From internal evidence in The New Héloïse, whose events are portrayed as having transpired over a period of more than a dozen years from around 1732, it has long been known that Rousseau invented a fictional protagonist, Saint-Preux, of exactly his own age. To this central figure of his story, as his Confessions make plain,1 he attributes both refined sensibilities and weaknesses of character deliberately drawn from his own nature, and by depicting him as a peripatetic tutor who is deemed by Julie’s father to be unworthy of her love on account of being beneath her station, he conveys the impression of a socially outcast romantic hero, doomed to unhappiness, whom readers could readily identify with the text’s author. This parallel, together with a number of other superficial resemblances between characters in the novel and figures who populated his world outside it, has invited the suspicion that the most popular of all of Rousseau’s works in the eighteenth century was conceived as an illusory representation of events he had actually experienced, an idealization of his autobiography couched in the epistolary form then fashionable for sentimental fiction. It would, however, be more accurate to interpret the novel’s occasional ménage à trois of Saint-Preux, Julie and Wolmar, as well as the incidents around which their relationships turn, as expressions of profound longings which, as a matter of fact, Rousseau could barely articulate, still less satisfy, in his own life. Somewhat like his contemporary, Diderot, who often contrived to be at his most intense through a form of displacement which involved speaking his own mind as if he were reporting claims that had been made by others, Rousseau characteristically allowed his vivid imagination to give more concrete form to worlds he could inhabit, and sentiments he could control, only in fantasy.
When he began to contemplate his novel, he remarks that it was largely because his time for love had passed, and all hope for the consummation of a desire which Thérèse was unable to stir in him had withered in his middle age, that he let his imagination draw him into a ‘land of chimeras’, an empyrean domain inhabited by the most perfect creatures, celestial in both virtue and beauty, and of such faithful reliability as he had never known among his friends here below. It was out of his exalted attraction to such an ‘enchanted world’ that The New Héloïse was born.2 The novel articulates the secrets of a rapturously ecstatic love which he was later to hope might actually prove the key to Sophie d’Houdetot’s heart; but despite the rumours about the nature of his infatuation with her—which were orchestrated by a jealous Madame d’Épinay, and which, with other factors, would soon provoke one of his life’s great crises, including his break with Diderot and eventually his estrangement from most of his Parisian friends—Rousseau never conquered Sophie as, in his imagination, he licensed Saint-Preux and Julie to seduce one another. The ‘erotic fervour’ and ‘amorous delirium’, which in his Confessions he claims were aroused in him by Sophie, came to inspire his composition of two of the most poignant letters of his novel,3 one about the hidden orchard of Wolmar and Julie at the retreat she called her Elyseum, the other about a day Saint-Preux spent with Julie, in Wolmar’s absence, in the waters and along the banks of Lake Geneva.4 By the winter of 1756, Rousseau was already gripped with love for the figure he had invented in June, doting on both her and her cousin, Claire, like a second Pygmalion, he remarks in his Confessions.5 The explosive arrival in his life of Sophie the following year, after an inconsequentially brief meeting earlier, inspired him to invest all of Julie’s charms into his new companion as well, soon making him dream only of Sophie herself, as he came to feel his own surging tremors and cascading passion for an object that was now real.
For her part, Sophie, though she was as moved by his intimate presence as he by hers, was not excited in the same way. Their sighs and tears mingled together, as each was intoxicated with love, he reports, Rousseau for her, and she for her absent lover, Saint-Lambert, whom Rousseau had met independently and with whom he was at the same time already beginning to form a friendship. His unreciprocated love for Sophie was thus always accompanied by a third presence, who at once lent poignancy to Sophie’s own need for Rousseau as a confidant, at the same time making it impossible for him, loving her with such profound respect, to seek to possess her. But having had aroused in him by a kind of contagion all the longing which Sophie felt for Saint-Lambert, Rousseau could now consummate a redoubled passion only through the catharsis of its infusion into Julie, a woman he could possess just within his own mind, from which she sprang. Sophie’s genuine affection for him, he thus reports, was a poisoned cup of sweetness which he swallowed in long draughts.6 The four months they spent together, in an intimacy of such delicious palpitations as Rousseau states he never experienced with any other woman, were kept within the bounds of duty, whose prescription of self-denial left his own soul in the radiant circumspection of enforced innocence, as he was to inform Sophie herself in a remarkable letter he sent her in October 1757,7 from which this passage of his Confessions would later be shaped. Yet so fired were his senses by images of an anticipated kiss that when he would walk along the slopes of Andilly to her home in Eaubonne, three miles from his Hermitage, his knees would tremble, his body crumple, and, unable to distract himself and think of something else, he would ejaculate and arrive at the home of a lover he could not win, a spent force purged of the ecstatic transports of his own imagination, only to be roused again at the mere sight of her, by his ‘always useless vigour’.8
If in his fiction Rousseau could assemble a world purified of such cumbersome anxieties and frustrations, in his other writings he sought equally blissful delights by cleansing moral landscapes of the fractious institutions and tortuous beliefs which he perceived as standing in the way of human self-fulfilment. The fanciful world which he constructed in his New Héloïse, at once brittle with dramatic tension but also luminous with unadorned grace, was matched elsewhere by his deconstruction of opaque and oppressive worlds, for which the idealizations of his fiction were a substitute. In his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, composed at much the same time as his New Héloïse and embracing many overlapping themes, he contrasts the salubrious entertainments of a republic—remarkably like Geneva—where convivial celebrations are held out of doors, under the sky, with the noxious amusements of the residents of a large city—which rather resembles Paris—whose scheming and idle people, depraved by sloth, turn instead for their pleasures to hypocritical distractions performed on a stage. Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves, he remarks, each being granted the role of an engaged actor and not just a captive witness, loving himself in the others, ‘so that all will be better united’.9 Shakespeare’s melancholic Jaques in As You Like It may have regretted that ‘All the world’s a stage’, but Jean-Jacques would have rejoiced if only it could be so.
In his Discourse on Inequality, he had earlier formed an image of savage man no less fancifully cleansed of the impurities and contaminations of society than was Julie of the worldly imperfections of her sex. In Emile, he was later to invent an equally imaginary priest, by way of abstraction from real persons, whose sublimation of an unmysterious god in Nature would be presented as a spiritual purge of truly religious belief from all the ceremonial trappings of a profane Church. While ‘the real world has its limits, the world of imagination is infinite’, Rousseau remarks in Book two of Emile, adding in Book four, in reply to those of his readers who supposed he only inhabited a world of fantasy, that he sees them ‘always in the land of prejudice’.10 Most of his major writings, fiction and non-fiction alike, bear witness to James Boswell’s remark, in a letter of 15 October 1766 to Alexandre Deleyre, that Rousseau had ideas which were ‘completely visionary, and unsuitable for a man in his position’.11 That ‘involuntary excitement’, ‘devouring ardour’ or ‘sublime frenzy’, that ‘sacred fire’, ‘noble delirium’ or ‘saintly enthusiasm’, of which he speaks in just a single paragraph of the fourth of his Moral Letters to Sophie,12 sparks the disengagement of our faculties from their terrestrial ties. While our reason crawls, our spirit soars, he observes. No other eighteenth-century writer so inspired the Romantic movement which arose, most predominantly in Germany and England, at the dusk of the age of Enlightenment, through the intensity of his feelings, the rapture of his dreams and the spontaneity of his imagination.
Even before it had absorbed his attention in the principal works by which he is now best remembered, Rousseau’s vagabond reverie drew him most fruitfully in the direction of music, a subject for which he had been born, he insists in both his Confessions and Dialogues.13 In his reflections on the inappropriateness of the French language to musical articulation, and in his objections to Rameau’s claims about the predominance of harmony over melody, he conceived music to have once been the ebullient form taken by men’s natural language, unmannered and unsophisticated, as enchanted in its enunciation as Julie’s loveliness appeared to his mind’s eye. Sung with conviction in inflected phrases, and freed of orchestral ornamentation and operatic recitative, a clear vocal line of music was in some respects the most populist of all the fanciful images that Rousseau evoked of mankind’s archaic means of self-expression, the lost primeval language of unsubjugated speech. Shorn of the pretence that the dominant and subdominant modes of the Western scale were inherent in every form of music, its original nature could be traced in his philosophy to its fundamentally poetic roots, and its progressive transformations from an ancient art into a modern science could be reconstructed in the manner of his treatment of the self-domestication of mankind in other ways.
But the origins of modern and Western music were not so remote as those of inequality, and Rousseau was accordingly able to assess the course of its development in far less speculative terms. Already in his contributions to the Encyclopédie, he had shown a genuine command of the history of music and of musical genres, and particularly of contemporary musical theory, pursuing themes in his articles ‘Accompaniment’, ‘Dissonance’ and ‘Fundamental Bass’ which largely elaborated Rameau’s own views on harmonic modulation and on the overtone resonances of a single note, prompting Diderot and d’Alembert to object, in the Encyclopédie’s sixth volume, that Rameau had ungraciously maligned a man who had in fact been largely faithful to his principles. Even in the enlarged versions of those articles that he incorporated in his Dictionary of Music of 1767, Rousseau still acknowledges a profound debt to Rameau’s Theory of Harmony, which had been published in 1722. But to comply with Diderot’s initial deadline, he had produced his original articles in only three months and had long sought an opportunity to return to and expand them, to pursue his differences with Rameau where they arose, and to elaborate themes which he had been unable to consider earlier.
The Dictionary of Music was conceived as a work of reference, and it did not excite him to flights of fancy as did most of the other projects to which he turned at L’Ermitage, after leaving Paris. For this reason, as he remarks in his Confessions, he put it aside when taking the daily walks which spawned his reveries, and, exceptionally, he worked out his ideas for it indoors, seated, when it rained.14 It is, nevertheless, one of his major works, comprehensive in its treatment of historical, technical and theoretical subjects, not only making the complexities of Rameau’s doctrines more intelligible to lay readers, as d’Alembert had attempted to do as well, but also providing thoroughly revised and more substantial commentaries on ancient, medieval and modern practices of notation in his article on ‘Notes’; a fresh essay on the history of lyrical drama (which in the Encyclopédie had instead been allocated to Grimm, under the heading of ‘Lyrical Poem’) in his article on ‘Opera’; and an analysis of the musical theory of Tartini in his article on ‘System’. Charles Burney, who had earlier translated the libretto of Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village into English, as The Cunning-Man, spoke in his own General History of Music in defence of Rousseau against the critics of both his Letter on French Music and his Dictionary of Music, while Rousseau himself, who had sketched a decidedly mixed assessment of the opera Alceste, by Gluck (1767), is reported to have suggested that Gluck’s remarkable Iphigenia in Aulis (1774), with a French libretto, perhaps finally belied his contention that it was impossible to write music with French lyrics.
Even in his Dictionary of Music, however, he reiterated and lent additional impetus to ideas which had first fired his imagination in the late 1740s and early 1750s. In a new article on ‘Plainsong’, he observes that it was when Christians began to form churches and to sing psalms and hymns that the spirited music of antiquity lost all its energy. From both Scripture and classical sources, most particularly the Pythagoreans, he adds in his article on ‘Music’—repeating remarks he had made in the Encyclopédie and recalling Plato’s Laws—we know that both divine and human law, as well as exhortations to virtue, were once sung in verse by choirs, there being no more effective way to teach men the love of virtue. Everything that can be elicited in the imagination stems from the power of poetry from which music once sprang, he claims in his articles on both ‘Imitation’ and ‘Opera’, in each case showing his lack of appreciation and poor discernment of the emotive powers of painting, by contrast with his sensitivity to music—perhaps the most striking difference between his aesthetic judgement and that of Diderot. Unlike painting, which inspires only our sense of sight, Rousseau contends, music transports the eye inside the ear, and depicts even objects which are invisible, like night, sleep, solitude and silence, noise sometimes producing the effect of perfect tranquility and silence the effect of noise, as persons who fall asleep at a monotonous lecture and wake up the moment it stops know only too well. Rousseau’s interest in music was sustained throughout his life, not least because, having resolved around 1750 to copy music by the sheet so that he might have some regular and independent income, he drew from that occupation, almost until his end, one of the few means of support on which he could count as a writer determined to refuse all favours or pensions, thus avoiding debts that might imperil his freedom. In the greatly distracted state in which he finally fled from England in the spring of 1767, he was nevertheless prevailed upon, by Hume, to accept just such a gift from the eventually far more demented King George III, and in due course, against his principles, he received the sum of fifty pounds for nothing. His transcription of an ‘air chinois’ in his Dictionary of Music, adapted from Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description de la Chine of 1735, was to figure in both Weber’s overture to Turandot and Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis.
Once again in France, over the next three years, Rousseau became, both in his own mind and in fact, an itinerant hostage to fortune, travelling under a cloak of anonymity as Monsieur ‘Renou’, accompanied by his housekeeper, said to be his sister. The Enlightenment’s most forthright lover of truth, who had for so long devoted his energies to unmasking hypocrisy, was now in disguise himself, flitting from Trye, on the border of Normandy, to Bourgoin and Monquin in Dauphiné, to Lyon and finally Paris, along the way visiting the grave of Madame de Warens in Chambéry and soon afterwards marrying Thérèse, in meanderings made all the more furtive by his principal patron of that time, the Prince de Conti—who really was a warder masquerading as a protector—while Rousseau was ignored by the authorities he sought to evade, because they judged him more absurd than dangerous. It was especially in this period that he turned his mind to the subject of botany, the great passion of his declining years. In Môtiers, after his flight from Montmorency, he had already become acquainted with the distinguished botanist, Jean-Antoine d’Ivernois, and had there made lengthy botanical excursions into the surrounding countryside with the Hungarian pseudo-baron Ignaz de Sauttersheim, the Pierre Loti of his age, whose life was more fictitious than all the fantasies of The New Héloïse. In Staffordshire, Rousseau had gathered ferns and mosses. But it was in the late 1760s, either alone or with a variety of companions, in the hinterland of Trye, Lyon, Grenoble, Bourgoin and Monquin, that he came to devote most of his time to the study of plants, arousing occasional suspicions that he was a sorcerer.
On his return to Paris in the summer of 1770, he was to resume his profession of transcribing music each morning, and in the afternoons would botanize and herborize in the course of long strolls which he took out of the city. On various dates between 1771 and 1773, he drafted eight long letters on botanical themes to Madame Madeleine-Catherine Delessert, to whom he had warmed after an earlier meeting in Lyon, and who wished to excite her four-year-old daughter’s natural curiosity by encouraging her to take an interest in plants. These letters, followed over the next four years by sixteen others on similar themes to various correspondents (all published with Rousseau’s complete works in 1782), were to excite the interest of Thomas Martyn, a professor of botany at Cambridge who held his chair for sixty-three years and for at least part of that time used his own translation of them in his courses; and they were also taken up by the painter Pierre Joseph Redouté, who illustrated them for a luxurious edition of Rousseau’s botanical writings published early in the nineteenth century. Around this time, Rousseau also compiled, but never completed, a dictionary of botanical terms. He continued as well to assemble the herbaria, on which he had already laboured even earlier, and of which a few survive, although the largest collection, forming eleven volumes, perished with Berlin’s botanical museum in the Second World War.
Rousseau’s acquired interest in botany seems a sensible choice of vocation for a man whose faculties were most alive while he was walking, his mind only working with his legs, as he remarks in his Confessions.15 Here, at last, Nature’s ageing child could commune directly with the great spectacle of Creation, before which he had always stood in awe—like a more youthful Emile, within reach of contentment, his power and will in equilibrium. Here was a subject whose lively colours and fragrances could fill his imagination, an Arcadian paradise of vegetable love, such as had equally seduced the poet Andrew Marvell a century earlier. In the Second Walk of his Reveries, he recalls the sweet pleasure he had felt in seeing and enumerating the plants still in flower in the meadows, between Ménilmontant and Charonne near Paris, which are now partly filled by the Père Lachaise Cemetery.16 In the Seventh Walk, devoted largely to the trees and vegetation which are ‘the clothing of the earth’, he savours the memory of a mountain gorge, where he had found coral-wort and cyclamen, and heard the cry of the horned owl and eagle, in a corner of the earth so deeply hidden that, when he had sat down on pillows of lycopodium, he dreamed he had stumbled upon the wildest and most remote refuge of the universe, having uncovered, like a second, lone, Columbus, a sanctuary from which his persecutors would never seek him out.17 Here, now recollected as a botanical expedition he had made near Môtiers around 1764, was Rousseau’s own Elyseum, originally inspired in the spring of 1757 by the arrival in his life of Sophie d’Houdetot, and described, in The New Héloïse, in remarkably similar terms, as Julie’s secret orchard, ‘the wildest, the most solitary, corner of Nature’.18 His love for Sophie had passed from one captivating heart of darkness to another, in retrodiction of his own life by way of imitating his own art. From sensual arousal, to fiction, to remembrance of now transported images, Rousseau—in this as in so many other respects the Proust of the eighteenth century—could make his botany and reverie resonate in one voice.
He had not always been so well disposed to the study of plants. If only he had succumbed to the temptation to follow Claude Anet, the young herbalist Madame de Warens had employed at Chambéry, and with whom he was to share her love, he might have become a great botanist himself, he suggests. But, ignorant of its charms, he had let himself be swayed by popular prejudice that it was a science like chemistry or anatomy, connected with medicine or pharmacology and fit only for apothecaries, he claims in his Confessions, his Reveries and even the introduction to his dictionary of botanical terms.19 Nothing could be further from the truth, he had later learned. And in what other science could he have passed his time? How could he have chased after animals, only in order to subdue them by force if he could catch them and then, in order to understand how they run, dissect them? If too weak, he could no doubt have impaled butterflies instead; if too slow, he could have fallen back on snails and worms; yet all those stinking corpses, dreadful skeletons and pestilential vapours had not been for him. Nor had he wished, with the aid of instruments and machines, to study the stars. But bright flowers, cool shades, streams, woods, meadows and green glades had purified his imagination, he remarks in the Seventh Walk of his Reveries. Plants had been placed within man’s reach by Nature Herself, springing up beneath the feet of a person whose mind had already settled there.20
Of course the meticulous and disciplined study of plants must not be confused with the agreeable sensations which inspire it, Rousseau admits in his dictionary.21 Botany, as he understood it, was essentially a taxonomic science which, if it did not necessarily dissect its objects of scrutiny, nevertheless sought to classify them and establish the purpose of their internal organization, he observes in his Reveries. In both his dictionary and his botanical letters he accordingly addresses his attention to the parts of fruits and flowers—to the pistils, calyces and panicles of plants—whose identity and function he learned from several authorities, especially the Systema naturae, Philosophia botanica and Regnum vegetabile of Linnaeus, the pre-eminent botanist of the eighteenth century, to whom he once corresponded, as well as an essay by one of Linnaeus’s principal editors, Johann Anders Murray. Rousseau sometimes confused one plant’s or organ’s description with another’s, and he occasionally misunderstood the principles he borrowed. Perhaps because he preferred the study of plants to that of animals, moreover, it never occurred to him that they might also be investigated in terms of their natural or artificially bred history, along such lines as were pursued by Buffon in his commentaries on the degeneration of species, which had so impressed him in his account of mankind’s development in the Discourse on Inequality. For botanical investigations, if not for the science of human nature, his model was Linnaeus rather than Buffon. His inspiration, nevertheless, was that of a man whose mind and sensibilities were most active when he was alone, out of doors, tramping in celebration of Nature. Botany, he remarks in his Reveries,22 is the ideal subject of study for the idle and unoccupied solitary man.
It was not, however, the only field to which Rousseau turned in his solitude, at once enforced upon him by his estrangement from society, and at the same time relished on account of the freedom it afforded his flights of fancy. There remained one other subject of his final years, whose appeal he felt even more powerfully, because it was inescapable and because reflection upon it had always supplied him with the critical lens through which he perused everything else—that is, himself. Rousseau claims that it was around 1760 that he first contemplated an autobiography, and by 1765, with all the major works on which he had embarked almost a decade earlier at L’Ermitage either in print or ready for press or abandoned, he turned to his Confessions in earnest and assembled them principally from his voluminous correspondence, including copies or drafts of his own letters which he had kept. Knowing his ways, his eloquence and his bias, some of his former friends, who were certain they would be maligned by him, took the precaution of maligning him, either first or as well, none more than Madame d’Épinay, who, in return for her solicitude and affection after providing him with his first refuge, had been unjustly accused by him of duplicity and treachery. Her original indiscretions, revolving around Rousseau’s infatuation with Sophie, had never warranted his venomous charges against her, but she was to repay his discourtesy and insults with interest. Joined by Diderot, she requested and obtained official prohibition of Rousseau’s public readings from the manuscript of his Confessions after his return to Paris, and with the assistance of Grimm and Diderot, as her own surviving papers make plain, she reassembled and even rewrote the letters she exchanged with Rousseau at the time of their break, so as to make him appear perfidious throughout the whole period of their relationship, in the account she offers in her pseudo-memoirs, published posthumously in 1818, known as the Story of Madame de Montbrillant. In part endeavouring to protect themselves from his scurrilous imputations, but also out of genuine and even mounting contempt for a man whose outrageous vanity seemed to them boundless, Rousseau’s enemies embarked on a variety of stratagems to discredit him, which of course always had the effect of confirming, not only his original mistrust of their character, but also his suspicions of a conspiracy to defame him. In the history of Western civilization, no major figure has ever surpassed Rousseau in his ability to confuse mere imprudence with sinister intent, leading to dreadfully escalating consequences thereafter.
In Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, better known by its subtitle, Dialogues, drafted mainly between 1772 and 1774, he allows free rein to his by now truly formidable paranoia. He is a bear who must be kept in chains so as not to eat the peasants, Rousseau has an interlocutor called ‘the Frenchman’ say about himself.23 Since his poisonous pen is so dreaded, how can gentlemen in such apprehension of this monstrous misanthrope conspire so assiduously to hound him?24 In attempting to speak of himself from the outside, Rousseau here constructs an alien persona, who can neither recover the spontaneity of his feelings nor establish the authenticity of the motives of the man he once was, since access to his character is barred by its exclusion from himself as author, now inescapably distinguished by his otherness from the subject of his own work. The Dialogues were to be published in 1780 in Lichfield, Samuel Johnson’s birthplace. More frenetically conceived on the wilder side of reason than any of his other works, they form a text which Rousseau tried to transmit to mankind by way of disencumbrance, seeking to leave it in the hands of Providence through placing it on the altar of Notre-Dame, only to find that the choir had been locked, his appeal to the world thereby silenced in stillbirth, even escape from himself denied him. In recent years it has attracted the attention of Michel Foucault in particular, who introduced it in a modern edition. But it is infrequently read today, and still more seldom read without pain.
Rousseau’s last major work, the Reveries, begun in 1776 and unfinished at the time of his death, is of a radically different character. Its opening passage, among the most poignant he ever penned, captures the tribulations of a life now purged of its anxieties and is presented as if it were the work’s last lines, recalling all that had gone before: ‘So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour, or friend, nor any company left to me but my own. The most sociable and loving of men has with unanimous accord been cast out by all the rest’.25 In a series of Ten Walks, or promenades, which conclude with a regression to his beloved maman and the idyllic peace he savoured with her in his youth, Rousseau rehearses many themes about his estrangement from society drawn from his other writings, depicting the perambulating mind of an old man, with all his faculties now restored, forever spiralling backwards. The Seventh, Ninth and, above all, Fifth of these walks constitute the work’s spiritual centre—the Seventh revealing the wilderness of his botanical Elyseum, the Ninth forming his lament on the inconstancy of happiness, and the Fifth recalling a watery bliss on an island sanctuary—comprising, in effect, the pastoral, heroic and choral symphonies of Rousseau’s reverie. In the Ninth Walk, he attempts to excuse the abandonment of his children and describes the juvenile impetuosity of his character, as well as the irresistible joy he feels at the mere sight of happy faces. But throughout the walk, he adopts a tone of sombre resignation at his fate, insisting that all our plans for happiness are just fantasy, there being no permanent way to secure contentment.
In the Fifth Walk, he appears to put forward similar sentiments with more intense conviction, stating that ‘everything is in constant flux on this earth’, our affections, being attached to things outside us, inevitably changing and passing away with their objects, our worldly joys but fleeting creatures of a moment.26 Yet in the same walk, recollecting his flight from Môtiers in September 1765, when he had found refuge on the Island of Saint-Pierre in the middle of the Lake of Bienne, he evokes images of a sheltered haven so beautiful that he could have written about every blade of grass in the meadows and every lichen covering the rocks, where he had spent afternoons exploring the sallows, persicarias and shrubs of all kinds, or had lain outstretched in a boat, drifting wherever the waters would take him, ‘plunged in a thousand indistinct and yet delightful reveries’—a sanctum of such exquisite happiness that he would have been content to live there all his life, ‘without a moment’s desire for any other state’.27 Just as his Seventh Walk displaces Julie’s Elyseum to a past he now suggests had been his own, so does his Fifth Walk thus transport a fictional day’s outing on the banks of Lake Geneva—which Saint-Preux had likewise described in strikingly similar detail as ‘the day when he had experienced the most vivid emotions of his entire life’28—to an island retreat of rampant beauty, cut off by Nature Herself from the manufactured turmoil of contemporary civilization. In escaping from the mundane crises of his life through reverie, Rousseau could dissolve all difference between recollection and invention. Transported by his own imagination, and carried with it into a celestial domain of pure bliss such as he describes in his third letter to Malesherbes, he could inhabit alternative worlds of perfect serenity uniquely fit for him.
In his major writings, and the various disciplines they address, he sought to give substance to such ideals by expunging all the institutions which obstructed their fulfilment, so that through a process of sublime negativity he could illuminate realms of unprosaic speech and unembellished music, of human nature without society, an education without teachers, a city without theatres, a state without rulers, a divine presence without a church. By way of such regressions, Rousseau not only posited diverse visions of men’s self-realization in a condition of unfettered freedom. He also disengaged himself more dramatically from his own age of Enlightenment, appearing less circumscribed by the presuppositions and conventions of its discourses than any other major thinker of his day. In some of its registers, his intransigently critical voice still speaks with undiminished vigour more than two hundred years after his death. Modern and postmodern philosophers and writers alike often owe a considerable debt to his works which they are sometimes loath to acknowledge, and more often still they espouse views to which, in earlier formulations, he had already objected himself. In Rousseau’s pursuit of a language of pure sincerity, in his ideal of truly communicative agents, engaged by their speech acts, taking full part in the articulation of public choice, can be found anticipations of the political philosophy of Jürgen Habermas, for instance. In his perception of the suffocating, mutilating and dehumanizing tyrannies of modern commercial society, portrayed as if it were the panopticon of a Procrustean monster assembled by a still-to-be-born Dr. Frankenstein masquerading as Bentham, he also points some of the way towards Foucault. Yet, as distinct from most postmodernist thinkers and their critics alike, Rousseau was to find refuge and achieve tranquility even while buffeted in a personal and political world of continual turbulence. From both introspection and good grace, the most formidable eighteenth-century critic of the trappings of civilization, and the most vivid illustrator of the textures of its despair and discontent, believed all his life, no less than did Anne Frank at the darkest moment of modern history, that human nature was still fundamentally good at heart.