Rousseau's Dog (3 page)

T
HE WATCHMAKER'S
son from Geneva now seemed destined for a life of riches, with entrée guaranteed to the most prestigious salons in the Republic of Letters.

With all that within his grasp, he chose instead to seek seclusion in the countryside, amazing his friends and surprising a swelling pack of enemies.

3

A
T A DINNER
given in Edinburgh, when Hume was a child, the dog Pod was accused of making a foul smell. Cried young David, “Oh, do not hurt the beast. It is not Pod, it is me!” Recording the incident in her memoir, Lady Anne Lindsay commended the child's honesty: “How very few people would take the evil odour of a stinking conduct from a guiltless Pod to wear it on their own rightful shoulders.”

Lady Anne was the first of many to extol Hume's singular goodness. In his account of Hume's final days, Hume's dear friend the economist
Adam Smith stressed the older man's exemplary character in phrases that likened him to Plato's description of Socrates. “I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching nearly to the ideas of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” At sixty-six, stricken by terminal bowel cancer, Hume himself would look back on a life of such unrelenting virtues:

“Frequent disappointments” was no exaggeration. Whatever the encomiums, Hume's career (we should really say careers) was far from smooth or successful. Indeed, when he and Rousseau first became acquainted, Hume was only just beginning to receive the acclaim that we now regard (and he regarded) as justly his.

David Hume was born in Edinburgh on April 26, 1711, into a moderately wealthy family, though, as a younger son, he could expect to have to make his own way in the world. His father was a comfortably well-off lawyer, Joseph Home of Ninewells, descended from the line of the earls of Home; his mother, Catherine, was also from an established family. Joseph Home died in 1713, leaving three children: the eldest, John; a daughter, Katherine; and David. David alone later changed the spelling of his name, because “thae glaekit English buddies” made it rhyme with “
combe.
”

As a young man, Hume was briefly a student of law, but found his attention compulsively drawn to philosophy.

He studied so hard that he became physically ill with what was diagnosed in 1730 as the “disease of the learned.” Whatever the disorder, it dogged him for five years; possibly, he never fully recovered—psychologically at least—from its impact. His search for a cure and a vocation took him briefly to a shipping firm in Bristol and, when that did not work out, to France; he lived first in Rheims, then in Anjou. His two-year visit yielded a manuscript he entitled
Treatise of Human Nature.

On his return in 1737 to London, the Scot was quick to compare England adversely with France, and the reception of the
Treatise,
published in 1738, would not have made him better disposed to the English. He borrowed a line from Alexander Pope to mourn what is now universally hailed as a masterpiece. “It fell dead born from the press.” (Pope: “All, all but truth, drops dead-born from the press / Like the last Gazette, or the last address.”)

Hume had expected a real financial return from the three-volume
Treatise
against his investment of time and intellectual energy. The commercial flop meant that, despite his exertions, he had only advanced down a career cul-de-sac. Putting philosophy aside, he returned to the family home at Ninewells and took up essay writing. He might not be acknowledged yet as a philosopher, but he could at least live by cultivating literary pursuits: essays, reviews, histories. His new calling would be man of letters. And here, at last, he had a modicum of success:
Essays Moral and Political
(1742) sold out in London.

Yet, if Hume could turn his back on the
Treatise
so easily, others would not. In 1744, the chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy fell vacant in Edinburgh. Hume was balked by clerical opposition to the
Treatise
on the ground that he was unfit to teach the young. (The same hostility dashed his hopes of the Glasgow chair of Moral Philosophy in 1751, which went to Adam Smith.)

His next career move was distinctly less elevated, but he was still struggling for money, and even men of letters must eat. In 1745, he became tutor to the violent, mad teenage Marquess of Annandale and spent an unhappy, though profitable, year at St. Albans. He was already toiling away on what would become
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding;
but in April 1746, when he gladly parted from Annandale and his devious entourage, the future, professionally and financially, was uncertain.

However, on Sunday, May 18, an unheralded invitation came to join a military expedition departing on May 21. Hume jumped at it. He owed the opportunity to a distant relative, Lieutenant General James St. Clair, whose secretary he became. Britain was battling France in the final phase of the War of the Austrian Succession and St. Clair's mission was the conquest of French Canada. Later, his orders were changed to an invasion of Brittany, for which no maps or charts were available—the (undeliverable) objective was to draw French forces back from the Low Countries. It was here that Hume witnessed action: soldiers slaughtered, sailors drowned; an officer, convinced he had failed in his duty, killed himself with what Hume saw as Roman dignity. At least military cuisine seems to have agreed with him: he emerged from the campaign inflated into the vast figure that has entered history.

In 1747, St. Clair recruited Hume again, this time as secretary on a military mission to Vienna and Turin. In Vienna, protocol demanded that diplomats should curtsy when presented to the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. On seeing Hume's waddling approach, she excused them. Hume wrote self-deprecatingly to his brother: “We esteemed ourselves
very much obliged to her for this attention, especially my companions, who were desperately afraid of my falling on them & crushing them.” Then it was on to the northern Italian city of Mantua, where Hume kissed the soil that had produced Virgil, and Turin, where the mission ground to a halt once peace was declared.

At this point we have a portrait of Hume from the future Lord Charlemont, the seventeen-year-old James Caulfeild, who qualified his physical description with the observation that “Nature, I believe, never formed any man more unlike his real character than David Hume”:

He also recorded for posterity Hume in love, though his account reads suspiciously like a Restoration comedy. Hume, allegedly, adored to distraction a beautiful married countess, who led him on for her amusement. She hid Charlemont behind a curtain in her boudoir so that he could enjoy her toying with the obese, infatuated swain as he heaved himself down at her feet, fruitlessly protesting his devotion. Interestingly, given the later image of the plain man, Hume's companions noted, with some mirth, how he adored his military uniform—all lace and gold braid—though Charlemont thought he looked like a trainband grocer.

Hume and St. Clair returned to England in time for Christmas 1748. At last, aged thirty-seven, Hume was financially independent and able to pursue his vocation as a writer. In 1749, he departed London for Scotland, and entered a decade of prolific literary output and high achievement.

Hume put down roots in Edinburgh, where he lived a hardworking but convivial existence, always careful with his money. He dined out as much as he could—four or five times a week—but never tipped (gave a “veil”). The servants appeared not to mind, as he made their masters and mistresses so happy. He ate well, and drank in moderation. He held little suppers: roasted hen and minced collops, washed down with a bottle of punch. He had his own house and a “regular family; consisting of a head, viz. myself, and two inferior members, a maid, Peggy, and a cat. My sister has since joined me, and keeps me company.”

He published his twelve
Political Discourses:
“the only work of mine that was successful on the first publication.” A miscellany of history, politics, and economics, it reached three editions in two years. But there was also
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals,
“which, in my own opinion, (who ought not to judge on that subject) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best. It came unnoticed and unobserved into the world.” This was an exaggeration. Reviewers castigated the ideas, but admired the clarity.

In 1752, he received some compensation for his failure to win the Glasgow chair with an appointment that carried public esteem in his home city. On January 28, he became keeper of the library (librarian) of the Faculty of Advocates (“a petty office of forty or fifty guineas a year,” he quibbled). It made him master of thirty thousand volumes, and rechanneled his ambition from essayist to historian—the step that would finally ensure his contemporary reputation. While philosophy could rarely move the passions, he reflected, historians were “the true friends of virtue.”

E
DINBURGH IN THE
middle of the century was the best of all possible worlds for Hume. Scotland's union with England in 1707 had brought economic prosperity and a cultural awakening, and with it a lively company of newspapers, journals, clubs, and improvement societies populated
by lawyers, clerics, academics, doctors, and gentlemen who could now afford to leave their estates to live in their tight-knit capital.

Although by disposition happier in small groups, Hume became more widely gregarious. The Poker Club, whose subject was politics and object the consumption of claret, assembled at Fortune's Tavern every Friday. When in the city, Hume kept up his attendance until eight months before his death. And from 1754, the Select Society, of which Hume, Adam Smith, and the portrait painter Allan Ramsay were founders, staged debates for men of rank. It had broad interests and extensive cultural influences. Hume's first choice of subject for debate was “Whether the difference of national characters be chiefly owing to the nature of different climates, or to moral and political causes?”

Edinburgh's men of rank included many of Hume's regular correspondents: a cousin, the Reverend John Home, author of a tragedy,
Douglas,
and private secretary to George III's Scottish favorite John Stuart, Earl of Bute; Dr. William Robertson, a historian whose reputation rivaled Hume's own; Adam Smith, moral philosopher and economist; the Reverend Hugh Blair, minister of the High Church in Edinburgh, and the first professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University; the Reverend Adam Ferguson, professor of philosophy at Edinburgh University. It was said that if you stood at the Cross of Edinburgh, within a few minutes you could take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.

Hume, while on clubbable terms with the ornaments of the Scottish Enlightenment, fitted less snugly into the official culture. In April 1754, his appointment as librarian was soured when three of the curators of the faculty struck out some French books ordered by Hume from London, describing them as “indecent, and unworthy of a place in a learned library.” (They included La Fontaine's fables.) In the future, all his choices would be vetted, they ruled. However humiliating the insult, Hume needed the library for his researches, and so he came up with the stratagem of keeping the title while handing over his duties. He gave his salary to the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. Nevertheless,
he resigned precipitately in January 1757, possibly to secure the post for his friend Adam Ferguson.