The Confessions

  THE CONFESSIONS OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in 1712. Abandoned by his father at the age of ten he tried his hand as an engraver’s apprentice before he left the city in 1728. From then on he was to wander Europe seeking an elusive happiness. At Turin he became a Catholic convert; and as a footman, seminarist, music teacher or tutor visited many parts of Switzerland and France. In 1732 he settled for eight years at Chambéry or at Les Charmettes, the country house of Madame de Warens, remembered by Rousseau as an idyllic place in the Confessions. In 1741 he set out for Paris where he met Diderot, who commissioned him to write the musical articles for the Encyclopédie. In the meantime he fathered five children by Thérèse Levasseur, a servant girl, and abandoned them to a foundling home. The 1750s witnessed a breach with Voltaire and Diderot, and his writing struck a new note of defiant independence. In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts and the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité he showed how the growth of civilization corrupted natural goodness and increased inequality between men. In 1758 he attacked his former friends, the Encyclopedists, in the Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles which pilloried cultured society. In 1757 he moved to Montmorency and these five years were the most fruitful of his life. His remarkable novel La nouvelle Héloise (1761) met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in Émile, which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of personal ideals against the powers of the state and the pressures of society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was The Social Contract, published in 1762. The same year he wrote an attack on revealed religion, the Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard. He was driven from Switzerland and fled to England, where he only succeeded in making an enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770 Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in France, where he died in 1778.

  J. M. COHEN, born in London in 1903 and a Cambridge graduate, was the author of many Penguin translations, including versions of Cervantes, Rabelais and Montaigne. For some years he assisted E. V. Rieu in editing the Penguin Classics. He collected the three books of Comic and Curious Verse and anthologies of Latin American and Cuban writing. With his son Mark Cohen he also edited the Penguin Dictionary of Quotations and two editions of its companion Dictionary of Modern Quotations. He frequently visited Spain and made several visits to Mexico, Cuba and other Spanish American countries. J. M. Cohen died in 1989.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

  TRANSLATED

  AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION

  BY

  J. M. COHEN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  The Confessions (completed in 1770) first published in 1781

  This translation first published in 1953

  31

  Copyright 1953 by J. M. Cohen

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–91310–0

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The First Part

  BOOK ONE

  BOOK TWO

  BOOK THREE

  BOOK FOUR

  BOOK FIVE

  BOOK SIX

  The Second Part

  BOOK SEVEN

  BOOK EIGHT

  BOOK NINE

  BOOK TEN

  BOOK ELEVEN

  BOOK TWELVE

  INTRODUCTION

  ON the opening page of this remarkable volume of self-revelations Rousseau claims to be writing a unique work, and one which he believes will find no imitator. In his second claim he was well wide of the mark. For not a decade has passed since the posthumous publication of the Confessions that some imaginative writer has not burrowed back in search of his childhood, or tried to impose a retrospective pattern on the thoughts and adventures of his maturity. Goethe, Herzen, Tolstoy, Mill, Ruskin, Trollope, George Moore, Bunin, Gide, are only a few of those who have turned round and remembered as they might not have done but for Jean-Jacques’s example. Novels too, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, took an increasingly autobiographical tone. Dickens gives us only scenes from his childhood; but from The Way of All Flesh to À la recherche du temps perdu and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the recasting in fictional form of the writer’s own experience increasingly recurs as the main theme of his novel. Even now, when fiction has tentatively returned to the third person, imaginative autobiography continues to proliferate; and only last year at least two English poets, Roy Campbell and Stephen Spender, published reminiscent volumes that were late branchings from the tree which Rousseau planted a hundred and eighty-five years ago.

  Before his day there were perhaps two great autobiographies, St Augustine’s Confessions and Santa Teresa’s Life of Herself; and both these works were written not for personal display or justification but to tell of a vital religious experience which might serve as an example to others. By Rousseau’s age, however, men had begun to see themselves not as atoms in a society that stretched down from God to the world of nature but as unique individuals, important in their own right. It was possible for the first time, therefore, for a man to write his life in terms only of his worldly experience, and to advance views on his place in the Universe that bore only a distant relationship to the truths of revealed religion. Rousseau set out to win his reader’s sympathy for himself, and to gain posthumous partisans who would compensate him for the misunderstanding of which he felt he had been a victim throughout the long misery of his life. His method was to draw the pattern of his feelings while at the same time narrating the events of his earlier years. For what was important to him was not so much to tell of his history and achievements, as to prove himself a man who, with all his imperfections, was nevertheless fundamentally honest and good. For this purpose he took particular pride in recording – and even in somewhat exaggerating – his more disgraceful actions; in this way displaying an individualistic variant of the Christian virtue of humility. This is perhaps the one feature of the Confessions that has found few imitators. For even in the hope of winning applause by their frankness, few men care to display themselves as even more miserable sinners than the rest of mankind.

  His rather disconcerting frankness, however, is not the only feature of Rousseau’s work that remains unique. For he is himself a unique figure. No one had as much influence as he on the two centuries that followed his brief burst of literary activity; and at the same time no one has revealed more fully the subjective origin of what came to be accepted as his objective thought. It is strange that a cluster of beliefs in the i
nnocence of childhood and of primitive society which have so deeply affected educational and political theory and practice ever since his day should be so naïvely shown to owe their inspiration merely to the over-stimulated infancy of a motherless child in eighteenth-century Geneva, and to its rough interruption by a premature encounter with the rough ways of the world. Yet so faithfully did Rousseau recall his earliest feelings when at the age of fifty-four he began to write his Confessions that we have not only a beautifully etched outline of those far-away childhood scenes, but a clear picture as well, which Rousseau was only half aware that he was drawing, of the formative influence of those first incidents on the unattractive, hypersensitive small boy that he was, and through him on the European thought of two centuries. One wonders whether, if he had persisted with that work on The Morals of Sensibility which he abandoned when he resolved on his retirement, he would himself have realized the subjective nature of his beliefs. For from what he tells us of this unwritten book in these Confessions he had stumbled across the idea that man is no more than a passive re-agent to the stimuli that flood in on him from the outside world: a theory of behaviourism which, if worked out, might have altered the tone of the present work considerably.

  ‘I may omit or transpose facts, or make mistakes in dates’, says Rousseau in the opening paragraph of his Seventh Book. ‘But I cannot go wrong about what I felt, or about what my feelings have led me to do and they are the subject of my story.’ It is impossible to read any page that he wrote without realizing that Jean-Jacques was entirely a creature of his feelings. A man whose chronic ill-health was considerably aggravated by his equally constant hypochondria, he was for ever preoccupied with sensations of comfort or discomfort, with likings and dislikings of persons, places, and weather; and his emotions, whether of affection, jealousy, or indignation, were always coloured by the bodily feelings of the moment. One finds in Rousseau very much less constancy of sentiment than in Wordsworth or Goethe, who were both as much in reaction as he was against the enlightened intellectualism of the mid eighteenth century. For whereas their emotions were based on some objective experience of the world, Rousseau’s profoundest intimations of anything outside himself, such as the experience he records on the shores of Lake Geneva on his way back from escorting Mme de Warens’s maid Merceret to her home, were always muddied by a yearning for he knew not what and by the consciousness that something in the past had escaped him to which he could almost give a name. Rousseau’s Confessions are, as he said, the story of his feelings, and of what they led him to do. The detail of his memories may often be inaccurate. It is exceedingly difficult, for instance, to ascribe his early journeys to their definite dates. Occasionally, where a check is possible, as of the length of his stay in the hospice at Turin before his abjuration of Protestantism, he may well prove to have exaggerated weeks into months. Again, the idyll of Les Charmettes, if an accurate picture, is ante-dated by something more than a year. For Mme de Warens did not rent Les Charmettes until the autumn of 1737, when Rousseau was already on his travels, from which he returned to find Wintzenried in residence; and it was probably as an outlet for the energies of this bustling young man that the farm was actually taken. It is almost certain, therefore, that Rousseau never had his beloved Mamma to himself there, even for a short time, in the way he describes. For by the spring of 1738 he was already sharing her favours with his Swiss rival. During the greater part of his stay at that remote and beautiful spot the sickly young man was undoubtedly alone. But though Rousseau’s memory may have betrayed him over facts, where his feelings are concerned he is never wrong. The somewhat sordid adventure with Mme Larnage, his brief moment of political importance in Venice, his, on the whole unhappy, relations with his successive patrons, and his growing obsession with the conspiracy against him: these and countless other matters in the Confessions, the recording of which relies on the calling up of past states of mind, are re-created in a manner that would be impossible for anyone with a less acute sensibility than Rousseau’s. For a parallel, one can only go to the early volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu, just as for the long story of the plot against his peace, allegedly instigated by Grimm and Diderot, there is no better comparison than with Marcel’s long brooding in Proust’s last volumes over the dead Albertine’s probable unfaithfulness.

  The feeling that most constantly recurs in the Confessions is one of loss, a regret for some other way of life that would have brought Rousseau happiness. Supposing that he had married Merceret, as she crudely invited him to do, and set up as a music-teacher in a remote corner of Switzerland, then he would not have climbed out of his own class and come to depend on the favours of the great. When he is in the town Rousseau longs for the country and for uninterrupted communion with Nature. But when in the country he looks back with longing to some earlier time, to the idyll of Les Charmettes – which was in fact imaginary – or into an even more remote past, before his feelings were sullied and prior to his fall from the paradise of early childhood. Always one is conscious that, for all his immense posthumous fame, Rousseau throughout his life made the wrong choices. He was out of his element in the Encyclopaedist circle. Grimm, Diderot, and d’Holbach were rationalists whose standards entirely differed from his own. He was out of his element again, as he confesses in the first book, among people of wit and fashion; for as a man of feeling rather than of intellect he was too slow in his replies to polite conversation, and gauche and tactless in company. It is true that the whole Confessions is an attempt to prove that the feelings convey a man’s apprehension of truth more faithfully than does the brain. But as a writer of books and originator of theories Rousseau was compelled to compete with the then dominant Encyclopaedists, who appreciated the man of feeling so long as, like Sterne, when he visited them in Paris, he was content to be whimsical, but were ruffled and bored by the earnest and ill-mannered Jean-Jacques, who was always so ready to be offended and often prone to impute bad faith to those who did not readily accept the truth of his rather muddled intuitions. Readers of Lawrence’s letters will see how faithfully the same pattern of mutual incomprehension has been repeated in our own day. Rousseau’s effect on the next generation was to legitimize and encourage the display of feeling. In fact, he contributed more than any other man to the growth of the Romantic movement. Yet when one compares his life with that of William Cowper, a man equally hampered by half-imaginary illness, equally preoccupied with his feelings, one sees the poet of The Task carefully measuring his commitments, limiting his psychological expenditure to the mild and comfortable joys of friendship, and hiding himself from the fear of hell-fire behind the closed shutters of his firelit room. Rousseau found no such refuge from his more worldly terrors, which in his middle years assumed a form to which we should to-day give the name of persecution-mania. He had ventured into a society in which he did not belong; and when at Montmorency he at last decided that he must escape it was too late. The fatal Émile was already at the printers; and his future livelihood in the retirement that he planned depended on the circulation of his works, on the goodwill of princes and potentates whom he had clumsily allowed himself to antagonize.

  The last four books of the Confessions take on a sombre colour that was only occasionally present in the first eight. There were country pleasures at the Hermitage; there was the charm of the Marshal de Luxembourg’s company; there was the short-lived idyll of his residence at the Orangery, and the impact of his books on the world. But these rewards for his early labours came too late for him to enjoy them. Already the sky was dark with threats of persecution. Mme d’Épinay had turned against him for reasons that are only too clear from the interchange of letters which he shows us. Grimm, whom he had once patronized, now wanted to be treated as an equal or, in his tactless German way, as something better than that. One is but too aware of this foreign upstart’s lack of manners. But Rousseau does not entirely establish the plot against himself of which he would convince us Grimm was a ringleader. Nor can one feel that Diderot’s
attempts to guide his actions, over such incidents as the offer of a court pension, were prompted by any ill-will. Rousseau had done all he could to ease the conditions of Diderot’s imprisonment when he was in Vincennes. Why should not Diderot now take a perhaps too presumptuous hand in Rousseau’s affairs, which he seemed so deplorably unable to manage for himself? But Rousseau, as he so frequently tells us, could not abide any sort of constraint. He must be absolutely free. And so Diderot became another of those scheming enemies whose plots he saw as the cause of all his misfortunes. It is impossible to disentangle the long story of the different breaches of confidence of which Rousseau accuses his former friends, nor can one hope to make sense of their various monetary offers to Mme Le Vasseur. But these might be interpreted as officious rather than ill-meaning. One cannot, in fact, accept the veracity of the Confessions over such matters. One can, however, always be certain that Rousseau is presenting a faithful account of his feelings at the time. One is readily drawn into his dream world in which every man’s hand is against him, and it is with horrified sympathy that one follows him from one temporary refuge to another until the last page on which, though intending to set out for Germany, he in fact took the first step towards England, a country that he already hated, and where he again found his imaginary persecutors already lying in wait for him.