring branches’ and the ‘bud’ are united, ‘Mingling, and made by Love, unto one mighty end’ (954–6, 958). While the descriptions of moving water – gushing springs, falling fountains and ‘loud roar/Of torrents’ (942–3) – evoke SaintPreux’s recollection that at Clarens ‘torrents of pleasures had flooded my heart’ (344; 419), Byron is explicit in the notes that what is being experienced is more than just sympathy with Saint-Preux’s emotions and he is also clear that this is not limited to Clarens. The ‘feeling with which all around Clarens, and  the opposite rocks of Meillerie is invested’, Byron writes, ‘is of a still higher and more comprehensive order than  the mere sympathy with individual passion’; rather, he contends, ‘it is a sense of the existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation of its good and its glory: it is the great principle of the universe’.22 Love enables the man of feeling to transcend his broader disaffection with society; here he can become part of a community which celebrates love’s ‘good and its glory’. This is reinforced by the

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recurrence of ‘mingle’ in the canto and the appended note which suggests that humankind and nature can blend in their surrender to the love which permeates the landscape. In post-Waterloo Europe, ‘Rousseau’s ground’ provides a refuge where love still reigns and a shelter for the libertarian man of feeling. The personification of love reinforces this suggestion. Given the male pronoun and described as having a ‘sparkling’ eye (938) and ‘soft and summer breath’ (939), love metonymically represents the man of feeling. ‘For ’tis his [Love’s] nature to advance or die;/He stands not still, but decays, or grows’ (964–5), asserts the narrator, recalling the intolerance for stagnation which characterized the portrayal of Rousseau. Naming Clarens and its environs ‘Love’s recess’ (962), Byron is explicit that there is no place for love in contemporary society. Love – which, as we have seen, stands for the man of feeling – has been forced here by ‘vain men’s woes,/And the world’s waste’ which have ‘driven’ it away (962–3). The man of feeling’s disillusionment with the current state of Europe, from which his libertarianism isolates him, is conveyed here. He needs a ‘refuge from the worldly shocks,/Which stir and sting the soul with hope that woos, then mocks’ (930–1). While Saint-Preux is isolated from society, not because he cannot negotiate its values, but because of his forbidden love, Byron politicizes that love by associating it with a wider dissatisfaction with European nationalism and monarchism. This resistance to nationalism is one way of addressing the inclusion of the Sardinian Meillerie in the space that Byron terms ‘Love’s recess’. In the key stanzas engaging with Julie, Clarens operates as shorthand for a wider locale which includes Meillerie. Byron seems to signal that he is locating his refuge for the man of feeling at Clarens in the repeated exclamations of ‘Clarens! sweet Clarens’ (923) and ‘Clarens!’ (932), which open stanzas 99 and 100. It would appear that the subsequent stanzas likewise describe this locale; no other places are named and the subject matter seems to run over the stanza ends. But consider, for example, the reference to Meillerie in the following lines: The rocks, The permanent crags, tell here of Love, who sought In them a refuge from the worldly shocks, Which stir and sting the soul with hope that woos, then mocks. (928–31)

Although ostensibly referring to Clarens, the ‘permanent crags’ which ‘tell here of Love’ recall Saint-Preux’s return to Meillerie with Julie described in Part 4, letter 17:

42

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism After we had reached this nook and I had spent some time taking it in: What! I said to Julie, looking at her with a tear in my eye, does your heart tell you nothing here, and do you not feel some secret emotion at the sight of a place so full of you? Then without waiting for her answer, I led her toward the cliff and showed her her initials carved in a thousand places, and several lines of Petrarch and Tasso relative to the situation I was in when I traced them. (425; 518–19)

Love is literally written on the landscape in the form of Saint-Preux’s inscriptions on the rocks, made while exiled from Julie’s company in Part 1, and these feature in Canto 3 as ‘permanent crags, [which] tell here of Love’. Likewise the ‘hope that woos, then mocks’ in part alludes to this painful wait for her to recall him to Vevey. In addition, the note Byron appends to line 928 begins with a quotation taken from Julie; specifically, it is a quotation from the note that ‘the editor’ affixes to the description of Meillerie in Part 4, letter 17 which refers to the view of the Alps from that place.23 The descriptions of the landscape in stanzas 101 and 102 strongly recall the same letter, in which Saint-Preux describes his return to Meillerie with Julie and to which Byron has already drawn our attention through this quotation. The similarities in these accounts suggest that Byron is blending Clarens and Meillerie together in his vision of a refuge for the man of feeling. Close analysis of stanzas 101 and 102 further demonstrates that Meillerie is being invoked here.24 In letter 17 Saint-Preux describes Meillerie thus: Forests of dark spruce shaded us gloomily on the right. On the left beyond the mountain stream was a large oak wood, and below us that immense plain of water which the lake forms in the midst of the Alps separated us from the rich coasts of the Vaud, the tableau of which was crowned by the Peak of the majestic Jura. In the midst of these grand and superb objects, the little spot where we were standing displayed the charms of a cheerful and rural site; several brooks filtered through the rocks, and ran down the greenery in crystal trickles. Several wild fruit trees bent their heads over us; the damp and cool earth was covered with grass and flowers. Comparing so pleasant a retreat with the surrounding objects, it seemed that this deserted place was meant to be the sanctuary of two lovers who alone had escaped nature’s cataclysm. (424–5; 518)

Compare this with stanzas 101 and 102: All things are here of him; from the black pines, Which are his shades on high, and the loud roar

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Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines Which slope his green path downward to the shore, Where the bowed waters meet him, and adore, Kissing his feet with murmurs; and the wood, The covert of old trees, with trunks all hoar, But light leaves, young as joy, stands where it stood, Offering to him, and his, a populous solitude, A populous solitude of bees and birds, And fairy-form’d and many-coloured things, Who worship him with notes more sweet than words, And innocently open their glad wings, Fearless and full of life: the gush of springs, And fall of lofty fountains, and the bend Of stirring branches, and the bud which brings The swiftest thought of beauty, here extend, Mingling, and made by Love, unto one mighty end. (941–58)

Both the structure and the content of Byron’s stanzas mirror Rousseau’s description of Meillerie. Consider, for example, the dark evergreens and ancient trees on the edges of each scene. Byron’s account of ‘black pines’ (941) and a wood ‘of old trees, with trunks all hoar’ (947) corresponds with Saint-Preux’s: ‘Forests of dark spruce shaded us gloomily on the right. On the left beyond the mountain stream was a large oak wood’ (424; 518). Byron describes how, ‘downward to the shore’, ‘bowed waters meet’ (944–5), and Saint-Preux too gazes downwards, where ‘below us [was] that immense plain of water which the lake forms’ (424–5; 518). Similarly, Byron’s ‘gush of springs,/And fall of lofty fountains’ (954–5) recalls Saint-Preux’s description: ‘several brooks filtered through the rocks, and ran down the greenery in crystal trickles’ (425; 518). In both texts, the surrounding trees bow comfortingly over the individual: while Byron describes ‘the bend/Of stirring branches, and the bud’ (955–6), Saint-Preux notes that ‘several wild fruit trees bent their heads over us; the damp and cool earth was covered with grass and flowers’ (425; 518). This broadened space is significant because of the two key roles that Meillerie plays in Julie. Banished from Julie’s presence, Saint-Preux awaits her summons here in Part 1 and then revisits the site accompanied by her in Part 4. Readers encounter it first as a shelter for Saint-Preux and then as a shrine to

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that time and to his relationship with Julie more widely. But although ostensibly a place associated with Saint-Preux and Julie’s relationship, Meillerie is a space that emblematizes the lovelorn man of feeling. It is deeply evocative for SaintPreux: ‘Over there is the stone where I sat to watch from afar your blessed abode; on this one was written the Letter that struck your heart; these sharp stones served as my burin to carve your initials’ (425; 519). While he terms it a ‘deserted place [that] was meant to be the sanctuary of two lovers who alone had escaped nature’s cataclysm’ (425; 518), it is explicitly a place that is of him, not of Julie; she feels uncomfortable and overwhelmed here, as Saint-Preux records: ‘Let us go from here, my friend, she said with trembling voice, the air in this place is not good for me’ (427; 519–20). In contrast, he terms it an ‘isolated retreat’, a ‘shelter amidst the ice’ and a ‘cherished place’ (424; 517). It is a sanctuary and strongly associated with love. Byron’s vision of all-encompassing love is derived from Saint-Preux’s experiences in Meillerie, then, but it is reset in different conditions. When SaintPreux is exiled to Meillerie, ‘immense ice formations hung from all these cliffs; festoons of snow were these trees’ only ornament’, and he explains that ‘the flame in my heart alone made this place bearable’ (425; 519). When he returns to the site, it is, as we have seen, ‘a charming and rural site’ where ‘the damp and cool earth was covered with grass and flowers’ (425; 518); this becomes, in Canto 3, a lush and fantastical bower of ‘fairy-form’d and many-coloured things’ (951). This disjunction is significant, but for now it is sufficient to note that what is being depicted here is a place for the exiled or isolated man of feeling. And it is a space which can incorporate varying versions of isolated, disenfranchised masculinity. Returning to Meillerie, Saint-Preux notes ‘how powerfully the presence of objects can revive the violent sentiments with which one was formerly seized in their presence’ (425; 519), and Byron’s speaker claims that here ‘he who knows/That tender mystery, will love the more’ (960–1). While for Saint-Preux the associations of the site provoke his extreme reaction, Byron is more ambiguous. The speaker seems to suggest that the landscape is such that it amplifies feelings of love in one who loves already but he perhaps also alludes here to the importance of this site to Julie; those who know the narrative, the ‘tender mystery’, will here ‘love the more’. The site and the narrative will combine to amplify love in the reader. In broadening his idealized space, then, Byron is able covertly to include the associations of the nook at Meillerie and appeal directly to the literary tourist. The inclusion of Meillerie also speaks to Byron’s resistance to nationalism. Like Rousseau, he defines this space through shared values rather than political

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or linguistic boundaries. In Julie, ideal communities are based on shared moral values rather than geography, language or ethnicity. Consider, for example, Saint-Preux’s treatment in the Valais region described in Part 1, letter 23.25 In the upper Valais, Saint-Preux is treated with great hospitality and was ‘very surprised at the contrast between these customs and those of the lower Valais, where, on the road to Italy, passengers are rather roughly held to ransom’ (66; 80). A Valaisan explains that this difference arises because: In the valley, he said, the strangers who pass through are merchants, and other people solely occupied by their trade and gain. It is just that they leave us a part of their profit and we treat them as they treat others. But here where no business attracts strangers, we are sure that their travels are disinterested; and so is the welcome we reserve for them. (66; 80)

Although the character of the upper and lower Valais seems quite different, the Valaisan’s use of collective pronouns suggests he perceives continuity between the two areas. Saint-Preux is treated well in the upper Valais because he visits for non-economic reasons. Acceptance is granted on the basis of the recognition of certain moral qualities rather than a shared identity founded on geography or language. He is welcomed into their homes and he finds that ‘I was free to do as if I were there alone’ (66; 81). The fact that he is Swiss is irrelevant: ‘The only compliment they paid me after learning I was Swiss was to say that we were brothers and that I had only to consider myself in their home as if I were in mine’ (66; 81). Given that this privilege has already been extended to him on the basis of his arrival as a tourist rather than a merchant, the identification seems of little importance: he is welcomed because, like the Valaisans, Saint-Preux has no interest in materialism or commercialism. Not acknowledging that Meillerie is in the Kingdom of Sardinia might be one way for Byron of signalling disapproval of the Congress of Vienna. Having been annexed by the French during the Napoleonic Wars, Savoy had been returned to the Kingdom of Sardinia in the Congress, a fact to which, as Peter Cochran has noted, Byron and John Cam Hobhouse would have objected.26 In a letter Byron wrote to Hobhouse from Evian on 23  June  1816, while he was on his water tour of Lake Leman with Percy Bysshe Shelley, he records that he had ‘just had a row with the Syndic of this town who wanted my passports which I left at Diodati – not thinking they would be wanted except in grand route – but it seems this is Savoy and the dominion of his Cagliari Majesty’.27 He did not bring his passport because he was travelling by boat, rather than by road – not because he was unaware that Savoy had been returned to Sardinia

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– and his casual comment that ‘it seems this is Savoy’ betrays his exasperation with the restoration of that region to Sardinia. Similar boundaries were crossed frequently when travelling in Switzerland, which was not yet united as a nation. For instance, on 20 September 1816 in his Alpine Journal, Byron writes: ‘Past the boundaries – out of Vaud – & into Bern Canton – French exchanged for a bad German – the district famous for Cheese – liberty – property – & no taxes.’28 By eliding these boundaries and depicting Clarens and Meillerie as sharing what he refers to in the notes as ‘a sense of the existence of love in its most extended and sublime capacity, and of our own participation in its good and its glory’,29 Byron builds on Rousseau’s treatment of identity to create a locale and community defined by shared experience of love rather than by geographical, political or linguistic barriers. Canto 3 politicizes issues foregrounded in Julie: Byron establishes a refuge for the man of feeling which resists ideologies of nation and national identity. Instead, it is defined first and foremost as ‘Rousseau’s ground’: literature can positively interact with physical spaces to provide sanctuary for men who have no place in society. We can be sceptical, then, about Byron’s suggestion that Julie has not contributed anything to the Swiss and Sardinian landscape. His comment in the notes that ‘[Rousseau] has added to the interest of his works by their adoption; he has shewn his sense of their beauty by the selection; but they have done that for him which no human being could do for them’ underplays the importance of the novel.30 This is evident both in the prominent role Julie plays in Canto 3 and in the way it has rewritten the landscape and communities which it depicts. In his notes, Byron records that the signs of the novel’s fictional community have been destroyed: Rousseau has not been particularly fortunate in the preservation of the ‘local habitations’ he has given to ‘airy nothings’. The Prior of Great St. Bernard has cut down some of [Rousseau’s] woods for the sake of a few casks of wine, and Buonaparte has levelled part of the rocks of Meillerie in improving the road to the Simplon. The road is an excellent one, but I cannot quite agree with a remark which I heard made, that ‘La route vaut mieux que les souvenirs’.31

Byron participates here in the same play with readers that Rousseau engages in in the second preface to Julie. The second preface takes the form of a dialogue between ‘N’ and ‘R’; towards the end ‘N’ asks, ‘But after all, you know the sites? You have been to Vevey, in the Vaud country?’, to which ‘R’ responds that while he has been to Vevey he has ‘not there heard mention of Baron d’Étange nor of his daughter’ and that while ‘I have been to Clarens: nothing I

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saw there was similar to the house described in these Letters’ (21–2; 29). Such a reply, as Nicola Watson observes, ‘was practically an invitation to readers to “check” the accuracy of the fiction against the real setting’.32 Like ‘R’, Byron has found that there is a disjunction between the scenes the novel depicts and the physical reality; like ‘R’, he knows that his documentation of this absence will provoke further visits from literary tourists who will now also be searching for the absences and new sights which Byron portrays: the deforestation, the levelled rocks, the new road. As Watson notes, after the publication of Canto 3, ‘the environs of Geneva would remain the country of Julie and Rousseau, but it would be seen largely through the lens of Byron’s famous celebration’.33 All this is to say that the value of these spaces does not derive solely from the place, or the novel, but from a complex interaction between Switzerland, Savoy, Julie and the literary tourists who visit it. By documenting this in Canto 3, Byron indicates that it is in this relationship between place, text and reader that a space for libertarian masculinity is created. Only by a careful reading of stanzas 99–104 can we identify ‘Love’s recess’ as encompassing Clarens and Meillerie. Byron rewrites the ‘wild and forsaken nook’ as a ‘populous solitude’ of ‘fairy-form’d and many-coloured things’; this is a Meillerie which exists neither in Julie nor in the existing geography but which can be accessed only by the reader with a detailed knowledge of Julie. Byron creates a space for the man of feeling which exists in a complicated interaction between the two texts, the place and the reader. This is reinforced if we turn back to Byron’s letter to Murray, with which I began this chapter: ‘struck to a degree with the force & accuracy of his [Rousseau’s] descriptions, – & the beauty of their reality’, he refuses to describe Meillerie, Clarens, Vevey or Chillon because ‘all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp’.34 Byron cannot articulate either the authenticity of Julie or the effect these places have had on him. While the implicit suggestion is that such emotions can only be accessed by visiting these sites oneself, we know that many no longer exist or do not exist as they did for Rousseau. Indeed, Byron notes in the same letter that ‘the garden – & summer house, where he [Edward Gibbon] composed, are neglected – & the last utterly decayed – but they still show it as his “Cabinet” & seem perfectly aware of his memory’.35 The author’s legacy is not dependent on such objects. It is, as we have seen, the relationship between landscape, author, text and reader which secures and legitimates these alternative spaces and where a place for the libertarian man of feeling will be found.

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Notes Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 1816–1817: ‘So Late into the Night’ (London: John Murray, 1976), 5:82. 2 Stanza 33 was added sometime between 4 and 10 July 1816: see Jerome J. McGann, ‘Commentary’, in Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 2:298. All quotations from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage will be from this edition; line numbers will be given in parentheses in the text after the quotation. 3 McGann observes that the ‘two key figures are of course Napoleon and Rousseau’ (‘Commentary’, 300), but as Jeffrey N. Cox notes, ‘commentators most often focus on Byron’s portrait of Napoleon in the canto’; see J. N. Cox, ‘Cockney Excursions’, Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 2 (2011): 111. For exceptions to this trend, see Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 141–4, and Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 76–81. 4 Diane Piccitto, ‘Manfred, Freedom, and the Swiss Alps: The Transformation of the Byronic Hero’, in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 168. 5 Cheeke, Byron and Place, 76. 6 Ibid., 79. 7 For the concept of imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2000). 8 Andrew Billing, ‘Political and Domestic Economy in Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloїse’, Romanic Review 100, no. 4 (2009): 473. 9 Cox, ‘Cockney Excursions’, 111. 10 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 4. 11 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, ed. and trans. David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13. 12 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 5:98. 13 Ibid., 5:104–5. 14 Watson has noted ‘the congruence between the Byronic sensibility of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, St Preux, and the Rousseau of the Confessions’ but as an ‘archaeologist of these layers of past emotional investment’, her focus is on Julie as a guidebook for the sentimental traveller (The Literary Tourist, 145, 150). Susan J. Wolfson implicitly casts Byron as a man of feeling when she observes that he was ‘painting himself for sympathy’ in his 1816 letters to Annabella and calls him ‘the 1

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sad, sorry, tormented, betrayed, childlorn, and now ex-pat Lord’: see S. J. Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Beings and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 217, 218. 15 Jerome McGann notes that ‘the various historical characters in the poem are all used as figurae expressing one or another aspect of Byron’s central attitudes of the mind, qualities of character, or circumstances of life’ (‘Commentary’, 300); and Nicola Watson refers to ‘the doubling of Rousseau and Byron’ (The Literary Tourist, 145). 16 Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181. 17 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8:219. 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. and ed. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 6:344; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Henri Coulet and Bernard Guyon, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théâtre, Poésies, Essais littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:419. All subsequent quotations from Julie will be from Stewart and Vaché’s translation; page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text, followed by the page reference for the French original in Coulet and Guyon’s edition. 19 Jock Macleod, ‘Misreading Writing: Rousseau, Byron, and Childe Harold III’, Comparative Literature 43, no. 2 (1991): 269. 20 Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, ed. McGann, 312. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 ‘These mountains are so high that a half-hour after sunset their crests are still let by the sun’s rays, the red of which covers these white peaks with a lovely rose colour that can be seen a long way off ’ (Rousseau, Julie, trans. and ed. Stewart and Vaché, 424; La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Coulet and Guyon, 518). 24 McGann notes that ll. 941–9 (stanza 101) echo Rousseau’s Julie, Part 4, letter 17 (‘Commentary’, 313), but I would include ll. 950–8 (stanza 102) too. 25 This letter is also discussed in Simon Bainbridge’s chapter in this book. 26 John Cam Hobhouse, ‘Saturday October 5th 1816’, in The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse, ed. Peter Cochran, 233, n. 294, https://petercochran.files.wordpress. com/2009/12/22-switzerland.pdf (accessed 1 August 2016). 27 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 4:81. On 5 October 1816 Hobhouse records in his diary being ‘searched, or rather not searched’ when he and Byron entered ‘the dominions of the king of Sardinia’: see The Diary of John Cam Hobhouse, ed. Cochran, 233.

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28 Byron, Alpine Journal, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 4:100. 29 Byron, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, ed. McGann, 314. 30 Ibid., 312. 31 Ibid., 313. 32 Watson, The Literary Tourist, 134. 33 Ibid., 144. 34 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, 4:82. 35 Ibid., 4:81.

3

‘The Columbus of the Alps’: Rousseau and the Writing of Mountain Experience in British Literature of the Romantic Period Simon Bainbridge

‘To Rousseau principally we owe the articulate revelation of the beauty of mountains.’1 So wrote the British poet and climber Geoffrey Winthrop Young in his introduction to a reissue of one of the great pieces of mountaineering literature, The Playground of Europe (1871) by Leslie Stephen, another figure who combined the role of the man of letters with that of mountaineer. Winthrop Young’s claim, based on Stephen’s more extended account, makes Jean-Jacques Rousseau the central figure in the now familiar narrative of the transformation of responses to mountains during the eighteenth century. In Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Hope Nicolson gave the classic account of this narrative of a shift from the understanding of mountains as the earth’s deformities – ‘Dugs, Risings, Tumours, Blisters … Earth’s Warts’, in the words of Joshua Poole – to a re-evaluation of peaks as a source of awe, delight and wonder.2 However, Nicolson makes only one passing reference to Rousseau. Similarly, one of the major historians of Alpine mountaineering and its literature, Claire Eliane Engel, takes issue with the kinds of claim for the Genevan’s importance made by Stephen and Winthrop Young: In spite of a persistent legend, Rousseau did not like mountains and discovered nothing about them. He borrowed most of his ideas from Haller’s poem Die Alpen, re-telling them in his own beautiful style. High valleys did not interest him. When he was in Cluses, he did not push on to Sallanches, which is quite near, though he was a first-rate walker.3

Rousseau may have had no serious credentials as a pioneering climber, unlike his fellow Genevan, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, the naturalist

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and travel writer who is frequently claimed as the founding figure of Alpine mountaineering. However, in this chapter I want to follow Stephen and Winthrop Young in claiming a major role for Rousseau not only as providing ‘the articulate revelation of the beauty of mountains’ but more specifically as stimulating the desire to climb upwards and achieve elevated status. While no active mountaineer himself, Rousseau produced one piece of mountaineering writing – letter 23 in Part 1 of Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) – that proved enormously influential as a motivation for ascent and that significantly influenced the experience of those who ventured into the high places in the Romantic period, including writers like Helen Maria Williams, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, all of whom will be examined in this chapter. Indeed, so powerful was Rousseau’s influence on the understanding of elevated experiences in the period that many of the most famous accounts of ascents can be seen as being in dialogue with the Genevan philosopher. In making this claim for Rousseau’s importance to the development of Romantic-period mountain literature, I am following in the footsteps of Cian Duffy, who has identified Rousseau’s contribution to what he sees as a ‘poetics of ascent’ that shaped British Romanticism and that had its origin in the scientific and travel writing of the Alps.4 Duffy’s wide-ranging account takes in the discovery of Chamonix following William Windham and Richard Pococke’s expedition to the Mer de Glace in 1741, the development of the Alpine guidebook, the influential writings of Marc Théodore Bourrit, William Coxe, Louis Ramond de Carbonnières and de Saussure, the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786, the political associations of Switzerland and the symbolism of Napoleon’s crossing of the Alps. These elements all contributed to Duffy’s ‘poetics of ascent’, which ‘valorises the imaginative effort involved in representing the Alps as the equivalent, and, often, as the apotheosis, of an actual, physical ascent to their summits’.5 In this chapter, I want to look more specifically and in greater detail at Rousseau’s role in the development of both aesthetic and embodied responses to mountains, particularly within the writing of the British Romantic period. I shall begin by examining Leslie Stephen’s assessment of Rousseau as ‘the Columbus of the Alps, or the Luther of the new creed of mountain worship’.6 As the ideas of discovery and heresy associated with Columbus and Luther would suggest, Stephen offers a powerful identification of both the originality and the heterodoxy of Rousseau’s version of the mountain experience. As an illustration of both the influence and the challenges of Rousseau’s account, Stephen examines a piece of Romantic-period

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travel writing, François-René de Chateaubriand’s ‘Voyage au Mont Blanc’ (1805). Reading Chateaubriand alongside Rousseau makes possible  an appreciation of the extent to which Rousseau’s writing shaped the idea  of the mountain experience for other writers of the Romantic period, something which I shall explore in the second half of this chapter through an examination of a number of representations of mountain climbing in travel writing (Helen Maria Williams), poetry (Wordsworth, Byron) and prose fiction (Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein). As these texts show, to climb a mountain  in the Romantic period no longer involved  the risk of encountering a dragon, an idea espoused as late as 1723 by Johann Scheuchzer, Physics Professor at Zurich  University, in his Itinera per  Helvetiae Alpinas regiones.7 Rather, it involved a confrontation with ideas about politics, religion, selfhood and nation espoused by, and associated with, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau and the transformation of self and society through elevation Rousseau’s centrality to the shifting responses to mountains in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is indicated by one of the earliest critiques of the growing cult of mountain worship, François-René de Chateaubriand’s travel essay ‘Voyage au Mont Blanc’. This essay was first published in 1805 and quickly translated into English as ‘Journey to Mont Blanc’ and republished in a number of British magazines including La Belle Assemblée and Literary Panorama. Presenting himself as one who has ‘explored many mountains in Europe and America’, Chateaubriand argues that his recent visit to Chamonix has strengthened his belief that ‘all the descriptions given of these stupendous monuments of nature are exaggerated’.8 That Chateaubriand made this critique about Chamonix was significant. By 1805, the Savoy village had become firmly established as the leading destination for mountain tourism, having been ‘immortalized’ by ‘the works of M. de Saussure’, as Chateaubriand notes.9 Sitting at the base of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in Western Europe, the village provided not only the best views of the mountain and its surrounding aiguilles but also the starting point for the popular excursion to Montanvert, the viewing point for the Mer de Glace glacier ‘discovered’ by Pococke and Windham.10 But Chateaubriand was underwhelmed by this most spectacular mountain environment, remarking that ‘the grandeur of the mountains, so often celebrated by poets

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and travellers, is not real, but consists mostly in the fatigue it occasions you, while the landscapes are far from equalling the idea you had formed’.11 While Chateaubriand here associates the celebration of the grandeur of mountains with a number of unnamed ‘poets and travellers’, elsewhere in his essay he specifically identifies Rousseau and his followers as responsible for the modern cult of mountain worship and the erroneous understanding of the effect of elevated environments: But should we implicitly believe Rousseau and those who have inherited his erroneous notions and not his eloquence, [that] when we reach the brow of a mountain our nature would suddenly be changed. ‘On their towering summits,’ he exclaims, ‘our meditations assume a more sublime cast, more fitted to the objects we behold; we feel a sort of delight neither too violent nor sensual. It seems that when we rise above the dwellings of man, we cast off all low terrestrial passions; – and I believe that the storms of the heart would soon be quelled, were we to fix our abode here.’12

As evidence of Rousseau’s misleading influence, Chateaubriand is here quoting a part of what was probably the single most influential piece of mountain writing in the eighteenth century, letter 23 in Part 1 of Julie. Given the huge importance of this short piece of writing for subsequent writing in the field, it is worth looking at it in some detail now before returning to Chateaubriand and Stephen’s accounts of its importance and influence. Letter 23 in Part 1 of Rousseau’s Julie is written by the novel’s hero, SaintPreux, to his aristocratic lover and pupil, Julie d’Etage. Separated from Julie and dejected by his emotional sufferings caused by their transgressive relationship, Saint-Preux describes in this letter his surprise at the positive effect that his time in the mountainous area of the Upper Valais in Switzerland has on his spirits. Travelling with a paid guide whom he considers to be ‘rather a friend than a mercenary’, Saint-Preux records that he ‘climbed slowly, and on foot, paths that were fairly rugged’, experiencing as he did so the different elements of the Alpine landscape: I wanted to daydream, and I was always distracted from doing so by some unexpected vista. Sometimes huge cliffs hung like ruins above my head. Sometimes high and thundering waterfalls drenched me in their thick fog. Sometimes a perpetual mountain stream opened by my side an abyss the depth of which eyes dared not fathom. On occasion I got lost in the darkness of a dense wood. On others, on emerging from a chasm a pleasant meadow suddenly delighted my sight.13

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Here Saint-Preux’s account of the mountainous landscape and of his responses to it would seem fully in line with the categories of the sublime, codified in the previous decade by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757). The elements of the landscape described by Saint-Preux include those that Burke saw as characteristic of the sublime, including vastness (‘huge cliffs’, ‘high and thundering waterfalls’), obscurity (‘drenched me in their thick fog’, ‘I got lost in the darkness’) and infinity (‘an abyss the depth of which eyes dared not fathom’).14 With ‘huge cliffs’ hanging ‘like ruins’ above his head and an abyss at his feet, Saint-Preux is in a position to experience the ‘terror’ that was the also the key source of the sublime for Burke, and the landscape brings a halt to Saint-Preux’s musings in the way described by Burke: ‘The mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.’15 However, Saint-Preux’s emotional reaction to the Alpine landscape moves beyond the state of astonishment characteristic of the Burkean sublime. Rather than being stunned or overwhelmed, Saint-Preux notes ‘the calm’ he felt during his first day’s journey through the Upper Valais (63; 78). Initially he attributes this emotion to the visual experience of being in the Alps, with the landscape seeming to change as if ‘in a true theatre’ as he passes through it (63; 77). For Saint-Preux, the change in his feelings is a surprising illustration of the effect of landscape on the emotions: ‘I wondered at the empire that the most insensible beings hold over our most intense passions, and I scorned philosophy for its inability to exert as much power over the soul as a succession of inanimate objects’ (63–4; 78). However, Saint-Preux continues to experience what he calls ‘this peaceful state’ during the night, invalidating his visual explanation of his changed emotions and prompting him to conclude that ‘it had yet another cause which was not known to me’ (64; 78). Saint-Preux’s language of unknown causes links his journey with the period’s voyages of discovery and places him in position of the explorer, with his own self and emotions as the unknown territory to be explored. Fittingly, Saint-Preux’s realization of the transformative effect of height on the emotions comes when he is at his most elevated. As Saint-Preux continues his journey, he ‘reached that day some of the least high mountains, and then following up and down along the crest, the highest of those that were within my capacity’ (64; 78). At this ‘more serene site’, raised above everything else, Saint-Preux is able to observe ‘thunder and storms gathering below’ (64; 78), an obvious symbol of his elevation above the world’s conflicts. It is from the revelatory position of the mountain summit that SaintPreux gains his insight into the cause of his sense of well-being:

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism It was there that, in the purity of the air where I found myself, I came to an understanding of the genuine cause of my change of humour, and of the return of that inner peace I for so long had lost. Indeed, it is a general impression experienced by all men, although they do not all notice it, that high in the mountains where the air is pure and subtle, one breathes more freely, one feels lighter in the body, more serene of mind; pleasures there are less intense, passions more moderate. (64; 78)

Saint-Preux’s explanation of the power of his summit location is essentially physiological. It is the purity of the air that affects bodies, minds, pleasures and passions. However, Saint-Preux goes on to identify other aspects of elevation that also contribute to the intellectual and emotional transformations experienced at height. In the influential passage about mountains that we have already seen quoted by Chateaubriand, Saint-Preux argues: ‘Meditations there take on an indescribably grand and sublime character, in proportion with the objects that strike us’ (64; 78). So here it is not only the purer air of the raised position that influences thinking, but the grand mountain landscape which imparts its own sublimity to thought. In describing the effect of physical elevation, Saint-Preux increasingly draws on the symbolism inherent within the summit position: It seems that by rising above the habitation of men one leaves all base and earthly sentiments behind, and in proportion as one approaches ethereal spaces the soul contracts something of their inalterable purity. There, one is grave without melancholy, peaceful without indolence, content to be and to think: all excessively vivid desires are blunted; they lose that sharp point that makes them painful, they leave deep in the heart nothing but a light and sweet emotion, and thus it is that a favourable climate causes passions to contribute here to man’s felicity which elsewhere make for his torment. (64; 78)

For Saint-Preux, the summit position lifts the individual above both social and individual corruption. Combining elevation with pure air, altitude transforms human nature into its ideal form. The effect of great height is both physiological and moral, with Saint-Preux reflecting: ‘I wonder that baths of the salutary and beneficial air of the mountains have not become one of the principal remedies of medicine and morality’ (64; 78–9). Saint-Preux’s idea of a renewed human nature resulting from elevation is also produced by, and paralleled with, the mountain environment as itself ‘a new world’. In his letter, he instructs Julie as follows: Combine in your mind the impressions of all I have just described to you, and you will have some idea of the delightful site where I was. Imagine the variety,

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the grandeur, the beauty of a thousand stunning vistas; the pleasure of seeing all around one nothing but entirely new objects, strange birds, bizarre and unknown plants, of observing in a way an altogether different nature, and finding oneself in a new world. (64–5; 79)

Ascent and elevation transform human nature by relocating it within a realm of heightened sensation, with Saint-Preux contending that ‘the subtlety of the air … makes colours more vivid, outlines sharper, brings all lines of sight closer’ (65; 79). Having set out to explore the source of his own emotions, Saint-Preux has seemingly discovered some previously unknown and exotic territory, full of new forms of unclassified species. The ‘new world’ he describes, containing ‘an altogether different nature’, becomes an earthly paradise that eradicates the individual’s sense of both self and the world: ‘All in all, the spectacle has something indescribably magical, supernatural about it that ravishes the spirit and the senses; you forget everything, even yourself, and do not even know where you are’ (65; 79).16 Chateaubriand’s identification of Saint-Preux’s letter as the major source of contemporary misunderstandings of mountains also illustrates the religious and political resonances of Rousseau’s presentation of the experience of elevation. Chateaubriand objects to the idea that ‘when we reach the brow of a mountain our nature would suddenly be changed’, as he puts it in a deliberately simplifying paraphrase.17 While heartily wishing ‘this were the case’, he ridicules the idea that ‘we stand out of the reach of sorrow when exalted a few acres above the level of the plains’.18 He disputes Rousseau’s account on experiential grounds: ‘a heart oppressed with grief, sinks beneath its weight on the highest places, as well as in the humble vallies’.19 But Chateaubriand’s critique of the representation of the summit (or ‘brow’) experience in Julie also reveals the extent to which Rousseau was associated with a new vision of the mountains that was radical in religious and political terms. Identifying in Rousseau ‘some traces of the genius of the age in which he lived’, Chateaubriand argues that the notion that ‘the spot we chuse to inherit’ can produce a ‘supposed change of our intellectual dispositions’ is part of ‘the system of materialism’, reducing the soul to the ‘state of a plant’.20 In other words, Rousseau fails to acknowledge ‘the greatness and power of his God’, the contemplation of whom is the only cause for ‘serenity’ of the soul. According to Chateaubriand, a ‘sort of natural instinct has always led men to send forth prayers to the Almighty from elevated spots’, and he provides a brief history of the role of mountains in worship.21 While Saint-Preux’s account of the elevated experience was heretically secular for Chateaubriand, it also had a powerful political dimension. Saint-Preux’s

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vision of the mountain environment as a ‘new world’ of transformed human nature seemed to offer an alternative to the old world corruptions of society and individuals at ground level. In the second half of letter 23, Saint-Preux offered an account of the Upper Valais’s inhabitants which appeared to present them as a model for just such a rejuvenated society. He offers what he describes as ‘a quick sketch of their manner of living, their simplicity, their equanimity, and that peaceful tranquility that makes them happy through freedom from pain rather than taste for pleasures’ (65; 79). What he finds most extraordinary, he argues, is ‘their disinterested humanity, and their zeal for hospitality toward all strangers whom chance or curiosity leads to them’ (65; 79). Saint-Preux contrasts the ‘disinterested’ inhabitants of the mountains – ‘a people who live to live, not to profit or to show off ’ – with those who travel through the lower Valais ‘occupied by their trade and gain’ (66; 80). The political implications of Saint-Preux’s praise of this community of ‘happy men’ is made clear when, before noting with some unease that ‘even at the homes of magistrates, the wife and daughters of the house stand behind my chair, and wait at table like domestics’ (67; 81–2), he discusses the generational and social equality that exists within the family unit: ‘Among themselves they behave in the same straightforward way; children of the age of reason are their fathers’ equals, domestics eat at the same table with their masters; the same freedom reigns in homes as in the republic, and the family is the image of the State’ (66; 81). Saint-Preux’s letter parallels the effect of elevation on the individual and society. While the individual is purified by mountain air, raised to a higher moral and ethical level by being lifted above the earthly values of the lower valleys, the ideal community of the Upper Valais offers a model of the republic as the perfect state. Both give promise for the possibility of ‘an altogether different nature, and … a new world’. For Chateaubriand, however, the ideal mountain community was as much a myth as the idea of the uplifting effect of elevation on the individual: I must be a very unfortunate being, for I could see, in the celebrated chalets, changed by the burning imagination of J. J. Rousseau, into enchanted retreats, nothing more than wretched hovels, filled with the dung of herds, perfumed with the smell of cheese and sour milk, and inhabited by unhappy mountaineers who look upon themselves as banished from the haunts of men, and long for the hour of descending into the vallies.22

For Chateaubriand, the elevated environment is no terrestrial paradise, as it had been for Saint-Preux, but a place of sordid exile from which its inhabitants long to return.

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Chateaubriand’s critique of letter 23 in Part 1 of Julie illustrates the extent to which Rousseau was seen during the Romantic period as the figure who most influentially reimagined mountains. It also identifies the political and religious challenges that encountering mountains after Rousseau came to represent. As  Leslie Stephen commented, Chateaubriand ‘says in substance … that if you admire the Alps you must be a revolutionist and a materialist’.23 Stephen himself brilliantly draws out what he sees as the underlying revolutionary and Rousseau-inspired politics of what he terms ‘The New School’ of mountain worship: The love of the mountains came in with the rights of man and the victory of the philosophers; and all the praise of Alpine scenery is curiously connected with praise of the unsophisticated peasant. It seems as if the philosophers fancied they had found a fragment of the genuine Arcadia still preserved by the Alpine barrier against the encroachments of a corrupt civilization, and the mountains came in for some of the admiration lavished upon the social forms which they protected.24

Stephen argues that when Rousseau reinvented the mountain, he did so in his own image, recreating it as a symbol of secularity and revolution. Chateaubriand’s response in his ‘Voyage to Mont Blanc’ was to reject this newfound ‘love of mountains’. In the second half of this chapter, I will examine how Rousseau’s revaluation of elevated locations shaped the understanding of mountains in British writing of the Romantic period and explore the extent to which the ascent into the mountains involved an encounter with the figure of Rousseau himself. Was it true that, after Rousseau, to admire the Alps – or mountains more generally – ‘you must be a revolutionist and a materialist’?

Meeting Rousseau on the mountains Julie has been claimed as ‘perhaps the biggest best-seller of the [eighteenth] century’25 and, as Duffy has argued, Saint-Preux’s letter from the Valais ‘echoes throughout eighteenth-century and Romantic-period writing about the Alpine sublime’.26 The letter provided a crucial formulation of the benefits of the mountain experience, establishing a justification for climbing that offered an alternative motivation to the scientific one associated with figures like de Saussure. During the eighteenth century, the search for scientific samples and data was frequently given as a reason for exploring mountainous areas. However, despite his interest

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in botany, in letter 23 Rousseau makes no reference to the potential scientific benefits of Saint-Preux’s journey into the Valais. Rather, the value of ascent lies in its potential for transforming self and society. Rousseau’s physiological account of the beneficial effects of elevation is, of course, specifically Alpine: what Saint-Preux experiences as the ‘purity of the air’ in the Upper Valais is the thinning of oxygen levels that occurs at higher altitude. However, his emphasis on the psychologically uplifting power of ascent was translated to the experiences gained in the much lower British mountains, where altitude is not a factor. To some extent, this was because Alpine literature itself shaped the understanding, even at a physiological level, of those who climbed in Britain. For example, on the summit of Skiddaw in 1773, William Hutchinson experienced what he felt was a lack of oxygen more appropriate to the higher reaches of the Alps: ‘The air was remarkably sharp and thin, compared with that from which we passed in the valley; and respiration seemed to be performed with a kind of asthmatic oppression.’27 Given that there is no detectable lessening of oxygen levels on Skiddaw’s summit, it would appear that Hutchinson’s understanding of his experience was being shaped by the extensive Alpine literature that emphasized the physical effects of altitude on breathing. Moreover, Saint-Preux’s account of his feelings when elevated was also specifically applied to the British mountain experience. This is seen, for example, in William Coxe’s An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire (1801), in which Coxe narrates his ‘Excursions to the Summits of the Sugar Loaf and Great Skyrrid’. Describing his experience on what he identifies as the 1852-foothigh summit of Sugar Loaf mountain (Mynydd Pen-y-Fal), he drops into a paraphrase of Rousseau: During my continuance on the summit, I felt that extreme satisfaction which I always experience, when elevated on the highest ground of the circumjacent country. The air is more pure, the body more active, and the mind more serene; lifted up above the dwellings of man, we discard all grovelling and earthly passions; the thoughts assume a character of sublimity, proportionate to the grandeur of the surrounding objects, and as the body approaches nearer to the ethereal regions, the soul imbibes a portion of their unalterable purity.28

To this passage, Coxe appends a one-word footnote: ‘Rousseau’. For this experienced mountain traveller, who was best known as the author of Travels in Switzerland, Saint-Preux’s account provided a means of understanding the ‘extreme satisfaction’ gained when elevated on a Welsh hill as well as on an Alpine peak.

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Influential as Rousseau’s version of mountain experience was, its association with his perceived revolutionary and materialist principles meant that the writers who followed him into the mountains negotiated with – and sometimes rejected – his account on religious or political grounds. Particularly striking in much of the period’s travel writing is the relocation of Rousseau’s emphasis on the uplifting power of elevation into a theological framework presided over by the divine. For example, in A Tour in Switzerland (1798), Helen Maria Williams provides an account of climbing a mountain in the Grison Alps: ‘We found ourselves restored to that feeling of serene, tranquil delight, for which the philosophers who have written on the theory of the Higher Alps, account, from the purity of the atmosphere at that immense elevation; and which state of soothing happiness Rousseau has described with his usual eloquence, in a letter to Julia.’29 Williams then quotes Saint-Preux’s account of the purity of Alpine air in a footnote that spans two pages. She also draws on his ideas about the ethical, moral and intellectual effects of elevation in ‘A Hymn Written Among the Alps’, a poem supposedly written while undertaking the climb and which provides the culmination of her ascent narrative: Where cloudless regions calm the soul, Bid mortal cares be still; Can passion’s wayward wish control, And rectify the will; Where midst some vast expanse, the mind Which swelling virtue fires, Forget the earth it leaves behind, And to its heaven aspires.30

While these lines clearly echo Saint-Preux’s letter, they noticeably culminate by locating the mountain within a sacred geography in which elevation above the earthly becomes an aspiration towards heaven. Following Rousseau, Williams’s ‘Hymn’ celebrates the mountain as a space of potential human transformation but it is a transformation that occurs within the divine framework established in the poem’s opening and closing stanzas: Creation’s God! with thought elate, Thy hand divine I see; Impressed on scenes where all is great, Where all is full of thee!

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism In every scene, where every hour Sheds some terrific grace, In nature’s vast, overwhelming power, THEE, THEE, my GOD, I trace!31

In Williams’s poem, Rousseau’s physiological and secular account of the benefits of elevation is contained within a ‘Hymn’ that presents mountains as evidence of the divine hand of God. While clearly influenced by Saint-Preux’s letter, Williams finds a way of admiring the Alps without being a full-fledged materialist.32 Other writers felt it necessary to confront the influence of Rousseau’s secular mountain experience more directly. For example, in The Philosophy of Nature, or the Influence of Scenery on the Mind and Heart (1813), Charles Bucke described William Coxe’s account of his climb of Sugar Loaf mountain discussed above. Bucke built on Coxe’s one-word footnote by quoting directly from Saint-Preux’s description of the pure Alpine air.33 This quotation was enough to prompt an attack from the New Edinburgh Review. Introducing Bucke’s references to Coxe and Rousseau, the reviewer confessed that ‘we do not exactly concur in his [Bucke’s] opinion as to their singular efficacy, either in medicine or religion’.34 Disputing ‘the authority of Rousseau’, the reviewer argues that mountains are not ‘conducive to the reclaiming of an infidel’ or ‘to the humility of mind’ needed for ‘true devotion’.35 For the reviewer, as for Chateaubriand, it is essentially unchristian to maintain ‘by both implication and unreserved expression … [that] the sufficiency of the material world, properly conducted, [is enough] to afford peace to the troubled mind’.36 The reviewer concludes his introduction to Bucke’s quotation of Rousseau by remarking: ‘It is positively painful to see a man of his character tampering with such nonsensical rhapsodies.’37 For this reviewer, to use Rousseau’s account as a means of understanding the power of elevation in the Alps was indeed to be a materialist. Following Rousseau, the experience of elevation through mountain ascent became a major but contested theme in much of British literature of the Romantic period. Of course, Rousseau was only one element of a range of cultural discourses and activities that contributed to the development of mountain climbing and its literature in the Romantic period, but the Genevan was particularly identified with an understanding of ascent as transformative and uplifting that was distinct from traditional religious accounts of mountain revelations. The final part of this chapter explores how we might see some of the

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most elevated texts of British Romanticism as constituting an engagement with – and at times a critical response to – Rousseau’s reimagining of experience  of altitude. I shall focus particularly on William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley as three writers who follow in the footsteps of Rousseau as a writer of ascent and whose writings show a negotiation – and even at times a rejection – of his famous account. Wordsworth provides perhaps the clearest example of a Romantic-period writer who used elevation to empower his own poetic vision, though he also contested and even at times denied the moral and ethical value of ascent. In a draft for his poem ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’, Wordsworth gives expression to the idea that a change in altitude will produce a transformation in the self and that physical height will lead to spiritual elevation: Let him – who, having wandered by the side Of Lakes and Rivers entertains a wish By lofty place to elevate his soul Ascend on some clear morning to the top Of huge Black-comb.38

Wordsworth affirms the spiritual power of elevation in the poem’s published version, claiming that the summit view offers a ‘revelation infinite’.39 Throughout his poetry, he describes similar moments of revelation gained by him when, as in Book 2 of The Prelude (1805), ‘alone upon some jutting eminence’ (363). Indeed, Wordsworth’s greatest poetry is structured by ascent. In Book 3 of The Prelude, he reveals the importance of height for his poetic ambitions when he uses a metaphor of climbing to describe his epic autobiographical project: And here, O Friend! Have I retraced my life Up to an eminence, and told a tale Of matters which, not falsely, I may call The glory of my youth. Of Genius, Power, Creation and Divinity itself I have been speaking, for my theme has been What passed within me. (168–74)

Wordsworth’s declaration of the full significance of his own life story is pronounced from the figurative mountain top, and once it is concluded he declares: ‘Enough: for now into a populous Plain/We must descend’ (195–6). However, Wordsworth’s poetic engagement with ascent is complex and more ambivalent than these examples might suggest. Mountain climbing famously

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produces two of the greatest revelations of The Prelude, in the crossing of the Alps section of Book 6 and the culminating experience high on Snowdon in Book 13. Yet neither of these accounts is a straightforward revelation of the sort described by Rousseau or even by Wordsworth himself in his ‘Black Comb’ poem. In both the poet is denied the conventional summit experience and view, crossing the Alps without realizing it and breaking through the cloud on Snowdon to find himself ‘on the shore … of a huge sea of mist’ (13.42–3). Both episodes do bring revelations but not instantaneous ones; the realization of the ‘Imagination’ inspired by the Alpine crossing occurs years later at the time of writing (6.525), while the understanding of the Snowdon vision as ‘The perfect image of a mighty mind’ comes ‘when the scene/Had passed away’ (13.66, 68– 9). While Wordsworth affirms the symbolic power of mountain climbing, he relocates its transformative force from the Rousseauvian transformation of the individual and society to the redemptive power of the Imagination. While these two much discussed passages are particularly in dialogue with the debates about the sublime, in a less-well known piece of 1817, one of the ‘Odes to Lycoris’ entitled ‘To the Same’, Wordsworth engages with Rousseau’s influential idea that physical elevation lifts the climber above human cares.40 He opens with a rejection of ascent itself: Enough of climbing toil! – Ambition treads Here, as mid busier scenes, ground steep and rough Or slippery even to peril! (1–3)

Wordsworth here breaks down Saint-Preux’s distinction between the uncorrupted, elevated world in which nature can be transformed and the tainted civil society it is supposedly above: for him, both are realms marked by ‘Ambition’. In the lines that follow, Wordsworth continues this critique, arguing that the ‘feelings of contempt’ for the world that the climber has left below are ‘unacceptable’ (8). He asserts that it is a ground-level engagement with the natural world rather than the elevated, summit prospect that teaches morality: – Oh! ’tis the heart that magnifies this life, Making a truth and beauty of her own; And moss-grown alleys, circumscribing shades, And gurgling rills, assist her in the work More efficaciously than realms outspread, As in a map, before the adventurer’s gaze – Ocean and Earth contending for regard. (12–8)

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Written in the post-Waterloo period, the Ode can be read at a political level as a rejection of the revolutionary associations with which Rousseau imbued the act of climbing. Elsewhere Wordsworth refers to Napoleon as the ‘Adventurer’,41 and here he links the visual experience of the summit location to a Napoleonic subordination of landscape. The Rousseauvian project of ascent does not lead to the purification of the climber; rather, it puts him in the position of the imperial overseer of ‘realms’, king of all that he surveys. Against Rousseau, Wordsworth argues that the ‘busier scenes’ of society should not be treated with ‘contempt’ by a climber seeking to transform self and society. Rather, he contends, it is through the feelings of the heart, operating at ground level, that ‘truth and beauty’ can be realized. Julie was, of course, central to the experience of Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley during the Lake Geneva summer of 1816 and to the series of major works that were produced out of it. Percy Shelley’s account in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour illustrates the extent to which Rousseau’s text shaped his imaginative experience of the landscape of Lake Geneva, Savoy and the Valais: I read Julie all day; an overflowing, as it now seems, surrounded by the scenes which it has so wonderfully peopled, of sublimest genius, and more than human sensibility. Mellerie, the Castle of Chillon, Clarens, the mountains of La Valais and Savoy, present themselves to the imagination as monuments of things that were once familiar, and of beings that were once dear to it.42

Similarly, in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron associates the region’s ‘rocks/The permanent crags’ with the figure of Saint-Preux; they tell of ‘Love, who sought/In them a refuge from the worldly shocks/Which stir and sting the soul with hope that woos, then mocks’.43 Byron’s idea of the area’s mountains as a ‘refuge from the worldly shocks’ is drawn directly from Julie and runs through much of his writing of 1816 and 1817. It is in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that Byron most directly reiterates Saint-Preux’s idea that entering a mountainous environment can bring about a consoling transformation of the self, declaring that ‘to me,/High mountains are a feeling, but the hum/Of human cities torture’ (681–3). Following Rousseau, Byron juxtaposes the high places and the low lands, giving the latter a specifically urban identity. He claims that his soul can ‘flee’ the ‘fleshly chain’ and ‘mingle’ with the ‘peak’ (686–8). It is through ascent that the poet can achieve this escape from the material world: And thus I am absorb’d, and this is life: I look upon the peopled desert past As on a place of agony and strife,

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Where, for some sin, to Sorrow I was cast, To act and suffer, but remount at last With a fresh pinion; which I feel to spring, Though young, yet waxing vigorous, as the blast Which it would cope with, on delighted wing, Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling. (689–97)

Like Saint-Preux, through elevation (figured here as flight) the poet rises above the terrestrial, leaving society and corruption below, as he ascends towards the purity of the ethereal regions. He escapes the ground-level condition of sin to find a new identity in the higher world. However, elsewhere Byron explores the limits for himself and his heroes of the mountain summit as a location where the self could find escape or transformation. In an earlier passage of Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he presents the mountain top as exemplifying the predicament of the Byronic hero in both social and psychological terms. Here acting as a symbol for the achievement of greatness, mountain elevation serves to illustrate the isolation of ‘all unquiet things’ from both the human world below and whatever stands above: He who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow; He who surpasses or subdues mankind, Must look down on the hate of those below. Though high above the Sun of Glory glow, And far beneath the Earth and Ocean spread, Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow Contending tempests on his naked head, And thus reward the toils which to those summits lead. (397–405)

Rather than enabling a transformation or transcendence of the self, as in Rousseau’s model, the process of elevation serves only to emphasize the essential isolation produced by the desire to rise above mankind. Byron presents a similar failure of elevation to produce ‘forgetfulness’ of the self in Manfred, in which such a motivation drives Manfred to climb the Jungfrau. Despite his physical elevation, Manfred experiences none of the psychologically uplifting effects of altitude, calling on the ‘toppling crags of ice’ and avalanches to ‘come and crush me’ before attempting to ‘spring from the cliff ’ in an act of suicide which is only prevented by the ‘sudden grasp’ of

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the  Chamois Hunter.44 At this point in the play, alleviation of suffering and escape from the self seem possible only through self-extinction rather than the self-transformation promised by Rousseau. By placing Manfred on the Jungfrau and by dramatizing the failure of elevation to provide an alleviation of his suffering  or a transformation of his self, Byron is able to present both  the sufferings and the sense of self of his protagonist as exceeding that of even the great sentimental hero of the eighteenth century, Saint-Preux. Manfred’s autonomy of self is such that he remains immune to even the greatest of natural powers: the mountain of Rousseau. Underpinning Byron’s resistance to the Rousseau-inspired transformation of the self in Manfred is his autobiographical expression of the same idea in the Alpine Journal, a text that could itself be seen as a version of Saint-Preux’s letter 23. In both, the exiled hero, in an attempt to alleviate the emotional sufferings caused by a transgressive relationship, travels to the mountains, where he writes an account of his experience for the woman whom he loves and from whom he is now separated. However, where Saint-Preux found ‘something indescribably magical, supernatural’ in mountain prospect that enabled an escape from self – it ‘ravishes the spirit and the senses; you forget everything, even yourself, and do not even know where you are’ – Byron is unable to escape his own identity: But in all this – the recollections of bitterness – & more especially of recent & more home desolation – which must accompany me through life – have preyed upon me here – and neither the music of the Shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment – lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory – around – above – & beneath me.45

The extent of Byron’s suffering is such that not even Rousseau’s mountain remedy can alleviate it. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reveals a similar failure on the part of the text’s protagonist to find the ‘serenity’ promised by Rousseau through elevation in the mountains. In Shelley’s novel, however, the failure of Victor Frankenstein’s attempt to enact Rousseau’s mountain programme becomes part of the wider critique of both his and Rousseau’s Promethean agenda to remake mankind. Both the Genevans, Frankenstein and Rousseau, sought to create ‘an altogether different nature, and … a new world’, to quote again from Saint-Preux’s letter. In  Frankenstein, it is in the mountains that both Frankenstein and Rousseau are brought face to face with the consequences of their revolutionary ambitions.

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It has long been recognized that Frankenstein can be read as a response to Rousseau, particularly Emile.46 In the closing section of this chapter, I want to argue that the novel can also be read as another important engagement with Rousseau’s account of mountainous environments as the location for the recreation as new of human nature and society, a programme of rejuvenation with obvious parallels to Victor’s project to recreate mankind. Shelley’s response to this celebrated passage of Rousseau’s writing is seen in her description of Victor’s excursion to Chamonix and his ascent to Montanvert which, as I shall show, rewrites Saint-Preux’s description of his journey in the Upper Valais. Mourning the deaths of William and Justine at the hands of the creature he has created, Victor undertakes this journey into the mountains at the encouragement of his father, Alphonse: My father, who saw in the unhappiness that painted in my face only an exaggeration of that sorrow which I might naturally feel, thought that an amusement suited to my taste would be the best means of restoring to me my wonted serenity. It was from this cause that he had removed to the country; and, induced by the same motive, he now proposed that we should all make an excursion to the valley of Chamounix.47

Another Genevan who has himself followed Rousseau’s broader agenda by removing to the countryside, Alphonse here advocates an excursion like Saint-Preux’s. The planned journey will be the means by which Victor can regain his ‘wonted serenity’, echoing ‘the calm’ Saint-Preux experiences during his first day’s journey through the Upper Valais.48 Victor also presents himself as believing in the potentially positive psychological effect of his undertaking, commenting that the ‘excursion’ would have worked, ‘if mine had been a sorrow to be chased away by any fleeting circumstance’ (121). Victor’s description of his journey into the mountains closely parallels SaintPreux’s. For example, Saint-Preux’s ‘sometimes huge cliffs hung like ruins above my head’ is echoed by Victor’s ‘we beheld immense mountains and precipices overhanging us on every side’ (121). Victor presents the aim of his journey in line with Rousseau’s arguments about the effect of mountain terrain, commenting that ‘at other times I spurred on the animal before my companions, that I might forget them, the world, and more than all, myself ’ (122). Here, Victor is in search of the mountain-inspired self-forgetfulness described by Saint Preux, in his famous phrase: ‘All in all, the spectacle has something indescribably magical, supernatural about it that ravishes the spirit and the senses; you forget everything, even yourself, and do not even know where you are.’

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Increasingly, Victor starts to feel the transformative effect of the Rousseauinspired excursion he has undertaken: The next day … We visited the source of the Arveiron, and rode about the valley until evening. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I returned in the evening, fatigued, but less unhappy. (122)

Victor’s sense that he has been elevated above ‘all littleness of feeling’ echoes Saint-Preux’s famous statement that ‘when we rise above the dwellings of man, we cast off all low terrestrial passions’. The next day, Victor embarks on his most ambitious attempt to transform his feelings through ascent. Feeling ‘unusually melancholy’, he decides to go to the ‘summit of Montanvert’, a location where he had previously experienced a ‘sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy’ (123). Remembering this occasion prompts Victor to utter the Rousseauvian statement that ‘the sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind, and causing me to forget the passing cares of life’ (123). Arriving at the highest point of his climb, the ascent appears to be having the desired effect, as Victor describes how ‘my heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy’ and speaks out loud his ‘faint happiness’ in an address to ‘Wandering spirits’ (124–5). Yet it is at just this moment that Victor’s cares reassert themselves in the most dramatic fashion: ‘As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed’ (125). It is, of course, the approaching figure of the creature. In Frankenstein, as in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Rousseau-inspired programme of ascent fails to produce the desired experience of elevation and leads instead to the protagonist’s confrontation with precisely what he is seeking to rise above. In Mary Shelley’s novel, the encounter with the creature on the Mer de Glace powerfully enacts the failure of the Rousseau-inspired agendas of both ascent and revolution. While Saint-Preux’s letter 23 offered the possibility of a transformation of the individual and society that reflected the revolutionary programme with which Rousseau had become associated, Mary Shelley’s presentation of Frankenstein’s ascent as leading only to the confrontation with

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the creature anticipates the failure of his broader Rousseau-inspired scheme to remake mankind. What better place to symbolize the failure of Rousseau’s dream for individual and social regeneration than on the mountain? Like the other texts discussed in this chapter, Frankenstein reveals the extent to which the journey into the mountains in the Romantic period was made in the footsteps of Rousseau, ‘the Columbus of the Alps’. The Genevan philosopher not only provided the ‘articulate revelation of the beauty of mountains’, to quote again Winthrop Young, but he also associated these monumental natural forms with his own ideals of self and society. To venture into the mountains, or even into writing about them, was to encounter Rousseau and the concepts of self and society he espoused. It is testimony to the significant reimagining of the  experience of elevation in letter 23 of Part 1 of Julie that this meeting with  Rousseau in the mountains generated some of the most powerful and durable passages of Romantic-period literature.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9

Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe, with an introduction by G. Winthrop Young (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), ix. Joshua Poole, English Parnassus; or, A Help to English Poesie (1657), cited in Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1959), 35. Claire Eliane Engel, Mont Blanc: An Anthology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 230. On the relationship between Rousseau and Haller, see Philippe Joutard, L’Invention du Mont Blanc (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 82–7. See Cian Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830: Classic Ground (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 30–1. Ibid., 60. Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (London: Spottiswoode and Co, 1871), 39. All subsequent references to this text are to this edition. See Johann Scheuchzer, Itinera per Helvetiae Alpinas regiones (Leiden: Pieter van der Aa, 1723), 3:353–424. For discussions of Scheuchzer, see Stephen, Playground of Europe, 16–22; Sir Gavin de Beer, Early Travellers in the Alps (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1966), 76–97. François-René de Chateaubriand, ‘Journey to Mont Blanc; and General Reflections on Mountainous Countries’, La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine 2, no. 17 (1807): 254. Ibid., 254.

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10 On the development of Chamonix and the growing cult of Mont Blanc, see Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 11 Chateaubriand, ‘Journey to Mont Blanc’, 256. Chateaubriand’s expression of disappointment has remarkable similarities to William Wordsworth’s account in Book 6 of The Prelude (1805) of his sense of deflation upon first seeing the summit of Mont Blanc and grieving: ‘To have a soulless image on the eye,/Which had usurp’d upon a living thought/That never more could be’ (454–6); see William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1:188. All further references to the 1805 Prelude are to this edition and are cited by book and line number in the text. 12 Chateaubriand, ‘Journey to Mont Blanc’, 258. 13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. and ed. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 6:63; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Henri Coulet and Bernard Guyon, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théâtre, Poésies, Essais littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:77. All subsequent quotations from Julie will be from Stewart and Vaché’s translation; page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text, followed by the page reference for the French original in Coulet and Guyon’s edition. An extract from Saint-Preux’s letter is included in Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750–1830, ed. Cian Duffy and Peter Howell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 16–9. 14 Cf. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 52, 66–7. 15 Ibid., 53–4. 16 See Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London: Granta, 2003), 208–9, who notes the influence of this passage and offers parallel examples from the following decade in the writings of de Saussure, Jean de Luc and Marc Theodore Bourrit. 17 Chateaubriand, ‘Journey to Mont Blanc’, 258. 18 Ibid., 258. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 259. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 257. 23 Stephen, Playground of Europe, 36. 24 Ibid., 45. 25 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Viking, 1984), 242.

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26 Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime, 1700–1830, 31. 27 William Hutchinson, An Excursion to the Lakes in Westmoreland and Cumberland, August 1773 (London: J. Wilkie, 1774), 157. 28 William Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801), 1:196. 29 Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland; or, A View of the Present State of the Government and Manners of those Cantons (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798), 1:7. 30 Ibid., 2:17. 31 Ibid., 2:16, 19. 32 For another example of a lengthy quotation of Part 1, letter 23, framed by text that sees the Alps as evidence of ‘the hand of Divinity’, see [George Wilson Bridges], Alpine Sketches, Comprised in a Short Tour through Parts of Holland, Flanders, France, Savoy, Switzerland and Germany, During the Summer of 1814 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 117–8, 267. 33 Charles Bucke, The Philosophy of Nature, or the Influence of Scenery on the Mind and Heart (London: John Murray, 1813), 48–9. 34 Review of Charles Bucke, On the Beauties, Harmonies and Sublimities of Nature (1823), in New Edinburgh Review, republished in Galignani’s Monthly Review and Magazine 3, no. 12 (1823): 378. 35 Ibid., 378. 36 Ibid., 377. 37 Ibid., 378. 38 William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 347. 39 Ibid., 99. 40 Ibid., 253–4. 41 Ibid., 55 (‘Look now on that Adventurer’). 42 Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (London: T. Hookham and C. and J. Oliver, 1817), 127–8. 43 Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 2:113, lines 928–31. All further references to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage are to this edition and will be given by line number in parentheses within the text. For Rousseau’s significance to Canto III, see also Helen Stark’s chapter in this book. 44 Byron, Poetical Works, Manfred, 4:64, lines 74–6 and 66. 45 Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 1816–1817: ‘So Late into the Night’ (London: John Murray, 1976), 5:104–5.

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46 See, for example, Lawrence Lipking, ‘Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques’, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 2012), 416–34. 47 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Text, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2nd edn (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 120–1. All subsequent references to Frankenstein are to this edition and are included within parentheses in the text. 48 It is worth noting that William Kenrick translates Saint-Preux’s ‘le calme que je sentais renaître en moi’ as ‘the serenity of my mind’: see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters, Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau. Translated from the French [by William Kenrick] (London: Griffiths, Becket and De Hondt, 1761), 1:68.

4

Rousseau and Romanticism in Wales Heather Williams

It is striking that Rousseau’s thinking appealed in equal measure to those at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He was by no means unique in this respect: analysis of book ownership and reading habits in France during the Revolutionary period has suggested that persecuted émigrés and committed revolutionaries alike read many of the same books.1 Nevertheless, it is remarkable how polarized the uses are to which Rousseau is put, both at home and abroad. In Wales, in particular, he has two very different reception histories. This chapter is about two groups of readers in Wales with different politics and different means of access to Rousseau. I discuss first the privileged group who could read Rousseau in the original French, before focusing on those whose radical politics led them to Rousseau in English translation. I shall also trace the reception of Rousseau in the Romantic period through texts in Welsh, since most people in Wales at the time could read neither French nor English: literacy rates in Welsh were high, but nine out of every ten inhabitants were monoglot Welsh speakers, as Rousseau himself was well aware when he decided in January 1766 that he wanted to visit Wales, ‘where they do not even understand English, but whose good and hospitable inhabitants will find in their hearts the understanding which will escape their ears’.2 This linguistic particularity makes Welsh culture a distinctive feature of British Romanticism, even if most modern scholars find the textual sources inaccessible.3 This chapter will contrast Rousseau’s direct impact on the lives of the cultural and social elite in Wales with his indirect, mediated influence on Welsh radicalism. Upper-class Francophiles in Wales were able to access Rousseau in the original French, and I shall suggest how their lives and land bear the imprint of his ideas. I argue that Rousseau’s conception of nature and the natural made its mark on the very landscape of west Wales at Thomas Johnes’s estate at Hafod Uchtryd, Cwmystwyth, and inspired Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler in their attempt

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to live out a life of what Butler described in her diary in 1789 as ‘exquisitely enjoyed retirement’ in their rural idyll of tranquillity and self-sufficiency at Plas Newydd, Llangollen.4 I shall contrast these with the case of Iolo Morganwg (bardic name of Edward Williams, 1747–1826), the self-taught stonemason poet, antiquarian, notorious literary forger and French Revolutionary sympathizer, who probably read Rousseau in English translation, and fellow radical Tomos Glyn Cothi (bardic name of Thomas Evans, 1764–1833). The readers in Wales who could access Rousseau in the original French belonged to a privileged social class. The aristocratic Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby had fled respectable marriage in their native Ireland for a simple life of devotion to one another in the Welsh hills in 1778, the year of Rousseau’s death. However, their geographical isolation and reluctance to travel did not prevent them from keeping up to date, via letters and visitors, with British and continental culture. They made their home in Plas Newydd at Llangollen, where they became known as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, and were something of a talking point throughout Europe, making of Plas Newydd a landmark for travellers on the post road from London to Ireland. In 1788–9 travellers en route from France to Ireland would stop and tell them of ‘troubles’ and ‘horrors’ in ‘poor France’.5 In July 1789 Butler transcribes into her diary passages from letters sent to them that describe ‘the horrors in France’; their friend Miss Bowdler writes from Bath that the Palais-Royal is a scene of murder, that the King has been publicly insulted and the French nation enraged.6 They also followed the newspapers and are vexed on 5 August 1789 when there is none: ‘No newspaper – how provoking at this critical time for France.’7 Their greatest preoccupation was their adored garden, and they kept minute details of seeds sown and fruits reaped, but appreciated its picturesqueness just as much as its role in helping them achieve self-sufficiency, using it for ritual lengthy recreational walks and deriving from it aesthetic pleasure: ‘The sun broke forth in such splendour. The country was in such a blaze of beauty that my beloved and I went to the white gate to behold and admire the magnificence of the amphitheatre.’8 For some, their relationship with nature is a continuation of the English tradition of privileging nature over horticulture, exemplified in Bacon, Langley and Jekyll,9 but it seems just as likely, given their Francophile reading habits, that they took their inspiration from Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761).10 There is evidence that they read Rousseau. French was part of everyday life for them, and their spoken French was, Mme de Genlis records, very good.11 We also have it on Genlis’s authority that their beautiful library was well stocked in both French and Italian works,12 and their handwritten catalogue lists many

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titles in these languages. Butler’s diaries contain minute details of books received and read, and these leave little doubt that the women devoured literature, particularly French literature, often reading it aloud. Unsurprisingly, they had no truck with Voltaire, who is referred to as ‘that detested Voltaire’.13 An entry in Butler’s diary in October  1785 reveals her to be ‘reading Rousseau to my Sally’ and ‘from one ’till Three reading Rousseau to the Joy of my life’ while a storm raged outside.14 By November their stamina had increased, as Butler claims to have read Rousseau aloud for five hours: ‘From Five ’till Ten read Rousseau (finished the 7th tome) to my Sally.’15 And a diary entry the following month notes that they have finished the fourteenth volume of Rousseau,16 meaning that they had read fourteen volumes in just three months. They were also interested in Rousseau the person, not just his books, though he had died a decade previously. Ponsonby’s commonplace book transcribes some lines that had been written in memory of Rousseau and inscribed at Ermenonville.17 They were so fascinated when Col. Manseragh St. George, who visited them on 4 February 1788, ‘related many curious anecdotes of Rousseau’ that they asked him to draw a picture for them: ‘As he drew admirably we requested he give us some idea of the face and Person of this unfortunate and inimitable genius. He very obligingly took out his pencil and drew two figures, I am persuaded striking likenesses of Poor Rousseau in a dress lined and trim’d with Fur, and a large Muff.’18 On Wednesday 9  July  1788, when Mr and Mrs de Luc visited the Ladies, the conversation once again turned to Rousseau’s life, and they received ‘a full account of Rousseau, his acquaintance and marriage with Mdlle Levasseur etc’.19 They also read books about Rousseau, such as Mme de Staël’s Letters on the Character and Writings of J.-J. Rousseau (Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1788), which they read in 1789–90.20 So it is beyond doubt that they were interested in Rousseau, but still rather difficult to identify any specific influence he may have had on them. Though Julie, which Ponsonby mentions in her commonplace book,21 once again appears to occupy a privileged position in the Ladies’ lives, with John Brewer claiming that they ‘devoured Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, reading it aloud in three-hour stints’,22 it is difficult to say whether Rousseau actually played a more prominent role than other works of sensibility that they loved, such as Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne or Florian’s Estelle, or works that treat similar themes, such as Genlis’s Théâtre à l’usage des jeunes femmes, Les Veillées du chateau and Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation. The Ladies’ garden can certainly be compared to Julie’s, a carefully contrived rural idyll, planned and maintained not only by themselves but also by gardeners,

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farm labourers and other domestic staff, just as Julie had received help to create her Elysium. Their attitude also seems to echo Wolmar’s idealized rural economy, as it is known that they took a sympathetic interest in the local people, ‘even their humblest neighbours, unusual in women of their class’.23 More than the transformation of their garden and their benevolent attitude towards local peasants, the very way they lived their lives seems to be a fulfilment of Julie’s wishes to live in harmony with Claire at Clarens, free from male influences, so that what had remained a fantasy for Julie was, for the Ladies of Llangollen, the bold choice of ‘une rayonnante amitié’.24 Another household able to access Rousseau in the original was the family of Thomas Johnes, landowner and landscaping pioneer in upland Ceredigion. He and his wife Jane and daughter Mariamne, while devoted to Hafod Uchtryd, the estate he had inherited in 1780, were also in contact with London-based culture, since Johnes was Member of Parliament for Cardiganshire and also its Lord Lieutenant. The enlightened education that he received in Edinburgh, as well as the Grand Tour of the continent that he made in 1768–71, taking in Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy, had broadened Johnes’s horizons.25 He remained a Francophile after returning to Britain, as we see from his translation of Froissart’s Chronicles into English (1806). He was also a bibliophile, whose collection of Welsh manuscripts kept in his famous octagonal library attracted the likes of Iolo Morganwg, to whom I shall return.26 The matter of knowing which books he owned is complicated by the catastrophic fire at Hafod in 1807, and though Rousseau’s works are listed in the catalogue of the Pesaro library that he bought after the fire, along with many canonical works from eighteenthcentury France (including Voltaire), they arrived at Hafod much too late to be responsible for any ‘influence’ on his landscaping work. It is the landscape created by himself, his wife and beloved daughter Mariamne, an accomplished botanist who corresponded with Edward Smith of the Linnean Society, that constitutes Johnes’s most lasting legacy. Together they created flower gardens and oversaw the planting of over three million trees and the building of a network of paths that would allow visitors to discover the wonders of the Hafod landscape. Thomas Johnes claimed that he relied heavily in this transformation on a work by William Mason, The English Garden (1772– 82), a long poem divided into four ‘books’. Indeed, he told William Gilpin, author of Observations on the River Wye (1782), that he had taken Mason’s book as his guide, and Gilpin relayed the compliment back to his friend Mason: ‘The walks, & lawns were laid out by Mr. Mason whose English garden he took in his hand; & wanted no other direction. So if you want to see an exact translation of

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Yr. book into good Welsh, you myst go to Mr. Johnes’s seat in Cardiganshire.’27 William Mason had a penchant for Rousseau that can be seen in the garden that he created at Nuneham Courtney for Lord Harcourt.28 As well as acting as an inspiration on nature and the natural, Rousseau was represented there by a bust placed in the shrubbery and by a quotation from Julie that was inscribed above a gate: ‘Si l’auteur de la nature est grand dans les grandes choses, il est très grand dans les petites.’29 In his 1783 edition of Mason’s The English Garden, which was probably the one that Johnes read, some notes by William Burgh were included, which refer the reader directly and precisely to ‘Rousseau’s charming descriptions of the Garden of Julie, Nouvelle Eloise, 4 partie, let. 11th’.30 It seems likely, then, that Johnes came across Rousseau’s ideas on nature either in the original French or in Mason’s books. Caroline Kerkham has suggested that Johnes’s landscape was modelled jointly on the estate of Mason’s poetic hero Alcander and on that of Rousseau’s Monsieur and Madame de Wolmar at Clarens; she goes so far as to describe Johnes’s empathy with Rousseau’s perception of nature as ‘remarkable’.31 His daughter Mariamne, who was born in 1784 but died young, is even more likely to have read Rousseau than her father. According to the obituary of Thomas Johnes’s penned by William Shepherd, a family friend on whom she made a great impression, Mariamne had read ‘the best authors in the English, French, and Italian languages … with diligence, and remembered with accuracy’.32 Her personal copy of Florian’s Estelle has survived and is kept in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Shepherd further mentions that her books were in ‘her apartments’, rather than in her father’s famous library, so its catalogues would not necessarily tell us of all the French books in his house. As a landlord, as well as a landscape gardener, Thomas Johnes clearly echoes the character of Clarens. The detailed description of the agricultural and economic workings of Clarens contained in Part 4, letter 10 stresses the importance of innovation, and Johnes is considered an ‘innovator and visionary’ in the field of agricultural experimentation;33 similarly, both Clarens and Hafod advocate self-sufficiency or reliance on local, simple food. At Clarens, where masters are expected to lead by example, the care that is taken of staff is exemplary; for instance a weekly prize is offered for good work, as well as bonuses and annual increments. Thomas Johnes was a benevolent landlord keen to improve and innovate for the benefit of his tenants. For instance, he employed a doctor for his tenants, supported a school for girls to learn reading and needlework and distributed Bibles and religious books to the poor.34 The philosophy behind the garden design at Hafod seems to echo that of Julie’s

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garden at Clarens. Julie had made her garden appear as natural as possible, though in fact it had been carefully contrived. The trees are filled with birdsong because she deliberately planted crops that would attract them and made nestbuilding materials available, and the water in her streams was diverted from the fountain in her father’s formal garden. Like Saint-Preux, who exclaims that the gardener’s work was so in tune with nature that ‘the gardener’s hand is not to be seen’,35 Thomas Johnes claimed that he was working with nature: ‘By beautifying it I have neither shorn or tormented it.’36 Attitudes towards places perceived as more natural or primitive than the rapidly growing urban centres of Europe were changing at this time – thanks partly to Rousseau. Thomas Johnes was one of the first Welshmen to respond to this change and, indeed, to exploit the potential of tourism by charging visitors to access his estate and complaining bitterly about ‘Saxon visitors’ to Wales who regard the place as ‘un pays conquis … and think everything may be had and done here with impunity’.37 Ironically, these people in Wales knew nothing of Rousseau’s desire to reside – and indeed live out his days – in Wales.38 On arrival in London in January  1766, Rousseau’s first thought was to flee the city, and the destination that captured his imagination was Wales, ‘that distant and wild country’, not so different from his native Switzerland.39 When he eventually leaves London for Staffordshire instead, mainly on Hume’s insistence, it is with one eye on a possible future visit to Wales.40 Welsh culture was further enriched and complicated by the London dimension: whether for reasons of education (Wales lacked a university), profession or business, many Welshmen were lured by the English capital, and a number of these made key contributions to the revival of Welsh culture, editing and scholarship, while others were in direct contact with French politics and thought.41 Two London Welshmen with French connections – Richard Price (1723–91) and David Williams (1738–1816) – warrant only very brief mention here as their links to continental thought are already well known.42 A Dissenting minister whose Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) provoked Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Price was born in south Wales and left it for London, where he came into contact with French culture and events in France, especially through his nephew George Cadogan Morgan, who wrote an eyewitness account of the Revolution.43 Like Price, Williams was arguably more London than Welsh, but he was much more than a mere consumer of French thought and culture: an educationalist and deist born near Caerphilly in south Wales, Williams – a friend of Brissot – saw a number of his own works translated into French, he is held to have influenced the ‘fête de l’Être suprême’,44 and his

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Liturgy gained the approval of both Voltaire and Rousseau. He was also part of a team that translated Voltaire into English, his Lectures on Political Principles is to some degree a response to Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois, and his Treatise on Education debates the pedagogical doctrines in Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762). Iolo Morganwg, who has been described as Wales’s ‘one-man Welsh Romanticism’,45 was an altogether different type of London Welshman. This stonemason and bard from Glamorgan, in south Wales, spent the years following the French Revolution in London, where he mixed with known radicals, played cat-and-mouse with government spies46 and masterminded the first Gorsedd (assembly of bards), which was to become the cornerstone of the revived Eisteddfod (Welsh cultural festival). He was instrumental in the burgeoning Welsh societies and networks both in the capital and back home, and his priority when not practising his trade as a stonemason was the restoration of the ancient Welsh past. This he did by transcribing, editing, translating and even inventing medieval Welsh texts, as well as reimagining the Gorsedd of Druids and bards as a political force advocating pacifism and a return to nature.47 Iolo has been seen by many – beginning with Elijah Waring48 – as Wales’s very own Rousseau. Modern critics have sought – often on the basis of scant archival evidence – to stress Rousseau’s intellectual influence on Iolo: Gwyn Alf Williams, for instance, describes the ideas of Iolo and London Welsh radicals as ‘a version of Rousseau’s natural religion’;49 according to Ceri Lewis, Iolo ‘read avidly the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire, and revelled in the pulsating excitement of the years that immediately followed the outbreak of the French Revolution’;50 for Huw Meirion Edwards, Iolo’s championing of the common man and the dialectic he saw between rural and urban life, nature and artifice, are ‘Rousseauesque’;51 Cathryn Charnell-White identifies echoes of Emile in Iolo’s advice to his daughter in 1810 to ‘abide by Nature’ and also to ‘adhere to truth on all occasions’;52 and for David Ceri Jones, Iolo’s contention that ‘great cities are destructive of population, life, health [and] morals’ recalls Julie.53 Critics have also tended to stress Iolo’s flair as a linguist: according to Geraint Jenkins, for instance, ‘he learned to read French and Latin, dabbled with Sanskrit and Greek, and turned himself into a self-styled authority on language and literature, history etc’.54 However, all the evidence points to Iolo relying on English translations to afford him access to ideas from France. His archive certainly provides evidence that he was familiar with a number of French titles, including some by Rousseau, and owned them, or at least stocked them in his shop in Cowbridge, but Iolo invariably refers to them by their English names: it

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is always Emilius and never Émile, Eloisa not La Nouvelle Héloïse. Thus it was a rather British Rousseau that he knew, and even then, evidence of him engaging with these texts rather than just having second-hand knowledge of them is scant. In the case of La Nouvelle Héloïse, the evidence is limited to a tantalizing reference to ‘Eloisa by Rousseau’, jotted down in a list alongside Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and ‘Pope Clement 13th or Ganganelli’ in a diary from 1780.55 Similarly, references to Rousseau’s Social Contract (Du Contrat social, 1762) are limited to its title, in English: the Social Compact is included in a list of books that Iolo deemed suitable for the circulating library that he was planning for Cowbridge.56 Another book list, entitled ‘Reading society’, gives ‘Rousseau’ but fails to identify the book.57 The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750), however, known to Iolo as ‘the Prize Question proposed by the Academy of Dijon’, was more than a mere title, as he refers to it in an essay on Welsh literature in which he makes the claim that Welsh literature is morally superior to English literature. Iolo argues that while the state of the latter ‘afforded Rousseau too many powerful arguments on the side that he took of the prize question proposed by the Academy of Dijon’, Welsh literature is altogether different and constitutes a force for good.58 The work by Rousseau that Iolo discusses in most detail is Emile. In a paragraph headed ‘Preface to the New Robinson Crusoe’, Iolo writes: The errors of great men are remarked and the discussion of them frequently leads to the Truth from which they have deviated. Thus Rousseau’s Emilius will, in spite of the false opinions advanced in it, always be a valuable book, both on account of the important Truths which it contains, and those which it has caused to be discovered; and it would be unjust not to attribute to it at least a considerable enlargement in our ideas concerning education.59

The connection that Iolo is making with Robinson Crusoe suggests some familiarity with the content of Emile, as Rousseau says of it in Book 3 of the novel: ‘This book will be the first that my Emile will read; for a long time it alone will compose his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there.’60 Elsewhere, though, it is the man rather than his texts who interests Iolo, as when Rousseau is listed as an example of the ‘true friends of mankind’, people, he notes, who almost invariably come from ‘the lower classes or very rarely above the middle’, and is set alongside Newton, Franklin, Ganganelli and Jesus Christ.61 Elsewhere in Iolo’s work the presence of Rousseau is more discreetly – but no less suggestively – felt. A good example of this is his involvement in

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the editing and repackaging of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym to the tastes of a 1790s audience, recently studied by Dafydd Johnston.62 Barddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym (The Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym), published in 1789 after a long period in preparation, was a landmark in eighteenth-century Welsh scholarship, coming as it did after some decades of renewed interest in the Welsh past, during which many medieval texts had been transcribed, edited, translated and manipulated by scholars both in Wales and in London. Its editors were Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr) and William Owen Pughe, aided (and somewhat misled) by Iolo, who sent them rather biased information on the life of the poet, as well as some forged poems, that influenced the final content and order of the poems in the collection. The fact that Barddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym is now discredited on account of the forged poems that it contains of course in no way prevents it from revealing to us some of the preoccupations of the day. On the contrary, it is worth asking, for instance, as Dafydd Johnston does, whether it is more than a coincidence that Barddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym was published exactly as the Bastille fell. The Revolution and the editing project share some cultural ideals and values, at least on the part of some of the people involved: Rousseau can be seen as the crucial link between literature, the personal and the political. Editorial choices in the arrangement of poetic material ensure particular emphases on certain themes; moreover, Johnston argues that it is possible to map the plot of La Nouvelle Héloïse onto the poetry collection, with the poet-hero Dafydd ap Gwilym cast as Saint-Preux, who falls for his tutee, who would be Julie, the daughter of his patron, Ifor Hael [Ivor the Generous], all against the backdrop of an idealized county of Morgannwg, that is standing in for Le Valais.63 Given Rousseau’s huge popularity with readers in Britain and continental Europe, the notion of ‘literary fashions’ allows us to see Iolo in a broader European context. In contrast to Iolo, his compatriot and friend Tomos Glyn Cothi barely left his native Carmarthenshire, never travelled as far as London and only learnt English as a second language. Officially named Thomas Evans, he was a Unitarian minister and the founding editor in 1795 of the radical periodical The Miscellaneous Repository neu, Y Drysorfa Gymmysgedig (The Miscellaneous Repository or, The Mixed Treasury). He was also a known radical – he was sentenced to two years in prison for singing a seditious song64 – and was prominent in the mission to enlighten the monoglot Welsh. Many of his publications, including much of the material in the periodical that he edited, were translations or adaptations by himself. What is more, his private notebook contains a Welsh translation of an English rendering of a passage from Rousseau:

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Hawl a Dyledswydd Dyn 1. Nis gall un Tad drosglwyddo i’w Fab yr hawl o fod yn ddi-ddefnydd i’w gyd-greaduriaid. 2. Mewn sefyllfa gymdeithasol yn yr hon y mae yn rhaid i bob un gael ei gynnal ar draul y gymdeithas, y mae’n ddyled ar bob un weithio gwerth ei gynhaliaeth a hynny heb edrych ar radd neu sefyllfa. Pob segurddyn, cyfoethog a thylawd, gwan a chryf, sydd ddihiryn, neu anonest ddyn. 3. Nid yw’r dyn sydd yn bwyta bara seguryd, heb ynnill ei gynhaliaeth, ddim gwell na lleidr; ac nid yw yr hwn sydd yn derbyn Tal (pension) am ddim gan lywodraeth, yn gwahaniaethu fawr oddi wrth leidr pen ffordd a fyddo yn byw ar ei ysglyfaeth ledradaidd. Rousseau.65

Here is the English translation of Rousseau that Tomos Glyn Cothi had used to create the very close translation into Welsh quoted above: No father can transmit to his son the right of being useless to his fellow creatures. In a state of society, where every man must be necessarily maintained at the expense of the community, he certainly owes the state so much labour as will pay for his subsistence, and this without exception of rank or persons. Rich or poor, strong or weak, every idle citizen is a knave. The man who earns not his subsistence, but eats the bread of idleness, is no better than a thief; and a pensioner who is paid by the state for doing nothing, differs little from a robber who is supported by the plunder he makes on the highway.66

This English passage is a very loose translation, with omissions and reorderings, of Rousseau’s French;67 it was published, as Tomos Glyn Cothi himself notes, in an English anthology called The Manual of Liberty, a compilation of mainly English and French writers containing many extracts from Rousseau, as well as Voltaire and Montesquieu. His Rousseau, then, came pre-digested, as well as pre-translated into English, which is hardly surprising given his lack of formal education. Whereas upper-class Francophiles probably read Rousseau in the original, constituting a direct link between French and Welsh cultures, radical Wales’s Rousseau is mediated through English, possibly aided by Wales’s own community of expats in London. We might conclude that however much British Romanticism needs to be seen in a European context, the only context needed to understand Romanticism in Wales is that of England. But this reference point is precisely what has made Welsh culture look deficient, like some pale reflection of its powerful neighbour’s culture. In fact, Wales too makes more sense viewed in a European context. A comparative approach puts Wales in parallel with smaller

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or stateless cultures in Europe. When we take a pan-European view, as Robert Evans has argued, Wales’s cultural achievements in the eighteenth century ‘can be compared to those of lands several times her size’.68 And movements elsewhere in Europe seem, as Gwyn Alf Williams suggests, ‘to speak with the same range of voices’ as Wales.69 Just as in France Rousseau was both praised by Robespierre, especially during the debate over his Panthéonisation, and venerated by MarieAntoinette, who visited his grave, so in Wales he was just as much an inspiration for known radicals and Revolutionary sympathizers Iolo Morganwg and Tomos Glyn Cothi as he was for the Ladies of Llangollen and Ceredigion landowners, who were horrified by events in France.70

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

See Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 105–6, and The Darnton Debate: Books and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Hadyn Mason (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh, Décembre 1765–février 1766 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 28:218–9, letter to Marie-Madeleine de Brémond d’Ars, 22 January 1766; translation mine. On literacy in Wales, see Eryn M. White, ‘Popular Schooling and the Welsh Language, 1650–1800’, in The Welsh Language Before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1997), 317–42; Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Wales in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 392–402, who notes that ‘by 1801, nine of every ten inhabitants were still monoglot Welsh to all intents and purposes, and both to insiders and outsiders the native tongue was the most tangible badge of difference’ (393). On Wales’s near-invisibility from studies of Romantic-era culture, see Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘Beauty Spot, Blind Spot: Romantic Wales’, Literature Compass 5, no. 3 (2008): 557–90. National Library of Wales [henceforth NLW] MS 22971C, 737. Butler’s diaries, which she kept between 1788 and 1821, are part of the Hamwood Papers (so called because they were formerly in the possession of the Hamilton family of Hamwood, Dunboyne, Co. Meath) held at the National Library of Wales; I am very grateful to staff there for granting me permission to read them. NLW MS 22971C, 246, 669. NLW MS 22971C, 590.

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NLW MS 22971C, 617. See also Marion Löffler, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse, 1789–1802 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 8 NLW MS 22971C, 252 bis. 9 See Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen (London: Penguin, 1971). 10 See Anne Scott-James, The Cottage Garden (London: Allen Lane, 1981), who argues that ‘Julie’s Elysium must surely have inspired the Ladies when planning their thickets underplanted with wild flowers; they even chose some of Julie’s shrubs, lilac, syringe and broom’ (32); see also Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester, NH: Manchester University Press, 2007), who notes: ‘Their favourite book was La Nouvelle Héloïse and they are believed to have modelled their unusually aristocratic cottage garden at Plas Newydd on Julie’s Elysium’ (17, n. 14). 11 Stéphanie Félicité du Crest de Genlis, Mémoires inédits sur le XVIIIe siècle et la Révolution française (Paris: Ladvocat, 1825), 3:348. On Genlis’s visit to Plas Newydd, see Heather Williams, ‘Cymru trwy lygaid Rousseau (ac eraill)’, Y Traethodydd 168 (2013): 241–54. 12 See Genlis, Mémoires, 3:349. 13 Cited in Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, with an Introduction on Diary Writing, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1923), 244. See also A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, ed. Elizabeth Mavor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 128. 14 Cited in A Year with the Ladies of Llangollen, ed. Mavor, 182. 15 Cited in Ibid., 203. 16 Cited in Ponsonby, English Diaries, 243. 17 NLW MS 22969A, 17. 18 NLW MS 22971C, 34. 19 NLW MS 22971C, 215. On the previous day the same ‘very agreeable charming couple’ were noted to have talked to them about ‘Troubles in France. Character of the Queen of France, Louis 16’ (NLW MS 22971C, 214). 20 NLW MS 22971C, 750, 826, 904. 21 NLW MS 22969A, 57. 22 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1997), 479. 23 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘A Local Institution’, Planet 91 (1992): 35. 24 Colette, Le Pur et l’impur (1941; Paris: Fayard, 2004), 124. 25 See Richard J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Thomas Johnes of Hafod’, Welsh History Review 15 (1991): 399–415. 26 On Johnes’s library, see Eiluned Rees, ‘An Introductory Survey of 18th-Century Welsh Libraries’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society 10, no. 4 (1971): 229. 7

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27 Letter to Mason, April 1787; Bodl MS Eng. Misc. d. 571, f.8v. I am very grateful to Bethan Jenkins for providing this transcript. This letter is cited and discussed in Caroline Kerkham, ‘Hafod: Paradise Lost’, Journal of Garden History 11, no. 4 (1991): 212, and Mavis Batey, ‘The English Garden in Welsh’, Journal of Garden History 22, no. 2 (1994): 157–61. 28 See Mavis Batey, ‘William Mason, English Gardener’, Garden History 1, no. 2 (1973): 12. 29 Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Henri Coulet and Bernard Guyon, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théâtre, Poésies, Essais littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:482, and Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. and ed. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 6:396 (‘if [the Author of Nature] is great in great things, he is very great in small things’, Part 4, letter 11). 30 Burgh’s note to Book 4, line 358 in William Mason, The English Garden: A Poem in Four Books. A New Edition, Corrected. To which are added, a Commentary and Notes, by W. Burgh (Dublin: P. Byrne, 1786), 252. 31 Kerkham, ‘Hafod’, 213. 32 See Caroline Kerkham, ‘The Rev. Dr William Shepherd and the Death of Mariamne Johnes’, Friends of Hafod Newsletter 14 (Winter 1996–7): 26–33. 33 Richard J. Colyer, ‘The Hafod Estate under Thomas Johnes and Henry Pelham, Fourth Duke of Newcastle’, Welsh History Review 8, no. 3 (1977): 258. 34 See Dafydd Jenkins, Thomas Johnes o’r Hafod, 1748–1816 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1948), 37. 35 Rousseau, Julie, trans. and ed. Stewart and Vaché, 393; cf. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Coulet and Guyon, 478 (Part 4, letter 11). 36 Cumberland MSS, Thomas Johnes to George Cumberland, 28 July 1794, cited in Kerkham, ‘Hafod’, 209. 37 A Land of Pure Delight: Selections from the Letters of Thomas Johnes of Hafod, ed. Richard J. Moore-Colyer (Llandysul: Gomer, 1992), 159. 38 See Heather Williams, ‘Rousseau and Wales’, in ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution, ed. Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 35–51. 39 Rousseau, Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Leigh, 28:199, letter to comtesse de Boufflers-Rouverel, 18 January 1766; translation mine. 40 See Rousseau’s letter to Chase Price of 15 March 1766 in Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh, Mars-juin 1766 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 29:31. 41 On the Welsh in London, see The Welsh in London, 1500–2000, ed. Emrys Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001).

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42 See Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘The Welsh in Revolutionary Paris’, in ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution, ed. M.-A. Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 69–91. 43 Travels in Revolutionary France & A Journey Across America by George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan, ed. Mary-Ann Constantine (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012). 44 See Henri Roddier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en Angleterre au 18e siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1950), 209. 45 Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt, ‘Introduction’, in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, ed. D. W. Davies and L. Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 2. See also the outcomes of the AHRC-funded project ‘Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic tradition in Wales’, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, http://www.iolomorganwg.wales.ac.uk/ (accessed 1 August 2016). 46 See Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘The Bard of Liberty during William Pitt’s Reign of Terror’, in Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford. CSANA Yearbook 3, 4, ed. Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 186. 47 On the relationship between editing, translating and forgery in Iolo’s work, see Mary-Ann Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). On the politics of his druidic vision, see Gwyn Alf Williams, ‘Druids and Democrats: Organic Intellectuals and the First Welsh Radicalism’, in Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 246–76. 48 Elijah Waring, Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, the Bard of Glamorgan; or Iolo Morganwg, B.B.D (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850). Over a century later, the historian Prys Morgan suggested that Iolo had ‘imbibed rather too much of Rousseau’s nature-worship’ and recounted the anecdote of Iolo’s experiment with eating grass in a failed attempt to return to nature: see P. Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975), 75; see also his ‘Romanticism and Rationalism in the Life of Iolo Morganwg’, in Wales and the Wider World: Welsh History in an International Context, ed. T. M. Charles Edwards and R. J. W. Evans (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), in which he describes Iolo as a ‘Celtic Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ (155). 49 Williams, ‘Druids and Democrats’, 252. 50 Ceri Lewis, ‘Iolo Morganwg’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, c. 1700–1800, ed. Branwen Jarvis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 135; see also his Iolo Morganwg (Caernarfon: Gwasg Pantycelyn, 1995), where he stresses Rousseau’s Social Contract as a key text for Iolo (129).

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51 Huw Meirion Edwards, ‘A Multitude of Voices: The Free-Metre poetry of Iolo Morganwg’, in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 177. 52 Cathryn Charnell-White, ‘Women and Gender in the Private and Social Relationships of Iolo Morganwg’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 373. 53 David Ceri Jones, ‘Iolo Morganwg and the Welsh Rural Landscape’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 237. For Iolo’s comment, see NLW 21323B, 57. For further insights from the archives, see Williams, ‘Rousseau and Wales’. 54 Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘On the Trail of a “Rattleskull Genius”’, in A Rattleskull Genius, ed. Jenkins, 12. Similarly, Ceri Lewis claims that Iolo read French ‘with considerable ease’ (‘Iolo Morganwg’, 131). 55 NLW 21326A, cited in Geraint H. Jenkins, Bard of Liberty: The Political Radicalism of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 41, n. 64. This is a Daily Journal for 1780, though Iolo seems to be using it mainly as scrap paper; the page in question is May 1780, and the list is headed ‘Jewel’s Library’. It has not been possible to elucidate this title. 56 ‘Books at present in my possession proper for a circulating Library. Sepr 1st 1795’, NLW 21407C. I am grateful to Ffion Mair Jones for guidance on Iolo’s many booklists. On the planned library see Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘The Urban Experiences of Iolo Morganwg’, The Welsh History Review 22, no. 3 (2005): 483. 57 Ibid. 58 NLW 13121B. The essay is reproduced in Cathryn Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 272–6; for the reference to Rousseau, see 275. 59 NLW 13141A, 114. 60 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 13:332; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Émile, Éducation, Morale, Botanique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:454. 61 NLW 13123B, 161. 62 See Dafydd Johnston, ‘Barddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym 1789 a’r Chwyldro Ffrengig’, Llên Cymru 35 (2012): 32–53, and ‘Radical Adaptation: Translations of Medieval Welsh Poetry in the 1790s’, in ‘Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt’: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution, ed. Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 169–89. 63 Johnston, ‘Barddoniaeth Dafydd ap Gwilym 1789’, 37, 44. 64 On Evans’s trial and imprisonment, see Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘A Very Horrid Affair: Sedition and Unitarianism in the age of Revolutions’, in From Medieval to Modern

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65

66

67 68 69 70

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths, ed. R. R. Davies and G. H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). NLW 6238A, ‘Y Gell Gymysg’, 101 (Tomos Glyn Cothi’s original pagination) or 107 (pagination added later in manuscript). I am grateful to Marion Löffler for bringing this passage to my attention. The Manual of Liberty: or Testimonies in Behalf of the Rights of Mankind; Selected from the Best Authorities, in Prose and Verse, and Methodically Arranged (London: Symonds, 1795), 37–8. This anonymous work was published by the radical H. D. Symonds, who was also responsible for publishing cheap editions of Rights of Man, for which he was imprisoned in 1793. Cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 470, and Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 344. R. J. W. Evans, Wales in European Context: Some Historical Reflections (Aberystwyth: The University of Wales Aberystwyth, 2001), 9. Gwyn A. Williams, ‘Romanticism in Wales’, in Romanticism in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 17. The research for this essay was undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Wales and the French Revolution’, at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies; I am grateful to colleagues on that project, as well as many others, for guidance on various aspects of this research.

5

Enchanted Ground? Rousseau, Republicanism and Switzerland Patrick Vincent

Republican and communitarian critiques of liberalism in the last thirty years have highlighted how Rousseau’s political thought defies Isaiah Berlin’s classic division between positive and negative liberty.1 Building on both the republican language of civic virtue and the natural law tradition of individual rights, Rousseau’s social contract theory attempts, through reason and affect, to harmonize our contradictory desire for individual autonomy and the public good. This hybrid understanding of Rousseau, very different from post-war critiques that saw in him only the precursor of totalitarianism, follows the trend in recent political theory to view the opposition between virtue and rights as a false one, and to argue that republicanism should not be understood as an alternative to modern liberalism but as an important precursor.2 As I will argue in this chapter, Rousseau modelled his modern ideal of liberty on a combination of republican and liberal features drawn in part from his hometown of Geneva and from the old Swiss Confederacy. In turn, he helped popularize Switzerland both as a seat of republican virtue and as a source of liberal selfhood among progressive-minded travellers.3 Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, establishment, old and even radical Whigs identified with Switzerland.4 During the French Revolution, when democratic republicanism and Rousseau were shunned in Britain, texts on that country continued to serve as an indirect way to address Rousseauvian ideas, notably among Whiggish and radical writers, including William Coxe, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin and the young Wordsworth. The conservative backlash against the Revolution, however, transformed Swiss liberty into a residual ideology identified solely with customary freedoms and no longer with equality or individual rights. As a result, both Tories and radicals separated Rousseau from Switzerland, but for

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very different reasons: Tories sought to protect the Swiss from the corrupting influence of the Revolution, whereas radicals aimed to salvage the philosopher’s democratic spirit. We see this complex post-revolutionary legacy of Rousseau at work in the Swiss travel narratives of Mary and Percy Shelley and of their friend Thomas Hookham Jr. Their texts remind us that the Romantics did not solely favour negative or positive liberty: much like Rousseau and contemporary critics of liberalism, they wanted to imagine a republic that could satisfy both of these at once. While the hold that Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) had on the Romantic imagination is well known, the significance of Rousseau’s native land in regard to his moral and political theories is less often recognized. As Marc Lerner has shown, eighteenth-century Switzerland served as a ‘laboratory of liberty’ that provided observers with ‘models of the variety of republican possibilities’ available to revolutionary-era Europe.5 Among these observers we find Rousseau, who, despite being banished from Geneva in 1762, drew many of his central ideas, images and emotions from the nature, history, institutions and society of his native city-republic and the Old Swiss Confederacy, making it sometimes difficult to distinguish what is distinctly Rousseauvian from what had already become commonplace representations of the Swiss republics cultivated both by the Swiss themselves and by their many visitors. Rousseau’s political theory, as a number of scholars have already pointed out, derives in part at least from Genevan and Swiss politics, which he both idealized and regularly found wanting.6 Like Johann Jakob Bodmer and other Swiss patriot reformers, for example, the philosopher decried the fact that mercenary service had corrupted the ancient simplicity of the Swiss, making them dependent on France. He also joined other critics in complaining that both urban republics, such as Geneva, Berne and Zurich, whose governments were representative, and the ‘pure’ or direct democracies of the so-called Forest Cantons had turned into closed oligarchies. The philosopher nevertheless played a central role in idealizing and popularizing republican features closely associated with old regime Switzerland. These include the equality and unalienable sovereignty of citizens, the smallness and homogeneity of republics, their loose association into a larger whole for peace and common defence and their non-metropolitan, decentred geography and mix of urban and rural features, congenial to a happy mediocrity. As in classical republican theory, Rousseau attributed the survival of these small communities to their stoic or agrarian virtue, often contrasted with the corrupt, overly civilized manners of the French. This was fostered through militias, revolving magistrates, sumptuary laws, patriotic education, public

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events meant to inspire domestic attachment, hard work, fresh air and vigorous walking, preferably uphill.7 Perhaps the most potent symbol of Swiss republican virtue for Rousseau was the popular assembly, or Landsgemeinde, still practised in several rural cantons: despite its historical shortcomings, he depicts it as the perfect incarnation of the general will in the opening chapter of Book 4 of The Social Contract (Du Contrat social, 1762), a book that the communitarian political scientist Benjamin Barber calls ‘profoundly Swiss’.8 Switzerland helped Rousseau above all to imagine his sociopolitical ideal of the republic as patrie. Patriotism – understood as the shared love of liberty rather than a shared culture, language or ethnicity – was for him necessary to ensure the survival of any sovereign political community formed by social contract. Rousseauvian liberty is both positive, in the sense that it relies on individual virtue, or self-legislation, to make the individual identify with the sovereign community or general will, and negative, because it also relies on the sovereignty of the law to protect citizens’ individual rights.9 By modelling his well-ordered society in part on Switzerland, Rousseau combined features of both classical republicanism and modern democracy, establishing the ideal citizen, not as a landed aristocrat, but as an artisan or free holding member of the rising urban middle classes.10 Much like Swiss culture itself, his ideal republic was conservative in its respect for community, custom and local attachment, and radical in its challenge to feudal social divisions and embrace of equality and of individual rights.11 Rousseau draws on Swiss history and institutions to theorize an ideal republic that transforms the solitary individual into the ideal citizen, restoring him to his natural wholeness and freedom through full identification with his community. Despite the liberal opprobrium cast on Rousseau’s concept of the general will after the Terror, his so-called antiliberal ideas remain essential to thinking through the modern tension between individual and community, the terms of which were already contained in the eighteenth-century civic humanist discourse on virtue versus commerce.12 Starting in the 1760s, well-bred visitors from around Europe flocked to Lake Geneva, which had been transformed by Julie into a new classic ground, often contrasting Rousseau’s patriotic enthusiasm with neighbouring Voltaire’s colder scepticism.13 They also set out in search of the primitive alpine society idealized in Saint-Preux’s letter on the Valais and paid homage to the philosopher in Môtiers and on the Île St-Pierre.14 In the wake of the Confessions and of the French Revolution, however, the association between Rousseau, republicanism and Switzerland fell out of fashion. As Edward Duffy has shown, the Enlightenment image of Rousseau as a ‘latter-day Cato’, or paragon of hard stoic morality, gave

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way, following his stay in Britain in 1765–6 and the publication of the first part of his autobiography in 1778, to that of Rousseau as ‘the new man of feeling’: the philosopher became identified with the individual expressiveness – many called it misanthropy or even madness – that helped define not only Romanticism but also the autonomous subjecthood of modern liberalism.15 Whereas the Jacobins made citoyen Rousseau one of their own, in 1791 Edmund Burke launched his ad hominem attack against Jean-Jacques, ‘founder of the philosophy of vanity’,16 complicating the terms of the writer’s reception in Britain during the next quarter century and making it more difficult for Romantic-period writers to engage openly with Rousseau’s moral and political ideas. While Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762) and The Social Contract were clearly considered Rousseau’s most controversial works, writers also found it more difficult to indulge in the natural sentiment found in his domestic idylls, notably Julie and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1782). One way that liberal Britons could continue to engage with both the public and the private Rousseau was by writing about Switzerland. The many Romanticperiod travel narratives, novels and poems evoking Switzerland and the Alps also often revisit Rousseau through an intertextual web of quotation, annotation and imitation, discussing its political institutions and natural landscapes as a foil to reflect on the Genevan philosopher’s ideas. In his popular Sketches of Swisserland (1779), for example, the Whig clergyman and historian William Coxe recounts touring Clarens with Julie in hand, yet feels obliged to distance himself from the Genevan philosopher’s questionable morality in a footnote to the second edition (1780), added in response to readers’ criticisms.17 Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland, a three-volume version first published in 1789, devotes a whole chapter to Rousseau’s Swiss exile, portraying him in a balanced, if not sympathetic manner, quoting from the ‘Fifth Walk’ of the Reveries, celebrating his imagination and sensibility but also criticizing his pride, sophistry and especially his politics, ‘those liberal yet levelling principles of government’.18 Coxe’s guide was famous for celebrating the Swiss republics from both a historical and a moral standpoint, comparing their heroic battles against Austria to those of the Greeks, for example, or railing against the baneful introduction of luxury. It also introduced a new, anthropological perspective on Switzerland, recounting the author’s own Rousseau-inspired walk across the canton of Appenzell and, as a timid endorsement of pure democracy, describing the inside of a Swiss cottage in the alpine republic of Glarus, evidence of its inhabitants’ industry, happiness and virtue.19 Despite Coxe’s establishment Whiggism and keen awareness of Rousseau’s radical associations, his Swiss travelogue suggests a

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close affinity between Switzerland, the author’s own civic humanist background, and Rousseauvian patriotism. The primitive republicanism depicted by Coxe drew the attention of a young French writer openly enthusiastic about Rousseau, Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, who translated the Sketches into French in 1781, adding long footnotes that reinforce the book’s Rousseauvian resonances.20 Ramond’s translation in turn served as a model for William Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches (1793), perhaps the most striking example of a text that replaces a direct discussion of Rousseau’s controversial ideas with a commentary on Switzerland. Cited as proof of the poet’s attachment to agrarian virtue and a prefiguration of his own ideal republican community in the Lakes,21 the ‘Once Man’ passage (ll. 520–35) is a civic humanist set piece on the Swiss mountaineer as selflegislating citizen that roughly approximates the Commonwealthman’s ideal of the independent, virtuous free-holder, but that is also distinctly Rousseauvian: Once Man entirely free, alone and wild, Was blessed as free – for he was Nature’s child. He, all superior but his God disdained, Walked none restraining, and by none restrained, Confessed no law but what his reason taught, Did all he wished, and wished but what he ought. As Man in his primaeval dower array’d The image of his glorious sire display’d, Even so, by vestal Nature guarded, here The traces of primaeval Man appear. The native dignity no forms debase, The eye sublime, and surly lion-grace. The slave of none, of beasts alone the lord, He marches with his flute, his book, and sword, Well taught by that to feel his rights, prepar’d With this ‘the blessings he enjoys to guard’.22

The first eight lines condense Rousseau’s conjectural history in the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755) and The Social Contract, whereas the second half on the necessity of a patriotic education resembles the Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, 1758) and perhaps even his less well-known, liberal-leaning Discourse on Political Economy (Discours sur l’économie politique, 1755). That Wordsworth was thinking about Rousseau when writing the passage is made even clearer in his unpublished ‘Letter to Bishop Llandaff ’, self-titled ‘An essay on the principles necessary to

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legitimately construct a republic’, where, after discussing Rousseau’s general will, he cites a similar Swiss ‘herdsman with the staff in one hand and the book in the other’ as a working example of the civic education necessary to enable popular sovereignty.23 Confirming the continuity between the Anglo-American civic humanist tradition and Rousseauvian republicanism, the ‘Once Man’ passage draws on Milton, on two Whiggish progress poems, Goldsmith’s Traveller and Collins’s ‘Ode to Liberty’, as well as on Ramond’s long footnote describing his tour of Glarus. Neither Wordsworth’s poem nor his political tract develops Ramond’s most famous Swiss republican topos, however: the sublime description of the Glarus Landsgemeinde attended by 4000 armed citizens and presided by a Landammann, or chief magistrate, carrying the sword of liberty.24 These primitive alpine democracies’ popular assembly is cited in The Social Contract, as we saw, to exemplify Rousseau’s general will. As Alan Liu has noted, however, the Swiss Alps of the Descriptive Sketches, filled with solitaries and suffering families, are more Wordsworthian than Whiggish,25 creating a strange disjunction with his philosophical generalization on the free and virtuous mountaineer. Indeed, the ‘Once Man’ passage unsettles the sense of fit between the Swiss and their mountains with its last imperfect rhyme on ‘guard’, as if proleptically warning readers of the old Swiss republics’ inability to guard themselves against their larger neighbour’s modern republicanism, soon to be imposed on them. Written under the spell of Girondist politics, the poem moves beyond Switzerland’s primitive form of democracy, recuperating Rousseau’s theory of the general will in the last, millenarian passages in the cause of Revolutionary France (ll. 756–813).26 Wordsworth’s ambivalent representation of old-order Switzerland is closer to that found in Helen Maria Williams’s A Tour of Switzerland (1798) than it is to Coxe’s Whiggish account. Published on the eve of the French invasion of Switzerland, her book offers a trenchant criticism both of the Swiss republics and of Rousseau, whose residual association with Robespierre was still strong. The Terror had destroyed Williams’s Girondist coterie and, she claims, forced her to escape to Switzerland in 1794.27 But Williams also wished to denounce the Swiss republics and to distinguish them from Rousseau because of their popularity among patrician Whigs, her book’s aim being to prepare the way for a Swiss revolution. Passing through Bienne, close to Rousseau’s retreat on the Île St Pierre, for example, she misleadingly states that he was ‘compelled, at length to seek refuge in Paris from the persecution of the Republics of Switzerland’, omitting to mention that Rousseau was first forced to flee Paris in

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1762, that he lived in Britain or that he was obliged to return incognito to France in 1767, where he was officially proscribed but tolerated.28 Bourgeois radical writers such as Williams or Thomas Paine had little faith in classical republican virtue or in ‘pure’ democracy, instead favouring the development of individual rights and representative government as practised in the American republic and post-Thermidorian France.29 Williams criticizes Rousseau’s mistrust of political representation in The Social Contract via Ramond, quoting at length his romanticized representation of the Glarus Landsgemeinde in order to argue that it is overly chaotic, potentially tyrannical and unworkable in a large, modern republic such as France.30 Via Coxe, she also mocks Berne’s youth parliament or Äussere Stand, an institution which Rousseau had praised in his Considerations on the Government of Poland as an excellent form of republican civic education.31 Even when citing Julie, arguably Rousseau’s least political text, Williams is at pains to disassociate the romantic landscape around Clarens from Switzerland’s oppressive political institutions, identified here with the ‘Swiss Bastille’ of Chillon: ‘The tear of sensibility, which has so often been shed over this spot for the woes of fiction, may now fall for sorrows that have the dull reality of existence.’32 Despite Williams’s plea in favour of a revolution in Switzerland, France’s 1798 invasion and creation of a satellite Helvetic Republic shocked British public opinion, which still imagined the Swiss as heroic and virtuous – thanks in large part to Coxe and to Rousseau. Only the primitive Catholic democracies stubbornly resisted the French. These became the sole custodians of the Swiss myth, helping to reinforce the ideal of Swiss liberty as traditional Freiheit, as a gift of God earned by virtue and experienced within a community of like-minded men, rather than as a universal natural right. In two novels that are partially set in Switzerland and were either written or conceived around the time of the French invasion, St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805), William Godwin dramatizes the tension between ancient and modern liberty by placing an alienated, protoByronic hero in a patriarchal Swiss scene of retirement.33 Gary Kelly has set Godwin in the context of Calvinism and the Commonwealthman tradition,34 but the classical ideal of virtue in these novels can also be traced more directly to Godwin’s friendship with the painter and exiled Swiss republican Henri Fuseli, to his reading of Coxe’s Sketches and of English republican texts by Ludlow, Milton and Clarendon and, of course, to his strong identification with Rousseau.35 Once again, Switzerland provides the author with a convenient context – and pretext – to discuss Rousseau’s moral and political ideas, notably his paradoxical opposition between private and public selfhood. The two novels are structured

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as confessions, and their eponymous heroes resemble the expressive but also egotistical self of the Confessions and Reveries, while two secondary characters, Marguerite and Ruffigny, incarnate Rousseau’s ideal of virtue and are closely associated with civic republicanism and Switzerland. When St Leon’s family is forced to emigrate to the canton of Soleure, settling in a ‘small and obscure, but neat, cottage’, his wife Marguerite immediately adapts to her new conditions, in effect becoming more Swiss than the Swiss themselves.36 The narrator seizes the occasion to praise the figure of the ‘patriotyeoman’, who, like Wordsworth’s Swiss mountaineer, represents the ideal republican citizen, educated, hardworking and selfless.37 Marguerite’s husband, on the other hand, is ‘destined by nature to wander a solitary outcast on the face of the earth’ and, like Byron’s later hero, Manfred, guiltily rejects living in such a virtuous community.38 This is also the moral landscape to which the young Fleetwood retires after escaping from the corrupting civilization of Paris. In the alpine democracy of Uri, Ruffigny, a ‘republican of the old model’ whose library contains all the Commonwealthman classics,39 attempts to reform Fleetwood through a heroic education meant to convert him to selflessness, domestic affection and civic virtue. As they sail around Lake Lucerne in order to visit the patriotic sites, however, Fleetwood sinks into a deep reverie that takes him from ‘William Tell and the glorious founders of the Swiss liberty, the simple manners which still prevail in the primitive cantons’ to ‘the wildest and most luxuriant of the uninhabited islands of the South Sea’, leading him to observe: ‘I had forgotten Switzerland, and M. Ruffigny, and the world, and myself.’40 Like St Leon or the Rousseau of the ‘Fifth Walk’ of the Reveries, Fleetwood shirks his duty to the community, guiltily indulging his private sensibility. Peter Marshall has claimed that both novels defend ancient liberty, looking back not only to the Commonwealth but also to Swiss forms of civic republicanism as an answer to the lack of public spirit in Britain.41 Such a reading is complicated, however, by the fact that St Leon’s family, like Rousseau in 1765 or many French emigrants during the Revolution, is driven out of Switzerland and that Ruffigny’s virtuous education, modelled on that in Emile, proves manipulative and counterproductive, worsening Fleetwood’s misanthropy.42 Although sympathetic to civic republicanism and to Rousseau, Godwin’s representation of Switzerland suggests that the Rousseauvian model of patriotic community cannot successfully force the solitary individual to become a virtuous citizen, and that doing so can lead to a homogeneous republic intolerant of all differences.43 In his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1808), Wordsworth also enlists the Swiss in general and Rousseau in particular in order to shore up Britain’s

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flagging public spirit, this time in the crusade against Napoleon. He imagines the wars of liberation against the French ‘tyrant’ as a moral struggle in which his early civic republicanism might be revived as the authentic spirit of republicanism.44 The pamphlet deploys classical republican rhetoric to ­re‑energize his countrymen’s patriotism, imagining the Tyrol and Spain, but also Switzerland, as proxy battlefields to regenerate Britain. Wordsworth, like many of his fellow Britons, identifies the so-called ‘subjugation’ of Switzerland as the turning point in his opposition to Revolutionary France and, as in his sonnet ‘On the Subjugation of Switzerland’, uses the alpine nation to voice his republican feeling.45 At the same time, he seizes the opportunity to discuss Rousseau, but ‘in a suitably subdued and repatriated form’, as Gregory Dart has aptly put it.46 The first time he cites Rousseau in print since his unpublished ‘Letter to Bishop Llandaff ’, Wordsworth’s mention of ‘the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau’ appears negative.47 The pamphlet nevertheless makes frequent – and wholly positive – references to the ‘People’ of both Spain and Britain, taking us back unmistakably to The Social Contract.48 As in Rousseau’s description of the lawgiver, he argues that only the spirit of the People, not a professional statesman or courtier, can muster the necessary energy and imaginative sympathy to fight for a country’s independence. In the thirty-four-line sentence beginning with the ‘instincts of natural and social man’, Wordsworth rewrites the ‘Once man’ passage, using the metaphor of the body to blend features associated with natural liberty, including dignity, virtue and sublimity, with social passions, or what James Chandler calls the poet’s ‘second nature’, among them love of country, honour and ancestral feeling.49 Like Burke, however, Rousseau also draws on organic metaphors that fuse nature and culture, for instance in the opening pages of his treatise on Poland, and he shares the basic view of individual rights as grounded as much in history as in nature.50 Here, unlike in Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth draws on Rousseau to make the case for what the liberal Swiss writer Benjamin Constant would criticize as the anachronistic ‘liberty of the ancients’, in which the freedom of the community trumps the rights of the individual.51 Using the metaphor of the ‘underground of the tree of liberty’, Wordsworth argues that whatever superficial civil liberties Napoleon may have given to the Spanish are irrelevant to what he calls ‘true Liberty’, which relies on the slow development of a society ‘growing out’ of itself.52 That liberty may be found in the ‘shade of ancestral feeling’ under which a great nation is ‘gathered together’, a reference that again merges Burke, with his predilection for English oaks, with Rousseau’s bands of Swiss peasants regulating affairs of state under an oak, in other words the idealized description

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of the Landesgemeinde that the philosopher cites at the beginning of Book 4 of The Social Contract as the most perfect expression of the general will.53 The Swiss popular assembly, which Wordsworth left out of the Sketches, is revived in the name not of individual rights, but of traditional Freiheit, or communal freedom. In Cintra, Wordsworth, anticipating John Ruskin, appropriates Rousseau, republicanism and Switzerland for the radical Tory cause. British tourists who set off to Switzerland after Waterloo were far more interested in the country’s sublime and picturesque landscapes than in its morals or institutions, which had failed to defend the nation against Bonaparte. They also separated their ideal of Rousseau from his heroic context or political ideas, focusing instead on his life and fiction. Passing through Switzerland in 1817, for example, the liberal travel writer Louis Simond makes the obligatory pilgrimage to Môtiers, Clarens and Chambery, yet remarks: ‘That Rousseau really sought truth is now scarcely believed by anybody, and even allowing for his madness, il est jugé comme un imposteur.’54 Visiting Clarens a year later, John Scott writes: ‘The scenery is the same as when Rousseau saw it, but all other things how changed!’55 In fact, the Treaty of Vienna had almost entirely restored the Swiss cantons to the status quo ante. Switzerland was one of the three remaining republics in postrevolutionary Europe, alongside Cracow and San Marino, but with no central government or currency, a still largely disenfranchised population, festering religious and political divisions and backward civil and penal laws, liberals such as Simond considered it a republic only in name.56 Even before the Revolution, travellers’ enthusiasm for Rousseau had more often been mediated by Swiss nature and by his epistolary romance than by Swiss history or politics. By 1816, romantic or sentimental tourism, in which Swiss landscapes were subjectively inhabited through what Nicola Watson has described as the reiteration of private experiences based on Rousseau’s rural idylls, became the norm.57 This new form of tourism sometimes put a strain on travellers. On the Île St-Pierre in the summer of 1794, Rowley Lascelles successfully re-enacts Rousseau’s famous far niente by taking a nap, but regrets not feeling sufficiently melancholy: ‘My mind was by no means in the tone to feel the sentiments proper to such an occasion.’58 Moreover, these sentimental accounts increasingly tested readers’ patience. For instance, the Eclectic Review prefaces an article on two Swiss travelogues by expressing the hope that, despite the ‘prodigious number’ of travellers, their ‘appetite for fame’ and the extreme facility with which travel books are ‘fabricated’, the dread of periodical criticism will bring down publication numbers.59 The review in question looks respectively at the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) and their friend and publisher Thomas Hookham Jr’s A Walk

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Through Switzerland in September 1816 (1818), which follow similar itineraries, make use of the same rhetoric of natural sentiment and sublime enthusiasm derived from Rousseau and Wordsworth, and share equally liberal political sympathies. The History is, of course, the best known of the Romantic period’s sentimental pilgrimages in the footsteps of Rousseau: it marks what Edward Duffy has called Percy Shelley’s ‘dramatic turning point’ in his appreciation of Rousseau and has been interpreted as evidence of the poet’s republican politics and religious scepticism.60 As Benjamin Colbert has pointed out, however, both the liberal Eclectic and the Monthly Review single out Hookham’s text rather than the Shelleys’ anonymously published work for being anti-religious and overly enthusiastic in its praise of Rousseau.61 At the same time, the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine politely compliments the History for its minimalist approach and ‘unpresuming’ freshness, passing over all references to Rousseau, politics and religion.62 A brief comparison of these two texts, as I shall show, helps us to understand better their divergent reception and again reminds us how Romanticism could adapt Rousseauvian republicanism in varying and sometimes paradoxical ways. One reason why the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour escaped censure was that all three reviews concentrate on the first part of the work, a heavily revised account of Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin’s ill-planned elopement tour with Claire Claremont in 1814. The Shelleys’ poor French, limited funds and patent lack of preparation give the text an ingenuous charm. Entering Switzerland through the Val de Travers, for instance, they mention neither Rousseau’s three-year stay in Môtiers nor his famed stoning, suggesting that Mary and Percy had not read the last book of the Confessions and were still unfamiliar with his life and ideas.63 Moreover, like Helen Maria Williams, whom they had tried to meet on their way through Paris,64 they critique the Swiss myth of liberty rather than exploiting this republican locus classicus to express their own republicanism. In Brunnen, scene of William Tell’s mythic struggle against the Austrian tyrant, the authors of the History claim to be sorely disappointed by the disjunction between Switzerland’s sublime landscape and its lack of republican manners, leading them to suggest that it is ‘habit’ rather than republicanism that make the Swiss ‘unfit for slavery’.65 In other words, despite Michael Rossington’s claim that the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour should be read ‘within a tradition of fugitive narratives in which Switzerland figures as a destination for disenchanted republicans’,66 both Rousseau and republicanism are notable by their absence in the book’s first part. In fact, the Shelleys’ journals and letters indicate that the group was following in the footsteps of the fictional hero Fleetwood, seeking ‘some sweet retreat’ or

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alpine ‘paradise’ beside the Lake of Uri as their final destination.67 As Mary later recalled of their 1814 tour, ‘it was acting a novel, being an incarnate romance’.68 The failure of the History to match romance with reality was already inscribed in Godwin’s novel, which, as we have seen, narrates the failure of Rousseau’s ideal republican community to transform Fleetwood into a virtuous character. Furthermore, if we compare Claire Clairmont’s revised 1814 journal, which relates several anecdotes exemplifying Swiss republicanism and happiness,69 with the History, which silences those episodes while exaggerating the scenes of natural sublimity, it becomes clear that, despite its title, the Shelleys crafted the first section as a subjective, private account, a sentimental romance rather than a history, which in turn explains why reviewers found it both amusing and politically innocuous. In contrast to the Shelleys’ account, Thomas Hookham does not limit himself to sentimentalism’s private discourse, but also revisits Rousseauvian republicanism, notably by depicting a Switzerland that is both idyllic and heroic. He sets off on foot to ‘traverse Switzerland en pèlerin’, paying the requisite tribute to Rousseau in Môtiers and acting the role of the democratic-minded traveller who engages with locals of all classes and demonstrates an extensive knowledge both of Swiss history and of Rousseau’s works, including Julie, his much less familiar Letters Written from the Mountain, the Confessions and the Reveries.70 Hookham’s politics were liberal, but they also relied on a positive concept of freedom and on a patriotic ideal of community, both of which he believed could still be discovered in Switzerland. Writing about Geneva, he observes: ‘The individual who has a voice in a government which is representative identifies himself with that government, and selfishness becomes patriotism.’71 Openly in favour of the French philosophes as well as the French and Swiss Revolutions, Hookham advocates the principle of non-domination. As Rousseau had also controversially argued in The Social Contract, the people have the right to rise up against an unjust government: ‘The best conservative of the happiness of a community is jealousy of individual power: the oligarchy of Berne was more dangerous to the liberties of Switzerland than the troops of France . … Is an offspring to submit patiently to every species of indignity and cruelty which a parent may choose to inflict on it?’72 However, Hookham also criticizes the French as ‘theorists of liberty, but practical tyrants’ when they invaded Switzerland, identifying Rousseau with the country’s heroic history and present republics, whose traditional freedoms he believes are still intact.73 We best understand the Shelleys’ and Hookham’s differing views on Rousseau and on Swiss liberty when we compare their respective accounts of the region

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most closely associated with the philosopher, Lake Geneva’s ‘enchanted ground’,74 discussed in the second part of the History. The Shelleys’ first three letters present Swiss republicanism in a highly ambivalent light. In Geneva, they make occasional references to the positive ‘consequences of republican institutions’, including greater social equality, freedom and refinement among the lower orders than in England, all commonplaces of eighteenth-century Whig travel writing. At the same time, they portray Genevan peasants as ignorant, complain that the city is dull and, in a powerfully subversive passage buried in the middle of the second letter, criticize its present magistrates, who, restored to power after 1815 thanks to the ‘chicanery of statesmen’ and ‘greater conspiracy of kings’, refuse to walk by Rousseau’s monument in Plainpalais.75 The first two letters, in short, clearly seek to distinguish Rousseau from his republican hometown. The third letter’s description of Percy Shelley and Byron’s boat tour around Lake Geneva between 22 and 30  June  1816 also pays lip service to Whiggish celebrations of Swiss liberty, yet it is primarily interested in extricating Rousseau from his Swiss context in order to salvage the radical spirit of the philosopher’s republican politics. Two versions of this letter exist: the original unpublished copy, written on 17 July 1816 and rediscovered in 1975, and a heavily revised edition, published in the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Both Addison in 1701 and Rousseau in 1754 had presented their sailing tours around Lake Geneva as patriotic homages to liberty. The purpose of the 1816 boat trip appears on the other hand to be solely private and sentimental: like hundreds of other literary pilgrims, they wished to visit the scenes made famous in Julie.76 By doing so, as Colbert suggests, the letter tends to ‘remain on safer ground’, notably by following the novel’s well-beaten sentimental path.77 However, as Rossington has noted, it also contains various ‘republican inflections’78 that emerge even more clearly in the letter’s original version. Shelley remarks, for example, that ‘most of the children (this is Savoy, the King of Sardinia’s dominion) were exceedingly deformed and ugly very unlike those in Switzerland’, another Whig commonplace serving to contrast republics with monarchies.79 Elsewhere he boldly criticizes Britain’s relationship with the Holy Alliance.80 The letter’s most radical passages are nevertheless those in which the poet addresses Rousseau’s fiction. In Clarens, Shelley pays homage to ‘divine beauty of Rousseau’s imagination’, which answered his own philosophical notion of intellectual beauty, as he reveals to Peacock in the original letter of 17 July: ‘I had not yet read enough Julie to enjoy the scene as I do by retrospect . … The feelings excited by this Romance have suited my creed, which strongly inclines to immaterialism.’81 Chillon Castle, ‘not at all remarkable, & only constructed for strength’,82 as Shelley also notes in the

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original letter, offered him an emblematic contrast to the idealism of Clarens, its ‘massy waters’ and ‘snow-white battlement’ serving as a distinctly material emblem of tyranny and of mental servitude, but also pointing to Shelley’s rejection of the material Swiss context that gave rise to Rousseau’s patriotism. The poet projects Rousseau’s spirit of liberty speculatively into the future so as to ‘cast a shade of falsehood on the records that are called reality’,83 contributing to Romanticism’s disassociation of Rousseau from Switzerland by imagining a writer whose ‘eruptive force [is] uniquely personal’.84 While sharing the Shelleys’ enthusiasm for Rousseau’s genius, Hookham nevertheless continued to believe in the existence, in Restoration Switzerland, of a genuine republic, in other words in a patrie which harmonizes one’s public and private selves, describing it as ‘a region of enchantment’ as he admires a sunset over Lake Geneva and mentally compares it with a passage in Julie.85 His first view of the Alps likewise generates an enthusiastic outburst of nature worship, in which he declares that ‘principles of virtue and wisdom could be propounded to the youth of all nations in scenes like these’.86 Unlike the Shelleys, the author connects these Rousseauvian associations based on his fiction with the ‘turbulent records of political history’, notably the Valais’s recent history of resistance to the French and present republican institutions. For Hookham, one hinges on the other: Rousseau’s spirit haunts not only the natural landscape but also the country’s governments, the majority of which he incorrectly labels as pure democracies.87 The correspondences between Rousseau, Switzerland and republicanism helped the Romantic generation to articulate many of their most important political and moral concerns, among them the desire for autonomy, alienation versus community, the importance of patriotic feeling and the corruption of wealth. They used these to develop compensatory ideologies in response to the perceived failure of the French Revolution. While Wordsworth and, later, Ruskin imagined the Swiss republics as models of ancient liberty and patriotic community that could serve as a useful antidote to individualism and utilitarianism, Percy Shelley used the romance mode to detach Rousseau’s ideal of liberty from Switzerland, recasting it as part of what Jerome McGann has called his ‘futureoriented program’ of progressive social meliorism.88 Because of such an overly formal and speculative understanding of Rousseau’s social contract, extracted from its Swiss context or imagined solely in the context of republican France, Romantic scholarship has also tended to ignore these correspondences or to view Rousseau’s model of liberty as dangerously intolerant.89 Many of the same concerns have re-emerged, however, in the last thirty years as part of republican and communitarian efforts to reimagine a well-ordered society, which balances

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individual freedom with social justice. Michael Walzer has referred positively to Rousseau’s patriotism and local attachment, for example, whereas Mauricio Viroli has sought to distinguish such patriotism from nationalism, attempting to revive its civic spirit without reverting to an essentialist or nostalgic ideal of community.90 Barber, an advocate of ‘strong democracy’ that merges republican and communitarian views, uses Rousseau to argue for the creation of a political community that privileges the common good, and in which individuals are transformed into self-legislating, autonomous citizens. Tellingly, his first book was a social history of Swiss liberty grounded in the local commune or Gemeinde, where individuals had to collaborate to survive, grazing land was held communally and decisions were taken collectively through a process of direct, face-to-face democracy. Barber sounds uncannily like the Tory Wordsworth, but also like the liberal Hookham and even the radical Shelley, when he argues that these conditions correspond perfectly to the institutional forms imagined by Rousseau: ‘Without prejudice to Rousseau’s intentions, we might well choose to say that mountains “forced the peasant to be free” in a sense similar to that in Rousseau’s Social Contract.’91

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

See Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–217; Céline Spector, Au prisme de Rousseau: usages politiques contemporains (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2011), 268. See Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See Jacques Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques et la légende (Paris: Didier, 1956), 151, which argues that Rousseau did much to popularize in England the image of Switzerland as both a heroic republic and an idyllic place of retreat. For this distinction, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’, in Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 215–310, which also notes the combination of conservatism and progressivism in Romantic ideology (292). Marc Lerner, A Laboratory of Liberty: The Transformation of Political Culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750–1848 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 5–6. On Rousseau’s Swissness, see François Jost, Jean-Jacques Rousseau suisse: étude sur sa personnalité et sa pensée (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1961); Benjamin Barber, ‘How Swiss is Rousseau?’, Political Theory 13, no. 4 (1985): 475–95.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Particularly significant in this respect are Rousseau’s Project for a Constitution for Corsica (1764), in which he argues that Corsica’s rustic conditions require a democratic political system similar to that in Switzerland’s Forest cantons, and his Considerations on the Government of Poland (1771), in which he continues to apply elements specific to Switzerland, including citizen-magistrates, armed militia and a confederal system of government. Barber, ‘How Swiss is Rousseau?’, 476. See Mauricio Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ‘Well-Ordered Society’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11. See Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168. See Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the ‘Well-Ordered Society’, 12. For a recent reformulation of the anti-totalitarian critique of Rousseau, see Stanley Hoffman, ‘The Social Contract, or the Mirage of the General Will’, in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113–41. On the tension between individualism and communitarianism in Rousseau’s writing, see Victor Goldschmidt, ‘Individu et communauté chez Rousseau’, in Pensée de Rousseau, ed. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 147–61. On the civic humanist discourse on virtue versus commerce, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 14. See Nicola J. Watson, ‘Rousseau on the Tourist Trail’, in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 84–100. See Gavin de Beer, ‘Rousseau et les Anglais en Suisse’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 33 (1956): 251–93. Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 12, 50. Edmund Burke, ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8:313. William Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland (London: Dodsley, 1779), 314–5, and Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland, 2nd edn (London: Dodsley, 1780), 265 n. William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland (London: T. Cadell, 1789), 2: 131. Ibid., 1: 24–5, 52–3. See Claude Reichler, ‘Ramond de Carbonnières avec et contre William Coxe’, in Le Second Voyage ou le déjà vu, ed. F. Moureau (Paris: Klincksieck, 1995), 39–48, and Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, 166.

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21 See David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), 65; Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), 45–6. 22 William Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 88–90. 23 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:39. See also Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, 166–7. 24 See William Coxe, Lettres de M. William Coxe à M. W. Melmoth sur l’état politique, civil et naturel de la Suisse, et augmentées des observations faites dans le même pays par le traducteur, trans. Louis-François Ramond de Carbonières (Paris: Belin, 1781), 1:76–103. 25 Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 176. 26 See Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, 166–8, which argues that Robespierre influenced Wordsworth and that the ‘Letter to Bishop Llandaff ’ necessarily follows a Montagnard line. 27 Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland, ed. Patrick Vincent and Florence Widmer-Schnyder (Geneva: Slatkine, 2011), 24–9. 28 Ibid., 305. 29 See Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1–35. 30 Williams, A Tour in Switzerland, ed. Vincent and Widmer-Schnyder, 276–7. 31 Ibid., 333. 32 Ibid., 321–2. 33 St Leon was written between 31 December 1797 and 23 November 1799. The Swiss passages of Fleetwood were written between 25 June and 7 July 1804, but Peter Marshall suggests that the book had already been conceived in 1798: see P. H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 260. 34 Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 221. 35 In his diary, Godwin records dining with Fuseli on 27 February 1798, or shortly before the fall of Berne to the French, and in April 1798 he reads Watteville’s Histoire de la Confédération Helvétique at the same time that he is reading Rousseau’s Julie. Godwin also sees Fuseli on 27 and 29 June 1804, in precisely the same period he was reading Coxe’s Sketches in order to write about Switzerland in Fleetwood. See The Diary of William Godwin, eds. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk (accessed 1 August 2016). On Godwin and Rousseau, see Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley,

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‘Introduction’, in William Godwin, Fleetwood, or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Handwerk and Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 23–7 and Pamela Clemit, ‘Self-Analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism 11, no. 22 (2005): 161–80. See also Rowan Boyson’s contribution to the present volume. 36 William Godwin, St Leon, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 73–5. 37 Ibid., 86. 38 Ibid., 80. 39 This was perhaps a reference to Thomas Hollis’s donations of republican classics to various Swiss libraries. See Allen Reddick, ‘“O Fair Britannia! Hail”: Thomas Hollis and James Boswell at Liberty in Geneva and Switzerland’, in Genève, lieu d’Angleterre, 1725–1814, ed. Valéry Cossy, Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Geneva: Slatkine, 2009), 241–68. 40 William Godwin, Fleetwood, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001), 122–6, 202. 41 Marshall, Godwin, 208, 262–3. 42 See Godwin, St Leon, ed. Clemit, 95–8. For a critique of Fleetwood’s Rousseauvian education, see Gary Handwerk, ‘Mapping Misogyny: Godwin’s Fleetwood and the Staging of Rousseauvian Education’, Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002): 375–98. Godwin also criticizes Rousseau later in the novel through the figure of McNeil, a character uncannily similar to James Boswell. 43 This, of course, not only anticipates the liberal, anti-totalitarian critique of Rousseau previously mentioned, but also critical theory’s recent interrogation of community, notably in Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy and Esposito, who all begin with an overly reductive interpretation of Rousseauvian community as ethnically and culturally homogeneous. On this, see Spector, Au prisme de Rousseau, 195, which notes that both Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy and his Letters Written from the Mountain (1764) accept difference and defend individual rights. 44 For further discussion, see Patrick Vincent, ‘Sleep or Death? Republicanism in The Convention of Cintra’, in William Wordsworth, Concerning the Convention of Cintra: A Critical Edition, ed. Richard Gravil and W. B. Owen (Tirril: Humanities Ebooks, 2009), 53–62. 45 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1:280–334. Wordsworth mentions the Swiss alongside the ancient Greek republics in discussing the right to petition as indispensable to liberty, points out that some French officers were grieved by the injustices committed during the invasion of Switzerland and, likewise, that many Swiss enlisted in the Napoleonic army in Spain deserted to British side, and cites Britain and Switzerland to disprove the notion that a peasant with no liberties can be patriotic.

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46 Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, 182. 47 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1:332. 48 See Vincent, ‘Sleep or Death?’, 58–9. 49 See James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and the Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 1. 50 See David Cameron, The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke: A Comparative Study (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 56–7. 51 First developed in his unpublished Principes de politique (1806) and introduced in print in his De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation (1814), Constant’s distinction between these two kinds of liberty is most clearly outlined in his 1819 speech ‘De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes’: see Benjamin Constant, Écrits politiques, ed. Marcel Gauchet (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 591–619. 52 The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1:322–4. 53 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. and ed. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 4:198; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:437. 54 Louis Simond, Switzerland; or a Journal of a Tour and Residence in that Country in the Years 1817, 1818 and 1819 (London: John Murray, 1822), 1:236. 55 John Scott, Sketches of Manners, Scenery, etc. in France, Switzerland, and Italy (London: Longman, 1821), 181. 56 See François Walter, Histoire de la Suisse (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2009–10), 4:112. 57 Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Period Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 133–50. 58 Rowley Lascelles, Sketch of a Descriptive Journey through Switzerland (London: Cooper and Graham, 1796), 32. 59 Review of A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and A Walk Through Switzerland, in Eclectic Review 9 (1818): 470. 60 Duffy, Rousseau in England, 88. For a more radical interpretation of the History, see Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 84–122, and Michael Rossington, ‘Rousseau and Tacitus: Republican Inflections in the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour’, European Romantic Review 19 (2008): 321–33. 61 Benjamin Colbert, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 84–5. The Eclectic attacks its ‘boundless idolatry of the nastiest of mortals – Rousseau,’ whereas the Monthly wishes that its author had been ‘less vehement in his admiration for Rousseau’. 62 Review of History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3, no. 16 (1818): 412–6. The term ‘unpresuming’ is used by P. B. Shelley himself in the

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Preface: see [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (London: T. Hookham, Jun., and C. and J. Ollier, 1817), vi. For the dates of the Shelleys’ reading of Rousseau, see Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre, 280–2. Arguing for the ‘shadowy’ presence of Rousseau in the 1814 section of the History as additional proof of Shelley’s republicanism, Michael Rossington cites Claire Clairmont’s remark, in her revised journal of the 1814 tour, that Shelley had asked her in Neuchâtel to translate one of Rousseau’s Reveries (Rossington, ‘Rousseau and Tacitus,’ 329). The Reveries are the least political of all Rousseau’s texts, however, and the incident suggests Shelley’s anticipation of the next day’s passage near the Île St. Pierre rather than his recognition of Môtier’s libertarian significance: see ‘The Journal of Claire Clairmont, August 14–22, 1814’, in Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet D. Fischer, ed. K. N. Cameron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3:350, 371–2. The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 10. [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 49–50. See also The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook, Travel Writing, ed. Jeanne Moskal (London: Pickering, 1996), 8:31, note a, where Moskal suggests that the Shelleys added these criticisms of Swiss republicanism after the 1815 restoration and their disappointing stay in 1816. Michael Rossington, ‘Republican Histories and Memories: The Shelleys, Switzerland and Geneva’, in Genève, lieu d’Angleterre, 1725–1814, ed. Valéry Cossy, Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Geneva: Slatkine, 2009), 307. Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Cameron, 3:364–5; The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, 8–9; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1:392. Cited in Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 83; see also Rossington, ‘Republican Histories’, 313. The quotation comes from Mary Shelley’s anonymously published review, ‘The English in Italy’, Westminster Review 6 (October 1826), 325. Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Cameron, 3:348–50. Thomas Hookham Jr., A Walk Through Switzerland, in September 1816 (London: T. Hookham and Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1818), 3, 6–18, 31, 37–41, 64–5. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 153. By 1816 ‘enchanted ground’ had become a stock expression to describe Lake Geneva and its associations with Rousseau: see also Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Unpublished Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 17 July 1816’, in Shelley and His

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Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet D. Fischer, ed. D. H. Reiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 7:32, and [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 119. 75 [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 101–3, 116. For a discussion of the Shelleys’ relation to Geneva, see Patrick Vincent, ‘“This Wretched Mockery of Justice”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Geneva’, European Romantic Review 18, no. 5 (2007): 645–61. 76 Lord Byron, letter to Hobhouse, 23 June 1816, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 1816–1817: ‘So Late into the Night’ (London: J. Murray, 1976), 5:81. On Rousseau pilgrimages, see Watson, ‘Rousseau on the Tourist Trail’, 84–100. 77 Colbert, Shelley’s Eye, 84. 78 Rossington, ‘Rousseau and Tacitus’, 324–8. 79 Shelley, ‘Unpublished Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 17 July 1816’, 29. Cf. [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 110. 80 Shelley, ‘Unpublished Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 17 July 1816’, 32; [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 119. The anecdote of Empress Maria Louisa in Meillerie is most likely an invention: see Claire-Eliane Engel, Byron et Shelley en Suisse et en Savoie (Chambéry: Dardel, 1930), 36. 81 Shelley, ‘Unpublished Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, 17 July 1816’, 33. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. See also [Mary and Percy Shelley], History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 128. 84 Duffy, Rousseau in England, 83. 85 Hookham, A Walk Through Switzerland, 49. 86 Ibid., 25–6. 87 Ibid., 153. 88 Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 119. 89 For a discussion of Romantic scholarship’s tendency to disassociate Rousseau from Switzerland, see the Introduction to Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, 1–15. 90 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 103; Viroli, Well-Ordered Society. 91 Benjamin Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 101.

6

Reading Rousseau in the Anti-Jacobin Novel Pascal Fischer

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 aroused intense interest in Britain. A wide-ranging and rather polarized controversy gradually developed about the fundamentals of politics and society, as well as religion and morality, and this spanned the whole of the 1790s and beyond. For much of the twentieth century, historical and literary scholarship concentrated on the contributions that radical thinkers made to this debate, as these were considered to be the precursors or even originators of a tradition of liberal democracy in Britain. Apart from Edmund Burke, whose reputation as the founder of conservatism has always been strong, writers who opposed the French Revolution and farreaching reforms at home were often disregarded. Since the 1980s, however, the conservative side of the political spectrum has attracted growing attention.1 And in the course of the re-evaluation of the revolutionary decade, the role that fiction played in the dissemination of conservative ideas has also been acknowledged. For a long time critics regarded the political novel of the period as the almost exclusive domain of progressive authors, but recent research has shown the important position of the antiJacobin novel in the literary history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 Critics of the ‘anti-Revolutionary novels’ of the 1790s have, however, tended to argue that these novels are largely directed against William Godwin and his philosophy.3 This emphasis is, of course, not without justification: it is true that the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and husband to Mary Wollstonecraft served as the principal target of the self-designated antiJacobins at that time. But this critical commonplace has obscured the fact that some of the conservative authors also attacked other alleged political enemies, notably JeanJacques Rousseau.4 For instance, while acknowledging that several radicals and philosophers – Godwin, Rousseau and Voltaire among them – are reviled in

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anti-Jacobin novels, Matthew Grenby nevertheless contends that the scholarly concentration on these invectives constitutes ‘an approach which misunderstands the underlying method of anti-Jacobin fiction’;5 and he goes on to argue that these novels are directed, not against the actual men and their philosophies, but rather against ‘their reputation, grafted on them by propagandists who might just as well have never read their work’.6 However, the fact that Rousseau was demonized does not amount to an argument against his significance as the ‘other’ that was needed to forge a conservative identity. Neither does Rousseau’s function as a bogeyman automatically mean that anti-Jacobin authors had no genuine objections to his philosophy. My argument, then, is that anti-Jacobin novels repay sustained attention to the ways in which the Swiss philosopher and his views are drawn upon to discredit radical doctrine as phantasmagorical, impractical and duplicitous. By looking at the use conservative novelists made of Rousseau, this chapter reveals an important facet of the reception of Rousseau in the Romantic period and furthers our understanding of the genre of the antiJacobin novel.

Edmund Burke and the anti-Jacobin attack on Rousseau In order to understand the role Rousseau plays for the conservative side in the French Revolution controversy in Britain, it is essential first to consider Edmund Burke, who not only was the first eminent public figure to voice his grave concern about the recent events in France, but also served as a kind of lodestar for the anti-Jacobin movement. Even though he did not determine all of the parameters of conservative propaganda,7 he set the tone for many attacks on the Genevan philosopher. According to Edward Duffy, ‘the assault on Rousseau’s reputation was fittingly led by the most influential of antiRevolutionary writers, Edmund Burke’.8 Richard Bourke sums up the main reason for Burke’s antipathy in the 1790s: ‘It appeared to Burke that Rousseau’s works had been adopted as the guiding canon of revolutionary fanaticism.’9 Yet, when it comes to the reception of Rousseau, scholars attach little importance to Burke’s principal anti-Revolutionary pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). While in her assessment of Burke’s condemnation of Rousseau Claire Brock bypasses the Reflections entirely,10 Duffy explains that in this text the English politician mentions Rousseau only in passing and even defends him against the Revolutionaries’ attempts to co-opt him for their purposes.11 Of course, Burke in fact writes in the Reflections: ‘I believe, that were Rousseau

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alive, and in one of  his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical phrenzy of his scholars.’12 There is, however, a short comment in that pamphlet that is crucial for understanding Burke’s perception of Rousseau. It appears in a passage in which Burke talks about the ‘national character’ of his compatriots, who have not lost the decency to treat with respect their fellow men, even their enemies: ‘Nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau.’13 These words epitomize Burke’s view of Rousseau’s philosophical system. Their paradoxical nature should be seen as an attempt to imitate a style Rousseau was known for. Even in 1763, Samuel Johnson had reprimanded Rousseau’s paradoxes as part of a ‘childish desire of novelty’.14 But why should subtilization – refinement – turn us into savages, who are, quite obviously, not subtle? According to Burke, Rousseau’s followers become so entangled in his sophisticated philosophical niceties that they are alienated from their ‘natural’ feelings and ethical principles. For Burke, however, ‘natural’ must not be understood, in the vein of primitivism, as ‘removed from culture’; on the contrary, the moral part of man – a consequence of cultural upbringing – should be regarded as his ‘second nature’, a term the author had already used in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and then elaborates on in the Reflections and in later speeches.15 In order to arrive at our true nature – our humanity – we need education, Burke contends; conversely, Rousseau’s attempt, by means of subtle argumentation, to deny the importance of cultural conditioning for humanity artificially reduces us to our first nature, and thus leaves us incomplete in an intellectual and moral sense – just like savages. Savages are, in fact, depicted very negatively by Burke. For instance, in the Reflections he compares the transportation of the royal family from Versailles to Paris in October 1789 to a ‘procession of American savages’ and contrasts savage barbarity with the mentality and manners of a civilized nation.16 In these remarks, he clearly also responds to Rousseau’s idealization of the savage. Incompatible with the Christian view of man, Rousseau’s philosophy is a kind of creed his French followers have converted to. While the anti-Rousseauvian edge of Burke’s Reflections may have been underestimated in modern scholarship, there is no mistaking the fact that Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) is the text in which he deals most acrimoniously with Rousseau.17 After the National Assembly of France had decided in December 1790 that the philosopher should be commemorated with a statue, Burke was even more convinced that his system of thought would substitute traditional values in Revolutionary France.18 While Burke does

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not explicitly blame Rousseau for the Revolution, the way the work connects Rousseau’s sentiments with the Revolutionary doctrine of the day helped to establish the conviction that the Revolution was Rousseau’s brainchild.19 It was particularly Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) that Burke considered, in Gregory Dart’s words, ‘a veritable source-book of revolutionary morality’.20 At the same time, Rousseau’s system of education, most consistently expounded in Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762), continues to trouble Burke in the Letter. The tension between Rousseau’s ideal of general benevolence and the fact that he had abandoned his children to a foundling home is censured strongly by Burke: ‘The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers.’21 In contrast to the Reflections, Burke now assigns the urge to educate one’s offspring to the first, brutish nature. It is a perverted ideology – the ‘philosophy of vanity’ – that creates ‘a lover of his kind, but a hater of kindred’, who ‘without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings’.22 According to Burke’s implicit argument, the educational theory which claims to lead man back to his innate dispositions ultimately causes alienation from them. In spite of these severe attacks, Rousseau’s philosophy only occasionally plays a role in the plethora of anti-revolutionary writings that were published in the heyday years of the pamphlet war between 1792 and 1793. When George Huddesford, for instance, ridicules the glorification of the so-called Hottentots by some philosophers, he does not refer to Rousseau directly: ‘The French may reasonably claim affinity in Blood to a people with whom some of their most ingenious writers have taken considerable pains to establish the closest affinity in Principle.’23 The person Huddesford does mention is François Le Vaillant, a French explorer who had drawn upon Rousseau’s image of the ‘noble savage’.24 The hiatus in the polemics against Rousseau extended over the middle of the 1790s. That he was then unearthed by the loyalists as a principal villain of Jacobinism has to do with the changing character of the public controversy and with their choice of a new weapon in the propaganda war: the novel.

Anti-Jacobin novels: Walker, Hamilton, Lucas and Lloyd When at the end of the 1790s the focus of the French Revolution debate shifted from the principles of government to questions of family, gender and education,

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Rousseau received renewed attention as a target of loyalist animosity in narrative texts designed to illustrate the detrimental effects of ‘French thought’ on the individual. Conservative writers finally realized that the medium of the novel was particularly well suited to showing the impact of ‘modern philosophy’ (or ‘French philosophy’) on the individual.25 Most anti-Jacobin novels draw upon a great variety of argumentative strategies to convince their readers that there are no serious alternatives to the established social, political and moral order. Frequently, the stories trace the downfall of deluded characters – usually women  – that have come under the sway of radical ideas. While some of the authors portray their opponents as sly rascals, they more often satirize them as indulging in fantasy. Whether they revert to light-hearted mockery or caustic vitriol, these satires commonly address questions of human nature and thus open up a philosophical dimension. In the wake of Burke, anti-Jacobin novels challenged Rousseau’s concept of ‘the state of nature’, his pedagogy and his morality in a variety of ways, as the following analysis of texts by George Walker, Elizabeth Hamilton, Charles Lucas and Charles Lloyd will demonstrate. George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799) is a particularly instructive example of the genre’s engagement with Rousseau. In the Preface to his novel, Walker preemptively defends himself against the charge of exaggeration: ‘So inimical are the doctrines of Godwin, Hume, Rousseau &c. to all civil society, that, when the reader candidly reflects, he will perceive that the inferences I have drawn from their texts naturally result.’26 Drawing upon all kinds of satirical techniques, Walker tries in particular to ridicule the ‘modern philosophers’ for being out of touch with reality. The misguided perception of the ‘state of nature’ appears as the fundamental flaw of the radical characters in the novel. All of them have totally phantasmagorical views of the world around them. At the very beginning of the novel, Dr Alogos, a caricature of Joseph Priestley, rhapsodizes about ‘the harmony of nature’ and laments that ‘man alone deviates from the pure state of existence he knew in the golden state’ (59). Alogos’ view that animals ‘never deviate into rapine and outrage’ (59) is immediately disproved by a hawk in pursuit of a lapwing. That Alogos brings down the hawk with the fowlingpiece he habitually carries for his amusement demonstrates the hypocrisy conservatives imputed to their opponents. The picaresque novel then introduces the anti-hero Frederick Fenton as a follower of Stupeo, a fictional representative of William Godwin with a strong affinity for Rousseau.27 Frederick’s decision to leave England for the American wilderness is explicitly connected to Rousseau’s doctrine of ‘natural man’, summed up by referring to the caption to

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the frontispiece of the first French edition of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755): ‘I remembered, in all its brilliance, the state of nature, described by Rousseau, and enlarged by Stupeo. I repeated again and again Il retourne chez ses Égaux; and I determined to make the wilds of America my asylum’ (133). The ‘modern philosophers’ Frederick and his friends Alogos and Stupeo move to America, where a large part of the novel is set, and try to imitate the life of the ‘wild Indians’ (201). Walker’s novel devotes much space to the radicals’ idealization of natural man, apparently embodied by the figure of the American ‘Indian’. In the late eighteenth century many Europeans identified the Rousseauvian ideal of the ‘noble savage’ with the native population of North America. Rousseau had already referred positively to Native Americans in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750). As Tim Fulford explains, ‘because Rousseau’s thought was influential, Indians were … idealized in fiction after fiction as innocent, unalienated people living in a harmony with each other and with nature that Europeans sadly lacked’.28 That there was a connection between the glorification of Native Americans and political radicalism can be seen in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s unrealized plan in 1794 to found an ideal republic on the banks of the Susquehanna and to live in accordance with the local tribes there.29 While The Vagabond certainly also reacted to the naïve view of the ‘Indians’ that many English Romantics held, the principal target remains Rousseau himself. Readers of the novel familiar with Rousseau’s work would easily recognize that the radicals in the story are strongly influenced by his ideas. The immigrants, for instance, refuse to cultivate the ground because they fear that this would be the first step towards civilization and all the ailments that it entails: ‘We shall become proud, selfish and tyrannical – we shall not readily yield it to another, and thus we give birth to all the horrors of civil life’ (201). They obviously have Rousseau’s verdict in mind – so prominently placed at the beginning of Part 2 of the Discourse on Inequality – that the first man to have fenced in a piece of land and claimed it for his own was ‘the true founder of civil society’ and thus of all the crimes, wars and horrors that come with it.30 It is out of respect for Rousseau that the group of English immigrants name their humble farm in the wilderness ‘Clarens’, after Julie’s country house. The clash between, on the one hand, the sentimental glorification of the ‘noble savage’ and the ideal of secluded simplicity and, on the other, the harsh realities of uncivilized life becomes most apparent when the little farm is robbed by members of the Miama tribe. Far from being indifferent to worldly possessions, they steal everything that is not nailed down – including one of the young

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women, Laura. Stupeo represents the epitome of delusion because he not only justifies their barbarity, but also blames it on the Europeans: ‘Revenge is all they seek, for the unjust usurpation of the Europeans’ (204). Stupeo later also imputes the greed with which one of the tribes barters with the settlers to a corrosive European influence: ‘“These men,” said Stupeo, “must have been contaminated by trading with Europeans”’ (210). This explanation turns out to be as fallacious as the whole belief in the nobility of natural man: ‘They appeared to be a tribe beyond any that had immediate connection with Europeans’ (210). The novel drives home the message that the radical veneration of primitive life is based on the chimerical visions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and certainly does not stand the test of practical life. Walker’s most trenchant criticism of Rousseau appears in the context of education. When Susan, the wife of Alogos and concubine of Stupeo, dies in childbirth far away from civilization, Stupeo decides to test Rousseau’s pedagogical ideas on the infant: Stupeo undertook the education of the boy, whom he insisted should enjoy perfect freedom, and be allowed to crawl about the house like any other animal. ‘He shall not be thwarted in any thing’, said he: ‘the great Rousseau tells us that we only implant vices into children by pretending to teach them justice, and destroy the temper by checking the sallies of imagination.’ (203)

The narrator comments with bitter irony: ‘Unfortunately for the enlightened system of education, this grand experiment proved abortive. The tender infant sickened, and died of consumption’ (203). When the philosophers start bickering about the causes of the boy’s death, the narrator reverts to full-blown sarcasm: ‘Thus these three great men could not agree upon so insignificant a thing as the death of a child under a grand philosophical experiment’ (204). The word ‘experiment’ was mostly used with a negative connotation by conservative writers to decry any plan for drastic reforms: in the Reflections, for instance, Burke accuses the members of the National Assembly of France of approaching the fabric of government without any respect: ‘But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant for the sake of an experiment.’31 What is more relevant for Walker’s novel than any possible metaphorical dimension of the child is Voltaire and Burke’s allegation that Rousseau was not interested in the well-being of his offspring; this appraisal is here extended to the other radicals. The novel attempts to create the impression that Rousseau’s educational theory, his contemptible neglect of his children and his reverence for savages

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are mutually dependent. When the radical philosophers later discover a sickly child that was simply abandoned in the bush by his Indian parents, Stupeo tries to vindicate the cruel act as a ‘glorious practice’: ‘Of what value is life with an unhealthy or deformed person? We are, in such a case a burden to ourselves and to others’ (211). For Walker and other conservatives, morality, compassion and charity are the result of systematic instruction in Christian values. But even Christians like Stupeo, who after all represents the Dissenting minister William Godwin, may become unfeeling to the most egregious barbarities if they are under the influence of a pernicious philosophy. Whereas for the most part the radicals in Walker’s novel ignorantly drift under Rousseau’s delusions, they are also sometimes portrayed as cunning manipulators who draw upon Rousseau to achieve their licentious ends. Frederick Fenton uses allusions to Rousseau’s writings in order to talk the innocent Laura into yielding to his physical desires. When Laura complains that Frederick’s ‘brothel doctrines’ would lead women ‘to live promiscuously like beasts of the field’, he replies, echoing The Social Contract (Du Contrat social, 1762): ‘And are men not by nature brutes, as the mighty Rousseau has proved to a demonstration?’ (154). A little later Frederick refers to Emile in an attempt to seduce her: ‘If women be formed to please, and be subjected to man, it is her place doubtless to render herself agreeable to him instead of challenging his passion’ (161). When this attempt, too, proves futile, Frederick changes his strategy and tries to kindle Laura’s lust by talking about Julie. But the girl comments very disapprovingly on the novel: ‘And what was St. Preux but a precious sentimental rascal, who, under the sanction of the most sacred friendship, plunders a believing love-sick girl, and talks all the while about virtue and celestial innocence?’ (162). Finally, Frederick has to give up his plans to use literature to lead Laura astray: ‘Frederick found by this discourse that he should not easily contaminate the purity of her mind by the introduction of voluptuous subjects, for he knew of no book more likely to introduce a desire of dissipation than the celebrated Eloisa of Rousseau’ (162). Gregory Dart has shown that conservatives in the late 1790s still feared the influence on the morals of women of Rousseau’s novel and ‘its celebrated prose style’.32 Laura’s unwavering virtue may somewhat compromise the novel’s depiction of Rousseau’s books as dangerous. The Vagabond certainly holds up this character as a heroic model to female readers and follows Burke’s insistence that Rousseau’s theories would eventually be ineffective in Britain, where people still have some decency. The strategy of denouncing radicals’ naïve view of ‘the savage’ quickly became established among anti-Jacobin writers. While Elizabeth Hamilton’s novel

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Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), published a year after The Vagabond, focuses on the middle classes in rural England and refrains from transferring its characters to the wilderness, it still manages to make some sideswipes at the idealization of the ‘noble savage’. All the radicals in the novel fall prey to Rousseau’s apparent misrepresentation of man in a state of nature. They are shown reading Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa (1790), the English translation of a work by François Le Vaillant, the aforementioned follower of Rousseau, which has them in raptures about the Hottentots, whom they praise in grandiose hyperbole: ‘Here is a whole nation of philosophers, all as wise as ourselves! All enjoying the proper dignity of man! Things just as they ought! No man working for another! All alike! All equal! No laws! No government! No coercion! Every one exerting his energies as he pleases!’33 They are so fascinated by this discovery that they even make plans to settle permanently in Africa. But it is not right to say, as Claire Grogan does, that in the novel ‘Philosopher and Hottentot become one and the same’.34 Rather, Hamilton shows that the radicals’ image of the savage is pure fantasy. Mr Myope’s delighted rhetorical questions – ‘What attainments must they have doubtless made in science? What discoveries in philosophy?’ (143) – are met with the sobering explanation that they are merely able to count to ten. The novel repeatedly stresses that the view of the noble savage is based on delusions. In comparison to Walker, Hamilton establishes only a tenuous link between Rousseau’s idealization of the savage and his educational ideas. It is true that one of the radicals, Mr Glib, abandons his family to prepare for the African excursion, but instead of referring to the example of Rousseau, he invokes the authority of Godwin, who has diminished the value of family ties (293–4). However, the novel attacks Rousseau’s ideas concerning the education of girls. The view that women should be taught to please men, presented in Book 5 of Emile, is condemned by the country parson and conservative role model Dr Orwell: ‘A creature instructed in no duty but the art of pleasing, and taught that the sole end of her creation was to attract the attention of men, could not be expected to tread very firmly in the paths of virtue’ (101). With regard to the role of women, the novel does not present the positions of Rousseau and of contemporary radicalism as congruent. The radical anti-hero Bridgetina also criticizes the Swiss philosopher, albeit from a different angle: ‘As to Rousseau, it is plain that he was a stranger to the rights of women’ (101). Surprisingly, Henry Sydney, another conservative paragon, even sides with Mary Wollstonecraft and her critique of Rousseau – but at the same time censures the zeal with which she has gone about the task (101).

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Where the novel clearly sees a connection between Rousseau’s ideas and radicalism is in the realm of love relationships. After elucidating the importance of Rousseau for the cult of sensibility, Chris Jones explains: ‘During the 1790s the attacks on the excesses of sensibility became more pointedly directed at its subversive and individualistic tendencies.’35 In contrast to the conservative characters in the Memoirs, who represent the ideal of emotional control in partnership, the radicals propagate the unbridled reign of the passions. In this they are mostly influenced by Rousseau’s Julie. Both of the central female characters, the aptly named Julia and Bridgetina, have read the novel and have thus become its gullible victims. Unable to distinguish between fiction and reality, they cast themselves in the role of Julie, directing their desires to ostensible incarnations of Saint-Preux. While the beautiful Julia ruins her life because she yields to the Jacobin scoundrel Vallaton, the homely Bridgetina makes a fool of herself by wooing the stately Henry Sydney. As Claire Grogan observes: ‘It is both Bridgetina’s unquestioning devotion to Rousseau and her unrequited, but persistent, love for Henry Sydney that provides the novel’s comic content.’36 Henry’s father speaks for the implied author of the Memoirs when he sweeps aside Rousseau’s novel with the following remarks: ‘“The example of Eloisa!” repeated old Mr. Sydney; “was she not a wanton baggage, who was got with child by her tutor? I remember reading an extract from the book in an old review; and I must say that the world was very little obliged to Mr. Rousseau for publishing such a story”’ (101). The fact that Mr Sydney then permits the possibility that Rousseau nevertheless had good intentions shows that Hamilton stops short of a total condemnation of the philosopher. It is clear that the genre of the anti-Jacobin novel allowed for some variation in the assessment of Rousseau and his philosophy. In Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote (1801), Rousseauvian philosophy is also regarded as harmful, but in comparison to Walker and Hamilton’s novels the discussion of the idealization of the savage has become less important. What remains central to this novel, though, is the misguided understanding of human nature that conservatives generally imputed to Rousseau, and here the focus is on his ideas about the education of children. Like Hamilton, Lucas acknowledges that there are different tendencies within radicalism: The Infernal Quixote distinguishes between several ‘sects’ of ‘modern philosophers’, but devotes the greatest attention to the ‘Naturals’. Even though a footnote argues that Rousseau was a strange ‘compound between a Natural and a Reasoner’,37 the novel leaves no doubt that his greatest influence was on the school of the ‘Naturals’. Lucas clearly constructs the representatives of this ‘sect’, Mr Cloudley and Mrs Cloudley, as followers of Rousseau. Their ideology finds its most

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obvious expression in the pedagogical principles practised at their estate. In accordance with these, the Cloudleys’ children were simply ‘consigned to the direction of the all-instructing goddess, Nature. Clad in check-shirt, a pair of trowsers each (other covering they had none), boys and girls, barefooted and bareheaded, in all seasons and all weathers, ranged, uncontrolled, about the premises’ (215). We learn that these children, ‘like pigs, geese and turkeys’ (215), return to the house whenever they want to eat or drink and often sleep in the stable or barn. Even though there are no explicit quotations from Rousseau in these descriptions, they echo Emile. By associating the children with animals, the novel illustrates the conservative view that a lack of guidance and instruction reduces man to his brutish nature. Apparently following Rousseau’s model of the stages of child development, the  Cloudleys only teach their offspring the alphabet at the age of  ten and then leave them total liberty in the choice of reading material: ‘“Subjects of study,” said  Mrs. and Mr. Cloudley, “we force not on them. In these they can exercise their own will; here they have a choice, a right”’ (216). Their  words serve to highlight the close connection between the private and political aspects  of radicalism. Lucas’s narrator savours the fact that this laissez-faire approach  produces only the poorest results. While the  mental faculties of the  children remain very limited, they exhibit an enormous ‘propensity to mischief ’ (216), but Mr Cloudley’s ideological delusion prevents him from recognizing these shortcomings. The novel reminds the reader that Rousseau’s problematic pedagogical system must not be seen in isolation, but rather springs from a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. When one of the visitors at the Cloudley estate later reflects upon his experiences there, he expresses the following conservative conviction: ‘These conscientious people forget that human nature is ever imperfect of itself; that the mind, from its earliest infancy, will warp one way or other, and therefore it is necessary to turn it towards those principles that seem best’ (224). The novel posits a connection between Mr Cloudley’s pedagogical ideas and his glorification of the state of nature. He flaunts his rejection of cultural constraints with his ‘long matted locks uncombed, … sandals on his feet, short coat or tunic, and belt around his waist’ and proudly calls himself a ‘citizen of nature’ (217). But this quintessential ‘new philosopher’ is portrayed not only as a ludicrous figure but also as a hypocrite when he pulls out the horsewhip to restore peace among his bothersome and aggressive children. Similar to Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, The Infernal Quixote ascribes a particular power to Rousseau’s novels to corrupt the morals of young women, thus associating the Genevan philosopher with wantonness and impropriety.

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The rakish villain Marauder tries to seduce the credulous Emily with the help of modern philosophy and imaginative literature, particularly ‘the celebrated works of Rousseau’ (84). While the narrator does not specify whether Julie is among them, we can infer this from the girl’s reactions: ‘Miss Emily read them with a wonderful avidity and satisfaction, favoured by many marginal notes of her attentive lover’ (84). Emily falls prey to the radical doctrine as well as to the cult of sensibility and elopes with Marauder only a little later. Notwithstanding their different emphases, the novels examined so far are as one in their criticism of Rousseau’s philosophical and moral system. However, the example of Charles Lloyd’s epistolary novel Edmund Oliver (1798) illustrates that the conservative camp was not uniform at that time. Lloyd was exceptional among anti-Jacobin authors for his openness towards Rousseau’s educational ideas. In several respects, Edmund Oliver is a special case, as its ideological orientation is ambiguous. Even though Lloyd professes his allegiance to the antiJacobin cause, for instance in the ‘advertisement’ to the novel,38 the text holds opinions that conflict with other branches of conservatism.39 Coming from a Quaker background, Lloyd maintained a pacifist attitude at a time when loyalists were uniting behind the national cause in the French Revolutionary Wars. Lloyd’s rather positive attitude towards Rousseau is part of his distinctive worldview.40 Rousseau’s Emile appears to be a particularly strong influence on Lloyd’s novel, in which educational methods are discussed at some length. It is true that Rousseau is not mentioned explicitly – that would no doubt have compromised further Lloyd’s credentials as an enemy of radicalism41 – but Rousseau’s pedagogy has a palpable presence. For instance, in a letter by the eponymous hero, we find the following advice on how to deal with children, which clearly echoes the concept of ‘negative education’ presented in the second book of Emile: ‘In fact, what you have to do is to do nothing. – Education is rather a negative than a positive process’ (201). That this theory entails liberty as well as the protection from harmful factors is also exemplified in the educational practice of another character: ‘Basil suffers his children to do whatever they like; he never restrains them, but takes care that nothing shall be put in their way which should tempt them to mischief ’ (203). It is not the case that all of the educational principles explored in the novel can necessarily be traced back to Rousseau. For instance, Basil’s practice, seemingly endorsed by the action of the novel, of confining infants alone to a room for hours without reacting to their cries in order to teach them ‘to consider all the purposes of their father as unalterable’ (204) shows the strong belief in patriarchal authority that is typical of 1790s conservatism.42 But there is evidently a hesitation

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between this kind of conservatism and an openness towards Rousseau’s ideas, as can also be seen in Lloyd’s depiction of the simple life: the ‘rural utopia’ that is presented at the end of the novel on the one hand betrays Rousseau’s influence, but on the other it relies on established norms and mores.43 Most critics agree with Marilyn Butler’s verdict that ‘no novelist on the conservative side who matured in the 1790s had a distinctive talent’.44 What is more, critics tend both to deny these authors literary qualities and to be sceptical about their philosophical insights: Matthew Grenby, for instance, claims that anti-Jacobinism ‘was more propaganda than ideology’.45 While we may not celebrate anti-Jacobin novels for their philosophical complexity, it should nevertheless be acknowledged that their propaganda was based on some deepseated assumptions – which may be called philosophical – about man, society and culture. The prominent role that Rousseau and his theories play in these texts can be explained only partly by his personal notoriety. It is true that Rousseau serves as a projection screen for conservative anxieties: we look in vain for a fair and thoroughgoing examination of his ideas. But below the surface of scorn and derision, Walker, Hamilton and Lucas’s novels express serious concerns that Rousseau’s philosophical system is fundamentally flawed. It is particularly his alleged misunderstanding of human nature that raised serious objections, because it had repercussions on several issues that were central to conservatism at that time: the formative influence of civilization and culture, the education of children, gender roles and love relations. Generally following the direction set by Edmund Burke, these works of narrative fiction elaborate on the presumed implications of Rousseau’s system to a much greater extent than Burke’s pamphlets. The examples discussed here have also shown that there is some variation in the criticism, and that Lloyd’s novel even endorses central tenets of Rousseau’s pedagogy. Irrespective of their individual approaches, the genre of the anti-Jacobin novel shows that Rousseau continued to exert an enormous influence on the debates of the 1790s and beyond.

Notes 1

See, for example, Thomas P. Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, The Historical Journal 29, no. 3 (1986): 601–22; Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, The English Historical Review 110, no. 435 (1995): 42–69.

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See, for example, Matthew O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); W. M. Verhoeven, ‘General Introduction’, in Anti-Jacobin Novels, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 1:vii–lxxv; Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3 See, for instance, Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 106; Gregory Claeys, ‘Introduction’, in Political Writings of the 1790s: French Revolution Debate in Britain, ed. G. Claeys (London: Pickering, 1995), 1:li, whose stance implicitly recalls an earlier critical tradition illustrated by, amongst others, Allene Gregory, The French Revolution and the English Novel (New York: Putnams, 1915), B. Sprague Allen, ‘The Reaction against William Godwin’, Modern Philology 16 (1918), 57–75 and Joyce M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (London: Methuen, 1932). See also Grenby, The AntiJacobin Novel, 227, who acknowledges the tendency to read the anti-Jacobin novel primarily as anti-Godwinian: ‘Ford K. Brown and Don Locke, in their biographies of Godwin, are particularly guilty of regarding him as virtually the sole subject of the anti-Jacobin novelists, and end up rather too over-zealously charting his “appearances” in fiction’; his references are to Ford K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), 31–2; Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 113–4, 157–9. 4 It is noticeable that the classic accounts of Rousseau’s reception in Britain take very little account of the anti-Jacobin novel: see, for example, Henri Roddier, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre au XVIII siècle: l’œuvre et l’homme (Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1950), 37, who briefly discusses Robert Bage’s Hermsprong, or Man As He Is Not (1796), Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796) and Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher, Nature His Law and God His Guide (1798), all of which are, incidentally, regarded as ‘Jacobin novels’ by Nancy E. Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jacques Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques et la légende (Paris: Didier, 1956), 226–7, who mentions Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver (1798), albeit without interpreting its relation to Rousseau; and Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 33, who argues that the philosopher ‘became an eponym for revolutionary mischief ’ at the time of William Pitt the Younger’s ministry, though he does not consider the English novel. 5 Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 76. 6 Ibid., 77. 2

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See John G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), who notes that ‘we cannot say that it immediately became the bible of counter-revolutionary thought’ (xl). 8 Duffy, Rousseau in England, 37. 9 Richard Bourke, ‘Burke, Enlightenment and Romanticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke, ed. David Dwan and Christopher J. Insole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34. 10 Claire Brock, ‘Rousseauvian Remains’, History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 134–51. 11 Duffy, Rousseau in England, 37. 12 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition, ed. Jonathan C. D. Clark (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 342. 13 Ibid., 249. 14 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:441. 15 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, The Early Writings, ed. T. O. McLoughlin and James T. Boulton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1:265; Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Clark, 357; ‘Speech in Reply, 12 June 1794’, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, India: The Hastings Trials, 1789–1794, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 7:540. 16 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Clark, 226. 17 See Brock, ‘Rousseauvian Remains’, 134. 18 See Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 753. 19 See Duffy, Rousseau in England, 38. 20 Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 124. 21 Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, The French Revolution, 1790–1794, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 8:315. See also Evan Radcliffe, ‘Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 2 (1993): 234. 22 Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 315. 23 George Huddesford, Topsy Turvy: With Anecdotes and Observations Illustrative of Leading Characters in the Present Government of France (London: J. Anderson, 1793), 27. 24 See David Johnson, ‘Representing the Cape “Hottentots” from the French Enlightenment to Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 525–52, who observes: ‘Rousseau’s opposition between European 7

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civilization’s worship of luxury and complacent acceptance of inequality, and m ­ anin-a-state-of-nature’s practical egalitarianism, is faithfully echoed in Levaillant’s writings’ (535). 25 See Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 19–24. 26 George Walker, The Vagabond. A Novel, ed. W. M. Verhoeven (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 54. All subsequent quotations from The Vagabond will be from this edition; page numbers will be included in the text. 27 See Hugh H. MacMullan, ‘The Satire of Walker’s Vagabond on Rousseau and Godwin’, PMLA 52, no. 1 (1937): 215–29, who argues that the novel ‘concerns itself with Jean-Jacques Rousseau merely in passing’ (217) and goes on to observe: ‘Many of Stupeo’s remarks are direct quotations or close paraphrases of Godwin; hence the reader cannot avoid connecting the two men. By creating such an association between a real man and an imaginary character, Walker, in permitting his creation to perform in a revolting manner, can cause in the reader a distrust of Godwin the man, unfounded in fact’ (224). 28 Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46–7. 29 Ibid., 120–1. 30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. and ed. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly and Terence Marshall, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 3:43; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Jean Starobinski, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:164. 31 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Clark, 337–8. 32 Dart, Rousseau, 125. 33 Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000), 141. All subsequent quotations from the Memoirs will be from this edition; page numbers will be included in the text. It is true that Rousseau refers to the Hottentots in the Discourse on Inequality to illustrate the physical faculties of man in a state of nature, but he never attributes any philosophical abilities to them: see Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. and ed. Bush, Masters, Kelly and Marshall, 25; cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Starobinski, 141. For Rousseau’s view of the Hottentots, see Johnson, ‘Representing the Cape “Hottentots”’, 532–3. 34 Claire Grogan, ‘Identifying Foreign Bodies: New Philosophers and Hottentots in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18, no. 3 (2006): 318. 35 Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 3.

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36 Claire Grogan, ‘Introduction’, in Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Grogan, 20–1. 37 Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote. A Tale of the Day, ed. Matthew O. Grenby (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 194. All subsequent quotations from The Infernal Quixote will be from this edition; page numbers will be included in the text. 38 Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver, ed. Philip Cox, in Anti-Jacobin Novels, ed. Verhoeven, 2: 3. All subsequent quotations from the Memoirs will be from this edition; page numbers will be included in the text. 39 For a discussion of the novel’s ideological position, see Pascal Fischer, Literarische Entwürfe des Konservatismus in England 1790 bis 1805 (Munich: Fink, 2010), 129–32. 40 See Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre, 223, who regards Lloyd as an important mediator of Rousseauvian ideas in England; Richard C. Allen, ‘Charles Lloyd, Coleridge, and Edmund Oliver’, Studies in Romanticism 35, no. 2 (1996): 245–94, who demonstrates that in 1794 Lloyd warmly recommended Emile to his brother (252). 41 How keen Lloyd was to be regarded as a conservative can be seen in his Letter to the Anti-Jacobin Reviewers (Birmingham: James Belcher, 1799). 42 For the patriarchal character of Edmund Burke’s political system, see Mary Jean Corbett, ‘Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the “Common Naturalization” of Great Britain’, ELH 61, no. 4 (1994): 879. 43 See Paul Keen, ‘A “Memorable Greave”: The Abject Subtext in Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver’, in Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850, ed. E. J. Clery, Caroline Franklin and Peter Garside (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 206. 44 Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 88. 45 Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 65.

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‘The Scene Itself ’: Rousseauvian Drama and Roman Space in Shelley’s The Cenci Rebecca Nesvet

The actor is both the greatest resource of freedom and the subtlest instrument of repression.1 Percy Shelley followed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s footsteps – quite literally. In 1816 he wrote from Geneva that the ‘enchantment’ which ‘the scene itself ’ lent to his reading of Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) revealed to him for the first time ‘the divine beauty of Rousseau’s imagination’.2 Shelley’s imaginative transposition of the figure of Rousseau writing Julie to nineteenth-century Geneva transforms the city into a stage. If Peter Brook is right to say that one ‘can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’ because ‘all that is needed for an act of theatre’ is for a ‘man [to] walk … across [an] empty space whilst someone else is watching’,3 Shelley’s interaction with Rousseau’s spectre in Geneva constitutes extremely minimalist theatre. Shelley’s theatricalization of Geneva might seem ironic in the light of Rousseau’s insistence, in his Letter to d’Alembert (Lettre à d’Alembert, 1758), that the same city remain without a state theatre, a position that has led one critic to call Rousseau ‘one of the most implacable enemies the theatre has ever had’.4 However, there is plenty of evidence that Rousseau was not so much an anti-theatrical villain as a would-be theatre reformer. As David Wiles argues, Rousseau’s supposedly anti-theatrical rhetoric in fact targets the political tyranny that the modern French theatre helps to maintain and offers hope that performance can be repurposed as a medium of civic political education.5 Jérôme Brillaud notes that Rousseau consistently represents indoor theatre as a prison and credits theatre al fresco – such as the ancient Greek and Roman amphitheatre and the Swiss fête – with the capacity to promote civic participation and Republican values.6 As Vanessa de Senarclens demonstrates,

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Rousseau understood ancient Greek and republican Roman theatre as politically constructive entertainment that motivated citizens and soldiers to discern tyranny and fight for freedom.7 Ancient performance forms, Rousseau believed, could support self-government in Geneva or any other Republican state. Can Rousseauvian theatre, as I shall call the ideal described earlier, also inspire tyrannized populations to rise up and found republican governments? I shall argue that Shelley explores this question in his stage play The Cenci: A Domestic Tragedy (1819). As Michael Demson has shown, The Cenci is a radical drama and also an intentionally Rousseauvian one, as it realizes the civic purpose to which Rousseau, in the Letter to d’Alembert, tries to harness spectacle.8 Extending Demson’s work, I contend that The Cenci functions as a Rousseauvian drama specifically by celebrating Rome’s republican political history, calling for the reanimation of the Roman Republic in its original ‘scene itself ’ – and perhaps in other spaces, too. A key to this agenda is the play’s recreation of Roman space. Shelley dwells on the Roman setting of the story, noting the presence of classical ruins and the moral decay of early modern Rome. He reconceives his quasi-historical heroine, the early modern Roman noblewoman Beatrice Cenci, as a Roman matron, a literary figure of classical origin associated in Romantic-era culture with republican political fervour. As Philip Hicks has noted, the Roman matron saw a marked revival of interest in late eighteenth-century Europe and America: in this interpretive tradition as in its sources, Roman matrons were ‘political heroines who had made key contributions to the Roman republic’ or ‘defied the corruption of imperial Rome’.9 Reading Beatrice Cenci as the Roman matron of a republican – and therefore Rousseauvian – didactic drama reveals Shelley’s reinvention of her ordeal as a call for the rejuvenation of a model republic in and beyond its Roman birthplace. Theatre makes spectators acutely conscious of the role of space in story, and, depending on the subject matter, in history. Both Rousseau’s writings on and in the medium of drama and The Cenci turn to the space of Rome – an ‘empty space’ insofar as political morality is concerned – as a resonant stage for the revival of republican civic spectacle. That Rousseau’s dramaturgical ideas inspired Shelley should come as no surprise, for Rousseau’s achievements in theatre and performance theory were well known by Shelley’s era, even in England. Rousseau’s theatrical works include several operettas. The best known, The Village Soothsayer (Le Devin du village, 1752), was first performed before the royal court at Fontainebleau and then for the public, the following year, by the Académie Royale de Musique at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. Rousseau could have become a

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prominent court dramatist, but he refused Louis XV’s invitation.10 Meanwhile, The Village Soothsayer entered the international repertoire, making Rousseau’s name as a dramatist. It was translated into German (1764) and English (The Cunning Man, 1767). The English version was written by Charles Burney, brother of the novelist Fanny Burney, who described the French original as one of the most successful works of the era’s repertory: ‘No production of the same kind was ever more admired, or more frequently performed abroad.’11 Even more impressive, perhaps, was Rousseau’s contribution to musicology as the major contributor to the Encyclopédie of articles on music and as the author of a Dictionary of Music (Dictionnaire de musique, 1767). His involvement, along with Rameau (the pre-eminent music theorist of his time), Diderot and d’Alembert, in the 1753 ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ cemented his engagement with musicology. In this quarrel, Rousseau attacked the French musical tradition and promoted Italian comic opera in its stead – as he had done in Le Devin, which owes much to Italian comic sources. As Cynthia Verra observes, Rousseau’s intervention in the discourse of music in fact encompassed ‘some of the most important philosophical issues of the French Enlightenment: the nature of artistic expression, the nature of scientific inquiry, and the respective roles of reason and experience in art and science’.12 Rousseau’s contribution to the debate also echoes his convictions about theatre history. French opera, like French theatre, is a hopelessly tyrannical tradition, he argues, made so by the French language’s propensity to support tyranny. He claims that since the days of the ancient theatre – which, as Aristotle emphasizes, incorporated music as a generic marker – opera overall has been in decline. However, in Italian opera, grounded in the more liberal tones of Italian, he sees hope for the rejuvenation of musical theatre and society.13 This conviction allows Rousseau once again to integrate his musical, performance and political theories, as the Italian language derives from Latin, the tongue of the ancient Republic, spoken in both the Forum and the theatres. To revive a Republican civic performance tradition was the rhetorical purpose of some of Rousseau’s non-musical playwriting. His unfinished Death of Lucretia (La Mort de Lucrèce, c. 1756) aims to reform politics by promoting republican policies and values. David Wiles points out that, in dramatizing this story, already recently appropriated from Livy by Voltaire in his verse tragedy Brutus (1730), Rousseau aimed to create ‘a republican manifesto’ in the genre of the public political debate.14 Eschewing the artifice he associated with French drama, Rousseau created the debate by giving Lucretia’s Republican father an adversary in her initially weak-willed husband, a cowed sycophant of the tyrannical

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prince Sextus Tarquin. The use of prose instead of verse reinforces the play’s generic identity as a scripted debate. Rousseau also makes Lucretia politically compelling by making her conform to the model of the Roman matron. Alone with Sulpitius, Sextus’s confidant, Pauline, Lucrèce’s confidant, describes her thus: ‘Since having become acquainted with this sweet and sensitive, but virtuous and steadfast, character I have become convinced that Lucretia, fully the mistress of her heart and passions, is capable of loving nothing but her husband and duty.’15 As Melissa Matthes explains, Lucrèce provides Parisian theatregoers with a ‘useful heroine’ who would inspire them to attempt a ‘renewal of the [Roman] republic’ in France: her body functions in life and death as ‘a representation of meaning signalling women’s role in the future republic as silent signifiers who are the carriers of culture and cultural value, but are not participants or makers of it’.16 This dutiful political performance reinforces the heroine’s identification as a Roman matron. Long after Rousseau had abandoned Lucrèce, his thought continued to integrate republican rhetoric and theatre reform. In 1758, when Jean le Rond d’Alembert published in the Encyclopédie an article on Rousseau’s native state, the Republic and Canton of Geneva, with a substantial digression on the necessity (as d’Alembert perceived it) of ending Geneva’s ban on public theatre, Rousseau was outraged. In the Letter to d’Alembert, he calls d’Alembert ‘the first Philosopher who ever encouraged a free people, a small city, and a poor State to burden itself with a public Theatre’ and asks whether this would be a beneficial innovation for such a state.17 He pays particular attention to d’Alembert’s assumption that Parisian-style theatre is compatible with republican political culture. He questions whether theatre can coexist with what he calls ‘republican austerity’ (261; 14). In response, he argues that it depends upon the kind of spectacle and the political tradition from which it grew. Rousseau approves of the performance traditions of the free states of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, and he even finds a place for public performance in the modern republican state. He admits that Romans have performed in improvisational comedy (Attelanes) and processionals (Exodes) ‘without dishonour’ (10; 71). He  approves of Spartan girls’ civic dances and of Geneva’s own civic festivals (350; 122). Both of these, he points out, are celebrated publicly, outdoors, in the open air (343; 114). It is only the French or British actors, servants of monarchies, whose theatre tends to be enclosed and performed for a court or paying audience that he bans from invading Geneva (349; 121). Rousseau’s ideal theatre must both author and authorize republican political life, for all and out in the open.

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In the generations that immediately followed Rousseau, his French and British successors in the theatre community sometimes realized aspects of his dramatic ideal, whether or not they consciously associated it with the philosopher. In 1785, Covent Garden produced the popular playwright Thomas Holcroft’s The Follies of a Day, translated from Beaumarchais’s controversial comedy La Folle Journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro, which, as W. D. Howarth explains, was suppressed by ‘direct opposition from the King and Court rather than through the opposition of a formal censor’ prior to its 1784 premiere.18 In 1790s, as David Karr has shown, London’s patent theatres became radical spaces: spectators learned from the stage action how ‘to demand their perceived rights as English subjects’, alarming anti-Jacobin authorities.19 Shelley might have been aware of this history on account of his father-in-law William Godwin’s close friendship with Holcroft, who influenced Godwin while he wrote his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Godwin also wrote plays, including Abbas and Antonio, the latter of which was publicly staged.20 One of the major themes of Antonio is individual liberty threatened by monarchic autocracy. The anti-hero Antonio, a medieval Spanish war hero, is outraged that his sister has married without his permission, so he has her kidnapped and imprisoned. In Act IV he promises to give her ‘liberty’ on condition that she reject her husband, which she counters with a scoffing response: Set me at liberty! I will not be Control’d. Set me at liberty! Why dost thou mock me with thy reasonings? Am I not thy prisoner? Think not, thou Canst cheat my soul! I’ll not attend to reason, Till I am free to do what reason bids.21

Accused of being a wild and ‘Pyrennean’ creature, Helena actually practises selfrule via reason, the ideal of revolutionary France. In production, Antonio failed, but its stage realization attests to the 1790s London patent theatre’s openness to drama that intervenes in political life – the exact sort of drama that Rousseau endorses in his Letter. Of a more obviously radical nature was the Regency Poet Laureate Robert Southey’s play Wat Tyler. Composed in the 1790s, when Southey identified as a radical, Wat Tyler dramatized the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, with obvious allusions to the French Revolution. It was controversially pirated in 1817 and immediately repudiated by the embarrassed Laureate. Other plays in this radical English theatre tradition enlisted the figure of the Roman matron to stir up the audience

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to seek political reform. A good example is John Philip Kemble’s play Coriolanus, or the Roman Matron, which premiered in 1789 and was revived periodically on the London stage until 1817. Adapted from Shakespeare and Livy via the eighteenth-century dramatists James Thomson and Thomas Sheridan, the play clearly defines the Roman matron’s character and values.22 According to an 1811 prompt-book, Mrs Siddons’s Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, with ‘flashing eyes and proudest smile, and head erect, hands pressed firmly against her bosom […] towered above all around her, and rolled […] across the stage’, contrasting sharply with ‘Shakespeare’s visionary and austere dowager’.23 She calls her fellow ‘matrons’ the ‘guardians of Roman safety’, and her own lines best define her: Hear me, proud man! – I have A heart as stout as thine: I came not hither To be sent back rejected, baffled, sham’d … . A Roman matron knows, in such extremes, What part to take … . To die, while Rome is free.24

Threatening suicide to force her son to ethical action, she projects stoicism and patriotism that put him to shame. It is not a coincidence that this play premiered in the year of the outbreak of the French Revolution and was intermittently revived throughout the succeeding era of British political radicalism and reaction, an era in which the patent theatres were demonstrably invested in radical politics.25 Michael Demson reads The Cenci in relation to this radical theatre scene. He sees Shelley’s play as a ‘critique of the degeneration of popular theatre’ since those days and a ‘radical recasting of theatrical poetics that agitates’, as Rousseau explicitly advised, ‘for a political response from the audience through a re-enactment of social history’.26 Extending this investigation of The Cenci as a Rousseauvian script, I want to argue that Shelley turns its apocryphal Roman heroine into a classical Roman matron in order to make the play argue for the restoration of ancient Rome’s republican government in its original location and, by extension, for comparable political revivals in his own postrevolutionary era. Reading The Cenci as a Republican spectacle reveals Shelley’s fulfilment of Rousseau’s frustrated dramatic revolution. Set in early modern Rome, The Cenci is an adaptation of the apocryphal history of Beatrice Cenci, a Roman noblewoman who was executed in 1599 for the murder of her own father, Conte Francesco Cenci. Their home, the Palazzo Cenci, still embellishes Rome’s Lungotevere Cenci, roughly contiguous to the old Jewish district and

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the ancient ruins of Mount Palatine.27 According to a local legend that Shelley endorses, Francesco Cenci (in the play, ‘Count Cenci’) raped Beatrice after successfully commissioning the murders of two of her four brothers. Cowed by the autocratic power of the Pope, whose expensive pardons keep Cenci from paying for his extravagantly public crimes, the men of Rome refuse to listen to Beatrice’s accusations, to save her from Cenci’s domestic tyranny or to acquit her of murder. In Demson’s words, Beatrice cries out for the audience ‘to be not passive in the world, but actors themselves who respond to the call for social justice’: this revolutionary play creates ‘a live confrontation with the economic forces that stratify society’, making it intelligible as protest theatre in the nineteenth century and today.28 In this sense, it responds to Rousseau’s programme for radical theatricality. What has hitherto not been recognized is the way in which the Roman setting of The Cenci plays a key role in its republican and therefore Rousseauvian agenda. ‘The Scene lies principally in Rome’, Shelley claims, ‘but changes during the Fourth Act to Petrella, a castle among the Apuleian Appennines’. Here, Shelley downplays the drama’s one dramaturgically essential non-Roman setting, emphasizing instead Rome’s centrality. Not only is The Cenci set in Rome, it is also inspired by an unacknowledged republic of modern Romans. ‘A Manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome’, Shelley declares at the beginning of his preface to the play; it relates ‘the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599’.29 He repeatedly emphasizes Beatrice Cenci’s haunting of modern Rome: upon his ‘arrival at Rome’, he claims, the population pestered him with ‘the story of the Cenci’. That story acts as an instrument of political reform, gathering the Romans into a republic of gossips: ‘All ranks of people knew her history’ and wished to discuss it. Beatrice herself, in death, Shelley saw as a representation of the people despite her aristocratic background. He imagined her of the people as well as among them, ‘mingled two centuries with the common dust’.30 This posthumous activity gives Beatrice’s corpse the alchemical quality of Rousseau’s Lucrèce: the power to create the political change that she could not create in life. And of course, the population that both women stir up is that of Rome. Shelley’s Cenci explicitly evokes Rome’s republican past. As Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey argues, Shelley’s ‘Romantic geography’ often includes thematically significant settings, such as the Indian Caucasus (the subject of debates about the location of the Ark), the interior regions of Africa visited by the tragic overland explorer Mungo Park and the Indian empire of Alexander

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the Great.31 With similar attention to geography’s fine detail and political significance, Shelley builds an indexical Rome through the dialogue in The Cenci, especially in the expositional opening scenes. Count Cenci haggles with the Church over a part of his patrimony, some land that ‘lies beyond the Pincian Gate’ (1.1.3). According to Shelley’s main Roman guidebook, A Tour through Italy (1813) by the Anglo-Irish Catholic priest and antiquary John Chetwode Eustace, ‘the Pincian hills, with temples, palaces, and gardens lining their sides, and swelling from their summits, must have formed a picture of astonishing beauty, splendour, and variety, and have justified the proud appellation so often bestowed on Rome, “of the temple and abode of the gods”’.32 Its Roman builders have since been superseded by the sixteenth-century despot Cenci and his clients, the Pope’s secret sons, one of whom explicitly challenges the ancients by deciding ‘to build a villa’ in the Pincian plot (1.1.19). Beatrice’s name-dropping of landmarks also invokes the Republic’s rise and fall. ‘Underneath the moonlit ruins of Mount Palatine’, Beatrice reminds Orsino, ‘I did confess to you my secret mind’, to which he replies: ‘You said you loved me then’ (1.2.5–8). She evokes a space to make Orsino remember his original promise, a sign of virtue that he has since discarded. Similarly, Roman ruins sometime reminded Rousseau of the inspiring ancient Roman past. In the Confessions, as Louisa Shea notes, Rousseau recalls his youthful fascination with the Pont du Gard, a Roman ruin that reminded ancien régime Paris of an alternative political order.33 Although later in life Rousseau considered such ruins less able to invoke the political liberty of their Roman builders, Shelley would have known his earlier outlook from the Confessions. Indeed, for Shelley in 1819 Mount Palatine must have seemed a symbol of lost Roman liberty. That is how it appears in Mary Shelley’s unfinished novel Valerius, the Reanimated Roman, which, like The Cenci, was composed in 1819. Her hero, who enters a state of suspended vitality during the Republican era and wakes up, to his horror, in the nineteenth-century present, likes Mount Palatine and Mount Caelius because the modern builders have left them alone. Mourning the Republic, he tries to rouse the Scottish heroine, Lady Isabell Harley, and her English husband to anger against the modern Italians, whom he considers weak, degenerate descendants of his Republican contemporaries, on account of their acceptance of tyrannical government. Like Valerius, the Shelleys knew Rome not only as the ‘scene’ of a past Republic but also as a potential (re)birthplace of modern Republican government and, more generally, a site of resistance to tyranny. According to Eustace’s guidebook, ‘while the French occupied Rome in the years 1798–9, &c. they erected in the

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centre of the Coliseum a temporary theatre, where they acted various republican pieces for the amusement of the army, and the improvement, I fancy, of such Romans as might be disposed to fraternize with them and adopt their principles’.34 Thus transformed into a theatre of republican agitprop, the Coliseum became the scene of a real-life farce that eerily anticipates ‘Ozymandias’: Voltaire’s Brutus, as may easily be imagined, was a favourite tragedy; and in order to give it more effect, it was resolved to transport the very statue of Pompey, at the feet of which the dictator [Caesar] had fallen, to the Coliseum, and to erect it on the stage. The colossal size of the statue, and its extended arm, rendered it difficult to displace it; the arm was therefore sawed off, for the conveyance, and put on again at the Coliseum; and on the second removal of the statue, again taken off, and again replaced at the Palazzo de Spada. So friendly to Pompey was the republican enthusiasm of the French! So favourable to the arts and antiquities of Rome, their Love of Liberty!35

The anti-Jacobin Eustace could barely disguise his horror. It might have pleased Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci, though. Like Napoleon and Valerius, she attempts to rouse Rome to reinstate its republic. Stuart Curran praises The Cenci’s ‘accomplished rhetoric, its vigorous directness, its lack of any pose’ and ‘its hard but resilient surface’, which together, he suggests, make it ‘a great poetic drama’.36 Read in relation to Rousseau’s dramaturgical intervention, these qualities make this prose tragedy a great scripted debate – like Rousseau’s Lucrèce. A close reading of The Cenci reveals more parallels with the ideal republican theatre envisioned by Rousseau. Shelley’s opening stasis shows the characters despising Cenci’s tyranny as part of a pattern of modern Italian political dysfunction, but helpless to resist it. Beatrice’s brother Giacomo lists ‘the memorable torturers of this land’, namely ‘Visconti, Borgia, Ezzelin’ (2.2.49) – all of whom Shelley appears to have cited, according to Michael Rossington, from disparaging accounts in C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, 1818).37 However, Giacomo tends to complain rather than act, and his normative, repetitive response to absolute misery is suicidal ideation. Shelley asserts that Cenci is able to tyrannize over his family and the general Roman population because of the absence of representative government, a key aspect of republican government. Shelley most clearly reveals this political dynamic when Beatrice’s duplicitous suitor, the young priest Orsino, offers to serve as her intermediary by presenting the Pope with a petition she has written, begging to be rescued from her father’s domestic tyranny. Instead, Orsino disposes of

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the petition and pretends that the Pope has disregarded it. Had Beatrice not settled for an intermediary, and made her own case as a Roman citizen, the play’s catastrophe – the murder of Count Cenci – might have been avoided. Instead, the frustration of Beatrice’s attempt at political self-representation compels her to demand political reform, at least in her own household. She begs Cenci’s banquet attendees to intervene to save her family. They constitute particularly modern, monarchical, Christian authorities, as Cenci reveals: Welcome, my friends and kinsmen; welcome ye, Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church, Whose presence honours our festivity. I have too long lived like an anchorite, And in my absence from your merry meetings An evil word is gone abroad of me; But I do hope that you, my noble friends, When you have shared the entertainment here, And heard the pious cause for which ’tis given, And we have pledged a health or two together, Will think me flesh and blood as well as you; Sinful indeed, for Adam made all so, But tender-hearted, meek and pitiful. (1.3.1–13)

His daughter frames her request as an opposition between republican and imperial systems: ‘Can one tyrant overbear/The sense of many best and wisest men?’ (1.3.132–3). Imperial Rome had been governed by autocratic ‘tyrants’, who overthrew collective rule. By insisting that a group of men chosen for their wisdom might be able to vanquish a solitary tyrant and govern better than him, Beatrice promotes republican government. At this civic event, she tries to bring republican rule back to Rome. She exhorts the men of 1599 Rome to effect this revolution just as the dying Lucretia exhorted the men of Tarquin’s Rome. This rhetoric is essentially republican because it privileges fraternal cohesion over patriarchal authority. Beatrice speaks up in outrage at the death of her brothers, choosing to align herself with them as a fraternity, and in so doing she rejects submission to her father. As Melissa Matthes explains, in the Lucretia-myth tradition of political rhetoric, the Republic (any republic) tends to arise from literal or symbolic fraternity, such as that of Brutus, Collatine and Lucretia’s father Lucretius, and to contest patrilineal authority, such as that which Sextus Tarquin derives from his royal father: this type of origin authorizes the idea of the Republic, which is a fraternity of rulers rather than a

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vertical hierarchy.38 In The Cenci, one banquet guest, Cardinal Camillo, echoes Beatrice’s demand that the Romans act in fraternity, but they refuse: Camillo. Can we do nothing? Colonna. Nothing that I see. Count Cenci were a dangerous enemy. Yet I would second any one. A Cardinal. And I. (1.3.142–4)

None will act unilaterally. Together, these officials affirm that Rome had indeed declined into tyranny again because they (unlike the Republic’s founders) behave as their tyrant’s cowed children, not his victims’ brothers. Sic semper tyrannis is not the cry of Beatrice’s contemporaries. She alone transforms herself into a female Brutus – that is, a Roman republican matron. If Beatrice raises the ghosts of Rome’s republican matrons, so does her stepmother, but in the negative. This woman – whose historical counterpart was conveniently named Lucrezia Cenci, née Petroni – is Roman and maternal. However, unlike the classical matrons, she is also weak, despairing and selfish. As such, Shelley’s Lucretia serves as a foil to the original Lucretia of Rome, with the Latin rather than Italian spelling of her name possibly even encouraging an unflattering comparison between this Roman Lucretia and her ancient original. During the banquet, while Cenci reports his sons’ deaths, his wife ‘fell into a trance’, requiring Beatrice to catch her (2.1.41). Conversely, by Lucretia Cenci’s own admission, Beatrice ‘alone stood up, and with strong words,/Checked his unnatural pride’, so that ‘the devil was rebuked that lives in him’ (2.1.43– 5). Lucretia’s cowardly enabling of tyranny exacerbates her children’s misery. She dismisses Cenci’s abuse, telling Bernardo not to cry: He struck but me Who have borne deeper wrongs. In truth, if he Had killed me, he had done a kinder deed. … Yet, weep not: though I love you as my own, I am not your true mother. (2.1.1–3, 6–7)

Her speech aims to dissuade Bernardo from sadness and from outrage. Her ‘wrongs’ may have been worse than his, but she wishes for nothing but death,

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is unwilling to resist Cenci, deploys her own suffering to minimize and dismiss the young boys and even encourages him to have no compassion for her, as she is not his ‘true mother’. She treats Beatrice similarly, complaining that Beatrice is fortunate because she might marry out of the household, while she (Lucretia) has more cause for ‘despair’, because she ‘loved him [Cenci] once, and now must live with him’ until ‘God in pity call for him or’ her (2.1.81–3). In an absurd perversion of the uxorial loyalty of the ancient Roman matrons, whose fidelity to their husbands was proportionate to the husbands’ heroic virtue, she insists that nobody must revolt against Cenci, because their sufferings are not worse than his wife’s, and she cannot or will not resist or leave. Nor does Lucretia inspire bravery in her (step)son. She tells Bernardo that taking action against Cenci’s abuses is unthinkable: ‘Alas! Poor boy, what else’ besides cry ‘could’st thou have done?’ (2.1.11). Unlike the original Lucretia, who inspired her men to fight back against tyrants and, in so doing, made herself the mother of the Republic she did not live to see, Lucretia Cenci looks cowardly because her passivity endangers others. When arrested for Cenci’s murder, she once again faints: ‘an ill appearance, this’, remarks the arresting officer, the Legate Savella (4.4.177). In the play’s denouement, Lucretia’s suicidal tendency helps to send Beatrice, Giacomo and herself to the scaffold, because she lacks the fortitude to endure torture in silence. She confesses to the murder and implicates her stepchildren. She admits her guilt in this: ‘To what a dreadful end are we all come’, she observes, before adding: ‘Why did I yield? Why did I not sustain/These torments?’ (5.3.107– 9). Also acknowledging her stepmother’s guilt, Beatrice finally rebukes her: ‘What ‘twas weak to do’/‘Tis weaker to lament, once having done’ (5.3.112– 3). A mother who causes her children’s deaths to limit her own pain, this sixteenth-century Lucretia shows how far Roman women have declined from their republican exemplae. Beatrice’s elder brother Giacomo Cenci is an equally pitiful modern shadow of the Republic’s brave sons of Rome. Giacomo becomes most angry at his father, not for rejoicing in his brothers’ deaths or maltreating his stepmother and sister, but for stealing his (Giacomo’s) inheritance, thereby causing his wife to ‘scorn’ him (3.1.323). Giacomo regrets his penury because it reduces his estate from ‘thrice-driven beds of down, and delicate food’, ‘an hundred servants, and six palaces’ to ‘that which nature doth require’ (2.2.14–5). Rousseau’s idea of the republican citizen (Roman or Genevan) would disdain these luxuries and find survival upon ‘what nature doth require’ sufficient. Despondent, Giacomo tries to kill himself out of hopelessness and shame, insisting that his suicide is

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inevitable. He and his siblings are left by their tyrannical father ‘as scorpions ring’d with fire’, he claims: ‘What can we do but strike ourselves to death?’ (2.2.70–1). Ultimately, Giacomo is executed for his passive role in the conspiracy to murder his father, which Beatrice and Orsino more forcefully stage-manage and which hired assassins commit. Giacomo is no modern Brutus and, in conflict with his materialistic wife, hardly even a modern Collatine. Terrified of fomenting revolution, he dies because the tyranny that he would not resist contains his desperate, feeble strike against one of its many Hydra heads. One character ultimately lives up to his Roman republican heritage – and he is inspired to do so by the oratory and spectacle that affirm Beatrice’s role as a Roman matron and make the play legible as a metatheatrical commentary on the progressive potential of Rousseauvian drama. The youngest Cenci sibling, Bernardo, spends much of the play simply watching the histrionic political machinations of his relatives, primarily Count Cenci and Beatrice. Initially he appears to be a weak, declined, modern Roman: although outraged by his father’s crimes, imprisoned by him, starved and beaten, Bernardo does nothing to resist this tyranny. However, his spectatorship can be read as an appreciation of spectacle, inasmuch as the spectacle of The Cenci, like that of Rousseau’s Letter, consists in any oration or other show of rhetoric or artifice that takes place in public.39 Taught by his spectatorship how power functions in his state, he makes an eleventh-hour attempt to save Beatrice by begging the Pope for a reprieve. He fails, but Beatrice exhorts him to keep on performing in public – from then on, as a public orator or storyteller with the stoic valour of an old Roman hero:     One thing more, my child, For thine own sake be constant to the love Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I, Though wrapt in a strange cloud of grief and shame Lived ever holy and unstained. And though Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name Be as a mark stamped on thy innocent brow For men to point at as they pass, do thou For bear and never think a thought unkind Of those, who perhaps love thee in their graves: So mayest thou die as I do; fear and pain Being subdued. (5.3.145–56)

Here, Beatrice commands her brother to maintain his love – a fraternal love that defies paternal loyalty, the authority of the Roman state and its judicial

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system, and the will of the fatherlike Pope. The outcome of his fraternal resistance will be an ancient Roman Stoic’s fearless death. Like Valerius, he will survive all that he knows and wander Rome, carrying republican values with him. As Shelley’s Preface claims, this tale reverberated through centuries of Roman society as transgressive urban legend. Shelley’s Bernardo might rejuvenate the spirit of republican Rome by awakening its Italian inheritors to his dead sister’s wrongs. If Bernardo obeys his sister’s last request, he might inflame an incensed res publica to resist tyranny, as Lucius Junius Brutus did. This means that Beatrice’s execution is no failure. Instead, it is the price of her admission to the pantheon of Roman matrons: Stoic women who inspire and enrage their menfolk to resist longstanding tyranny oppose Rome’s corruption and found or restore Republican government. In The Cenci, therefore, Shelley ‘authors’ an ideologically republican spectacle that constructively responds to Rousseau’s most serious criticisms of the theatre as it was in 1750s France. This is demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in the play’s final scene. When Beatrice resolutely goes out of the prison into the open air and her imminent public execution, past the grieving Bernardo, to meet the jeering, tyrannized mob of post-Republican ‘Romans’, Shelley pits Rousseauvian performance against the sort of theatre that Rousseau despised. She walks off Shelley’s stage and onto an offstage Roman public space where the menfolk who mourn her may, in time, revive the Republic. In fact, Shelley may have desired his English audience to be roused to shake off their monarchic tyranny and refound England’s republic  – the one that briefly existed in the midseventeenth century. After Covent Garden rejected The Cenci but asked him for another script, Shelley decided to write a Tragedy of Charles I, the despotic king whose overthrow inaugurated that republic, the Commonwealth. Shelley never completed Charles I, but his interest in its premise immediately after completing The Cenci reveals him at work on a programme of theatrical and political reform aimed at the recognition of England as a once and possible future republic. By envisioning restaging the downfall of Charles I in its original ‘scene itself ’ – London – Shelley repeats the transformation of actual urban space into republican theatre, exactly as Rousseau, defending the Roman Exode and Genevese fête, imagined. Rousseau and Shelley’s theatricalization of sometime republican ‘scenes’ testifies to live dramatic performance’s unique potential to recall, restage and reanimate history – to draw lost time out of enduring space.

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Notes Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre (London: Calder, 1989), 12. Quoted in Benjamin Colbert, ‘Shelley, Travel, and Tourism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe with Margaret Callaghan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 601. 3 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 7. 4 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 192. 5 David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 138. 6 Jérôme Brillaud, ‘“If You Please!” Theatre, Verisimilitude and Freedom in the Letter to d’Alembert’, in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie Macdonald and Stanley Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 77–91. 7 Vanessa de Senarclens, ‘L’exception de la tragédie antique grecque dans la Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles de 1758’, in Rousseau et le spectacle, ed. Jacques Berchtold, Christophe Martin and Yannick Séité (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 43–56. 8 Michael Demson, ‘On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley’ (PhD thesis, City University of New York, 2009). 9 Philip Hicks, ‘Female Political Identity and the Historical Imagination, 1770–1800’, William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2005): 265–6. 10 See Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Mariner, 2005), 225. 11 Charles Burney, The Cunning-Man, a Musical Entertainment in Two Acts, as Performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Originally Written and Composed by M. J.J. Rousseau (London: Beckett and de Hondt, 1766), n.p. 12 Cynthia Verra, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Radical and Traditional Views in his Dictionnaire de musique’, Journal of Musicology 7, no. 3 (1989): 309. 13 Ibid., 315–6. 14 Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship, 118. 15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Death of Lucretia, trans and ed. Charles Butterworth and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004), 10:165; cf. JeanJacques Rousseau, Lucrèce, ed. Jacques Scherer, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:1028. 16 Melissa Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli and Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 106, 135. 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, trans. Allan Bloom, ed. A. Bloom and Christopher Kelly, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and 1 2

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20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28 29

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism Christopher Kelly, Letter to d’Alembert and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans. A. Bloom, Charles Butterworth and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004), 10:261; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Jean Rousset, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Écrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 5:14. All subsequent references to the Letter will be from Bloom’s translation; page numbers will be given in parentheses in the text, followed by the page reference for the French original in Gagnebin and Rousset’s edition. William D. Howarth, Beaumarchais and the Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 88. David Karr, ‘“Thoughts that Flash like Lightning”: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London’, Journal of British Studies 40, no. 3 (2001): 324–56. Peter Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 87, 235, 253. William Godwin, Antonio, A Tragedy in Five Acts (London: Robinson, 1800), 50. See Esther K. Sheldon, ‘Sheridan’s Coriolanus: An 18th-Century Compromise’, Shakespeare Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1963): 153–61, who notes that this ‘was apparently the version through which most 19th-century playgoers knew Coriolanus’ (161). Cited in John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’s Stage Imagery on Stage, 1754–1901’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1987): 342. John Phillip Kemble, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; or, the Roman Matron; A Historical Play, Adapted to the Stage, with Additions from Thomson (London: Gosnell, 1812), 38–9. Other women identified as Roman-style ‘matrons’ by Romantic-era writers include the British radical writer Catharine Macaulay and Mary Shelley’s fictional medieval heroine Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, in Valperga, or the Life of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823): see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kari Lokke, ‘“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley and Sand’, PMLA 118, no. 3 (2003): 512–3. Demson, ‘On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, abstract, 198. Stuart Curran, Shelley’s ‘Cenci’: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), xii. Demson, ‘On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, 202. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’, in The Cenci, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2002), 140. All references to The Cenci are to this edition; for quotations from the play, references to act, scene and line number(s) will be given in parentheses in the text.

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30 Ibid., 140–1. 31 Naoko Miyamoto Alvey, Strange Truths in Undiscovered Lands: Shelley’s Poetic Development and Romantic Geography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 32 John Chetwode Eustace, A Tour through Italy (London: J. Mawman, 1813), 1:236. 33 Louisa Shea, ‘Rousseau’s Ruins’, in Rousseau and Freedom, ed. Christie MacDonald and Stanley Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 196–9. 34 Eustace, A Tour through Italy, 1:277; see also Colbert, ‘Shelley, Travel, and Tourism’, 184. 35 Eustace, A Tour through Italy, 1:277–8. 36 Curran, Shelley’s ‘Cenci’, 61. 37 See Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci, ed. Michael Rossington, in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and others, 1817–1819, ed. K. Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (London: Longman, 2000), 2:770. 38 Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics, 30. 39 See David Marshall, ‘Rousseau and the State of Theater’, Representations 13 (1986): 84–114, who argues that Rousseau’s Letter involves precisely this broad idea of spectacle (96).

8

Rousseauvian Vision and Anthropology in Percy Shelley’s Alastor Thomas Roche

Percy Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude (1815) tells the story of a poet whose life parallels in a number of ways the biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is not an actual character in Alastor, as he would be in the Triumph of Life (1822). However, the poem clearly alludes to specific passages from Rousseau’s works and to well-known aspects of his life, and critics have long seen it as central to the thoughtful response to Rousseau that Shelley would work out over the course of his career.1 The poet-protagonist of Alastor is a composite drawn from various models, with Shelley incorporating many details of his own recent experience into the narrative, inventing and refashioning as he draws from his source material.2 More particularly, Shelley wrote Alastor after a close reading of William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814), and the poem refers to both Wordsworth and Rousseau and takes up many of their central ideas. In  responding so directly to Rousseau’s works and life, Alastor opens the dialogue between Rousseau and the English Romantics that Wordsworth himself had refused. It also begins a period of direct engagement on the part of English Romantic-era writers with the reorientation of ethical thought that Rousseau himself had initiated.3 In this chapter I accept the identification of Rousseau as a model for the Alastor poet, but I go further than previous critics in applying to the poet’s case, not the conventional or psychoanalytic category of narcissism, as has often been done, but Rousseau’s own historical and theoretical model for analysing harmful forms of self-love. Rousseau’s theoretical ideas give us a means to analyse and judge the poet’s experience, just as Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) applies Rousseau’s own mature philosophical system in analysing the experience of the young JeanJacques. Shelley’s use of Rousseau’s theoretical writings in this poem has been

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little explored, though the Swiss philosopher’s presence as a model for the poetprotagonist of Alastor is evident as early as the poem’s subtitle, ‘The Spirit of Solitude’, which suggests the famous solitude of Rousseau himself and his wellknown alienation from the social. Shelley begins the Preface to the poem with the poet’s ‘feeling’ and ‘imagination’ as prior to ‘contemplation’ and ‘knowledge’,4 recalling Rousseau’s famous claim ‘I felt before thinking’ and his analysis of the origin of his own emotions in early childhood experience.5 The education of the poet occurs during intense reading and communion with nature, and also during a journey that, in broad terms, retraces the path of civilization back to its origins, from Greece through Egypt, Arabia and Persia to the Caucasus mountains, using imagery that suggests a psychological regression. Shelley thus continues Rousseau’s investigation of both psychological and anthropological origins, as developed in the Confessions and in the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755), undertaking his own study of the origins of civilization and of the origins of desire and its obstacles. During his travels the poet first encounters an ‘Arab maiden’ to whom he pays scant attention and then has a dream vision of a ‘veiled maid’; Shelley’s descriptions of this vision draw heavily on Rousseau’s account of the genesis of Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761) in Book 9 of the Confessions.6 The poem’s second half describes the protagonist’s desperate attempts to find an equivalent  for his dream vision in the waking world until, ‘blasted by his disappointment,  he descends to an untimely grave’;7 his torments, if not his early death, reflect similar dissatisfactions that mark the life of Rousseau. My main focus here will be on the two visions that the Alastor poet experiences, which recall two passages in Rousseau’s Confessions, the first describing Rousseau’s inspiration for and composition of the Discourse on Inequality, and the second describing the genesis of Julie. Although each passage from the Confessions is only a paragraph in length, taken together they bring us to the very heart of Rousseau’s thought. Through them it is possible to sketch out the genealogy of moral emotions in the Discourse on Inequality and also to discuss the interweaving of psychological, historical and even anthropological material that informs each of Rousseau’s major works. In sketching out such a genealogy of the poet’s moral emotions, which in large part will be a genealogy of the poet’s self-love, I am following up to a point the work of critics who have tried to piece together from Alastor a critique of Rousseau. As Neil Fraistat argues in his notes to the poem, Alastor is ‘grounded in the myth of Narcissus and Echo’.8 Critics tend to take Shelley’s use of this myth to imply an accusation of selfishness, vanity or solipsism; such charges

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are naturally extended from the poet to Rousseau or Wordsworth and often to Shelley himself. My argument draws on these discussions of narcissism and related concepts, but with a new focus on self-love that directly associates it with creativity and does not imply an opposition between self-love and sympathy. It is easy to take a didactic approach to Alastor, following Shelley’s lead in the Preface, in which he states that the poet’s case is ‘not barren of instruction to actual men’.9 However, the moral certainty expressed here is undercut by the multiplicity of the poem’s narrative voices, none of which can be identified with Shelley himself; it is also hard to reconcile the didactic Shelley of the Preface with the persona that emerges from his poems, letters, prose and way of life.10 Those who read Alastor as a critique of Rousseau usually take as a starting point the ad hominem attacks on Rousseau’s life and the belief, widespread in Shelley’s England, that Rousseau’s writings were motivated by a vanity so excessive that it became something like, as Edward Duffy has put it, a ‘ruling passion’.11 Shelley certainly had read such attacks and felt the need to respond to the image of Rousseau that predominated in his culture. The concept of narcissism means little if not contrasted with emotions, behaviour and manners of thinking that are not narcissistic. The more sophisticated critics of Rousseau did in fact provide such a contrast, but upon examination, their alternatives would prove very uncongenial to Shelley himself. The charge of vanity originated in 1750s Paris and had become canonical in English following the publication of Edmund Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), in which Burke writes that Rousseau ‘entertained no principle either to influence his heart or guide his understanding, but vanity’.12 Mary Wollstonecraft’s extended critique of Rousseau in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which centres on Rousseau’s excessive emotionalism, also draws on the vocabulary and ideals of Enlightenment thought: ‘When he should have reasoned, he became impassioned, and reflection inflamed his imagination instead of enlightening his understanding.’13 Both Burke and Wollstonecraft criticize Rousseau’s egotism with reference to external and restraining influences – tradition, in the case of Burke, and reason, in the case of Wollstonecraft – that would assume a didactic relation to the desiring self. Despite radical differences in other aspects of their thought, Burke and Wollstonecraft both rely on a traditional opposition between reason and the passions – an opposition that has also informed much of the criticism of Alastor. In contrast to these predecessors, Shelley drew the theoretical framework for Alastor’s analysis of destructive forms of self-love largely from the thought of Rousseau himself. In particular, Shelley’s treatment of the poet’s self-love is

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indebted to Rousseau’s identification of two forms of self-love, amour de soi and amour-propre, and the displacement of amour de soi by amour-propre within the narrative that he works out in the Discourse on Inequality. In addition, Shelley situates the poet’s self-love within a biographical narrative that includes extensive analysis of early childhood, echoing Rousseau’s for his own life and for that of Emile. Shelley certainly modifies Rousseau, adding new elements, most notably the poem’s Wordsworthian inflections and an adaptation of literary narratives that analyse narcissism. His refashioning of such material allows for psychological ambivalence, fluidity of affect, a multiplicity of motivations and many other nuances which critics have hitherto overlooked. This framework analyses the two forms of self-love within a developmental process and reveals the contingent nature of that process, especially at points where amour-propre begins to predominate. If the poet’s amour-propre is closely linked to his feeling of guilt and of being judged guilty, my aim in discussing it is to displace the centrality of moral judgement in favour of a critical voice similar to that of Rousseau’s auto-critique, which identifies the emergence of destructive forms of self-love at a particular moment. My second part follows Shelley in his analysis of that particular moment – the vision of the veiled maid and the guilt that follows – and shows how the psychic splitting and the exteriorization of guilt displace the self created in the early passages of Alastor. Before that, though, I shall examine the historical and affective material out of which that self was created.

Alastor and Rousseau’s anthropological narrative Rousseau’s Confessions is not simply the life story of a unique individual. Rather, it fuses an autobiographical narrative with the central aspects of Rousseau’s thought as developed in his theoretical writings.14 More specifically, Rousseau interweaves his own autobiography with the speculative anthropology that he worked out primarily in the Discourse on Inequality and that informs his entire project. Rousseau’s history or ‘genealogy’ of the course of human history  – his narrative of the evolution of civilization and social institutions – has a number of parallels in his own education and development, as presented in the Confessions, despite his claims that he has in some important sense detached himself from the society of his time.15 The two narratives – autobiographical and anthropological – complement and inform each other, as Jean Starobinski and Philippe Lejeune have shown.16 The method of reading the two narratives

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together, as if the Confessions were a palimpsest containing traces of the earlier Discourse on Inequality, has become classic in Rousseau studies. Rousseau’s anthropological project permits a separating out of the passions of amour-propre, which have been acquired during the long process of acculturation, from a deeper level of affect associated with an early instinct for self-preservation, which he calls amour de soi.17 Rousseau’s manner of detaching himself from society in order to access something like a pre-social being, or pre-social affect, is an aspect of his broader theory of the passions, which traces certain emotions, notably compassion, to amour de soi and distinguishes these emotions from those generated from life in society, which Rousseau calls the passions of amour-propre. In a well-known footnote to the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau defines amour de soi as ‘a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch after its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue’; amour-propre, by contrast, is ‘only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else [and] inspires in men all the harm they do to one another’.18 Amour-propre, fomented by life in society, is the source of pride, jealousy, greed and other emotions that develop when we compare ourselves with others and desire to dominate others. The passions of amour de soi are prior to those of amourpropre, but they are often displaced by the powerful and turbulent passions of amour-propre as the latter are fomented by life in society; Rousseau often refers to this process of estrangement from amour de soi as an ‘alienation’. Such, in brief, is how Rousseau proposes to construct an alternative to the destructive forms of narcissism criticized by conservatives such as Burke.19 Shelley did not uncritically accept the idea of amour de soi or the ‘natural man’ who has access to this earlier and more compassionate form of affect. However, he did understand and provisionally enter into this aspect of Rousseau’s ethics, inhabiting it, as it were, to critique it from the inside. In fact, he refers to the Discourse on Inequality as early as 1811 in a note to Queen Mab.20 The poem’s notes testify to a wide reading in Enlightenment philosophy, and although Rousseau figures less prominently in them than others, the Discourse on Inequality was formative for many of the thinkers whom he does cite. The most important of these for Alastor is the French historian Volney, whose Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires, 1791) has long been recognized as a model for the poem.21 Shelley’s reading of the Discourse on Inequality can also be traced through later works. For example, in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, written

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in 1816, Shelley revises the Pauline virtues of ‘love, hope and charity’ to ‘love, hope and self-esteem’,22 with ‘self-esteem’ almost certainly translating the Rousseauvian concept of amour de soi. In addition, the essay ‘On Christianity’, written in 1817 or perhaps earlier,23 contains a substantial response to the Discourse on Inequality, with Shelley arguing that ‘Rousseau certainly did not mean to persuade the immense population of his country to abandon all the arts of life, destroy their habitations and their temples, and become the inhabitants of the woods’.24 He thus dismisses the popular interpretation of the Discourse on Inequality – initiated by Voltaire25 – as advocating a return to a pre-social existence. Shelley continues: ‘He addressed the most enlightened of his compatriots, and endeavoured to persuade them to set the example of a pure and simple life, by placing in the strongest point of view his conceptions of the calamitous and diseased aspect which, overgrown as it is with the vices of sensuality and selfishness, is exhibited by civilized society.’26 This assessment crystallizes the ethical project that Rousseau develops out of his distinction between amour-propre and amour de soi. He critiques the ‘civilized vices’ of sensuality and selfishness which originate in amourpropre, and in opposition to these passions he creates an ideal self that is characterized by simpler and more natural forms of affect. Shelley responds directly to the ideal self that Rousseau creates, ‘natural man’, who still has access to compassion and related affects that civilization has layered over with sophisticated expressions of vanity and the like. As this self is fashioned in his writings, Shelley does not take up the ad hominem attacks directly; rather, his dialogue with Rousseau addresses possible failings in the attempt to create an imaginative alternative to destructive forms of self-love. Alastor’s announced subject is solitude, and the poem is much more explicitly concerned with the psychological analysis of solitude, narcissism and psychological regression than with the broader historical course of development I have discussed. Recent critics have sought to contextualize Alastor by identifying the texts that Shelley drew on; they have also brought a contemporary theoretical perspective to bear on the poem, most notably in critiquing the political or cultural assumptions associated with romantic-era depictions of the East and other texts that inform the poem, such as Denon’s Journey in Lower and Upper Egypt (Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, 1802), based on research done during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt.27 But I would argue that the self-conscious nature of Shelley’s use of the avant-garde historiography of his time should be given more attention than it has hitherto received, since that historiography, derived primarily from Rousseau, not only structures the poem but also informs

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the psychological dynamics associated with the vision of the  veiled maid in solitude that lies at the centre of the poem. The interrelation between psychology and a broader historical and social context informs both of the visions that I shall discuss, most notably in that each seems to be initiated by a refusal of the social. When Shelley refers in the Preface to Alastor to ‘those who attempt to live without sympathy’,28 he includes those who do so, not out of narrowness or selfishness, but because they are searching for a ‘Power’ that exists outside established social matrices and cultural forms – a power that can be accessed only by leaving behind cultural solidarity. The  poet-protagonist of Alastor spends his early youth primarily in solitary reading and communion with nature, and he soon leaves ‘his cold fireside and alienated home’ in search of ‘strange truths in undiscovered lands’ (76–7). His travels begin in remote and unspecified scenes of ‘waste’ and wilderness’, where he sees volcanoes, ‘bitumen lakes’ and ‘secret caves/Rugged and dark, winding among the springs/Of fire and poison, inaccessible/To avarice and pride’ (78, 85, 87–90).29 The poet then begins to visit cultural sites, primarily the ‘awful ruins of the days of old’ (108) at Athens, Tyre, Balbec, Jerusalem, Babylon, Memphis and Thebes (Luxor), following a trajectory that loosely traces the coast of the eastern Mediterranean and that suggests a search for the origins of civilization. The poet thus detaches himself from his society and accesses a transformative intellectual and affective experience. The contrast between the natural scenes, free of ‘avarice and pride’, and the cruelty symbolized by the ‘waste/Where stood Jerusalem’ (109–10) is understated, however: Shelley leaves his reader to draw the Rousseauvian conclusions from the transient monuments to human expense and vanity.30 The poet’s knowledge is attained in solitary, trancelike contemplation of unexplored caverns and unvisited ruins, inaccessible secret places and the remnants of earlier and lost civilizations. Shelley describes at length one moment where such knowledge is suddenly revealed to the poet. This experience takes place during his travels in Egypt, where he visits the ruins of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, to the north of Luxor, once the site of a well-known zodiac: Among the ruined temples there, Stupendous columns, and wild images, Of more than man, where marble dæmons watch The Zodiac’s brazen mystery, and dead men Hang their mute thoughts on the mute walls around He lingered, poring on memorials Of the world’s youth, through the long burning day

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Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades Suspended he that task, but ever gazed And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw The thrilling secrets of the birth of time. (116–28)31

If the passage suggests psychic regression, it also dramatizes a dialogic encounter with past cultural forms. It may represent narcissism, but at this point in the narrative Shelley does not articulate a strong critique of this form of regressive trance, in contrast to other writers who have retold the myth of Narcissus, such as Ovid and Milton. The phrase ‘gazed and gazed’ and the words ‘vacant’ and ‘flashed’ echo Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, which describes his meeting ‘a host of dancing daffodils’ – the common name of the genus Narcissus.32 This reference, along with the poet’s stillness and seeming passivity, clearly suggests the character of Narcissus, but with important qualifications. Significantly, the experience allows communication with ancient and otherwise ‘mute’ civilizations, rather than fostering isolation. The intensity of the poet’s gaze and his fascination with the visual recalls the youth in Ovid’s version of the myth.33 However, his gaze is not just a mirroring of the ‘watch’ of the unspeaking ‘dæmons’ or a suspension of effort, but rather an active, searching process that leads to creative ‘inspiration’ and suggests a rebirth. Absent at this stage in the narrative is any voice that might break the poet’s trance and initiate a return to the social, such as one finds in Shelley’s models.34 The implication is that the poet seeks truths that would be lost if the cultural norms, which would overwhelm and occlude his ‘vacant mind’ and thus disrupt the vision, were reimposed. This passage directly responds to a similar investigation narrated by Rousseau in the Confessions. In 1753, three years after Rousseau won the prize of the Academy of Dijon for the Discourse on Sciences and the Arts, Rousseau learned that the same academy had solicited essays on the subject, ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’ Rousseau, ‘struck by this great question’, left Paris for a short time to begin a response: ‘In order to meditate on this great subject at my ease I made a trip of seven or eight days to St. Germain with Theresa, our landlady, who was a good woman, and one of her friends.’ Rousseau spent the trip, ‘one of the most pleasant ones of my life’, walking in the forests of Saint-Germain and beginning his imaginative recreation of the life of primitive humans: ‘I, without a care in the world, came in at meal times to be cheerful without restraint. All the rest of the day, deep in

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the forest, I sought, I found the image of the first times whose history I proudly traced.’35 The first stage in Rousseau’s critique of social institutions is thus the imaginative recreation of pre-social man, ‘natural man’. This project permits a historical understanding of the evolution of the social institutions that the academy, in its reference to natural law, had assumed to be part of the natural order. Rousseau reveals these institutions as contingent human creations: ‘I made a clean sweep of the petty falsehoods of men; I dared to strip naked their nature; to follow the progress of time and things that have disfigured it, and comparing the man of man with the natural man, to show them the genuine source of his miseries in his pretended perfection.’36 Rousseau’s insight depends on his detachment, on his distance from his society. Shelley’s critique of Rousseau turns primarily on aspects of Rousseau’s persona as it is dramatized in this passage and other similar passages in the Confessions, in which Rousseau portrays his authorial persona and the inspiration for his works as they take shape in a specific autobiographical context. Rousseau’s project is political, but he describes his inspiration for the Discourse on Inequality in terms that invoke a poetic vision, even a revelation: Exalted by these sublime contemplations, my soul raised itself close to the divinity, and from there seeing my fellows follow in the blind route of their prejudices, errors, misfortunes, crimes, I cried out to them in a feeble voice which they could not hear, ‘Madmen, who moan ceaselessly about nature, learn that all your ills come to you from yourselves.’37

Shelley unmistakably alters this authorial persona of an accuser, even as he remains in sympathy with the thrust of Rousseau’s thought. The vision of the veiled maid, which reworks the genesis of Julie, is more clearly a critique of Rousseau than the passage quoted above. This passage does, however, allow us to deepen our sense of the two writers’ affinities as well as some areas of tension between each writer’s thought. For example, Shelley would write his Defence of Poetry (1821) in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, not Rousseau’s two Discourses. However, a parallel reading of the Discourses and the Defence would reveal a deep-seated tension between the two writers. The  two Discourses trace a narrative of decline into greater corruption and vice: in the historical narrative of the Discourse on Sciences and the Arts, which expresses ideas Rousseau would admittedly later modify, the sophisticated literary cultures Shelley most admired, most notably that of Periclean Athens, contribute to the process of increasing inequality and corruption, as opposed

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to creating a freer and more just society foreshadowed in the work of legislatorpoets. Rousseau’s narrative of human goodness corrupted by the arts and sciences is a demystifying argument, as is the deeper critique of social institutions worked out in the Discourse on Inequality. These two texts also create an ideal – ‘natural man’ – which stands in sharp opposition to contemporary society. Shelley’s critique turns on the difficulty of any dialogue between this ideal and society. Rousseau’s oppositional stance is an ethical choice, and not just because he rejects cultural material that was at the time allied with the very authority he wanted to critique. Rousseau rejects much of the material out of which what we call the superego is constituted. As isolated as he is, the Alastor poet’s first flash of insight occurs in a temple that is a remnant of a sophisticated civilization – that of ancient Egypt – and Shelley keeps the traces of contemporary attempts, such as those by Denon, to recover knowledge about that civilization. A major aspect of Shelley’s project is to refashion the conscience or superego, in part out of affective material valorized by Rousseau, but also out of cultural material he rejects. Rousseau and Shelley fashion these passive but creative forms of conscience or superego in opposition to the forms of selfishness that structure social interaction, they believe, in their respective societies. In that respect they share much in common. The emotional tone of the first half of Alastor maintains a consistent sense of wonder and awe that develops out of the aspects of Rousseau’s writings most congenial to Shelley. However, the insight of Shelley’s poet primarily deepens his awareness, his consciousness of human suffering, and he does not actively take up Rousseau’s accusatory stance.

Shelley and Rousseau’s ‘country of chimeras’ As I argued earlier, Alastor reworks, with an even higher degree of specificity than the passage discussed in the previous section, a second event in Rousseau’s life, namely his imaginative conception of the novel Julie, as described in Book 9 of the Confessions, and particularly his creation of the novel’s heroine. Rousseau conceived Julie after he had left the Parisian intellectual world in 1756 and moved to Montmorency, a small village in the countryside north of Paris, with his companion Thérèse and her family. He lived in Montmorency from 1756 until 1762, and during this time he distanced himself from the philosophes and eventually broke with them completely. His withdrawal from society coincided with a sudden increase in productivity that would see the completion of Julie, the

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century’s bestselling novel, and the drafting of substantial material that would form the basis of The Social Contract (Du Contrat social, 1762) and Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762). However, despite the peace and creative energy he had found, he continued to feel melancholy and dissatisfied: How could it be that with such inflammable senses, with a heart entirely full of love I had not at least one time burned with its flame for a specific object? Devoured with the need to love without ever having been able to satisfy it very well, I saw myself reaching the gateway of old age, and dying without having lived.38

Shelley’s critique of Rousseau begins with the analysis of the poet’s case in the Preface to Alastor, which in fact retains the framework that Rousseau himself uses to analyse his own situation in this passage of the Confessions, even to the point of echoing Rousseau’s vocabulary. In Shelley’s reworking of this situation, the poet is ‘led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks deep of the fountains of knowledge, and is still insatiate’.39 Shelley continues: ‘So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself.’40 Like Rousseau, the poet cannot direct his desire toward a ‘specific object’ but instead thinks of nature and abstractions, contemplating ‘memorials/Of the world’s youth’ and finding satisfaction in experiences of awe before the ‘thrilling secrets of the birth of time’ (121, 128), as discussed earlier. In The Triumph of Life, Shelley would return to the idea, itself part of Rousseau’s own self-analysis, that Rousseau could not ‘temper’ his desires to objects in the real world: ‘I was overcome/By my own heart alone; which neither age/Nor tears nor infamy nor now the tomb/Could temper to its object.’41 The social emotions fomented by experience in the world, following this account, do not provide the same kind of modulating or guiding influence on desire that conventional forms of guilt or shame do or even any direction towards conventional forms of satisfaction. Shelley takes up Rousseau’s vocabulary, but when in this poem Rousseau testifies that he was overcome ‘by my own heart alone’, Shelley modifies Rousseau’s analysis of his own case. The Alastor poet’s inability to move beyond this psychic state – to develop his compassion (expressed in the poet’s vegetarianism and rapport with animals) into desire for love and community – does not have its origin in a problematic relation to the

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social, as Rousseau would have it, or in desires having their origins in social life. In Alastor, the destructive and alienating emotions have their origins in the poet’s own mind. In his own account in Book 9 of the Confessions, Rousseau experiences a radical disjunction between his poetic identity, which combines excessive emotions and creative activity, and the nullity of any social identity he might be able to assume. The true self seeks an object that is necessarily apart from the social world: ‘The impossibility of reaching true beings threw me into the country of chimeras, and seeing nothing existing that was worthy of my delirium, I nourished in it an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings in accordance with my heart.’ Rousseau’s imagination hearkens back to a psychological state prior to the constitution of the social self, a confused and overwhelming flood of impressions that Rousseau shapes into an ideal society: ‘In my continuous ecstasies I intoxicated myself with torrents of the most delightful feelings that have ever entered into the heart of a man. Completely forgetting the human race, I made for myself societies of perfect creatures as celestial by their virtues as by their beauties, reliable, tender, faithful friends such as I never found here below.’42 The social world has enforced a doubling or split within his personality, with the affect he describes in this passage often hidden beneath the social self, ‘the man of man’, or the aspects of the self controlled by social emotions, such as pride, shame and timidity, and unable to find any social means of expression. He is still subject to these emotions, of course: almost as a corollary to his ability to detach himself from society, the social passions return with an overwhelming force. When he leaves for his walks, ‘wretched mortals arrive’ and he can ‘neither moderate nor hide my disdain’.43 Shelley does not accuse Rousseau of quietism or of living in a fantasy world, nor does he criticize what could seem as passive withdrawal. The Alastor poet is perhaps passive in the sense that his affect shifts from extreme to extreme, with an incredible velocity, without any active control on his part. He submits to these oscillations without resistance or without control, and the extremes do not influence each other. However, his shifting psychological state expresses an intense energy and, more importantly, is linked by the visions to literary creation. In fact, Shelley would reformulate this scenario, in his remarks on Julie in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock of 17 July 1816, in a manner that excludes the possibility that Rousseau is an escapist: ‘The beings who inhabit this romance [Julie], were created indeed by one mind [Rousseau] – but a mind so powerfully bright as to cast a shade of falsehood on the records that are called reality.’44 This formulation takes up Rousseau’s terms ‘being’, ‘cast’ and ‘reality’, but inverts their sense, so

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that the ‘country of chimeras’ is more real, more lasting and more influential than the social world. In this formulation, the two worlds communicate with each other, with the former influencing the latter and essentially recreating it. Shelley thus opens the possibility that these two worlds – and the affect associated with each – can modify one another in a sort of dialogue. For this reason, the passivity and sterility implicit in the common diagnosis of the poet-protagonist as a narcissist lead us away from Shelley’s critique. The poet’s passivity allies him to powerful creative forces that are dramatized in the visions and in his fashioning of a strange and unconventional life. Alastor is an allegory, and the poet’s life is the work of art he creates. The Alastor poet’s sudden awakening to desire for sympathy – almost a conversion experience – initiates a similar dream vision of an ideal woman, described in neo-Platonic terms as a ‘being’, following Rousseau’s term. The Preface describes the vision as follows: He images to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture . … He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.45

The aftermath of the vision, represented in the poem’s second half, is a frantic search for a real-world equivalent of the veiled maid, during which the poet’s passions are projected onto the landscape and figured – echoing common Rousseauvian images – as whirlpools, torrents or floods; they consume him in a process of decay that eventually leads to his early death. However, while Rousseau expresses disgust, disdain, shame, timidity and a variety of other selfalienating passions, the emotion that drives the Alastor poet to ruin is guilt. The poet imagines the highly idealized ‘veiled maid’ and is then punished by persecuting spirit, the ‘furies of an irresistible passion’ which ‘[pursue] him to a speedy ruin’, the furies being a common figuration of guilt. My argument is not that Rousseau suffered from unconscious guilt or that Shelley saw him as doing so. However, as I read it, Alastor articulates a very different interpretation of Rousseau’s case than is found in the writings of Rousseau himself. Rousseau saw the two kinds of affect he experiences – the desire that is the source of the vision that he is able to satisfy in the ‘Fifth Walk’ of the Reveries, as opposed to the negative affect that overwhelms his identity in society – as having origins that are completely distinct. Shelley, however,

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looks to the vision as a source of the alienating passions, rather than seeing the two kinds of affect as fundamentally different. Shelley finds the split within the poet’s psyche, rather than dramatizing a difference between two worlds, one imaginary and one social and hostile. There is no possible source of the alienating affect, in the text of Alastor, outside the poet’s psyche – and the poet’s projection of guilt onto external sources is a mistake.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

See, for example, Jacques Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique: les écrits autobiographiques et la légende (Paris: Didier, 1956), 261–92; Donald L. Maddox, ‘Shelley’s Alastor and the Legacy of Rousseau’, Studies in Romanticism 9 (1970): 82–98; Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Monika Lee, Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 87–122, which argues that it is possible to ‘seek intertextual connections between it [Alastor] and other works, and psychological correspondences between his and other personalities by examining traces of repetition and variation with respect to both Wordsworth and Rousseau’ (91); and Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 84–123, 187–202. For a summary of the poem’s autobiographical aspects, see The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 3:349–55. All quotations from Alastor will be from this edition; line numbers will be given in parentheses in the text after the quotation. For instance, the following year would see the publication of Canto Three of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and William Hazlitt’s ‘On the Character of Rousseau’. On the former, see Helen Stark’s essay in this volume; on the latter, see Gregory Dart’s essay in this volume. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Christopher Kelly, ed. C. Kelly, Roger D. Masters and Peter G. Stillman, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 5:7; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:8. This parallel was first noted by Donald Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’: A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 62, n. 106. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5.

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8 Ibid., 3:355. 9 Ibid., 3:5. 10 On the didactic strain in Alastor criticism, see Thomas Frosch, Shelley and the Romantic Imagination: A Psychological Study (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2007), which notes that ‘the Alastor Poet himself must still be one of the most disapproved of characters in literature who is not a criminal or someone directly hurtful to others. He is commonly criticized for his commitment to fantasy and isolation, his autoeroticism, his rejection of people in general and women in particular; he is regarded as narcissistic, suicidal, insane’ (48). For an early appreciation of the text’s polyphonic quality, see Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 11–46, which observes that, in addition to the voice of the Preface, the poem itself contains two distinct voices – that of the Wordsworthian poet whose voice frames the story, and that of the visionary poet who is the protagonist. For a discussion of the critique of the poet presented in the Preface, see Elise Gold, ‘Touring the Inventions: Shelley’s Prefatory Writing’, Keats–Shelley Journal 36 (1987): 78–9. For a reading that critiques the narrator from the protagonist’s perspective, see Yvonne M. Carothers, ‘Alastor: Shelley Corrects Wordsworth’, Modern Language Quarterly 42 (1981): 27–9. My argument applies a modified version of Rousseau’s thought to the case of the poet, rather than using one of the identifiable voices in the poem or Preface to critique another. 11 Duffy, Rousseau in England, 22. 12 Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke to a Member of the National Assembly, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, I: The Revolutionary War, 1794–1797; II: Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 9:663. On the influence of Burke’s letter on Rousseau’s reception in England, see James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 114–6. See also Voisine, J.-J. Rousseau en Angleterre à l’époque romantique, 127–54; Duffy, Rousseau in England, 41–3; Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. 13 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 5:160. 14 For the argument that Rousseau’s entire philosophical system is present in the Confessions, see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The ‘Confessions’ as Political Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 15 For parallels between Rousseau’s project and Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, see Barbara Carnevali, Romantisme et reconnaissance: figures de la conscience chez Rousseau, trans. Philippe Audegean (Paris: Droz, 2012), 292–5, 299–308. 16 See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, rev. ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 88; see also Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, 76–8.

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17 For a systematic discussion of this distinction, see Carnevali, Romantisme et reconnaissance, 11–69. 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. and ed. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly and Terence Marshall, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 3:91; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Jean Starobinski, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 3:219. 19 Rousseau begins by conceding that amour de soi and ‘natural man’ are imaginative creations, which is undoubtedly how Shelley took them. Rousseau writes: ‘Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The Researches which can be undertaken concerning this Subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clarify the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin’ (Discourse on Inequality, trans. and ed. Bush, Masters, Kelly and Marshall, 19; cf. Discours sur l’inégalité, ed. Starobinski, 132–3). 20 In note 7 to Queen Mab, which glosses 5.93–4, Shelley writes that ‘employments are lucrative in an inverse proportion to their usefulness’ and cites ‘Rousseau, “De l’Inegalite parmi les Hommes”, note 7’: see The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 2:249. The argument in fact comes from Rousseau’s note 9. 21 See, for example, Marilyn Butler, ‘Shelley and the Empire in the East’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 158–68; Michael Demson, ‘On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley’ (PhD thesis, City University of New York, 2009), 73–83. 22 The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:75; see also 490. 23 On the dating of this essay, see Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 89–90. 24 The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E. B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 266. Shelley introduces the comparison between Rousseau and Jesus with a discussion of the subject of the Discourse on Inequality: ‘The dogma of the equality of mankind has been advocated with various success, in different ages of the world . … Attempts to establish usages founded on this dogma have been made in modern Europe, in several instances, since the revival of literature and the arts. Rousseau has vindicated this opinion with all the eloquence of sincere and earnest faith; and is, perhaps, the philosopher among the moderns who, in the structure of his feelings and understanding resembles most nearly the mysterious sage of Judea.

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25

26 27

28 29

30

31

32

33

34

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It is impossible to read those passionate words in which Jesus Christ upbraids the pusillanimity and sensuality of mankind, without being strongly reminded of the more connected and systematic enthusiasm of Rousseau.’ In a letter to Rousseau after reading the Discourse on Inequality, Voltaire wrote: ‘I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race . … One acquires the desire to walk on all fours when one reads your work. Nevertheless, since I lost this habit more than sixty years ago, I unfortunately feel that it is impossible for me to take it up again’; quoted in Discourse on Inequality, trans. and ed. Bush, Masters, Kelly and Marshall, 102. Voltaire’s reading became influential in Shelley’s England: see Duffy, Rousseau in England, 12. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Murray, 266. See, for example, Michael Rossington, ‘Shelley and the Orient’, Keats–Shelley Review 6 (1991): 18–36 and, for a summary of such criticism, Benjamin Colbert, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 46–7. The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5. For a discussion of the imagery of psychic regression in Alastor, of which the visit to the cave is the first example, see Frosch, Shelley and the Romantic Imagination, 77–83. Cf. Demson, ‘On Historical Thought in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Percy Bysshe Shelley’, who sees in Alastor an idea of ‘human history as a catalog of crimes and corruption’ (79). My own view is that in this portion of the text Shelley consciously strips out the pessimistic tone that dominates his sources. On these lines, see also Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, 77–8. Shelley could have seen the zodiac at the Musée du Louvre and read about it in Volney’s Ruines and in Denon’s Voyage. Cf. ‘I gazed – and gazed – but little thought/What wealth the shew to me had brought:/For oft when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude’; see Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2014), 418. See also The Poems of Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, 1804–17 (London: Longman, 1989), 1:469 (note to Alastor, 126–7). The poet’s indifference to the affections of ‘Arab maiden’, whose role parallels Echo’s and whose disappointment is described immediately following this passage, also recalls Ovid. On this parallel, see, Susan Fischman, ‘“Like the Sound of His Own Voice”: Gender, Audition and Echo in Alastor’, Keats–Shelley Journal 43 (1994): 141–69. Wordsworth’s recollection of this experience models a possible replacement of the voice by the pool, as his memory gives the experience form and meaning. Very different critiques of narcissism are offered by Ovid and Milton, but both strongly model a return to the social. Such a voice will later emerge out of the experience of the second vision, where the poet’s desire is more clearly staged.

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35 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 326; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 388. 36 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 326; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 388. Rousseau uses the image of unveiling, so often taken up by Shelley, to represent this critique. 37 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 326; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 388–9. It is striking that though Rousseau’s stance remains as oppositional in the Confessions as it was in his earlier Discourses, his voice in the later text is enfeebled, ineffective, unheard by his contemporaries. 38 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 358, emphasis mine; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 426. 39 The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5, emphasis mine. Cf. Reiman, Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’, who notes that ‘Shelley’s Preface to Alastor parallels very closely The Confessions, where Rousseau tells how he embodies his ideals in the character of Julie, parallels it so closely, in fact, that one suspects Shelley may have had in mind Rousseau as one of the misled idealists of whom the Youth in Alastor was a type’ (62 n. 106). See also Maddox, ‘Shelley’s Alastor and the Legacy of Rousseau’, 85. 40 The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5, emphasis mine. 41 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Triumph of Life, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2012), 491, lines 240–3. 42 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 359; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 427–8. 43 Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 359; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 428. 44 Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet D. Fischer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 7:33, emphasis mine. For further discussion of this letter, see Jack Donovan, ‘Laon and the Hermit: Connection and Succession’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, ed. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 96. 45 The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat and Crook, 3:5.

9

Rousseau’s Boat: The ‘Fifth Walk’, Romanticism and Idleness Rowan Boyson

This chapter focuses on Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 1782), but we will be considering not Rousseau the walker nor Rousseau the botanist, but Rousseau the pleasure-boater, the idle floater.1 The impact of the Reveries on Romanticism has often been framed in terms of its more active theme of walking and practical botany, influencing writers from John Thelwall to Mary Wollstonecraft, William Hazlitt and Henry Thoreau.2 But what interests me here is the influence of one lazier moment, namely the luminous scene of drifting on the Lac de Bienne by the Île de St Pierre, first treated in the Confessions and then rewritten as the ‘Fifth Walk’ of the Reveries: I would slip away and get in a boat all alone, which I would row out to the middle of the lake when it was calm, and there, stretching out full-length in the boat, my eyes looking up to the sky, I would let myself float and drift slowly wherever the water took me, sometimes for several hours at a time, plunged in a thousand vague yet delightful reveries, which, although they did not have any clear or constant subject, I always found a hundred times preferable to all the sweetest things I had enjoyed in what are known as the pleasures of life.3

Irving Babbitt memorably saw in this ‘Fifth Walk’ the very inception of the ‘Romantic’ movement, highlighting Rousseau’s use of the adjective romantique to describe the shores of the Lac de Bienne.4 He suggested that Rousseau’s account of watery consciousness could be traced through Wordsworth, Shelley and later French Romantic writers, and, while acknowledging the unsurpassed ‘charm’ of Rousseau’s ‘justly celebrated’ and ‘delightful’ account of drifting on the lake, he saw it as a charm that needed to be smashed, since it represented, for him, a desire to ‘sink down to the subrational’.5 For Babbitt, the idleness of the boat scene comes to epitomize all that was wrong with Rousseau, whose ‘programme

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amounts in practice to the indulgence of infinite indeterminate desire, to an endless and aimless vagabondage of the emotions’.6 In its stead, Babbitt asserted ‘discipline’, the ‘law of the human’ and proper ‘work’: ‘My quarrel is only with the aesthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose and gives forth as a profound philosophy what is at best only a holiday or a week-end view of existence.’7 These arguments may be viewed in the context of what David Dwan has shown to be a surprisingly widespread Modernist hostility to Rousseau.8 Dwan argues that this critique – focused first on Rousseau’s dangerous emotional naturalism, later on his dangerous abstraction – drew inspiration from Nietzsche and was framed by suspicion of increasing European democracy in the period 1870–1914. Although Dwan does not attend specifically to Babbitt’s attack on Rousseauvian idleness, this attack echoes another cited by Dwan: Bertrand Russell’s calls for individual political discipline in opposition to a Rousseauvian anarchy of the emotions.9 Rousseauvian natural idleness was, for Babbitt and his contemporaries, dangerous because it represented a regressive, individualistic, emotional slippage into bestiality; whereas human dignity, even European civilization, lay in effort, structure and perfectibility. While very much of its time and the fruit of a certain prejudice, Babbitt’s collocation of Rousseauvian idleness and Romanticism is nevertheless worth revisiting, particularly at the present moment, in which idleness has returned to the fore, and indeed been celebrated, as a counterweight to new work and communication habits and the perceived imperative for ever-greater productivity and efficiency.10 Contemporary ecological thought has also emphasized idleness as a model of non-appropriation, treading lightly, living slowly, leaving resources unused, allowing for economic ‘slack’ and non-growth.11 Partly influenced by such arguments, several recent literary studies have sought to trace a longer history, claiming that idleness was especially ambivalent in the Enlightenment, represented as delicious and privileged but also deathlike and stagnant.12 The moral pendulum of idleness has swung from positive to negative and back again according to the corresponding valences of work and production. The English word idle is a term of pure negation, whose very etymology is obscure: the Old English and Old Saxon word originally meant ‘empty’, denoting something void, worthless and useless.13 From the early Middle Ages ‘idle’ referred to a person not working, inactive or unemployed. To be idle is to have the potential for sin (the devil makes work for idle hands); it is also the sin of not using potential (the Labours of Hercules, the Parable of the Talents). Yet it is also to have the privilege of distance from labour, distance enabling contemplation and creativity, reflected both in classical conceptions of otium

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and retirement, and in the mid-eighteenth-century writing of Samuel Johnson, James Thomson and William Cowper. Since the dawn of the industrial era, idleness has undergone a series of transvaluations and been reflected upon by social thinkers like Marx (on the loss of ‘heroic indolence’), Weber (in relation to the ‘work ethic’), Adorno (the ‘leisure industry’) and Benjamin (on otium). Rousseau features centrally in Walter Benjamin’s chapter on idleness in The Arcades Project (1927–40).14 Benjamin traces changes in conceptions of leisure from the ‘recognized privilege’ of aristocrats and thinkers, courtiers and scholars (otium existing prior to, and outside of, business, neg-otium), to the loss of such privilege with the advent of industry: ‘It is only in bourgeois society that the poet becomes an idler.’15 Benjamin’s fragments and quotations on idleness bring out many facets of the idea, for instance the way it brings together modes of hunting and study as two forms of idle ‘spontaneity’. He celebrates a Baudelairean ‘trinity’ of idleness in flânerie, gambling and study, but argues that Rousseau presented the ‘classic description of idleness’ in the Confessions, noting especially the way Rousseauian idleness is marked by ‘godlike existence’ and ‘solitude’.16 For Benjamin, this solitude enables the possibility of ‘empathy’: a separation from usual habits enabling a ‘readiness to savour, on one’s own, an arbitrary succession of sensations’ and an openness to ‘any passer-by’.17 In contrast, Pierre Saint-Amand has recently framed Rousseauvian idleness as rather more nihilistic. He claims that the ‘problem of idleness’ – its ‘paradoxes’ and ‘nuances’ – ‘pervades’ Rousseau’s writing, starting from the point of the emphatic praise of labour in the earlier writings. Yet he perceives a hinge on which Rousseau’s critique of idleness turns into a ‘project’ of idleness in the autobiographical writings: this is the idea of the anthropological ‘naturalness’ of idleness in the original human state (Essay on the Origin of Languages, Dialogues). From here Rousseau begins to suggest that in a state of solitude, idleness is transvalued: no longer a ‘vice’ but a way of removing oneself from the world of will and amour-propre.18 In an extended reading of the Reveries, with reference to theorists including Foucault, Arendt, Deleuze and Agamben, Saint-Amand focuses on how the text repeatedly stresses escape from stricture. He concludes that Rousseau’s pursuit of laziness stands for ‘an enterprise of untethered individualization, apolitical in the sense of being detached from the various sites of power and from all forms of relation’.19 This individualization is also an extreme ‘abandonment of will’, represented particularly in the logic of the ‘doubly negated injunction’ of Rousseau’s strange definition of freedom at the end of the ‘Sixth Walk’: ‘I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants to do, but rather in never doing what he does not want to

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do.’20 On the one hand, therefore, the Reveries brings Rousseau to the ‘particular asceticism of the subject which is the serene and radical murmur of liberty’, but also, on the other hand, to the renunciation of history and life itself, the subject’s self-undoing in death.21 This chapter aims to interrogate Babbitt’s provocative idea that Rousseau’s influence on Romanticism is epitomized in what Babbitt called the ‘boat revery’ [sic] of the ‘Fifth Walk’,22 and argues that this image has continued to haunt literary and critical history. It sets out the intellectual genesis of Rousseau’s scene and its complex tapestry of sources, before identifying some references to, or reworkings of, the ‘Fifth Walk’ in Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Wordsworth. It proposes that in his account of his stay on the Île de St Pierre, Rousseau generated a powerfully attractive and yet deeply ambivalent scene, containing lake circumscription, island isolation, sound, water, rowing, the sentiment of existence, pleasure and idleness – a scene that appealed especially to first-generation Romantic writers for the way it suggested key ethical and political questions about human passivity.

The genesis of the ‘Fifth Walk’ There is a biographical core to the text of which we have begun to see glimpses: Rousseau fled to the Île de St Pierre on the Lac de Bienne in Switzerland in autumn 1765 following the controversy over Emile, or On Education (Émile, ou De l’éducation, 1762) and his stoning at Môtiers. Rousseau completed his Confessions in 1770 and gave an account of his stay on the island almost at the close of the whole work, in Book 12.23 Then, in composing the Reveries in 1776–8, the island scene was reworked as the ‘Fifth Walk’.24 The two accounts are broadly similar. Rousseau begins by describing the island and its setting, emphasizing its perfect suitability for happiness and as a refuge from social life and persecution; he describes the pattern of his days there, including morning letter writing, botanizing, harvesting, post-lunch rowing and bathing, and solitary evening contemplation by the lakeside; finally he discusses his sense of loss after being compelled to leave by the Bernese authorities. The version in the Confessions is a little longer than that of the Reveries and offers more autobiographical detail: how Rousseau had previously briefly visited the island and formed a plan to go there; his pension from Peyrou, the letter from the Bailiff of Nihau; the correspondence with the Corsicans. The Confessions thematizes the island chiefly in terms of escape and solitude: in figuring the turn away

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from oppressive social life and fame to isolation and idleness, the scene seems rooted in the arguments of the Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’inégalité, 1755). The Reveries, with a more expansive, universalizing tone, stresses instead the paradoxical fantasy of limitation and imprisonment on the island, and the relation between this enclosure and the promise of happiness; here the scene is rooted in the arguments for a harmony between need and ability presented in Rousseau’s Emile. The key images and ideas – island, lake, boat, watery-aural qualities, distinctive pleasure – can be recognized in a variety of probable sources: Rousseau’s blend of mythic elements with aesthetic fashions helps to explain the scene’s deeply compelling quality. Islands have long held associations with escape and fantasy, from Homer’s Odyssey to Thomas More’s Utopia and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, capable of suggesting the blank canvas of the desert island or the teeming fertility of a lost paradise.25 Rousseau famously wrote in his educational treatise Emile that Robinson Crusoe was the only novel that his young pupil should read because of the self-sufficiency proposed by the mariner.26 The Confessions alludes to his desire ‘like a second Robinson Crusoe, to build myself an imaginary dwelling on this little isle’.27 In the Reveries, Rousseau writes that his island is ‘very pleasant and wonderfully situated for the happiness of a man who likes to live within defined limits’.28 Closed by its spatial limitations, the island offers a miniaturization of community and economy beyond even the tight-knit communities idealized in Rousseau’s other writings, for example Clarens in Julie, or the New Heloise (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761). Lakes were also a source of contemporary imaginative interest: they emblematized sensibility for William Gilpin in the 1770s, developing a new aesthetics of the picturesque in the Lake District as Rousseau was writing about his Swiss lake. In the section titled ‘General Remarks on Lakes’ of his Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1786), Gilpin cites the vivique lacus – the ‘living lake’ – of Vergil’s Georgics and, stressing their purity and aliveness, observes: ‘The principal incidents observable in lakes, are, their line of boundary – their islands – and the different appearances of the surface of the water’.29 The lake is seen to offer the new fashionable ideal of irregularity and contrast, as well as moments of mysterious animation: Sometimes also, when the whole lake is tranquil, a gentle perturbation will arise in some distant part, from no apparent cause, from a breath of air, which nothing else can feel, and creeping softly on, communicate the tremulous shudder with exquisite sensibility over half the surface . … It is tremblingly alive all over: the merest trifle, a frisking fly, a falling leaf, almost a sound alarms it.30

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Such perturbation could also be caused, of course, by boats, which are required to get across lakes; Gilpin recommends the particular perspective afforded on the Lake District by rowing.31 Boating for pleasure had become increasingly fashionable in the eighteenth century, evinced by the design of private boating lakes in landscaped estates.32 In his Essay on Gardens (Essai sur les jardins, 1774), the French equivalent of Gilpin’s picturesque landmark, Claude-Henri Watelet enthusiastically described a boat ‘that I row myself ’ (rather than rowed by a boatsman or servant).33 This Essay celebrated the ‘Moulin Joli’, which Watelet began developing in 1754 over three small islands in the Seine. This was a ferme ornée, the fashionable and picturesque ‘ornamented farm’ of eighteenthcentury culture designed for visual delight as well as function; it contained a working mill, with rowing boats and milkmaids. Whether or not Rousseau had direct acquaintance with the Essai as he reworked his boat reverie over the 1770s, the parallels between Rousseau and Watelet’s delighted descriptions of rowing to a little private island for fishing, rabbit-hunting and botanizing are striking.34 They suggest the tremendous imaginative fantasy of varied labours on a private island, an idyll of self-sufficiency reversing the globally interdependent, divided-labour vision of Scottish economics, especially Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).35 Rousseau’s days on the Île de St Pierre, patterned on spontaneous reading, writing, hunting, farming, swimming and dreaming, may have later shaped Marx and Engel’s dream of an undivided existence in The German Ideology (1846): ‘To hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.’36 Rousseau’s activities are, nonetheless, insistently play-labours, ends in themselves, and his boat is usually directionless. David Quint has described in romance and chivalric literature the trope of ‘the enchanted boat, which travels without human guidance carrying the hero from episode to episode’: originating partly in the image of Cleopatra’s small barge fleeing Actium (in Vergil’s rendition) and epitomized, for Quint, in Tasso’s ‘barco aventurosa’, the directionless boat has represented fortune and feminine changeability and a ‘romance narrative that is open-ended and potentially endless’.37 Yet, whilst it may allude to such older romance, Rousseau’s unguided boat has the magic taken out: the boat glides on currents that are essentially bodily and heads for no episode other than passivity and quietude. The emphatically corporeal terms for movement and stillness in Rousseau’s reveries may be rooted in Epicurean traditions, which defined pleasure in terms of motion, particularly smooth, moderate movement. At the end of his account

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of the ‘godlike’ sentiment of existence achieved in proximity to water, Rousseau gives an account of the pleasurable movement required: ‘There must be neither total calm nor too much agitation, but a steady and moderate movement with neither jolts nor pauses. Without movement life is lethargy.’38 Cicero characterized Epicurean pleasure as an agreeable motion (iucundum motum) which affects us with a ‘smoothness’ or ‘sweetness’ (suavitate).39 Lucretius’s notion of the atomic clinamen – the swerve which is allied to free will – connected pleasure, motion and movement: ‘We all go where each one’s pleasure leads and swerve from our paths at undetermined times and places, just as our minds incline to do . … This is the source of motion in our limbs.’40 These traditions may have found a conduit to Rousseau via the early French Newtonian and philosophe Lévesque de Pouilly’s widely translated and reprinted Theory of Agreeable Sensations (Théorie des sentiments agréables, 1736). Pouilly claimed that motion explained pleasure, efficiently yet gently guiding us on God’s path for development away from a natural state of torpor; pleasure was a kind of providential bonus for the exercise of our faculties, a ‘moderate motion’ avoiding ‘a deplorable state of insensibility and languor’ as well as ‘excessive and violent action’ which would ‘impair and destroy our organs’.41 The unsigned Encyclopédie article ‘Pleasure’ (‘Plaisir’, 1765) may have drawn from Lévesque de Pouilly in its analogy between the laws of physical motion and the laws of pleasure, and in recommending the pleasure of ‘exercises of the organs of the body that do not weaken them’ and ‘those occupations of the mind that do not exhaust it by extended and lively disputes’.42 The philosophical account in the ‘Fifth Walk’ of gentle pleasure may thus have been influenced by such Epicurean–Enlightenment traditions; certainly, it was distinctive in linking what it termed the ‘sentiment of existence’ to such pleasure. In both versions of the Île de St Pierre visit, Rousseau suggests that the sensory experience of water strips away self-consciousness. In the Confessions, the experience is emphatically visual: ‘I have always loved water passionately; the sight of it plunges me into a delicious reverie . … I had got into the habit of going every evening to sit on the shore, especially when the lake was agitated. It gave me a singular pleasure to watch the waves break at my feet.’43 In the Reveries, by contrast, the account focuses more on sound: ‘The ebb and flow of the water and its continuous yet constantly varying sound, ever breaking against my ears and my eyes, took the place of the movements inside me that reverie did away with and were enough to make me pleasantly aware of my existence, without my having to take the trouble to think.’44 The phrase ‘sentiment of existence’ and the related phrase ‘sentiment of myself ’ have a history. John Spink has shown that philosophers, novelists and clandestine writers from the 1690s

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to the 1740s, including Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Claude Buffier, Henri de Boulainvilliers, Marivaux, Prévost and Vauvenargues, often referred to the sentiment of self in asking whether the self could be an object of perception. From the middle of the eighteenth century, Spink argues, the focus became more anthropological than epistemological, with figures including Condillac, Diderot and Buffon discussing the sentiment of existence in asking whether feelings of pleasure or pain were the chief motive in self-preservation and enquiring about the first feelings or thoughts of prehistoric humans. Taking up this mid-century innovation of a pleasurable sentiment of existence, Spink sees Rousseau’s Reveries as the apogee of almost a century of speculations on the theme.45 To this constellation of earlier ideas about selfhood, pleasure and existence Rousseau further adds notions of repose and idleness. The history of the positive conceptions of idleness taking shape in both French and English culture in the middle of the eighteenth century can be traced back to Montaigne’s Essais (1595), to which Rousseau explicitly compares his project at the beginning of the Reveries,46 in particular the link he posits between idleness and aesthetic contemplation. In his chapter ‘Of Idleness’ (1.8), in which he recounts how, having retreated from active life in early middle age, he has come to find himself engaged in the process of writing his book, Montaigne presents idleness as a (negative) mental wildness that leads almost accidentally to poetic composition. Rousseau’s argument is rather different, pressing for blissful passivity as an end in itself, yet the ‘watery’ consciousness I have been emphasizing in my analysis of the ‘Fifth Walk’ also has an analogue in Montaigne, who refers to Vergil’s representation of Aeneas’s fluctuating or idle mind as like ‘ruffled water in a bronze pot [that] reflects the light of the sun and the shining face of the moon, sending shimmers flying high into the air’.47 The mock-heroic declaration of a ‘dedication’ to idleness in the ‘Fifth Walk’, echoing the ‘grand scheme for living a life of idleness’ to which he refers in the Confessions,48 can be seen as a turning point in Rousseau’s thinking about the relation of indolence and labour, a theme which, whilst constantly present in his earlier works, was previously more ambivalent or critical. One probable influence for a new, positive conception of repose was Diderot’s idealization of godlike repose in his Encyclopédie article ‘Delicious’ (‘Délicieux’, 1754), influence suggested by the fact that Rousseau several times describes the pastime of idleness as ‘delicious’.49 Diderot’s definition begins with delicious taste and smell, and then turns to metaphorical instances of a visit and delicious repose. Such bliss, Diderot writes, is only available to the sensitive soul in perfect health; the past and future cease to exist; he experiences ‘entirely passive

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delight’, a ‘delicious quietism’, and, combined with ‘immutability’, a possibility of ‘the greatest and purest happiness that man can imagine’.50

Rowing through Romanticism The rich imagistic texture of the Île de St Pierre passage emerges more clearly through these aesthetic, literary and intellectual-historical contexts. At the same time, however, such contexts show that it is difficult to identify exactly where a Romantic writer may have borrowed from this scene and not from, say, Gilpin or Montaigne. As Gregory Dart suggests elsewhere in this book, Rousseau’s influence is ‘everywhere and nowhere’.51 But some later Romantic references seem very close to Rousseau’s boat reverie, and it should be remembered that the Confessions and Reveries were well known in England soon after their first publication in Geneva in 1782, as were the translations of the Reveries published in 1783 and 1790. Early reviews, focusing mainly on the more lurid revelations of the Confessions, did not make particular mention of the Île de St Pierre scene. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the island scene could be used as a stand-in for the whole Reveries: when the young socialist and secularist George Holyoake published his cheap abridged Confessions in 1857, he omitted almost all of the ‘dull and tiresome’ Reveries apart from the ‘exquisite description of the island of Saint Pierre’.52 In the interim, tourists came to visit the real island in droves. Nicola Watson has argued that it was above all Julie which ‘delineated the shape of sentimental landscape tourism’ and ‘modelled tourism’ itself, noting evidence from Boswell’s trip that Rousseauvian literary pilgrimage was already widespread around Lake Geneva by 1764.53 Watson has also noted that the Île de St Pierre was ‘a good deal harder to get to than the shores of Lake Geneva, remote from the standard routes and requiring something of the order of an hour and a half ’s journey by rowing boat’.54 Yet Watson suggests that it proved the most affecting of the Rousseau sites as judged by the amount written about it; for instance, a Frenchlanguage guidebook to what was dubbed ‘Rousseau’s Island’ went into three editions by 1817. Many English and European visitors came and frequently paused their arduous walking in order to rest awhile.55 They left published and unpublished reminiscences which alluded directly to the imagery of a gliding boat, calm waters and the enjoyment of existence. Tourists were affected by Rousseau’s Île, and at the same time the Reveries quickly began to shape the way other watery landscapes might be described,

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as, for example, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Although much of the sailing in Wollstonecraft’s book is long distance and arduous, she comments frequently on the soothing aesthetic effects of rivers and seashores, such as the bay of Tonsberg in Norway, where the ‘prattling of the sea amongst pebbles has lulled me to sleep’.56 Gazing one morning on a seaside scene of boats, birds and bells, ‘every thing seemed to harmonize into tranquillity’, and with ‘ineffable pleasure’ her ‘very soul diffused itself in the scene, and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves’ (49–50). This spiritual boating soon becomes practical when Wollstonecraft learns to row: ‘It was not difficult; and I do not know a pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were, with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried along by the current indulging a pleasing forgetfulness, or fallacious hopes’ (51). As in the loss of self-consciousness through sensation in the Fifth Walk, this modulation of soul by waves leads directly into a train of philosophical thoughts on existence, but the existence she emphasizes is that of ‘this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow’. In lines that work directly against Rousseau’s claim to have achieved godlike self-content, Wollstonecraft finds in the energies of rowing a reminder of our immortal spirit and a rebuke to materialist reverie: ‘Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream’ (51). Her act of pleasure-boating is coded as both active and feminine: she has sought an opportunity to swim to build up her strength and her ‘embonpoint’, alluding to her recently weaned baby daughter, and she first takes an oar to help her rowing companion, who is herself a young pregnant woman (50). In  her two Vindications (1790, 1792) Wollstonecraft denounced the association of femininity and passivity or idleness in Burke’s aesthetics and Rousseau’s educational thought; in the Letters she criticizes the indolence of Scandinavian society women.57 Wollstonecraft’s Norwegian reworking of Rousseau’s boat reverie shows the scene’s great fecundity for this first generation of Romantic writers: she borrows the pleasure, the sensuality and the loss of self, but insists upon an active, sociable and sex-equal interpretation of that experience. Like that of Wollstonecraft, William Godwin’s engagement with Rousseau was both extensive and ambivalent.58 Godwin deployed ‘Fifth Walk’ imagery of watery idleness and reverie in two prominent moments in his novel Fleetwood (1805). In the opening pages, where Casimir Fleetwood describes his own natural education in Wales, we hear of Fleetwood’s practices of ‘delightful idleness’:

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I loitered by the side of the river, and drank in at leisure the beauties that surrounded me . … I listened in delightful idleness to the sound of the stones, which I gently let fall into the cavities of the rocks, or followed them with my eye as they bounded . … Often I reposed by the side of a cataract, and was insensibly lulled into slumber by the monotony of its dashings.59

This close sensual attention turns his mind, as it does Rousseau’s, inwards and away from the senses; Fleetwood explains that he ‘acquired a habit of being absent in mind from the scene which was before my senses’, a habit that is willed and practised, so experience is replaced with pleasurable torpor: I sunk into a sweet insensibility to the impressions of external nature. The state thus produced was sometimes that which we perhaps most exactly understand by the term reverie, when the mind has neither action nor distinct ideas, but is swallowed up in a living death, which, at the same time that it is indolent and inert, is not destitute of a certain voluptuousness. (56)

The thought process of this passage, working carefully round a definition of pleasurable indolence, re-enacts Rousseau’s impressions of spontaneous analysis in the ‘Fifth Walk’ and suggests the lively interest that contemporary readers took in its philosophical content. Later in the novel, Fleetwood meets M. Ruffigny, a Swiss friend of his beloved father and a sagelike character obviously alluding to Rousseau. They go on a ‘little tour to the Lake of Uri’, though unlike the self-rowing Wollstonecraft, these characters take ‘two rowers and a steersman’ (126). Like the Lac de Bienne, Lake Uri is ‘skirted on both sides with rocks uncommonly wild and romantic’, it is ‘smooth as crystal’ and full of ‘peculiar solemnity’ (126). Fleetwood, who is fleeing a period of debauchery and heartbreak in Paris, is brought into a ‘deep reverie’ by the setting, when Ruffigny announces the death of Fleetwood’s father. Fleetwood wonders why Ruffigny has ‘contrived’ such a scene for the news, concluding that it was to ‘soften’ his heart: ‘My sensibility was increased by the preparation, and the impression I received was by so much the deeper’ (127). The boat scene is thus figured as psychically transformative, saving Fleetwood from his corrupt misery, yet it is a negative moment from the perspective of Fleetwood’s later personal disasters. The future indelible association of this picturesque scene with his experience of grief allows Fleetwood to aestheticize his emotions, giving his grief ‘a new merit at the tribunal of sentiment and taste’ (129). The lake comes to represent a ‘cathedral’ setting for ‘so magnificent a funeral’ (129). As Handwerk and Markley point out, Ruffigny’s ‘method’ comes with a price of Fleetwood’s ‘self-revulsion’ and ‘incorrigible misanthropy’, particularly misogyny.60 Godwin’s novel thus

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avows the power of Rousseau’s delicious idling but warns of the loss of contact with the empirical and social world that its sensuality paradoxically encourages. Wordsworth’s Prelude, completed in its first extended version the same year as the publication of Godwin’s Fleetwood, features numerous acts of boating, rowing and directionless floating, and insists on water’s sounds as shaping identity and consciousness. Certainly there are non-Rousseauvian sources for these too: a poetic tradition of linking water to poetic ambition, as in John Denham’s famous Thames lines in Cooper’s Hill (1642); the cultural power of Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque; the simple fact that Wordsworth was also influenced by the lakeside setting of his home. It is known, however, that Wordsworth visited the Île de St Pierre in his 1790 walking tour of the Alps, probably on a day trip on 18 September.61 And he was likely to have seen a borrowed copy of the 1783 English translation of the Confessions of J.J. Rousseau, with the Reveries of the Solitary Walker.62 That the Île de St Pierre passage was an important model is further suggested by William Hazlitt’s explicit comparison of the two boaters in his essay ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ (1816): ‘We will confidently match the Citizen of Geneva’s adventures on the lake of Bienne against the Cumberland Poet’s floating dreams on the lake of Grasmere.’63 Rousseau’s  boating scene is also highlighted by Hazlitt at the climax of his list  of the most powerful passages of the Confessions, picking up that charged word ‘delicious’: ‘His last solitary retirement in the lake and island of Bienne, with his dog and his boat; his reveries and delicious musings there; all these crowd into our minds with recollections which we do not choose to express’; and in alluding to the Genevan’s ‘most intense consciousness of his own existence’, Hazlitt recognizes the philosophical charge of these autobiographical works.64 Book Two of Wordsworth’s Prelude, focusing on the poet’s natural education in the Lakes, echoes closely the language of the Île de St Pierre passage, especially that of the sentiment of existence: ‘I was only then/Contented, when I felt the sentiment of Being spread.’65 The emphasis on supreme, yet almost deathlike, pleasure and happiness achieved in these watery natural settings is also very close to the boat reverie: the ‘dead still water’ has a ‘weight of pleasure’ (2.176– 80). Existence is felt in terms so sensual that the body becomes autonomous, active thought evaporating: ‘In many a thoughtless hour, when from excess / Of happiness my blood appeared to flow / With its own pleasure, and I breathed with joy’ (2.191–3). The ‘Summer Vacation’ and return to Lake Windermere in Book Four makes a claim for ‘consummate happiness’ achieved in ‘the circuit of our little lake’ (4.127–31), echoing the claim in the ‘Fifth Walk’ that the Île de St Pierre is ‘wonderfully situated for the happiness of a man who likes to live within defined limits’.66 Happiness within enclosure is also a central theme of Home

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at Grasmere, perhaps the closest of Wordsworth’s writings to the ‘Fifth Walk’, in which Grasmere is represented as having an air of transcendental ‘repose’, closing down ‘desire’ to achieve ‘full complacency’.67 What Wordsworth seems to take from the ‘Fifth Walk’ in these long poems is less the active sensuality of Wollstonecraft’s usage, or the lesson in sensibility of Godwin’s, than the ideas of perfect satiety and happiness within a deliberate closing down of options. But if Rousseau’s celebration of passive delight is absorbed, the dedication to idleness is much more ambivalently handled. In the Cambridge books of The Prelude, idleness is associated with youth and student life, with lazy reading, sociable fun and the wasting of time – connotations rather different from Rousseau’s solitary and serious idleness. In both The Prelude and Home at Grasmere there are anxious claims about the risk of stasis and the vocation of the poet, hence the famous final self-admonition of Home at Grasmere: ‘But ’tis not to enjoy, for this alone/That we exist: no, something must be done’ (874–5). Wordsworth’s writing has long been viewed as struggling with the question of the poet’s vocation in an era of shifting work and professional categories.68 Recent work has highlighted Wordsworth’s engagement with both English and German traditions on work and creativity. Richard Adelman, for instance, has suggested that Wordsworth (especially in ‘Gipsies’, ‘The Brothers’ and the Lucy poems) repositions ‘idle thought’ as paradoxically a form of ‘activity par excellence’.69 Adelman sees this reworking of idleness as a sphere of valuable, legitimate aesthetic contemplation as emerging from poets’ (particularly William Cowper’s) responses to eighteenth-century theory on the division of labour and education, and a parallel English development to Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). Simon Swift argues that ‘for Wordsworth, idleness and its connection to fanaticism becomes something of a testing-ground for his conception of poetry’, and he cites the example of ‘The Ruined Cottage’, which reflects both ‘a fear that poetry might be figured as idle and that it might succumb to the temptations of ease’.70 Swift contends that Kant and Wordsworth are attuned to the paradoxically idle busyness of Enlightenment and Revolutionary fanaticism and enthusiasm (beelike Schwärmerei), and that both argue for ‘work as an alternative to the soaring visions of philosophical, theological and poetic exaltation’.71 I would argue that Rousseau’s ‘Fifth Walk’ must also be recognized as a crucial component of this discourse on ease, and that for Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth it proved an indelible, lyrical image of subjective dissolution and freedom, even if they all re-angled the scene in line with their own commitments. English allusions to Rousseau’s boat participated in longer-running debates about the proper place of work, human perfectibility or natural passivity,

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the corporeal nature of pleasure and its connection to the sense of existence. Returning finally to Babbitt’s disdain for Rousseau’s ‘transcendental idling’, one must observe the simple fact that the scene was appreciated so positively in the period from 1790 to 1805.72 This fact is even more striking when one considers that a position similar to Babbitt’s was articulated in the 1790s, albeit in German philosophy. Although Johann Gottlieb Fichte was alluding to the indolent state of nature presented in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750) rather than the Reveries, he saw Rousseau’s emphasis on ‘undisturbed tranquillity’ or ‘rest’ as a fundamentally immoral misinterpretation of human destiny: How to enjoy as much as possible, – how to do as little as possible, – this is the question of a perverted nature, and the various attempts made to answer this question are its crimes. There is no salvation for man until this natural sluggishness is successfully combated, – until he finds all his pleasures and enjoyments in activity, and in activity alone.73

This suggestion that Rousseauvean passivity was dangerous and perverse is not even hinted at in the English texts considered here, including Wollstonecraft’s reworking of the boat reverie which, though it asserts the spiritual necessity of activity, is still essentially appreciative of it. Babbitt’s claim that the ‘Fifth Walk’ contained the core of Romantic aesthetic commitments (or noncommitments, from his point of view) has, in a sense, been confirmed by the connections I have traced in this chapter, which show a remarkable consistency of engagement with Rousseau’s text, even where the responding texts differ so much in genre and argument. The few pages of the ‘Fifth Walk’ have provided a rich imaginative resource for generations of writers and critics, and they cannot but resonate again now that the developed world has become ‘a global infrastructure for continuous work and consumption’.74 Perhaps that is why, even without any acknowledgement of Rousseau, scenes of solitary rowing and floating continue to serve as epiphanies in contemporary ecological and anti-technological literature.75

Notes 1

My title, ‘Rousseau’s Boat’, borrows from the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s chapbook and later poetry collection, R’s Boat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), in which she explores questions of utopianism and sexuality through a Rousseauvian lens.

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13 14 15 16 17

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On walking, see Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London: Granta, 2001). On botany, see Bernhard Kuhn, Autobiography and Natural Science: Rousseau, Goethe, Rousseau (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Rachel Corkle, ‘Seeing Jean-Jacques’ Nature: Rousseau’s Call for a Botanist Reader’, in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 54–67. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. and ed. Russell Goulbourne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–3; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Marcel Raymond, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Les Confessions, autres textes autobiographiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:1044. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), 7. Ibid., 281. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 289. David Dwan, ‘Modernism and Rousseau’, Textual Practice 27, no. 4 (2013), 537–63. Ibid., 556–7. See, for instance, Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004); Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature, ed. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Judy Wacjman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Sarah Jordan, Anxieties of Idleness: Idleness in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University, 2005); Richard Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Pierre Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). ‘Idle, adj. and n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2016; accessed 1 August 2016. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2002), 800–6. Ibid., 802. Ibid., 805. Ibid., 804.

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18 Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness, 63. 19 Ibid., 65. 20 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 68; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1059. 21 Saint-Amand, The Pursuit of Laziness, 75; see also Eve Grace, ‘The Restlessness of “Being”: Rousseau’s Protean Sentiment of Existence’, History of European Ideas 27, no. 2 (2001): 133–51. 22 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 282. 23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar, ed. Patrick Coleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 623–37; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, Les Confessions, autres textes autobiographiques, 1:636–50. 24 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 49–58; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1040–9. 25 See Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004); Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 233; and the catalogue of the ‘Imagining Islands: Artists and Escape’ exhibition (20 June–21 July 2013) at the Courtauld Gallery, London, http://courtauld.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2013-islandscatalogue.pdf (accessed 1 August 2016). 26 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 13:332; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Émile, Éducation, Morale, Botanique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:454. 27 Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Scholar, 630; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 644. 28 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 49; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1040. 29 William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England; Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (London: Blamire, 1786), 1:95 (emphasis in original). 30 Ibid., 1:99–100 (emphasis in original; an allusion to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34), Epistle I, l.197). 31 Ibid., 1:224. 32 See Neil Wigglesworth, A Social History of English Rowing (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 83. 33 Claude-Henri Watelet, Essay on Gardens, trans. Samuel Danon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 58.

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34 Ibid., 56–60. This section, ‘The Chinese Garden’, is Watelet’s amended translation of ‘The Garden of Solitary Pleasure’ by Confucian scholar Sima Guang; a discussion of sources is given in ibid., 81. 35 On closed commercial states, see Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 36 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 53. 37 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 249. 38 Rousseau, Reveries, trans. Goulbourne, 56; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1047. 39 Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), II.iii, 86–7; I.xi, 40–1 (my literal translations). 40 Lucretius, De rerum natura book 2; in Epicurus Reader, 66. 41 Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly, Theory of Agreeable Sensations (London: W. Owen, 1749), viii. 42 ‘Pleasure’, in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. R. H. Ketchum (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2007), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.826 (accessed 1 August 2016). It is worth noting that Adam Smith perceived close connections between Lévesque de Pouilly, Rousseau and the Encyclopédie in his 1756 anonymous ‘Letter’ to the Edinburgh Review, reviewing recent developments in French philosophy: see The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. S. Skinner, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3:250. 43 Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Scholar, 628, 631; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 642, 645. 44 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 54; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1045. 45 John S. Spink, ‘Les avatars du “sentiment de l’existence” de Locke à Rousseau’, Dix-huitième siècle 10 (1978): 269–98. 46 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 9; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1001. 47 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 30. The reference is to Vergil, Aeneid, 8.22. 48 Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Scholar, 626; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 640. 49 See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 227.

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50 Cited in ibid., 228. 51 See Gregory Dart’s chapter in this book. 52 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Rousseau: Abridged from the Edition of 1796, with Preface, by the Editor of the ‘Reasoner’ (London: Holyoake, 1857), iii. 53 Nicola Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 133, 137. 54 Nicola Watson, ‘Rousseau on the Tourist Trail’, in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto and Patrick Vincent (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 93. 55 Rousseauvian tourism is also addressed in Patrick Vincent’s chapter in this book. 56 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, ed. Tone Brekke and Jon Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49; subsequent references to this edition will be included in parentheses in the text. On Wollstonecraft’s response to Rousseau’s solitariness, see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 57 See ‘Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke’, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men with a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints [1790, 1792], ed. Sylvana Thomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 46–9, 153–4; Ibid., 23. 58 On Godwin and Rousseau, see Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley, ‘Introduction’, in William Godwin, Fleetwood, or, The New Man of Feeling, ed. Handwerk and Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 23–7; Pamela Clemit, ‘Self-Analysis as Social Critique: The Autobiographical Writings of Godwin and Rousseau’, Romanticism 11, no. 22 (2005): 161–80. 59 Godwin, Fleetwood, ed. Handwerk and Markley, 55. Subsequent references to this edition will be included in parentheses in the text. 60 Handwerk and Markley, ‘Introduction’, in Godwin, Fleetwood, 27. 61 Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth’s Walking Tour of 1790 (Tulsa: The University of Tulsa Monograph Series, 1983), 92. 62 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1779 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 185. 63 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, The Round Table and Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Dent, 1930), 4:92. 64 Hazlitt, ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, 91, 88. 65 William Wordsworth, 1805 Prelude, bk 2, lines 418–20, in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 86. All quotations from The Prelude will be from this edition; book and line numbers will be given in parentheses in the text.

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66 Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Goulbourne, 49; cf. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Raymond, 1040. 67 William Wordsworth, Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First of ‘The Recluse’, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 46, MS. B: l.162; 62, MS.B: l.395. On other philosophical sources for Wordsworth’s language of pleasure in this poem, see Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 122–52. 68 See Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 69 Adelman, Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 6. 70 Simon Swift, ‘Wordsworth, Kant, Fanaticism and Humanity’, in The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science, 1650–1820, ed. Tom Jones and Rowan Boyson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 155. 71 Ibid., 155. 72 Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 289. There is, of course, an afterlife beyond 1805. Of particular importance would be the Rousseauvean–Wordsworthian boat reverie in Shelley’s Alastor (1816), as discussed by Thomas Roche in his chapter in this book. Babbitt further identified a Rousseauistic enchanted boat in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and compared it with Matthew Arnold’s interest in the ‘enchanted stream’ in his introductory essay to The Journal of Maurice de Guerin, trans. Edward Thornton Fisher (New York: Leypoldt and Holt, 1867): see Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 281–2. Goulbourne notes the Fifth Walk’s presence in Holderlin’s poems of the early 1800s, Lamartine’s ‘Le Lac’ (1820), and W. G. Sebald’s eulogy for Rousseau’s Ile de St Pierre (2001), see Goulbourne, xxv–xxvii. One might also see connections with Guy de Maupassant’s Sur l’eau (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1888) and the contemporaneous Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1889); and finally, alluding to Rousseau’s Reveries, Maupassant and Hegel’s Logic, Theodor Adorno’s philosophical vignette, ‘Sur l’eau’, in Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life [1951], trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), 156. 73 Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s popular public lectures in 1794 were published later that year as The Vocation of the Scholar: see Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar, trans. W. Smith (London: John Chapman, 1847), 67, 69–70 (emphasis in original). 74 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 3. 75 See, for example, George Monbiot, ‘Hooked’, The Guardian, 22 August, 2009, and Dave Eggers, The Circle (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013), 83. I am grateful to Richard Adelman, Russell Goulbourne and David Higgins for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and to Joe Moshenska, Peter de Bolla, Isaac

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10

Rousseau, Emile and Britain Frances Ferguson

Rousseau’s Emile was translated into English in 1762, the same year it was first published in France and promptly condemned by the Parlement of Paris. It quickly joined John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1690) to become a common reference point for educational writers and a set of implicit guidelines for writers of children’s books. To say that Rousseau’s text was widely known in Romantic-era Britain understates its influence. What is more, that influence made itself manifest in a variety of different ways. One view, pursued by Dissenting educators, such as Anna Letitia Barbauld, her brother John Aikin, Thomas Day and Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria, stressed the variability of understanding and highlighted Rousseau’s Emile as a sustained exploration of the kind of difficulties of interpretation that, two hundred years later, Derrida would associate with writing in particular and would identify as an ineliminable aspect of language use in general.1 These Dissenters attended to Rousseau’s insistence in Emile that a teacher was always flying under false colours in presenting to a child something the child could not understand or could not understand in anything like the way that the adult understood it. The poet John Thelwall spoke for this group when he observed, in conversation with Coleridge, that he ‘thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion and be able to choose for itself ’. Coleridge’s riposte was to point to a plot overgrown with weeds, which ‘have taken the liberty to grow, [when] I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries’.2 In calling for an education that unfolded gradually and in constant awareness of the developing capacities of a child, Rousseau exposed the very project of education as morally perilous. That is, his account of the differences between the adult’s thinking and the child’s brought out the political aspect of education more starkly than anyone else had previously done. An educator who convinced

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a child that she should believe things that she would later discover to be false – the proposition, for instance, that there is a Santa Claus who gives presents to well-behaved children – was not, from a Rousseauvian standpoint, purveying a beneficial fiction. When Rousseau insisted that children should not be taught religious beliefs before they reached the age of reason – an age that Tzvetan Todorov estimates Rousseau put at about fifteen3 – he burdened education with a fresh need to sort out its own claim to authority. Should educators refrain from inculcating their own views in children who could only accept them on faith, or should those educators recognize that what they were disseminating was prejudice, an opinion that scarcely counted as a judgement because it was merely second hand? Conservative thinkers such as Sarah Trimmer, Robert Southey and Coleridge disparaged Rousseau’s views, seeing them as an abdication of a teacher’s duty to lead his pupils towards accepted truths. For them, the Rousseauvian project of delaying instruction in matters of belief and opinion could be summarily dismissed. At the same time, however, others took Rousseau’s thinking very much to heart – none more so than Barbauld, the writer on whom the following discussion of the positive British response to Rousseau’s educational thinking will focus. In taking up various Rousseauvian questions, she modified his claims to arrive at positions that might guide educational practice. In turn, she underpinned that practice with reasoned views that were at a far remove from the sentimental image of Rousseau. Rousseau shifted the emphasis in education from knowledge to understanding and spawned a series of writings largely directed at children themselves. Such writings, by Dissenting educators and others, aimed to take into account the perspective and capacities of children of various ages. While one might name Socrates as an early exponent of the importance of understanding rather than mere rote learning, these late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century educators aimed not just to interrogate their pupils to see if they actually understood what they were saying when they recited their lessons or expressed their opinions. They also tried to adapt lessons very deliberately and explicitly, to introduce them at the appropriate time in a child’s development. Writers such as John Newbery had pioneered a publishing list that was specifically directed to children and their amusement, but the English Rousseauvians afforded particular attention to what modern educators term comprehension and treated reading comprehension as a staged process. There had long been primers designed to provide basic or introductory knowledge, but these educators divided both primers and fictional writings into age-graded categories that were designed to appeal to children

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within relatively narrow age ranges, as Barbauld did with her series of Lessons for Children (1778–9).4 The time-honoured injunction that a speaker or writer consider his audience and speak to their understandings no longer applied in the terms of the ancient rules of decorum. Rather, the high, middle and low styles that were aimed at different strata of society came to seem as if they insufficiently registered the potential divisions between writers or teachers and their audiences. The burden of understanding what children could understand increasingly fell on writers and educators, who increasingly directed themselves towards specific target audiences identified by age, with ages identified even in the titles and not just in bookdealers’ categorizations. If Rousseau’s example in Emile encouraged educators to think even more carefully about their pupils’ dispositions and understandings than Locke had counselled them to do in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Rousseau exercised an influence perhaps even more pervasive in prompting British educators to consider the place of the teacher. Locke had worked with a pragmatic psychology that generally appealed to the experience of a father or a tutor, encouraging him to combine amusement with instruction and affection with discipline. Rousseau, by contrast, was interested in creating small-scale educational experiments to demonstrate particular concepts. Unlike scientists who can largely bracket themselves off from their experiments, Rousseau faced a dilemma that necessarily confronts both education and the social sciences generally: namely, that the educator and the analyst are themselves the product of social interactions and cannot in actual life create experiments denatured of their own social experience. Thus, even as Rousseau describes the first of his experimental stagings of an idea – that of property – he introduces a difficulty. To avoid stuffing Emile’s head ‘with words which have no meaning within [his] reach’,5 Rousseau lays out a simple scheme. His tutor will take advantage of the fact that ‘the child, living in the country, will have got some notion of labour in the fields’ and the additional fact that ‘every age, especially his, … [will want] to create, imitate, produce, give signs of power and activity’.6 The tutor will accede to Emile’s request to plant beans and draw out the lesson of Emile’s activity: ‘And then, explaining to him this term “belong”, … make him feel that he has put his time, his labour, his effort, finally his person there; that there is something of himself that he can claim against anyone whomsoever.’7 The notion of educational experiment might stop here, with a connection between what Emile has done and the definition of property. But for Rousseau that would have been for it to have devolved into a catechetical exchange or a simple application of a doctrine about property: the

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ability to follow directions on making property is insufficient. Emile, it turns out, cannot be said to have understood the concept of property until he has used it to make a decision – and, moreover, a decision that violates his own interests. As the conceptual experiment unfolds, Robert the gardener makes an appearance to turn over the very soil that Emile has tilled and to counter Emile’s tears of grief and registered injustice with his own indignant charge: Emile has destroyed Robert’s melons ‘when they were already sprouting’ and ‘done [him] an irreparable wrong’.8 The lesson that ‘the idea of property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant by labour’ introduces ‘primary notions’ in ‘the career of moral ideas’9 into Emile’s experience and utilizes Emile’s own initial sense that he has been wronged as an avenue to the recognition that he wronged another when he uprooted Robert’s Maltese melons to make way for his own beans. The lesson about property is clear. Less clear, however, is any justification for this conception of property, any claim for its standing as a moral idea other than the difficulty entailed in registering someone else’s interests as prior to one’s own. Moreover, for a host of commentators, from Rousseau’s own time to the present, the mastery of concepts that is supposed to betoken Emile’s freedom is purchased with a significant curtailment on his ability to think for himself. The attempt to derive concepts from experience necessitates that experience must be staged in a series of experiments – experiments that are said to succeed only as the tutor attests to Emile’s having passed through them as if he were going through so many tests. Jean Starobinski usefully draws out this line of observation about Emile’s tutor and Rousseau’s position in Emile. On the one hand, ‘childhood must remain the age of immediacy’; on the other, the child’s confidence in his sensations and judgements is a by-product of the tutor’s having absolutely arranged for them to be what they are: ‘Emile feels free but really is not … he is supposed to live in “nature”, but in fact he lives in a world arranged by his teacher.’10 In illustration, Starobinski invites us to ‘consider the following passage from Emile’, an explicit statement of the tutor’s activity: He [Emile] should always think that he is the master, but you should always be the master in fact. No subjugation is more perfect than one that maintains the appearance of liberty … The poor child, who knows nothing, is capable of nothing, and aware of nothing – is he not at your mercy? Are you not in full control of his environment? … His work, his play, his pleasures, his pains – are these not in your grasp, unbeknownst to him? He must only do what he wants to do, of course. But he must want only what you want him to. He must not take a step that has not been planned by you; he must not open his mouth without your knowing what he is going to say.11

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Starobinski identifies the apparent contradiction well: the tutor and the pupil must be on an equal footing, in that they can both make the same observation about their experience; at the same time, however, the plausibility and palpability of Emile’s inferences are a direct product of extreme control. Locke’s suggestion that a parent or a tutor should rule the child through affectionate ties may have seemed to Rousseau a deceptive way of proceeding in education, because it allowed small-scale statesmanship and policy to distort and override the lesson. How much more disfiguring, then, in the light of Starobinski’s comments, does Rousseau’s own counsel seem? As Starobinski argues, the two sets of issues – that of the child’s understanding and that of the place of the educator – are impossible to disentangle, even in the narrow confines of a thought experiment of the massive kind represented by Emile itself. Rousseau’s discussion aimed at clear-eyed understanding on the part of the pupil, a command of notions so transparent that anyone could arrive at them unfailingly because they were delivered without any distortions from the teacher’s understanding. Yet at the same time Rousseau had to make it appear that his teacher was, on the one hand, all-knowing and, on the other, absolutely free from any shaping by circumstance. Rousseau’s project – in ways that he seems alternately to conceal and to underscore – makes learning a fundamentally moral enterprise, as much because the very disparity in the situations of pupil and teacher continually makes their interaction carry a moral freight as because an education should instil values that one might want to live by. From one standpoint the Parlement of Paris took an almost unaccountable action in denouncing Emile upon its publication in 1762. The work so clearly combined practical advice – the recommendation that mothers should breastfeed their own children – and fictional constructs – portraying Emile as a child entirely without parentage – that it might have seemed to escape official notice. In retrospect, however, we can understand the affront: Emile captured the notion of a generation gap. It presented the case that educators could not demand that children arrive at the ideas of their elders and made teachers look foolish when they imagined that they could beat children into educational submission. Education became a necessary but highly problematic enterprise. Rousseau’s constant observation in the opening books of Emile is that education is ill-timed, and this claim became something like a mantra for British writers, reviving and intensifying observations that Locke had made. Attention to a child’s physical well-being must precede any attempt to address his understanding, because it is so evidently the case that the child must be alive and well in order to think and learn. Kant would later emphasize the fact that

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human infants are, by contrast with many animals, born prematurely, in that they need care for a protracted period. In the service of creating a kind of proleptic autonomy for the child, by contrast, Rousseau advocates routines designed to make him proof against various threats to his physical being. He must learn to endure cold so as not to become overly delicate. The importance of the world of conditions is so absolute in Rousseau’s account that he imagines the natural environment to represent an essentially universal set of circumstances. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) thus becomes significantly less as an imaginative fiction than as a thought experiment, one that considered what it would be like for someone to be self-educated, or rather, educated by nature or by nature and his own cultural products alone. Rousseau’s attention to the child’s relationship with the natural world left many imagining him to be a primitivist. But perhaps his greatest contribution to educational thought was to see with great lucidity how difficult it is for any child to understand the world around her on the basis of only a few years of living in it. The education that the tutor offered Emile insisted that such things as the convictions one derives from one’s sensory experience become a bedrock for further understanding, that a child learn how to become inured to some circumstances – the experience of cold weather and icy baths, for instance – and how to recognize his subservience to other circumstances, such as the need to acknowledge hot stoves by avoiding them. From the vantage he presented, any parent or teacher who attempted to protect a child from the natural world looked like someone who was disarming that child for life. As Rousseau insisted that the initial stages of a child’s education involve encounters with the natural world, he advocated, as Todorov puts it, ‘holding social pressures at bay’.12 Rather than imagining that a child is a social being from birth, he insisted that morality and one’s obligations towards others could come into view only over time. One version of the British understanding of this aspect of Rousseau’s thinking was the projected but unfulfilled Wedgwood project that would have reared a child in isolation – not just distanced from bad company or the distractions of urban life but from social interaction altogether. The child in this scheme was to have become an experimental subject, someone who would demonstrate the moment at which a particular child’s mind was ready for particular ideas.13 The Wedgwood project was by no means the only psychological scheme trafficking in real life that Rousseau’s thought experiment in Emile inspired. Thomas Day aimed to create latter-day Galateas by bringing up two young orphans in the hope he would find one of them ideally suited to be his wife,

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an actual being created through the careful rationing of ideas.14 The difference between the British psychological experimentalism and Rousseau’s Emile, however, lay in Rousseau’s refusal to suggest exactly when a child might learn a particular thing. Rather than observing that a baby should be recognizing faces at one particular age or doing sums at another, Rousseau continually tended to suggest that all would be lost if one assumed that certain ideas were available to a child at any particular age. With this insight, he massively extended the notion of infancy. No longer did it refer merely to the period before a child could converse with adults and with other children. Rather, Rousseau’s expansive account reworked the objection to rote learning that had figured prominently in Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. While Locke had generally opposed an educational model that made children the imitators of adults, he had imagined a modest place for memorization and had thought of it as something like stock for one’s mental warehouse that might be re-examined in new inventories; Rousseau, by contrast, particularly trained his criticism on pedagogical conversations that were only apparently shared, that infantilized children by leaving them effectively without speech. Most parents, most educators, he thought, offered constant injunctions to a child: ‘Don’t steal’, ‘Don’t lie’ and many such others. His paraphrases made it clear, however, how little parents and educators could assume that their understandings of what they were saying made any sense at all to children before a certain age. Locke might have observed that the notion of property was not eternal and universal, that once the entire world was America, looking as though it merely awaited the labour of an individual who would make it his own. Rousseau’s variation on this theme was to insist that all the world continues to look like America to young children: it is both wilderness and puzzle. Since children have no understanding of property and cannot see that many things in the world have been marked with the invisible tags of the application of the concept of property, they may take but they cannot steal. And similar kinds of mysteries attend many notions that adults commonly work with. Appreciating all that children could not understand necessitated a reevaluation of what teachers should. A teacher should recognize what a child had not been able to recognize and acknowledge both the child’s insights and incomprehensions. Any learning that a child encountered before he could properly understand it was inevitably duplicitous. Anything the child was instructed to say before he could understand what he was saying was not merely an empty act of memory, nor was it a culpable pretension on the child’s part. Rather, the person who introduced and drew out the statement ought

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to rebuke himself for essentially requiring a child to lie, to repeat words that had no meaning for him or a meaning wildly at odds with that of the parent or tutor. Rousseau dismissed books before Emile reached the age of twelve, not because he thought that the pupil would inevitably understand everything after the age of twelve, but rather because he thought that a child could not possibly comprehend much of what they say before then. Reading was less a skill to be advanced with all deliberate speed than a potential contest between the educator and the child. A child of the kind whom Locke had imagined, one who had been ‘cozened’ into a knowledge of his letters at an early age by educational toys,15 had relinquished a substantial portion of his personal authority in his earliest years. Catechetical education, in which an adult quizzes a child to elicit answers that are said to bear the impress of thought and thoughtfulness, is, Rousseau contends in Book 5 of Emile, misguided: ‘All the answers of the catechism are misconceived . … In the mouths of children these answers are really lies, since the children expound what they do not understand and affirm what they are not in a position to believe.’16 Only actual comprehension of the words and concepts involved could avoid compromising the child’s autonomy. Thus it was that Rousseau, in an apparent paradox, urged that Emile write before he read and that he be kept away from a knowledge of the letters of the alphabet until he developed a strong and direct motive for reading, namely the desire to decipher a party invitation directly addressed to him. Rousseau’s great theme was that education should rest on knowledge by acquaintance and abjure knowledge by report, to use Bertrand Russell’s famous formulation of the two avenues to concepts.17 Ultimately, his position directly related to the attack on materialism that Rousseau outlines in the ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’ in Book 4 of Emile, where he insists that matter cannot have thought itself into existence and that there must have been an intelligence – a deity – that had governed the movement of matter to produce the natural world of sense. Rousseau’s Vicar had to hypothesize a creator who had initially introduced a guiding consciousness into matter because Rousseau continually stressed the difficulties of keeping the material world connected to the world of thought. He decried introducing catechisms and fables – indeed, all books  – into the child’s experience because they introduced words in their material aspects before a child could control them with his thought. As Rousseau began with the obvious in opposing outright injunctions to think or act in a particular way, he extended this thinking in his repudiation of catechetical education, which would have made him highly unlikely to endorse

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projects such as Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary or the adaptations of its basic lines of thought in such works as William Pinnock’s popular catechisms for young readers.18 The effort to identify how people have been using certain words might have won his approval, but not the idea that one might usefully begin with a word or image and identify its various attributes or component parts. Definitions of words and instructions for experiments looked to him as though they would always fail of yielding an actual concept, conceptual knowledge appearing to him as incomplete if it had not been won through direct attention and conscious comprehension. Reciting the meaning of words, as Johnson’s Dictionary might encourage one to do, or rehearsing the various elements of a catechism of heraldry, for instance, would have seemed to him a misleading way of tracking thought. Paul de Man captured Rousseau’s refusal to take past practice as a definitive guide to linguistic behaviour when he depicted Rousseau’s utterance of the name ‘Marion’ as ‘noise’ rather than as any one of a series of possible explanatory interpretations.19 Many writers – in Britain and throughout Europe – endorsed Rousseau’s views on rote learning and catechetical education. Yet few seem to have grasped the full range of implications of those views. Consider, for example, Aesop’s fable of the fox and the crow as Rousseau parses it in Book 2 of Emile.20 Aesop’s Fables had long served as a reliable entertainment for children, and educators had for generations imagined that its lesson could be taken up by children, with any difficulties of apprehension being remedied with explicit statements. In  Rousseau’s analysis, however, the fable looks less like an amusing vehicle towards a deep truth than like the inculcation of a deep-seated misunderstanding. The fable may, from one perspective, rightly be said to recount an exchange in which the fox flatters the crow, tricking him into dropping the cheese he holds in his beak by suggesting that the crow is white rather than black and that the crow has a lovely singing voice rather than a hoarse croak; the crow, eager to demonstrate the beautiful voice that the fox has praised, drops the cheese he has been holding in his beak, leaving the fox in full possession of it. Yet while at least a few glosses of the fable are available to an adult – that one should not listen to flattery, that one should know oneself so as to avoid being vulnerable to flattery, that one should look after one’s possessions – Rousseau thinks that there is probably only one that enters the mind of the child: the thought of the pleasure that he himself would take in savouring the cheese. Reasoning from the sense that the cheese is a prize – indeed, the prize in the fable – the child is all too likely to imagine that he is seeing the fox rewarded for his cleverness and endorsed for this characteristic behaviour.

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Rousseau’s aim in presenting the Aesopian example clearly informed William Wordsworth’s thinking, particularly in the early poems of Lyrical Ballads. He  dramatized miscommunication in poems such as ‘Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the art of lying may be taught’, in which a father tries to engage his son in making a comparison and a choice that the child finds himself hard-pressed to produce, and ‘We Are Seven’, in which an adult tourist turns an apparently simple polite exchange with a little girl who lives in the region he is passing through into a debate over whether she should include her dead siblings when she is asked how many children there are in her family.21 The basic claim that children and adults speak different languages, and that most of their conversations are lies, in being differentially understood by parties to the exchange, emerges as a problem as fundamental as it is insoluble. Conversations between children and adults are not so much conversations as routine, socially tolerated misapprehensions, the Rousseau of Emile and the Wordsworth of ‘Anecdote for Fathers’ and ‘We Are Seven’ would say.22 Wordsworth may have made poetry out of the apparently irreconcilable differences between children’s thinking and that of adults. Yet the conundrum posed by the recognition of the difficulty that adults and children might have in trying to speak the same language prompted two quite different kinds of responses. Numerous educators, particularly Dissenters, such as Barbauld, her brother John Aikin, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria Edgeworth, made children’s stories resemble small-scale versions of the realist novel. Even as Robinson Crusoe steadily expanded its adult audience as a fictionalization of what might be actual, its various adaptations and abridgements looked ready-made for children of the kind whom Rousseau meant to teach about the world of things and persons. By contrast with them, writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Charles Lamb explicitly opposed the idea that patently fantastic stories – stories with characters like giants and giant killers – should be kept out of children’s reach. Lamb thus denounced, in a letter to Coleridge of 23 October 1801, the ‘cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child’,23 convinced that the turn towards natural history and geography – and the realism that those subjects entailed – failed to acknowledge a child’s imaginative freedom. It was a view that Wordsworth echoed in Book 5 of The Prelude when he suggested the sense of freedom and power that fantastic tales might give children.24 The swipes at Barbauld and her ‘crew’ took up only a portion of the debate about actuality that Rousseau had sparked off. Rousseau had indeed sought to derive all of a child’s thinking from his immediate experience and thus repudiate

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stories of imaginary beings. Like Locke and, later, Jeremy Bentham, he particularly discouraged threatening young children with remarks about ghosts and goblins. There were to be no Santa Clauses in Emile’s world, no fictions passed on children that they would finally grow out of or be seen as ready to dispense with. But, as I observed earlier, he had also distanced his pupil from book learning in general, postponing reading and other people’s opinions until Emile had arrived at the age of reason. As Barbauld herself paraphrased Rousseau, he encouraged parents to give a child ‘nothing to unlearn’.25 She effectively turned the tables on Rousseau’s criticism of books and societal pressure, however, when she focused on the fact that Rousseau’s statements themselves appeared in the form of a book that parents and teachers felt obliged to adopt. She further suggested that Rousseau’s system had all the liabilities that attach to any system that seeks to sequester a child and protect him from society. With Mary Wollstonecraft, who observed in Chapter  2 of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that ‘men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in’,26 Barbauld treated Rousseau’s systematic thought experiment as so necessarily fictitious as to be misleading. In the closely argued essay ‘What Is Education?’ (1798), Barbauld points out that the very existence of Rousseau’s Emile and its exhortations to parents constitutes a standing recommendation that those parents lay aside their own experience and instead adopt a system they derive from the very books that Rousseau castigated – whether Rousseau’s own book or a composite of many, from Xenophon’s to Catherine Macaulay’s.27 She grasps Rousseau’s reasons for insisting that a child should derive his understanding from his own experience rather than from authority and sees in Rousseau’s reasoning the need to avoid the pressure of conformity to certain beliefs before one can understand what one is subscribing to. Yet, in having far more sympathy for a materialist perspective than Rousseau does, she makes a series of telling points both in ‘What Is Education?’ and in the related ‘On Prejudice’, published in The Monthly Magazine in 1800. The first point I have already mentioned: namely, that Rousseau’s Emile is in the paradoxical position of recommending, within the pages of a book, direct experience rather than the knowledge found in books. Barbauld also drew out the corollary to that position: Rousseau had written a book that disparaged the previous experience of parents and educators. Rousseau’s scheme may laudably advance the idea that a pupil should have nothing to regret, nothing to unlearn from his education, but in the process it makes education ‘impracticable’.28 It is, she observes, absolutely impossible to provide the educational situation that Rousseau sketches in Emile. Indeed, were it conceivable that a child such as

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Emile might be assigned a tutor such as Emile’s, Rousseau’s suggestion that the tutor should stand by and observe Emile’s experiments with the world fails to take into account how much Emile’s death would limit all further acquaintance with the world: ‘A child may be allowed to find out for himself that boiling water will scald his fingers, and mustard bite his tongue; but he must be prejudiced [encouraged by authority and report] against rats-bane.’29 She joins Rousseau in rejecting ‘superfluous solicitude’,30 but essentially argues that aspects of the physical world are as complex as the moral ideas – such as that of property – that Rousseau has struggled to reduce to direct experience. Even aspects of the physical world need the kind of pre-arrangement and pre-judgement that occurs when Emile’s tutor arranges a lesson that calls for a decision about prior ownership or when a parent warns a child off dangers that may be unapparent to him. The kind of control that might be an embarrassment for the Rousseauvian tutor came, to Barbauld, to look simply like responsible trusteeship. Barbauld goes on to argue, in very direct contrast to Rousseau, for the importance of the kind of insensible education that results from the child’s observing the behaviour of the people around him. While Rousseau stresses the damage that may be done by a child’s being given lessons before he can properly understand them, Barbauld insists that the child begins learning almost at birth. While Rousseau imagines that moral ideas need to be developed in advance of an experience of society, Barbauld insists that every child can and does make essentially moral judgements about his parents’ behaviour. Thus she can endorse Rousseau’s opposition to the use of injunctions and moral precepts: ‘There is nothing which has so little share in education as direct precept.’31 At the same time, however, she is alert to the social perceptions that initiate children into the lying that so many school books warn them against: We need only reflect, that there is no one point we labour more to establish with children than that of their speaking truth, and there is not any in which we succeed worse. And why? Because children readily see we have an interest in it. Their speaking truth is used by us as an engine of government.32

Barbauld implicitly maintains that Rousseau writes as though children are incapable of understanding outside the precincts of his staged conceptual experiments. She brings out the extent to which Rousseau’s scheme aims to achieve through system the effect that injunctions long for: it would create a world free from lying, one in which other people were incapable of testifying to the thing that is not. The fox in Aesop’s fable, Barbauld suggests, is not alone in benefiting from a lie: ‘[Your child] knows that in the common intercourse of life,

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you tell a thousand falsehoods.’33 Already parrying her reader’s objections – ‘But these are necessary lies on important occasions’ – she drives home the point that the child ‘is the best judge how much occasion he has to tell a lie’, adding: ‘He may have as great occasion for it, as you have to conceal a piece of news from a sick friend, or to hide your vexation from an unwelcome visitor.’34 Indeed, she continues, the very demand for truth can itself be productive of lies: ‘That authority which extends its claim over every action, and even every thought, which insists upon an answer to every interrogation, however indiscreet or oppressive to the feelings, will, in young or old, produce falsehood.’35 With that analysis, Barbauld strikes at the heart of Rousseau’s plan to argue that his attempt to shield his pupil from consequential mistakes and from the temptation to succumb to social coercion itself makes education an exercise in suborned testimony, which lies even when it happens to speak truth because it speaks from a felt sense of that coercion. Barbauld aims, by contrast, to redeem an education that is always already engaged with society by suggesting the impossibility of restricting the reach of education. The friend to whom she writes in ‘What Is Education?’ may be looking for a plan both comprehensive and complete for his son’s education, but Barbauld insists that education is ‘a thing of great scope and extent’,36 for it ‘goes on at every instant of time; it goes on like time’.37 Against Rousseau’s efforts to introduce concepts and skills only at the moments at which they can be fully ratified by reason, Barbauld observes that ‘the moment [the pupil] was able to form an idea his education was already begun: the education of circumstances – insensible education’.38 Rousseau had imagined that an education into society might be seen as distinct from an education by things, but Barbauld treats both as irremediably interinvolved and simultaneous – an insensible apprehension of sensible circumstance. The first principle in Barbauld’s scheme of education is that nobody can control the circumstances that form the major part of education: the parent and the tutor have only limited power in the face of them. As she argues in ‘On Prejudice’, the child will accept many views through pre-judgement, extending credence to certain views out of confidence in the parents who have succoured and protected him. Yet in ‘What Is Education?’ she attributes to the child an ability to recognize lies and to distinguish the heart-felt from the insincere. The child, in her view, understands lying at least as well as his parents: Children have almost an intuitive discernment between the maxims you bring forward for their use, and those by which you direct your own conduct. Every child knows whom his father and mother love, and see with pleasure, and whom

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they dislike; for whom they think themselves obliged to set out their best plate and china; whom they think it an honour to visit, and upon whom they confer honour by admitting them to their company.39

Locke and Rousseau both imagined that it was important for a parent or a tutor to sustain a child’s esteem, with Locke warning fathers against making their children impatient for their deaths. Yet, even as she commends a child’s reliance on parental pre-judgements, Barbauld imagines greater scope for reciprocal judgement than either of her predecessors. She thus calls attention not just to parental knowledge and judgement but also to the child’s and stresses the ways in which someone’s education begins again, not with the onset of puberty and adolescence as Rousseau would have it, but with parenthood. The process of educating one’s child causes one to reconsider one’s own earlier education and also to come to terms with one’s own present circumstances and those of one’s child. Thus, she challenges the friend to whom she writes in ‘What Is Education?’ to understand how his own situation has changed over the course of his life. Now that he has become prosperous, he cannot, she maintains, educate his son as he himself was educated. One life, one course of education cannot be seen as a controlled experiment for another life and course of education: Your life was of very little consequence to any one; even your parents, encumbered with a numerous family, had little time to indulge the softnesses of affection, or the solicitude of anxiety . … It is not possible for you, it would not even be right for you, in your present situation, to pay no more attention to your child than was paid to you.40

She pursues her objection to her friend’s adopting a Spartan Rousseauvian plan for his son as an example of ‘mimic experiments of education’, which always have ‘something which distinguishes them from reality’.41 A rich man’s experience is different from that of a poor man, and it would be unrealistic to educate the son of the poor-child-that-was as if he were himself poor. Wordsworth may have painted an alarming picture of a little child ‘conning another part’ in the Immortality Ode (1807),42 but Barbauld shows in ‘What Is Education?’ how tempting it is for adults to do likewise and follow the actions that others have taken without any appreciation for the differences in their circumstances. Barbauld thus intensifies Rousseau’s account of the slide into educational dishonesty. Conversations at cross-purposes and full of misunderstanding may count as lies in Rousseau’s book, but equally misleading is the application of educational schemes developed to meet someone else’s circumstances rather than this particular child’s situation. Aesop’s suggestion that the crow should

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know himself may be lost on a child thinking of the appealing taste of cheese, but Barbauld imagines that the very existence of a child continually enjoins a parent to assess his own situation instead of living in imitation of someone else’s. Understanding who one is and what one’s circumstances are, she thinks, continue to be challenges throughout life and cannot simply be cordoned off as the advice that adults use fables to introduce to children. Barbauld’s work, in its various aspects, constitutes a thorough assimilation of and response to Rousseau’s writing. In the essays discussed here, she outlines her understanding of the nature of any educational project. Yet the writing she explicitly addressed to children looks like a very deliberate attempt to address the problems of communication between adults and children that Rousseau had outlined and that Wordsworth had taken up. In her series of Lessons for Children, she writes books that aim to introduce a child to their own capacity to describe and name. Sitting with her nephew and adoptive son, Charles Rochemont Aikin, she essentially transcribes a conversation. The books are full of commands: to sit, to look at various things, to be sure not to pull the cat’s tail. Yet, in spite of the continual reliance on injunctions, the full force of parental authority is softened by the books’ formats and placement in family life. The books themselves are short, designed to be read in one brief sitting. The pages are ample, with words printed in large type and with abundant leading so as to make the words easy for a child to single out. They constitute a common platform for parent and child. The writing is as fully deictic as Barbauld could make it: in the first, Charles and she are observing the same objects and creatures in their immediately proximate world. As the series develops, she includes conversations about what they will encounter when they travel to France. The project of description is designed continually to direct their attention to the same things and to make description perform a task of equalization between the two. The adult may have seen this particular chair or this particular cat more often than the child has and may have attached a name to it more frequently, but the book serves to align their observations and namings. While Rousseau imagines that someone like Emile’s tutor would be able to pass almost anything off on a child, Barbauld’s writing uses the observable world as evidence to be continually appealed to in illustration of what the adult is saying and what the child will shortly be able to say. If he does not know French when he first visits France, the trip to France will generate in him a desire to learn French as much as Emile’s receipt of an invitation made him desire to learn to read. Rousseau may insist that education should conform to the child’s direct acquaintance with various aspects of the world, but Barbauld suggests, both

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more and less explicitly, that acquaintance must always also involve description. The Rousseauvian pedagogue may expose the difference between what the adult teller or reader of a fable understands and what a child understands, but Barbauld imagines that education consists entirely of developing the capacity to observe the consonances and the differences between what a child sees and what a child hears said about the objects of experience. In Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), the domestic world that provided points of common observation for adults and children expands even further. Barbauld had refrained from introducing religious ideas into Lessons for Children, on the theory that children would not be able to grasp them. With Hymns in Prose for Children, however, she seemed not so much to have determined to write for older children as to have realized that, in her view, the natural world already and immediately prompted religious observance. As Mary Wollstonecraft put it in her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Barbauld’s Hymns ‘contribute to … make the Deity obvious to the senses’.43 Barbauld’s concession to the tender ages of her audience was to cast the hymns into prose, thinking, as she puts it in the Preface, that children should be ‘kept from reading verse, till they are able to relish good verse’ and the ‘elevation in thought and style above the common standard’ that she takes to be essential to it.44 Yet this distinction between poetry and prose did not serve to represent poetry as a prized literary destination. Rather, in keeping with Joseph Priestley’s suggestion to his pupils at Warrington Academy that poetry and prose were interchangeable operations and that one might translate between the two,45 Barbauld imagined that her rhythmical prose might capture the essential thought of religious verse and might make it possible for a variety of children to take turns reading out portions of her hymns to one another without looking as though they were reciting language that they could not understand. The notion of translation was key. Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar claimed to infer the existence of a deity from his observation of the organization of matter, or rather from the difficulty that materialism had in explaining the existence of the natural world and the creatures in it, and Rousseau delayed having any discussion of religion until Emile might understand its concepts. Barbauld, however, presented her Hymns in Prose for Children as a series of exercises in description. The natural world appeared as a transparent communication of the goodness of the creator of the natural world: ‘everything speaks of him’, she wrote in Hymn 9, and ‘every field is like an open book’.46 Barbauld may have opened her own book onto the immediate domestic environment in her Lessons, but she continually used the Hymns to build

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towards names – in a fashion that she and her brother John Aikin systematically pursued in Evenings at Home (1793). Thus, in Hymn 8, she identified the various elements that together make up larger units almost as if she were talking about the assimilation of atoms into molecules: The father, the mother, and the children, make a family; the father is the master thereof . … Many houses are built together; many families live near one another . … This is a village; see where it stands enclose in a green shade, and the tall spire peeps above the trees. If there be very many houses, it is a town . … Many towns, and a large extent of country, make a kingdom . … Many kingdoms, and countries full of people, and islands, and large continents, and different climates, make up this whole world – God governeth it.47

Another way of putting this point is to observe that many of the hymns and many of the stories in Evenings at Home follow a similar line of organization. They assemble a series of descriptions on the way to attaching a name to them, as in Hymn 4: ‘What is beautiful, and more beautiful; what is strong, and stronger; what is glorious, and more glorious has a name: “This great name is GOD.”’48 ‘The Masque of Nature’ asks children to identify the various seasons of the year, repeatedly enjoining the ‘youths and maidens’ to name what is described – and making it easy to come by the answers spring, summer, autumn and winter.49 Stories such as ‘The Young Mouse: A Fable’ and ‘The Travelled Ant’ feature animal characters and narrators who can describe without being able to name, pointing to the human advantage of being able to name, with naming as a necessary aspect of praise for the deity. The young mouse can describe the ‘house’ that he thinks ‘the good people of this family’ have built him to live in,50 so that children hearing the story – and the mouse’s mother – will recognize it as a trap. The ant who sets out on an edifying journey, ‘a tour of mere curiosity’, recounts his brushes with frogs, snakes, birds, life-threatening carriages and humans bent on exterminating insects.51 The narrative work of the story is to describe these various things so much from the ant’s perspective that a child of almost any age would be able to supply the names that lie implicit in the story: a child of almost any age would immediately see herself cleverer than the mouse and the ant. This pattern of storytelling as a version of simple riddling culminates in ‘Things by Their Right Names’, one of the stories in Evenings at Home that is credited to Barbauld, in which the storytelling father responds to a child’s request for a story of ‘bloody murder’. In this contrapuntally produced story, the child repeatedly suggests details that would make the men of the tale conform

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to Gothic tales about robbers in the woods, while the father repeatedly redirects the details: the men do not have ‘black crapes over their faces’ but ‘steel caps on’, for instance, and they were not ‘ill-looking fellows’ but ‘tall, personable men’. With the revelation that these men burned a village and ‘murdered twenty thousand men’, the child resists, protesting that twenty thousand men would not have allowed ‘these fellows to cut their throats’. Crucial information – that ‘the murderers were thirty thousand’ – enables the child to reorder his understanding of the details of the story: ‘O, now I have found you out! You mean a battle.’52 Animal narrators often allow children to be quicker than they – or at least more proficient in naming what the animals describe – but the continual process of aligning descriptions with names that remain to be supplied reverses Rousseau’s account of the gulf between stories and their apprehension and opens the way for a fresh conception of the place of the educator in relation to the pupil. Rousseau might have imagined that a child should be so self-reliant as to be proof against various physical hardships and worries about his health and that the most serious danger for a child lay in too-ready acquiescence in the views of adults. Wordsworth, in describing his own education by beauty and by fear in The Prelude, might have endorsed Rousseau’s position on the superiority of direct acquaintance and experience to the reports of others. Barbauld, drawing contrasts between what children know and what the animals they are told about know, as well as drawing analogies between the creaturely nature of children and adults, both creates a distance between children and animals (in which animals seem like deficient children) and diminishes the sense of distance between the teacher and the child. A teacher, herself like the child in being under the protection of a deity to be observed in all natural things, can protectively name things to be avoided (a trap for a mouse, rat’s bane that might kill a child) and things that are no longer fear-inspiring when named (an owl). In her account, the process of education is an ongoing arrangement and rearrangement of all the elements that humans assemble from the report that the natural world continually offers. She may imagine that world to be, in and of itself, entirely good, but she insists that an education for life involves understanding how the elements of the world are better or worse, good or bad for humans. Moreover, that process of arrangement does not simply illustrate itself in direct agreement between persons about an immediately available world. It also involves a child’s learning the proximity of understanding and critique as she comes to discern the ‘right names’ that attach to particular descriptions. It is an educational project that points the way towards an understanding of a politics of language like George Orwell’s, one in which critical analysis continually searches for the better,

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more transparent name for the terms of experience. In fully acknowledging that the same words will be differentially available to adults and to children, Barbauld suggests how finding the names that seem right is an ongoing process of experiential negotiation.

Notes See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 136–64. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1835), 1:191. 3 Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. by John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 59. 4 Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children from Two to Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1778); Lessons for Children of Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1778); Lessons for Children from Three to Four Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1779). 5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 13:231–2; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Émile, Éducation, Morale, Botanique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 4:330. 6 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 232; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 330. 7 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 232; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 331. 8 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 233; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 331. 9 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 233; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 332–3. 10 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 145:216. 11 Ibid., 217. 12 Todorov, Frail Happiness, 60. 13 See David V. Erdman, ‘Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Wedgwood Fund’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 60 (1956): 489–91. 14 See Sylvia W. Patterson, Rousseau’s ‘Emile’ and Early Children’s Literature (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1971), 63. 15 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: Churchill, 1693), 178. 1

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16 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 555; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 349–50. 17 See Bertrand Russell, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, in Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), 217–24. 18 Cf. William Pinnock, A Catechism of Heraldry (London: Davidson, 1800). 19 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 288–9. 20 Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. Kelly and Bloom, 249–51; cf. Rousseau, Émile, ed. Wirz and Burgelin, 82–4. 21 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Fiona Stafford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 49–51. 22 For a modern reworking of this idea, see Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), who argues that children’s books are written not for children themselves but to appeal primarily to the adults who purchase the books they read to children. 23 The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Saxe Cummings (New York: The Modern Library, 1963), 727. 24 See William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 167–71 (lines 293–346, 1850 edition). 25 Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘On Prejudice’, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Toronto: Broadview, 2002), 335. 26 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 5:90. 27 Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘What Is Education?’, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 322. 28 Barbauld, ‘On Prejudice’, 334. 29 Ibid., 344. 30 Barbauld, ‘What Is Education?’, 331. 31 Ibid., 326. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.; emphasis in original. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 327. 36 Ibid., 322. 37 Ibid., 323. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 327. 40 Ibid., 324.

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41 Ibid. 42 See Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2014), 435. 43 Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London: J. Johnson, 1787), 17. 44 Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. McCarthy and Kraft, 237. 45 Joseph Priestley, Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley (Written by Himself to the Year 1795) (London: H. R. Allenson, 1904), 32. 46 Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children, 251–2. 47 Ibid., 248. 48 Ibid., 242–3. 49 John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld, Evenings at Home, or The Juvenile Budget Opened, rev. Cecil Hartley (London: Routledge, 1874), 19–20. 50 Ibid., 2. 51 Ibid., 48. 52 Ibid., 111–2.

11

Rousseau and the Romantic Essayists Gregory Dart

In a letter sent to Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 8 November 1796, Charles Lamb professed a deep affection for his friend’s verses: I love them as I love the Confessions of Rousseau, and for the same reason; the same frankness, the same openness of heart, the same disclosure of all the most hidden and delicate affections of the mind: they make me proud to be thus esteemed worthy of the place of friend-confessor, brother-confessor to a man like Coleridge. This last is, I acknowledge, language too high for friendship; but it is also, I declare, too sincere for flattery.1

This letter captures a key moment in English literary history, the moment at which disappointed radical energy was beginning to transfuse itself into lyric poetry, and the late eighteenth-century cult of ‘sensibility’ to mutate into Romanticism. It is addressed to a Coleridge who had recently left off political lecturing and pantisocracy, and who was now only months away from his epochal meeting with William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Its sentiments are evidence of Lamb and Coleridge’s intimacy, kept up since their schooldays at Christ’s Hospital, but they are also testimony to the great value that was being placed on intimacy in their literary circle. For Lamb especially, as for Coleridge’s live-in tutee Charles Lloyd, sensibility was what fuelled poetry and provided it with its leading subject. It was also, in its very immediacy, an effective means of breaking down the formal barrier between writer and reader. ‘I love my sonnets’, Lamb had written to Coleridge earlier the same year, ‘because they are the reflected images of my own feelings at different times.’2 He valued them, in other words, not as sophisticated distillations of feeling into form, but as transparent records of past sentiment. Going beyond their English poetic models William Cowper, William Lisle Bowles and Charlotte Smith, the Lamb–Coleridge circle had started to see

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sensibility as a utopian force that could break down obstacles and dissolve social distinctions – and it is for this reason, I would argue, that Lamb had decided to reach for the Confessions in his letter of late 1796. Published posthumously in 1782, Rousseau’s autobiography had been relatively well received in England during the early 1790s, notwithstanding the controversial links Edmund Burke had sought to make between its author’s ‘mad Confession of his mad faults’ and the political psychology of French Jacobinism.3 Setting their faces against the prevailing wind, what many English radicals chose to see in the Confessions was a utopian commitment to openness, a direct appeal, on the part of an exemplary solitary individual, for society to reform itself on simple, natural lines. By standing before God and his public at the beginning of his memoir and challenging his readers to look upon their lives with the same honesty, Rousseau had implicated everyone in his struggle. Maximilien Robespierre saw the revolutionary potential of this book from the beginning, mentioning it explicitly in his Dedication to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1789).4 A large number of his political generation agreed, and in the years that followed, Rousseaustyle confession quickly became a keynote of Jacobin style. In the Confessions, sensibility had been put to a new and highly ambitious end – the renovation of modern society – and the book quickly became an autobiographical template for radicals on both sides of the channel. After the Terror, the revolutionary memoirs of the fallen Girondins Jean-Baptiste Louvet and Jeanne-Marie Roland owed a lot to the Rousseauvian model, as did Mary Wollstonecraft’s deeply personal Letters from Sweden (1796).5 Lamb was not a public figure like Wollstonecraft, nor was he much given to political pronouncement in his private letters. But in many ways this actually helps to explain, rather than problematize, his use of Rousseau in the letter quoted above. To mention the Confessions in this fashion, as many radicals had done before him, was to invoke an inspiring example of honest testimony. But it was also to remind oneself – and one’s interlocutor – of the larger purpose that might have lain behind the Citizen of Geneva’s late, great book of revelations: the attempt to bring about, even in the most unpropitious of circumstances, a new republic of fine feeling, a society of shared understanding. For whenever the Confessions were mentioned, as commentators on every side agreed, the world of Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), Emile (1762) and indeed The Social Contract (1762) were never far behind. Was this what Lamb intended? It is very difficult to tell. There is almost something a little artificial and overstated about Lamb’s mention of Rousseau. Indeed, it smacks slightly of bravado, as if he were only saying it to impress

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Coleridge. The conundrum is compounded by the fact that, notwithstanding the ‘love’ of the Confessions that Lamb confesses here, there is scarcely a mention of Rousseau in the rest of his mature writings, whether public or private. Whatever Rousseau’s place in Lamb’s mental life, he was to retain a subterranean presence in his work. Not that this is particularly unusual, of course. Indeed, it is one of the most intriguing things about the reception of Rousseau in England in this period that, certain formal lines of educational and political discussion aside, his literary influence is at once everywhere and nowhere, pervasive and yet difficult to pinpoint, a parasite in the blood. Once noted, the fact that Victor Frankenstein comes, like Jean-Jacques, from Geneva, cannot help but influence our view of Mary Shelley’s celebrated anti-hero of 1818, but it is still only a single detail, a stray symptom, an ambiguous gesturing towards an unexpectedly reanimated corpus. Partly this has to do with Rousseau’s foreignness: the way that literary or philosophical influence tends to exert itself across national or linguistic boundaries is always, one could argue, different from the way in which more local influences operate – different not necessarily in degree but in kind. But it might also have to do with the kind of writer Rousseau was: a controversial figure, especially in England from the 1790s, whose challenge to after-comers was so fundamental that in practice it was often difficult to distinguish from the call of nature, or the appeal of candour, or the pull of self-consciousness itself. It is far from straightforward, then, to determine the depth of Lamb’s engagement with the Confessions, but the manner in which his letter to Coleridge continues does suggest some considerable investment in Rousseauvian aspirations and concerns. Several circumstances preceded Lamb’s letter. The first, and most devastating, was the killing of his mother by his sister Mary in a fit of temporary madness only a couple of months before.6 This catastrophe effectively ended Lamb’s prospects of having a wife and children of his own. Deeply attached to Mary, Charles resolved to devote the rest of his life to looking after her, giving himself up thereafter to what he called a ‘double singleness’.7 This decision had been made prior to the November 1796 letter. But the other, more literary context to this missive was the batch of sonnets that Lamb had submitted to Coleridge for inclusion in the latter’s Poems on Various Subjects, which had been published earlier in the year. Generous as Coleridge had been to incorporate Lamb’s contributions in the first place, he had also been a very interventionist collaborator, doctoring a number of his friend’s lines before they went to press. Vexed by this, Lamb had urged a restoration of the originals for the proposed second edition of 1797. The argument was that, notwithstanding the fact that many of Coleridge’s revisions were, in an objective sense, improvements

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(and it was agreed that they were), Lamb nevertheless thought it important to remain faithful to the earlier, authentic versions of his poems, essentially because of their status as ‘reflected images’ of his feelings ‘at different times’. ‘I charge you, Col.,’ he had written several months earlier, ‘spare my ewe-lambs … I would not wrong your feelings by proposing any improvements in such personal poems as “Though my bleedest my poor heart”.’8 Lamb’s recommendation to Coleridge of Rousseau’s Confessions as the authentic testimony of one independent individual is all-of-a-piece with this position. But in truth he was already moving beyond it by the time he wrote the November letter. Primarily, this new maturity in him expressed itself in a growing reluctance to argue about poetic minutiae. In the years leading up to this moment, his and Coleridge’s intimacy had been cemented through this very practice: it was in poring over individual lines of poetry – their own and those of the classics – that their literary kinship had been forged in the mid-1790s.9 This had been the leading preoccupation of those famous evenings spent together smoking Oronokoo and drinking egg-hot at The Salutation and Cat in Newgate Street.10 Now, however, in the wake of his recent family tragedy, Lamb had come to find such intense critical soul-searching vain and unhelpful, and he was quite content for Coleridge to do what he wanted with his poems – print them or not print them – as long as he did not try to ‘improve’ them further. ‘Take my sonnets once for all,’ he wrote, ‘and do not propose any re-amendments, or mention them again in any shape to me, I charge you’.11 Lamb’s impatience was exacerbated by the fact that, almost without exception, the sonnets in question were love poems that spoke of a long-defunct romance from a couple of years before that he now wanted to put behind him. But it was also prompted by a growing suspicion that, in his present condition at least, the practice of poetry itself had become a problematic, perhaps even a psychologically destabilizing one, because of the way in which it made one’s most private emotions publically available, endlessly subject to outside criticism and ‘amendment’: The Fragments I now send you I want printed to get rid of ’em; for, while they stick burr-like to my memory, they tempt me to go on with the idle trade of versifying, which I long – most sincerely I speak it – I long to leave off, for it is unprofitable to my soul; I feel it is; and these questions about words, and debates about alterations, take me off, I am conscious, from the properer business of my life.12

The tensions in this letter are evident, for even as we see Lamb recommending to Coleridge – through Rousseau – the values of extreme openness, frankness and

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mutual confession, he is also admitting, in alternate breaths, how very lacerating such literary fraternity can be, with all its relentless picking over of one another’s inner feelings under the guise of stylistic analysis. When Wordsworth wrote ‘we murder to dissect’ in one of his Lyrical Ballads (1798),13 we know that he was referring primarily to the deadening effects of certain kinds of philosophical enquiry, with Godwinian anarchism uppermost in his mind. But what Lamb seems to be reluctantly suggesting here is that there might be something destructive and alienating at the very heart of literary collaboration, even that which has been conducted in a supposedly ‘fraternal’ spirit. And, of course, in many ways his misgivings were to prove prophetic, for in the very next phase of Lamb and Coleridge’s friendship they suffered a significant falling-out over their mutual friend and poetic collaborator, the highly neurotic – and, in Thomas De Quincey’s opinion, notably ‘Rousseauish’14 – Charles Lloyd. Staying brave in the face of these incipient tensions, however, Lamb’s letter of 8 November did conclude with a return to the spirit of its opening, famously anticipating Coleridge’s imminent turn towards Wordsworth, literary primitivism and the ancient ballad tradition, by encouraging him, in a rousing peroration, to keep it simple: ‘Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.’15 Well known as this letter of Lamb is in the annals of English Romanticism, the central place of the Confessions in it has seldom been discussed. And yet it is an essential part of its meaning. For by invoking Rousseau, Lamb was doing two things at the same time. He was rehearsing that strong line, which had already been propounded by Germaine de Staël, Wollstonecraft and others, on the Confessions as a utopian text, a paradigm of simplicity, sincerity and virtue.16 But he was also – perhaps unconsciously – invoking that other, darker story the Confessions had to tell about how the collapse of literary friendships might emblematize the ‘fall’ of modern society as a whole. One line on the Confessions, which was already being mooted by some commentators of the time, was that, like ‘The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’ in Book 4 of Emile, it was all about the radical opposition between the morality of intentions and the morality of consequences, with its author’s distinctiveness lying in the very vehemence with which he had defended the former against the latter, arguing that, in a corrupt modern society, it was the perennial fate of good intentions to be misinterpreted as they entered the realm of action.17 There were several set pieces in the early part of the Confessions in which Rousseau had sought to

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justify the young Jean-Jacques for his objectively ‘bad’ actions – lying, stealing, exhibiting himself and so on – by retreating into a world of pure intentions. Guilt – sometimes overwhelming guilt – was acknowledged, but only in order to be deconstructed and transformed. The young boy’s libelling of his poor ­fellow‑servant Marian over a stolen ribbon at the end of Book 2 is perhaps the most famous example: ‘Never has wickedness been farther from me than in that cruel moment, and when I accused that unfortunate girl, it is bizarre but true that my friendship for her was the cause.’18 Amorous ambivalences and the capacity of emotional polarities to switch and reverse themselves as they passed from the inner world to the outer: these were leading themes in the early books of the Confessions. One obvious way of reading the text, then, which would have been appealing to Benthamites and Burkeans alike, was as a series of cautionary tales about the dangers of ‘good’ intentions.19 But this is not the way it was taken up by young radicals of the 1790s. Their tendency, on the contrary, had been to invest heavily in Rousseau’s sentimental idealism and to try to realize his dream of fellow feeling. What this meant in practice, for a whole generation of radical young men and women, was that they were learning the lesson of the Confessions the hard way: repeating Rousseau’s errors in life and then trying to master them in writing. One reading of Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1796–7), Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) and Godwin’s Antonio (1797) is that these poetic dramas, penned in the late 1790s, are all, in their way, meditations on failed transparency, dramatic essays on revolutionary fraternity and its discontents. But it is only in Lamb’s offering in the same genre, John Woodvil, A Tragedy (1802), that we can see a thoroughgoing critique of ‘brother-confession’ in its own terms. Lamb’s play is set during the early years of the English Restoration. Sir Walter Woodvil, a proscribed parliamentarian, is in hiding with his younger son Simon in Sherwood Forest. His eldest son John, who has reconciled himself to the new order, is now in charge of the family estate, near Ottery St Mary (Coleridge’s birthplace) in Devon. While in his cups at a feast in honour of the restored King, John longs to establish a transparent intimacy with another man, ostensibly by confiding to him the secret of his refugee father’s whereabouts; and he describes the challenge to himself in explicitly experimental terms: I have been meditating this half-hour On all the properties of a brave friendship, The mysteries that are in it, the noble uses, Its limits withal, and its nice boundaries.20

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Singling out his friend Lovel, a courtier (who was dubbed ‘a court spy’ in the first draft of the play), Woodvil lays the problem out in abstract terms, asserting that the ideal friendship would define itself in terms of a commitment to ‘a law within’ that went beyond all external family and social obligations – and that a mutual confidence, or shared secret, would be the perfect test of such a bond: Pray mark me. Having a law within (great spirits feel one) [A friend] cannot, ought not to be bound by any Positive laws or ord’nances extern, But may reject all these: by the law of friendship He may do so much.21

This is the doctrine of the Rousseauvian conscience turned into an explicitly anti-institutional principle, invoking an internal virtue that would define itself through the customary pieties it would transcend. The emotional atmosphere here is close to that of Wordsworth’s Borderers and Schiller’s Robbers (1781), and the indulgence of ‘private judgement’ highly reminiscent of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). But there is also, going back further, a palpable echo of the insistently anti-institutional (and anti-social) principles of Robespierrist Jacobinism. In the world of the play, of course, Woodvil is not in any obvious sense a revolutionary: he is merely a proud and ambitious aristocrat. Nevertheless, Lamb shows him to have been corrupted by a very modern taste for experiment. Like the dark predator Matravis in Lamb’s rural prose tragedy Rosamund Gray (1798), he is a ‘young man with gray deliberation’, a cold speculator in morals.22 Soon after this speech, Woodvil confides to Lovel that his father is not in exile in France, as was commonly thought, but is living as an outlaw in Nottingham; and Lovel responds promptly by vowing not to reveal the secret to anyone. But no sooner has Woodvil shared this truth with his friend than he starts a fullscale interrogation of Lovel’s past and present behaviour, insisting that he prove himself worthy of the secret with which he has just been entrusted. Quickly realizing the extent to which his father’s fate now lies entirely in his friend’s hands, Woodvil falls upon his knees and pleads with him to keep his confidence: You see these tears. My father’s an old man. Pray let him live. LOVEL. I must be bold to tell you, these new freedoms Shew most unhandsome in you. JOHN, (rising) Ha! do you say so? Sure, you are not grown proud upon my secret!23

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There is a paradox, of course, to the sharing of secrets, particularly secrets that involve a third party. In spirit, it might be considered to be a utopian, egalitarian impulse: the desire to create a little pocket of truth – of sympathetic truth – that will bind its adherents together. In practice, however, it is painfully destabilized by internal ironies, most notably the fact that what the person doing the entrusting – in this case Woodvil – is effectively demanding of his friend is something that he himself, at the very moment of disclosure, is demonstrably showing himself to be incapable of, namely discretion. Or, as Samuel Johnson sagely put it in The Rambler No. 13: ‘All the arguments upon which a man who is telling the private affairs of another may ground his confidence of security, he must upon reflection know to be uncertain, because he finds them without effect upon himself.’24 Hence Woodvil’s sudden guilt and paranoia; hence also his shock at the sudden reversal of the power dynamic, whereby a man like him who had begun in a position of moral superiority, being in proud possession of an important secret, suddenly finds himself deprived of that superiority as a result of sharing it. From being above, he finds himself below, not only in terms of practical power – his friend is now in a position to betray this confidence for his own advantage – but in moral terms as well. This ‘secret-sharing’ is hence a restaging of the fall – of Pride’s original fall – but it is one in which, as with the various falls from paradise that speckle the opening books of Rousseau’s Confessions, the initial impulse, the intention, was actually a virtuous one: a desire for openness and shared knowledge. Lamb’s Woodvil is never less than virtuously Rousseauvian in his desire for shared truth, for total confidence, but what his explorations of the new freedom of the heart bring in is a terrible new world in which the slave has become the master. Woodvil, whose very indiscretion was based on a kind of unconscious pride and love of power, can now see nothing but pride and power in the continuing independence of Lovel, and he reacts by treating him tyrannically, deliberately humiliating him in a duel. But the final result of all this, ironically, is to bring about the very outcome Woodvil had been most afraid of: his father’s subsequent betrayal by Lovel and rapid tragic demise. The literary parallels are not hard to see. Woodvil is an Ancient Mariner who sleepwalks into a crime against nature. He is a Viscount Falkland who has chosen to share his secret with Caleb Williams and is then shocked at the social and moral revolution that unravels as a result. He is a Frankenstein who has sought to bring a new kind of friendship into being – and finds himself instantaneously horrified at the obligations that come with it. Having imagined that ‘brother-confession’ was about freedom, Woodvil discovers that it is nothing but a new kind of bondage.

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What he was pursuing was a return to the Rousseauvian state of nature; what he discovers is that of Hobbes. Woodvil’s redemption, at the end of the play, comes about when he rises early one morning and goes to the local church, where he repents and finds himself reincorporated within the tradition of his forefathers. Of course, it cannot but be significant to Romanticists that it is Ottery St Mary, the Coleridge family’s local church, that Woodvil visits. But what is Lamb suggesting? That Coleridge has lost his way and neglected his family? He sometimes berated him about this at the time. Yet the Christian conclusion to John Woodvil, muted and brief as it is, does also remind us that it was Coleridge that Lamb had thanked for saving his faith in the aftermath of the ‘day of horrors’; he was the friend that had brought him back from the brink when he had seen nothing left to live for. What details like this suggest is that John Woodvil, far from being a portrait of a specific person – Coleridge, or Lloyd, or Lamb himself – is far better seen as a kind of composite figure. Like Mortimer in Wordsworth’s The Borderers or the eponymous hero of Charles Lloyd’s novel Edmund Oliver (1798), John Woodvil is a study of an ill-starred Rousseauvian idealist, an idealist who is betrayed, or rather who betrays himself, into a post-revolutionary self-consciousness. He is representative of a generation. Some twenty years after Lamb’s ‘Simplicity’ letter to Coleridge, William Hazlitt was to return to the very same historical period, and more specifically to the spring of 1797, just prior to the famous Lyrical Ballads summer. He did this in order to commemorate the Lake School’s utopian moment, but also to lament its subsequent decline. His essay ‘On my First Acquaintance with Poets’, first published in The Liberal in January 1823, reminisces in great detail about walking down to Somerset to see Wordsworth and Coleridge at Nether Stowey and gives a detailed biographical description of the two poets at the height of their powers.25 More succinct and more personal, however, is the brief vignette that he offered in the middle of his essay ‘On Going a Journey’, which was published in the New Monthly Magazine in January 1822, exactly one year before. Here again, Rousseau is a background presence, and the role he plays is very similar to the one in Lamb’s 1796 letter: It was on the tenth of April, 1798, that I sat down to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I chose was that in which St. Preux describes his feelings as he first caught a glimpse from the heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which I had brought with me as a bon bouche to crown the evening with. It was my birth-day, and I had for the first time come from a place in the neighbourhood to visit this

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delightful spot. The road to Llangollen turns off between Chirk and Wrexham; and on passing a certain point you come all at once upon the valley, which opens like an amphitheatre […] How proud, how glad I was to walk along the high road that overlooks the delicious prospect, repeating the lines which I have just quoted from Mr. Coleridge’s poems! But besides the prospect which opened beneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE; which have since faded into the light of common day, or mock my idle gaze. ‘The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.’ Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and defaced. I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not only I myself have changed; the world which was then new to me, has become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the waters of life freely!26

The text invoked here is Julie, but its literary model is Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782). Hazlitt depicts himself as the last Jacobin on earth, thinking back to that moment in 1798 when he was on the eve of going down to Nether Stowey to meet Wordsworth and his sister for the first time. There are many things to notice here. One is that the allusion to Rousseau functions not as an idea, image or turn of phrase but as a topos: a view or distant prospect. The reference to Saint-Preux returning, after many years of exile, to the valley of his beloved Julie, can be seen to function as a kind of backdrop against which to view the other literary references present, which are much more local and particular. The allusions to Coleridge are acknowledged, but the passage also ripples with echoes of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Resolution and Independence’. The implication throughout is that what Rousseau’s Julie provided, and continues to provide, is a true prospect of Liberty, Genius, Love and Virtue that was first taken up, and then subsequently squandered, by Hazlitt’s former acquaintances, the Lake Poets. Hence the writer’s utopian return to the moment immediately prior to the Lyrical Ballads summer – when everything had still seemed possible. As he wrote in his ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, which was first published in 1816 in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner:

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We spent two whole years in reading [the Confessions and Julie]; and (gentle reader, it was when we were young) in shedding tears over them . … They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet is the dew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their recollection! There are, indeed, impressions which neither time nor circumstances can efface.27

This last is a quotation from Rousseau’s Saint-Preux in William Kenrick’s translation – ‘Believe me, Eloisa, there are impressions, which neither time, circumstance, nor reason can efface’28 – but is here being used to denote the experience of reading Rousseau himself. The bitterness and sense of betrayal Hazlitt expresses towards the Lakers here is only too characteristic – and something he returns to often during the 1820s. But what is equally typical is the fact that even the apparently sunny allusion to Julie is not without a certain dramatic irony. In one way, of course, Hazlitt is writing his own prose version of ‘Tintern Abbey’, substituting the ‘sylvan Dee’ for Wordsworth’s ‘sylvan Wye’ and returning to a favoured spot from his past in order to gauge how far he and others have changed. Characteristically, he finds that he himself has not altered his opinions, that he has, like Rousseau himself, been heroically incorrigible. But what he cannot ignore is the extent to which he has been let down by the reversals of others. In a sense, he is in exactly the same position as Saint-Preux, returning to the sublime prospect of his homeland, only to find his beloved Julie now married to the atheist Baron de Wolmar and already embarked upon that increasingly theatrical, and sometimes explicitly stage-managed, ‘community of fine spirits’ that occupies the last half of the novel. Ostensibly Hazlitt offers us Rousseau as the utopian visionary who was both prior to and superior to Wordsworth and Coleridge; but in another way the prospect that he shows Rousseau as offering is itself nothing but a distant view of personal and political disappointment. It is a prospect that recedes, in other words, the closer you seek to get to it, not a little like Wordsworth’s celebrated ‘spots of time’ from Book 11 of the 1805 Prelude: ‘the hiding-places of my power/Seem open’, the poet writes, ‘I approach, and then they close’.29 Hazlitt often deployed Rousseau in this fashion: as a stick with which to beat the apostate Lakers Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, and on occasion the Whig poets Moore and Byron. In ‘On the Jealousy and Spleen and Party’, for example, he contrasted Moore’s timid, snobbish Whiggism with Rousseau’s truly democratic legacy, and in ‘On Byron and Wordsworth’ he was to make a similar point about the author of Childe Harold.30 In ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, Hazlitt offered his most explicit account of Rousseau’s historical significance,

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discovering a continuing egalitarian message especially in his personal and autobiographical works: He did more towards the French Revolution than any other man. Voltaire, by his wit and penetration, had rendered superstition contemptible, and tyranny odious: but it was Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, above humanity, home to the bosom of every man – identified it with all the pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart.31

When contrasting Rousseau’s legacy with that of Wordsworth, Hazlitt was helped by the fact that, in terms of their colossal egotism, love of nature, mountain republicanism and lack of humour, they were so very nearly alike: We see no other difference between them, than that the one wrote in prose and the other in poetry; and that prose is perhaps better adapted to express those local and personal feelings, which are inveterate habits in the mind, than poetry, which embodies its imaginary creations. We conceive that Rousseau’s exclamation, Ah, voilà de la pervenche! comes more home to the mind than Mr. Wordsworth’s discovery of the linnet’s nest ‘with five blue eggs’, or than his address to the cuckoo, beautiful as we think it is; and we will confidently match the Citizen of Geneva’s adventures on the lake of Bienne against the Cumberland Poet’s floating dreams on the lake of Grasmere.32

The allusion, which is one that Hazlitt makes on several occasions in his book, is to Book 6 of the Confessions, when Rousseau sees some periwinkle while climbing with his friend Du Peyrou in 1764 and is reminded of Madame de Warens coming suddenly upon the same flower during their idyll at Les Charmettes nearly thirty years before. The argument that Hazlitt makes out of this instance is an interesting one. To him, it is as if Rousseau, through his monstrous egotism, but also by virtue of being a prose writer, is better able to convey the deep truth of subjective experience than Wordsworth the poet, who, though equally egotistical, is always trying to persuade you that the things he finds beautiful really are so. Intriguingly, for Hazlitt, poetry, even at its most concrete and descriptive, still has a little too much of the ideal and the abstract about it. It does not capture the abstract in the particular that is the peculiar virtue of reflective prose. In  Rousseauvian autobiography, it seems, the relationship between the abstract and the particular is at its most heightened: experience there has never been more desultory, everyday, local and particularized, but it is always shot through with abstract significance. The periwinkle passage speaks more powerfully about the power of memory and

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personal association, Hazlitt argues, than Wordsworth’s daffodils, because the very beauty of the latter distracts you from the real point of the poem. Wordsworth’s poetry was one of Hazlitt’s touchstones – one of the great landmarks of the age – but it is all the more interesting, on that account, to see this comparison with Rousseau producing what is, in effect, an argument in favour of the reflective essay – the form that Hazlitt himself practised – over and above lyric poetry. This was the reason that he could think of Rousseau’s selfishness as having had something utopian in it. To his mind, it was so extreme and transgressive that it could not help but release its opposite, namely the universal sympathy of all readers, and a respect for the absolute particularity of personal experience: The best of all [Rousseau’s] works is the Confessions […] because it contains the fewest set paradoxes or general opinions. It relates entirely to himself; and no one was ever so much at home on this subject as he was. From the strong hold which they had taken of his mind, be makes us enter into his feelings as if they had been our own, and we seem to remember every incident and circumstance of his life as if it had happened to ourselves.33

This was the Rousseau that Hazlitt liked to celebrate; the one that he had less time for was the systematizer, the man who could not be happy until he had pushed his feelings to the point of principle. As Hazlitt wrote in his essay ‘On Reason and Imagination’ (1826): Rousseau was too ambitious of an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning, scarcely attainable in the mixed questions of human life, (as may be seen in his Social Contract – a work of great ability, but extreme formality of structure) and it is probable he was led into this error in seeking to overcome his too great warmth of natural temperament and a tendency to indulge merely the impulses of passion.34

Behind Hazlitt’s objection to the systematic in Rousseau there was, of course, a political element: a lingering aversion to the way in which sensibility had been systematized during the Terror. But his primary complaint, the issue uppermost in his mind, was a stylistic one and concerned the relationship between the essay and the treatise. Rousseau had written a number of works that he had dubbed essays but they were all, in Hazlitt’s eyes, treatises in disguise, ‘too ambitious of an exceedingly technical and scientific mode of reasoning’. What Hazlitt had discovered through his own early foray into philosophy with his Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) was that the best way of practising what he wanted to preach in philosophical terms – that is, of showing the ideal in the

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real and the abstract in the particular – was by adopting the form of the familiar essay, the form in which one could begin anywhere and in which abstract ideas could accumulate associatively and in an open relation to particular lived experience. It was precisely because Hazlitt was a philosopher, then, that his preferred Rousseau was the writer of the Confessions and Reveries, texts in which philosophical ideas were shown emerging from particular circumstances, in all their tangled propinquity. Charles Lamb was no philosopher, but in his ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ (1823) he sketched one of the best theoretical defences of the familiar essay as a ‘negatively capable’ form. This is beneath the surface; ostensibly the essay was an exploration of another, equally germane theme: that of the limits of personal sympathy. In the persona of Elia, his playful nom de plume, he explored his own middle-aged prejudices: his aversion to Scotchmen, Quakers, Negroes and Jews. Even when read today, this essay is still not as offensive as it ought to be, probably because of the way in which it holds its prejudices at arm’s length, as prejudices, and explores them in all their familiar rivalry with what they oppose: You cannot cry halves to anything that [a Scotsman] finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian-you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semiconsciousness, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox? he has no doubts. Is he an infidel? he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him – for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book.35

The only kind of book that conversation ought to resemble, in Lamb’s view, is the essayistic kind – one that is intimate, exploratory, conjectural, open. But even in the act of recommending Rousseauvian informality, the personal touch and the acknowledgement of process that is so particular a feature of the Reveries, the mature Lamb finds it crucial to resist the demands of complete transparency – the rules of truth-telling that were expounded so exactingly in the ‘Fourth Walk’. This moment comes at the end of ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, when Lamb tries to negotiate his mixed feelings about Quakers:

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I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship . … But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) ‘to live with them’. I should starve at their primitive banquet . … As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected, and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant. Something less than truth satisfies.36

Lamb had – or so he told Coleridge – briefly considered turning Quaker in February 1797, when still under the influence of their friend Charles Lloyd, and it is interesting to consider that this was one direction in which his youthful desire for revolutionary simplicity might have taken him.37 But returning to his work twenty years later, we find that the literary persona of ‘Elia’ that he had crafted for himself in the meantime was entirely predicated upon a kind of virtuous mendacity, pitched somewhere between jest and earnest. Pragmatically, the semi-anonymity of a literary persona did make sense for a private man like Lamb with a day job in the City and a sick sister to attend to. But more than that, having spent his youth inhabiting the agon of truth, he now found himself increasingly drawn to the ‘twilight of dubiety’, that realm where all persons, feelings and ideas could be placed, as it were, in sceptical solution, reposing in a kind of ‘border-land’ between the negative and the affirmative. To Lamb, lyric poetry had always been a very emotionally direct and therefore somewhat exposing form; in the reflective essay, by contrast, and especially when writing through a persona, he found he could be full of opinions without being opinionated, confessional without being self-crucifying. The naturalness and intimacy of Rousseau’s written voice had revitalized the English essay tradition. Gone were the impersonal symmetries of Johnson’s Rambler, which had been the model up until that point, a style in which, as Hazlitt had argued, ‘all things were reduced to the same artificial and unmeaning level’.38 Lamb, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey were all to benefit from Rousseau’s example. The only problem with his first-person style – and it was a problem for his readers as well as for the writer himself – was that it left no place for irony or any other kind of double-dealing; he was always ‘standing upon his oath’. The Romantic essayists were drawn to Rousseau’s confessional etiquette like moths to a flame, but they were also afraid of getting too close, for fear of being scorched by its implications. Hence their penchant for autobiographical equivocation and framing irony. Guilt as the motor of self-consciousness: this was one of the most important legacies bequeathed to the Romantic poets and prose writers by the Confessions.

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It is the motor that drives Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805) and turns it into the Paradise Lost of modern literature. It is what gives energy and urgency to a whole range of auto- and crypto-autobiographies of the period, from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) to Frankenstein (1818). This idea was also powerful in the essayists, although its source in Rousseau was often suppressed. In the opening paragraph of his first ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’ article of 1821, Thomas De Quincey, militant Tory that he was, went to suspiciously great lengths to distance himself from the French confessional tradition, that habit of ‘obtruding’ one’s ‘moral ulcers or scars’ upon the public, as he put it, ‘and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have draped over them’.39 But as his astonishing memoir unfolded, what became increasingly evident was the extent to which De Quincey’s own characteristic mode, both as an autobiographer and as a biographer, was indelibly marbled with Rousseauvian traits: tendencies to indiscretion, revelation, self-justification and literary betrayal that all owed a great deal to Rousseau’s example. In his Opium memoir De Quincey took Rousseau’s confessional economy – an economy in which guilt was always being transformed into self-justification – and turned it into something even more perverse and unstable. Where Rousseau’s autobiographical method had always been, to a greater or lesser extent, about revealing the subjectively good intentions behind Jean-Jacques’s objectively bad actions, De Quincey’s had guilt and innocence running perpetually in parallel – and in competition – with one another. The Confessions of an English OpiumEater was not a confession of guilt, De Quincey insisted in the Preface – or, if it was, the blameworthiness of the narrative in moral terms would be more than offset by its value as a medical case study. Finesses such as this set the tone: the Confessions was double-dealing throughout, always seeking to trade in two currencies at the same time. Simultaneously it presented itself to the reader as a narrative of material abjection and of imaginative sublimity, a wallowing in ‘guilt and misery’ which was nevertheless also a celebration of the grandeur potentially contained in human dreams. The Opium-Eater was a poor wretch, but he was also a transcendent artist; a repentant hero (for telling the truth about his life) and a court spy (who made dark hints about the drug habits of others). Exploiting the fissure between the writing self and the suffering self that had first been opened up by Rousseau’s Reveries, De Quincey seemed happy to sacrifice life to art, the moral to the aesthetic. ‘Opium’, as he wrote in the concluding section of the Confessions, ‘is the true hero of the tale’.40 In De Quincey the influence of Rousseauvian confession was repressed but profound; but in Leigh Hunt – a writer who was outwardly much more

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sympathetic to Rousseau – the literary inheritance was strangely attenuated. Hunt was a radical liberal who cultivated a politics of familiarity in both his life and his writings, and yet despite being a prolific political journalist and enthusiastic autobiographer, he owed surprisingly little to Rousseau. Part of the explanation for this is that politically he was a believer not in revolution but in reform. But even more saliently, perhaps, his personal writings were, almost without exception, amiable exhibitions of an expansive but essentially complacent egotism. Nowhere in Hunt do we find the explosive dynamic of guilt and exculpation – of self-mortification and self-aggrandisement – that one finds in the Rousseauvian tradition. There is no equivalent to De Quincey’s Saturday nights among the markets of the London poor or the contorted self-exculpations of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. In 1820 Hunt translated Rousseau’s little-known monodrama Pygmalion for inclusion in the Indicator, but largely in order to critique its solipsistic narcissism, not to endorse it: It appears to us that instead of making [Pygmalion] fall in love, almost out of vanity … it might have been better … to represent him fashioning the likeness of a creature after his own heart, lying and looking at it with a yearning wish that he could have met such a living being, and at last, while indulging his imagination with talking to her, making him lay his hand upon hers, and finding it warm.41

Here Hunt swaps Rousseau’s utopian idealism for a form of reformist optimism, his phrasing recalling Keats’s notion of the imagination as being like Adam’s dream of Eve ‘he awoke and found it truth’.42 Of all the Romantic essayists the most straightforwardly Rousseauvian was Hazlitt, a man who, as Hunt himself commented, had Shakespeare and Rousseau ‘by heart’.43 Hazlitt’s ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ was written in the middle of the 1810s, but his most Rousseau-like personal writings all date from the following decade. The most notorious of all is his self-destructively candid Liber Amoris (1823), a restaging of Rousseau’s doomed affair with Sophie d’Houdetot in a lower-middle-class lodging house. Less catastrophic, but no less characteristic, is the ‘Farewell to Essay-Writing’ (1828), where we are taken on a Rousseauvian ramble – a leisured rhapsody on the solitary pleasures of the countryside – by an ageing, unloved narrator who, like Jean-Jacques himself, has nothing else to pride himself upon but the retentiveness of his memory and the consistency of his opinions: ‘What sometimes surprises me in looking back to the past is to find myself so little changed in the time. The same images and trains of thought stick by me.’44 And yet, even as everything in this essay is striving

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to perpetuate the Rousseauvian fiction of a man writing his meditations only for himself,45 its very title draws attention to its status as a piece of commercial journalism. Lamb drew attention to this performative element in his friend’s work when he said, in an unpublished review of Hazlitt’s Table-Talk from 1821, that ‘the Writer almost everywhere adopts the style of a discontented man’. The phrasing here is crucial, not least because of its half suggestion that there might be a particular discontented man whose style Hazlitt had seen fit to adopt. But perhaps the most important point that Lamb makes in his review is that this air of disappointment was not a drawback; on the contrary, he insists, ‘this assumption of a Character is what gives life and force to his writing’.46 As in Hazlitt, so too in Lamb, the frame within which the essayist places the lucubrations of the Rousseauvian solitary is both metropolitan and commercial. ‘The Superannuated Man’, Elia’s essay on his retirement from the East India House, is, in its way, a rewriting of Rousseau’s ‘Fifth Walk’ – but in an explicitly urban setting. In Lamb’s handling, the emancipation of Elia from a lifetime of clerkdom is the most delightful and terrifying revolution of all: I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years’ confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity – for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.47

This joke would have been all the richer for Lamb’s friends, to whom he had been complaining for years about his cruel imprisonment at the office and the lack of peace that he and Mary enjoyed at Mitre Court in the Strand, where they were beset by a constant stream of friendly visitors. In a letter to Wordsworth’s wife Mary in the spring of 1818, on the cusp of his emergence as a public author, Lamb complained about his status as a man who was never allowed to be alone. It is a telling missive, shot through with Rousseauvian resonances: Evening Company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth) and voices all the golden morning, and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself.48

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‘He who thought it not good for man to be alone’ was God: the God of Genesis, about to create Eve. But it also reminds us of Diderot, sniping at Rousseau in the aftermath of the d’Houdetot affair and the scandal of his abandoned children.49 Lamb wrote this letter just as his two-volume Works (1818) were going through the press, when he was only two years away from becoming ‘Elia’. Indeed, one way of reading his creative breakthrough in the 1820s is in terms of a transferral of the characteristic suppleness and humour of his letters into the familiar essay form. The letter of May 1818 is a splendid example of this, because in its dubious tone, pitched somewhere between seriousness and frivolity, it reads like a classic Elia essay: I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his damn’d unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great Books, or compare sum with sum, and write PAID against this and UNP’D against t’other, and yet reserve in some ‘corner of my mind’ some darling thoughts all my own – faint memory of some passage in a Book – or the tone of an absent friend’s Voice.50

These sentiments, for all their comic inversions, are very close to Rousseau’s Reveries, identifying, as they do, a kind of double movement at the heart of everyday life. Simultaneous with the daily drudgery of home and office, Lamb suggests, there is the alternative universe of reverie, where one can dream about favourite books, friends and actresses: The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions (earth’s I mean), or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front – or as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney.51

Here reverie runs in parallel with routine and with everyday domestic to-ings and fro-ings. But what interrupts this double movement, whether at work or in the home, is the unwonted intrusion of friends and literary acquaintances, all buzzing about him like the swarm at the beginning of Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot: ‘These pests worrit me at business and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which had come to an amicable compromise but for them.’52 The pains of this situation were real and did sometimes have serious consequences: too frequent visits by friends and acquaintances often brought recurrences of Mary’s mental illness, so that from time to time Charles had to

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bar even close friends from their door. But while registering these pressures, Lamb’s letter still manages to open up a space of literary reverie alongside them, which is then made available to his ‘ideal readers’ in the Lakes. The familiar essay form, as conducted by Lamb in his ‘Elia’ essays, is the continuing expression of this parallel existence, this life in and out of the teeming streets and amidst the claims of others. It is the form in which the Rousseauvian self finally comes to a humorous truce with its obstacle.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

7

8 9

The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Letters of Charles Lamb, 1796–1801 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1:59. Ibid., 1:20 (letter to Coleridge, 10 June 1796). Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford, The French Revolution 1790–1794 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 8:314. On the relationship between Rousseau’s autobiography and political theory, see Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism: The Politics of Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Maximilien Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Marc Bouloiseau, Alfred Soboul and Georges Lefebvre (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967), 2:211–2. Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, Narrative of the Dangers to Which I have been Exposed (London: J. Johnson, 1795), a translation of Quelques notices pour l’histoire (Paris: Louvet, 1794); Jeanne-Marie Roland, An Appeal to Impartial Posterity (London: J. Johnson, 1795), a translation of Appel à l’impartiale postérité (Paris: Louvet, 1794–5); Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London: J. Johnson, 1796). See E. V. Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb (London: Methuen, 1905), 93–112; Winifred Courtney, Young Charles Lamb, 1775–1802 (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 114–20; Jane Aaron, A Double Singleness: Gender in the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 97–114. The phrase comes from Elia’s description of his relationship with his cousin Bridget at the beginning of Lamb’s London Magazine essay ‘Mackery End, in Hertfordshire’ (July 1821), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, (London: Methuen, 1903), 2:75. The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Marrs, 1:20–1. See Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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10 See, for example, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Marrs, 1:32 (letter to Coleridge, 13–6 June 1796). 11 Ibid., 1:60. 12 Ibid., 1:59–60. 13 ‘The Tables Turned’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Fiona Stafford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82. 14 Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lake Poets, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, Autobiography and Literary Reminiscences (London: Black, 1896), 2:201. 15 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Marrs, 1:60–1. 16 See Germaine de Stael, Letters on the Character and Writings of J.-J. Rousseau (London: Robinson, 1790), a translation of Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau (n.p.: n.pb., 1788); Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘Second Partie des Confessions de J. J. Rousseau’, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 7:228–34. 17 See Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, 52–9, 62–6. 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Christopher Kelly, ed. C. Kelly, Roger D. Masters and Peter G. Stillman, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. R. D. Masters and C. Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 5:72; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:86. 19 In 1789, the year of the Revolution, the English philosopher and legislator Jeremy Bentham sought to expose the limitation of ‘sentiments’ and ‘good intentions’ in his utilitarian Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne and Son, 1789); and in 1791, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, Burke railed vehemently about the gap between the theoretical benevolence of Rousseau and his followers and their practical malignity: ‘Benevolence to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy’ (Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 314). 20 Charles Lamb, John Woodvil, in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, Poems and Plays (London: Methuen, 1903), 5:181. 21 Ibid. 22 Charles Lamb, Rosamund Gray, in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, Miscellaneous Prose, 1798–1834 (London: Methuen, 1903), 1:22. 23 Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Lucas, 5:185. 24 The Works of Samuel Johnson (London: Hansard and Sons, 1810), 4:85. 25 William Hazlitt, ‘On My First Acquaintance with Poets’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, Uncollected Essays (London: Dent, 1933), 17:118–20.

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26 William Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, Table-Talk, or Original Essays (London: Dent, 1931), 8:186. The quotation is from Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Death of Wallenstein. The opening allusion is to Rousseau’s Julie, Part 4, letter 6, which describes SaintPreux’s return to his home country after a long period of exile: see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. and ed. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 6:343–50; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Henri Coulet and Bernard Guyon, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théâtre, Poésies, Essais littéraires (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 2:418–26. 27 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Character of Rousseau’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, The Round Table and Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Dent, 1930), 4:91. This essay is also discussed by Rowan Boyson in her chapter in this book. 28 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters, Collected and Published by J. J. Rousseau. Translated from the French [by William Kenrick] (London: Griffiths, Becket and De Hondt, 1761), 4:141 (Part 6, letter 7); cf. Rousseau, Julie, trans. and ed. Stewart and Vaché, 554, and Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Coulet and Guyon, 675. 29 William Wordsworth, 1805 Prelude, bk 11, lines 335–6, in The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979), 86. 30 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Jealousy and Spleen and Party’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, The Spirit of the Age and Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A. (London: Dent, 1932), 11:365–7; ‘On Byron and Wordsworth’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, Miscellaneous Writings (London: Dent, 1934), 20:156. 31 Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, 4:89 n. 32 Ibid., 4:92. 33 Ibid., 4:90. 34 William Hazlitt, ‘On Reason and Imagination’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men and Things (London: Dent, 1931), 12:52. 35 Charles Lamb, ‘Imperfect Sympathies’, in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, Elia and The Last Essays of Elia (London: Methuen, 1903), 2:60. 36 Ibid., 2:63. 37 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Marrs, 1:103. 38 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Periodical Essayists’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P.Howe, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (London: Dent, 1931), 6:102.

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39 Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [Part One]’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), 2:9. 40 Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater [Part Two]’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), 2:74. 41 Leigh Hunt, ‘Rousseau’s Pygmalion’, in The Indicator (London: J. Appleyard, 1822 [10 May 1820]), 241. 42 John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817, in Letters of John Keats, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 1:185. 43 Leigh Hunt, ‘My Books’, in The Indicator and The Companion: A Miscellany for the Fields and the Fireside (London: Colburn, 1834), 2:188. 44 William Hazlitt, ‘Farewell to Essay-Writing’, in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, 12:257. 45 This is Rousseau’s claim at the beginning of the Reveries: see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000), 8:8; cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, ed. Marcel Raymond, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and M. Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 1:1001. 46 Lamb’s unpublished essay is reproduced as an appendix in Robert Ready, Hazlitt at Table (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 97. 47 Charles Lamb, ‘The Superannuated Man’, in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Lucas, 2:195. 48 The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. by E. V. Lucas, 3 vols (London: Methuen, 1935), 2:226. 49 In Book 9 of the Confessions Rousseau recalls taking exception to what he felt was a remark directed at him, namely the aphorism ‘Only the wicked man is alone’, uttered by the character Constance in Diderot’s play The Natural Son (Le Fils naturel, 1757): see Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Kelly, 382; cf. Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, 455. 50 Letters, ed. Lucas, 2:225. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid.

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Index Aiken, John 187, 196, 203 Austen, Jane 25

Evans, Thomas 76, 83. See also Cothi, Thomas Glynn

Barbauld, Anna Letitia 7, 12, 19, 27, 29 n.24, 187–8, 197–205 Evenings at Home 203 Hymns in Prose for Children 202 Lessons for Children 26, 189, 196, 201–2 ‘What is Education’ 197, 199–200 Blake, William 3 Burke, Edmund 3, 13–15, 55, 94, 99, 210, 214, 229 n.19 Anti-Jacobinism 114–17, 119–20, 125 Reflections on the Revolution in France 37, 80 Burney, Fanny 18, 133 Butler, Sarah 75–7. See also Ladies of Llangollen Byron, Lord George 3–5, 33–6, 39, 52–3, 63, 65, 103, 219 Alpine Journal 36, 46 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 5, 33, 37–8, 40–7, 48 n.14, 49 n.15, 65–9, 98 Don Juan 19–20 Manfred 33, 66–7, 69, 98

Gilpin, William 78, 171–2, 175, 178 Gisborne, Thomas 16 Godwin, William 3, 6, 21, 25, 91, 97–8, 113, 117, 120–1, 170, 176-8, 213 Abbas 135 Antonio 135, 214 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice 113, 135, 215 Fleetwood 102, 176–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von The Sorrows of Young Werther 2, 35 Gregory, John 14, 16 Gwilym, Dafydd ap 83

Chapone, Hester 16 Chateaubriand, François-René de 53–4, 56–9, 62 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 118, 187–8, 196, 209, 211–14, 217–19, 223, 225 Cothi, Thomas Glyn 6, 76, 83–5. See also Evans, Thomas Cowper, William 169, 179, 209 Coxe, William 52, 60, 62, 91, 94 Day, Thomas 187, 192 De Quincey, Thomas 7, 213, 223–5 Diderot, Denis 133, 174, 227 Edgeworth, Maria 16, 18, 25, 187, 196 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 187, 196 Egypt 150, 154–5, 158

Hamilton, Elizabeth 16, 117 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 120 Hays, Mary 14–15, 18, 25 Hazlitt, William 3, 6–7, 217–21, 223, 225–6 Essay on the Principles of Human Action 221 ‘The Fight’ 1–2 Liber Amoris 1 ‘On Byron and Wordsworth’ 219 ‘On Going a Journey’ 217–18 ‘On my First Acquaintance with Poets’ 217 ‘On Reason and Imagination’ 221–2 ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ 178, 225 Table Talk 226 Hookham (Jr.), Thomas 92, 100–2, 104–5 Hunt, Leigh 7, 218, 223–5 Johnes, Mariamne 78–9 Johnes, Thomas 75, 78–80 Johnson, Samuel 115, 169, 195, 216 Ladies of Llangollen 76, 78, 85 Lake District 7, 171–2

252

Index

Lamb, Charles 7, 196, 209–17, 223, 226–8 ‘Imperfect Sympathies’ 222 Leigh, Augusta 36 Le Vaillant, François 116, 121 Lloyd, Charles 117, 209, 213, 223 Edmund Oliver 124, 126 n.4, 217 Locke, John 174, 187, 189, 191, 193–4, 197, 200 Lucas, Charles 117, 122–3, 125 Macaulay, Catherine 22–4, 197 Mason, William 78–9 Mathias, T. J. 14, 16 Milbanke, Annabella 36 Milton, John 96–7, 156, 165 n.34 Paradise Lost 2 Montesquieu 81, 84 More, Hannah 14, 16–17, 24 Morganwg, Iolo 6, 76, 78, 81, 85, 88 n.48 Murray, John 20, 33, 47 Napoleon Bonaparte 33, 35–7, 45, 52, 65, 99, 139, 154 Norway 7, 176 Opie, Amelia 18 Peacock, Thomas Love 103, 157, 160 Plutarch 2 Polwhele, Richard 14 Ponsonby, Sarah 75–7. See also Ladies of Llangollen Price, Richard 80 Radcliffe, Ann 18–19 Robinson, Mary 18 Rome 6, 132, 136–42, 144 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques Confessions 6, 7, 93, 98, 101–2, 138, 149–50, 152–3, 156–60, 167, 169–75, 178, 209–14, 216, 219–22 The Death of Lucretia 133–4, 139 Discourse on Inequality 2, 6, 11, 20–2, 26, 95, 118, 150, 152–4, 157–8, 171 Emile, or On Education 2, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 19, 23–4, 26, 68, 81–2, 94, 98, 116, 120–1, 123–4, 152, 159, 170–1, 187–205, 210, 213 Essay on the Origins of Language 2

Julie, or the New Heloise 2, 5–6, 12–14, 20, 33, 36–40, 42–7, 52, 54, 57, 59, 65, 70, 76–7, 79, 81, 92–4, 97, 102–4, 116, 120, 122, 124, 131, 150, 157–8, 171, 175, 210, 218–19 Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre 23, 95, 131–2, 134 Reveries of the Solitary Walker 6, 7, 26, 94, 98, 102, 110 n.63, 161, 167–86, 218, 222, 224, 227, 231 n.45 The Social Contract 82, 88 n.50, 93–7, 99–100, 102, 105, 120, 159, 210, 221 The Village Soothsayer 132–3 Ruskin, John 100, 104 Saussure, Horace Bénédicte de 51–3, 59 Shelley, Mary 52, 63, 65, 138 Frankenstein 2, 7, 53, 67, 69, 70, 211, 224 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 3–5, 65, 92, 101, 103–4, 131 Alastor 6, 149–62 The Cenci 5–6, 131–45 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour 65, 100–1, 103 Smith, Charlotte 3, 18, 26, 209 Southey, Robert 118, 135, 188, 219 Staël, Germaine de 13, 20, 77, 213 Switzerland 4–6, 33, 35, 40, 46–7, 52, 54, 61, 80, 91–105 Berne 92, 97, 102, 170 Chillon Castle 33, 103 Clarens 5, 33–5, 37, 39–42, 46–7, 65, 78–80, 94, 97, 100, 103–4, 118, 171 Geneva 5, 6, 47, 65, 91–4, 102–4, 131–2, 134, 175, 211 Île de St. Pierre 6, 167, 170, 172–3, 175, 178 Lac de Bienne 6, 167, 170, 177 Meillerie 33–5, 39–47 Mer de Glace 52–3, 69 Valais 45, 54–5, 58–60, 65, 68, 83, 93, 104 Vevey 33, 42, 46–7 Thelwall, John 17, 167, 187 Thomson, James 136, 169 Trimmer, Sarah 14, 17, 24–5, 188

Index Volney, Constantin François de Chassebœuf The Ruins of Empires 2, 153 Voltaire 77–8, 81, 84, 93, 113, 119, 133, 139, 154, 220 Wakefield, Priscilla 26 Wales 5, 7, 75–85 Llangollen 76, 217–18 Walker, George 118–22, 125 Waterloo 5, 33–4, 41, 65, 100 West, Jane 14, 16–17 Williams, David 80 Williams, Edward 76. See also Morganwg, Iolo Williams, Helen Maria 52–3, 61, 91, 96, 101 Winthrop Young, Geoffrey 51–2, 70 Wollstonecraft, Mary 6, 11–13, 15, 18, 19–27, 167, 170, 177, 179–80, 213

253

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 176, 197, 210 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 202 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 19–21, 26–7, 151, 176, 197 Wordsworth, William 4–5, 6, 52–3, 63, 65, 91, 98–9, 104–5, 149, 151, 156, 167, 170, 179, 196, 200–1, 209, 217–18 Borderers 214–15, 217 Convention of Cintra 98, 100 Descriptive Sketches 95–6, 99 Excursion 149 ‘Home at Grasmere’ 178–9 ‘Letter to Bishop Llandaff ’ 95 Lyrical Ballads 196, 213 The Prelude 2–3, 64, 178, 204, 224 ‘View from the Top of Black Comb’ 63–4