Rousseau's Dog (4 page)

A morsel of humble pie was worth it. His epic four-part, six-volume
History of England
appeared between 1754 and 1762, and the series became among the most popular works of history ever published.

Hume wrote his studies in reverse chronological order, beginning with the Stuart monarchs, moving to the House of Tudor, and ending with the earlier periods from Julius Caesar. He made at least £3,200 on the whole history at a time when a man could consider himself well-to-do on £80 per annum. As well as financial rewards, there was public and private acclaim. Voltaire called it “perhaps the best ever written in any language.”

Hume had identified a gap in the thriving book market. Although novels abounded, booksellers stocked little history. In Hume's wake came other, widely praised histories of England, but his work outran them all, maintaining its classic status into the nineteenth century, by the end of which it had gone through more than a hundred editions. In the United States, the last student version was printed in 1910. That he was a
philosophical
historian distinguished him from his predecessors and contemporaries. In 1762, the
Critical Review
enthused that

But this eulogy was a few years in the waiting. The first volume of the
History,
covering the reigns of James I and Charles I, was a commercial dud. Hume, who expected much from his evenhanded dealing with the issues of king and Parliament, prerogative and liberty, church and
state, England and the other British nations, was assailed on all sides. As he noted, “English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, Churchman and Sectary, Freethinker and Religionist, Patriot and Courtier, united in their rage. … I scarcely, indeed, heard of one man in the three kingdoms, considerable for rank or letters, that could endure the book.”

He diagnosed several causes: the spirit of irreligion in the work, Whig ministers' decrying it, and London booksellers' conspiring against him because it was published by an Edinburgh bookseller. The
Monthly Review
(vol. 12, 1755) gave it a twenty-three-page appraisal, opening with a condescending: “The history of his own country is the last he ought to have attempted.” The reviewer praised Hume's orderly and elegant narration and command of character, but questioned his impartiality, and ended with a stern rebuke:

The year 1756 saw Hume choose a London bookseller to publish the second part of the
History,
covering the period from the execution of Charles I to the 1688 revolution. The
Monthly Review
thought it more satisfying: it had none of those indecent excursions on the subject of religion which must have given offense to every candid reader.

In the summer of 1758, Hume departed for London to stay with Annie and Peggy Elliot, who ran a boardinghouse for Scottish gentlemen in quiet, narrow Lisle Street, near what is now Leicester Square. Socially, London proved frostier than cozy Edinburgh for this Scottish purveyor of contentious theological and political opinions. Samuel Johnson snubbed him. David Garrick introduced him to Edmund Burke, who claimed he had spoken to Hume only because the present liberal state of society required it.

Hume also ventured into political high society, meeting a number of Whig grandees. With some significant politicians he did not get on well, among them George Grenville, soon to be prime minister. Grenville and his Whig allies were all enemies of Bute, then the politically powerful tutor to the future George III, who described the Scottish earl as his “dearest friend.” The Whig belief that Bute was imbuing George with dangerous ideas of monarchical government stoked anti-Scottish sentiment. This probably contributed to the antagonism toward Hume, who, furthermore, was seen as a Tory sympathizer.

Hume completed the two volumes of the
History of the House of Tudor
in 1759. “The clamour against this performance was almost equal to that against the
History
of the first two Stuarts.” Horace Walpole thought it “hasty,” inaccurate, and careless. Dividing his time between London and Edinburgh, Hume then labored until November 1761 on what would prove to be the final part of his marathon series, covering the period from Julius Caesar to Henry VII.

The
History
series, ultimately, if belatedly, brought Hume respect, rewards, and renown. Certainly his command of prose and his philosophical insight combined to present history as it had never been presented hitherto. He could move the reader with his set pieces and penetrating character studies while deploying his gifts as a philosophic historian to explain the wider significance and motive of what was narrated. His use of satire, parody, and irony; his ability to shift effortlessly from factual statements to cleverly observed description; his command of language to create effect—all these enabled him to turn historical events and analysis into a seamless and compelling narrative. His compassionate portrayal of the death of Charles I made readers weep; his near-burlesque vision of Archbishop Laud at Communion made them cry with laughter.

Controversy was inevitable, however. For Hume had involved himself in a fundamental political divide. What attitude should be taken to the Stuart kings and their overthrow? And historically, had the governance of England been based on an absolute or a limited monarchy? Tories
believed, broadly, in an absolutist inheritance of English government grounded in and exercising power through the royal prerogative. Equally broad, the Whig concept was of a prerogative conventionally limited by the traditional liberties of the people expressed through Parliament.

Hume congratulated himself on arriving at a balance between both interpretations. “My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.” But as Hume also understood, his readers were more influenced by his character studies, and so saw him as writing from a Tory viewpoint. “Nothing can so much prove that men commonly regard more persons than things, as to find that I am commonly numbered among the Tories.”

However, Hume always regarded himself as standing above political divisions, and in his writings Whigs could detect support. At the end of the
History,
while stressing the fragility and flux of the constitution, he claimed that the Glorious Revolution broke irrevocably with the past. “It gave such an ascendant to popular principles as has put the nature of the English constitution beyond all controversy. … We, in this island, have ever since enjoyed, if not the best system of government, at least the most entire system of liberty, that ever was known amongst mankind.”

The
History
made Hume moderately prosperous. On Whitsunday 1762, he announced his purchase of the third story facing south (and the sixth facing north, as it was built on a slope) of James's Court in Edinburgh, with magnificent views over Edinburgh and across the Firth of Forth. Katherine Home and the maid Peggy joined him, and he bought a chaise.

W
ITH THE LAST
volume of the
History,
Hume had come to the end of his creative work; from now on, he would only be dealing with the devious behavior of his booksellers, reediting, and revising.

How had Hume's latest career petered out and his intellectual output dried up? To the Earl of Shelburne, an Irish intellectual and future
prime minister, Hume likened himself to a Hottentot who flees the cultivated life and returns to his companions in the woods. A man accustomed to retreat and study, he told the earl, was unfit for the commerce of the great world and it was wise for him to shun it. But behind the rational phrases lay umbrage and bile. Although he now had an enviable reputation and a circle of friends in London, Hume was bitter at the scant regard given to men of letters by men of riches and power. Literature was appreciated in Scotland. This was not so among “the barbarians who inhabit the Banks of the Thames.”

Indeed, he seems to have returned to Edinburgh estranged from the English, almost seeking refuge. The London “barbarians” were rife with anti-Scottish prejudice. In September 1764, Gilbert Elliot, an old Edinburgh chum and M.P., wrote to Hume, then in Paris, exhorting him to “love the French as much as you will; but above all continue still an Englishman.” In his resentful reply, Hume mused on his future:

He contemplated taking the reigns of William of Orange and of Anne as his next subject. Nonetheless, he told Andrew Millar, his publisher, “I have an aversion to appear in the capital till I see that more justice is done me with regard to the preceding volumes. … The general rage against the Scots is an additional discouragement. I think the Scotch Minister [Bute] is obliged to make me some compensation for this.”

This might have been a pleasantry. If he was genuinely expressing his hopes of a government pension or a place, he was in for another
disappointment. Bute was indeed thinking of public office for a Scottish historian—but not for Hume. William Robertson was appointed historiographer royal for Scotland on July 25, 1763, with an increased stipend, of £200. Hume was put out. “I have been accustomed to meet with nothing but insults and indignities from my native country: But if it continues so,
ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis.
” In the words of the victorious Roman general Scipio Africanus, “Ungrateful fatherland, you shall not even have my bones.”

Thus in 1763 we find Hume at the height of his literary powers and acknowledged as one of the finest minds of his generation. He has broken new ground in philosophy, politics, economics, historiography. Yet his considerable achievements have not brought him unalloyed success, contentment, or even peace of mind. Rather, at each step of the way, success has been dogged by failure, setbacks, and public hostility. Only the beneficence of his character has won widespread recognition.

At the age of fifty-two, he is about to embark on another change of career and become a diplomat in the European capital of culture. It was much more than a new job—it was an escape to Elysium.

4

E
ARLIER, WHILE
H
UME
was still in Edinburgh writing his
History
in the Advocates Library and making merry at the Poker Club, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had resolved on an escape to solitude.

However bafflingly to his contemporaries, Rousseau was determined to put Paris behind him. In 1756, aged forty-four, he accepted the hospitality
of Louise-Florence d'Épinay, a wealthy noblewoman who had rejected her husband—a philandering, dissolute tax farmer—and whose family château stood on the edge of the forest of Montmorency. In her diary she described Rousseau as seeming “ignorant of the ways of society, but it is clear enough that he is exceedingly able. His complexion is dark and his face is lit up by very burning eyes. When he talks he appears good-looking. But when one recalls his face afterwards one thinks of him as plain.” Rousseau was always lucky in his patrons: Mme d'Épinay would become, for a time, a loyal supporter.

Rousseau, with Mlle Le Vasseur and her infirm mother, moved to the dwelling Mme d'Épinay had renovated for him, the Hermitage, a short distance from her château—though only after a sharp exchange with his hostess in which he obdurately asserted his financial self-sufficiency. In the Hermitage, he enjoyed, in Mme d'Épinay's words, “five rooms, a kitchen, a cellar, an acre and a quarter of kitchen garden, a spring of running water, and the forest for a garden.” She had even ingeniously reconstructed the fireplaces so that one fire heated several rooms.

By this time, the German-born Friedrich Grimm, a hard-up aristocrat who was editor of the cultural newsletter
Correspondance littéraire,
had become Mme d'Épinay's latest
amour,
and he was a fixture at the château, as was Mme d'Épinay's sister-in-law, Countess Sophie d'Houdetot, with whom Rousseau would fall unbearably in love.