Some years afterwards he substituted another shorter set of grievances, namely, that Hume would not suffer Theresa to sit at table with him; that he made a show of him; and that Hume had an engraving executed of himself, which made him as beautiful as a cherub, while in another engraving, which was a pendant to his own, Jean Jacques was made as ugly as a bear.[368]
It would be ridiculous for us to waste any time in discussing these charges. They are not open to serious examination, though it is astonishing to find writers in our own day who fully believe that Hume was a traitor, and behaved extremely basely to the unfortunate man whom he had inveigled over to a barbarous island. The only part of the indictment about which there could be the least doubt, was the possibility of Hume having been an accomplice in Walpole's very small pleasantry. Some of his friends in Paris suspected that he had had a hand in the supposed letter from the King of Prussia. Although the letter constituted no very malignant jest, and could not by a sensible man have been regarded as furnishing just complaint against one who, like Walpole, was merely an impudent stranger, yet if it could be shown that Hume had taken an active part either in the composition or the circulation of a spiteful bit of satire upon one towards whom he was pretending a singular affection, then we should admit that he showed such a want of sense of the delicacy of friendship as amounted to something like treachery. But a letter from Walpole to Hume sets this doubt at rest. "I cannot be precise as to the time of my writing the King of Prussia's letter, but ... I not only suppressed the letter while you stayed there, out of delicacy to you, but it was the reason why, out of delicacy to myself, I did not go to see him as you often proposed to me, thinking it wrong to go and make a cordial visit to a man, with a letter in my pocket to laugh at him."[369]
With this all else falls to the ground. It would be as unwise in us, as it was in Rousseau himself, to complicate the hypotheses. Men do not act without motives, and Hume could have no motive in entering into any plot against Rousseau, even if the rival philosophers in France might have motives. We know the character of our David Hume perfectly well, and though it was not faultless, its fault certainly lay rather in an excessive desire to make the world comfortable for everybody, than in anything like purposeless malignity, of which he never had a trace. Moreover, all that befell Rousseau through Hume's agency was exceedingly to his advantage. Hume was not without vanity, and his letters show that he was not displeased at the addition to his consequence which came of his patronage of a man who was much talked about and much stared at. But, however this was, he did all for Rousseau that generosity and thoughtfulness could do. He was at great pains in establishing him; he used his interest to procure for him the grant of a pension from the king; when Rousseau provisionally refused the pension rather than owe anything to Hume, the latter, still ignorant of the suspicion that was blackening in Rousseau's mind, supposed that the refusal came from the fact of the pension being kept private, and at once took measures with the minister to procure the removal of the condition of privacy. Besides undeniable acts like these, the state of Hume's mind towards his curious ward is abundantly shown in his letters to all his most intimate friends, just as Rousseau's gratitude to him is to be read in all his early letters both to Hume and other persons. In the presence of such facts on the one side, and in the absence of any particle of intelligible evidence to neutralise them on the other, to treat Rousseau's charges with gravity is irrational.
If Hume had written back in a mild and conciliatory strain, there can be no doubt that the unfortunate victim of his own morbid imagination would, for a time at any rate, have been sobered and brought to a sense of his misconduct. But Hume was incensed beyond control at what he very pardonably took for a masterpiece of atrocious ingratitude. He reproached Rousseau in terms as harsh as those which Grimm had used nine years before. He wrote to all his friends, withdrawing the kindly words he had once used of Rousseau's character, and substituting in their place the most unfavourable he could find. He gave the philosophic circle in Paris exquisite delight by the confirmation which his story furnished of their own foresight, when they had warned him that he was taking a viper to his bosom. Finally, in spite of the advice of Adam Smith, of one of the greatest of men, Turgot, and one of the smallest, Horace Walpole, he published a succinct account of the quarrel, first in French, and then in English. This step was chiefly due to the advice of the clique of whom D'Alembert was the spokesman, though it is due to him to mention that he softened various expressions in Hume's narrative, which he pronounced too harsh. It may be true that a council of war never fights; a council of men of letters always does. The governing committee of a literary, philosophical, or theological clique form the very worst advisers any man can have.
Much must be forgiven to Hume, stung as he was by what appeared the most hateful ferocity in one on whom he had heaped acts of affection. Still, one would have been glad on behalf of human dignity, if he had suffered with firm silence petulant charges against which the consciousness of his own uprightness should have been the only answer. That high pride, of which there is too little rather than too much in the world, and which saves men from waste of themselves and others in pitiful accusations, vindications, retaliations, should have helped humane pity in preserving him from this poor quarrel. Long afterwards Rousseau said, "England, of which they paint such fine pictures in France, has so cheerless a climate; my soul, wearied with many shocks, was in a condition of such profound melancholy, that in all that passed I believe I committed many faults. But are they comparable to those of the enemies who persecuted me, supposing them even to have done no more than published our private quarrels?"[370] An ampler contrition would have been more seemly in the first offender, but there is a measure of justice in his complaint. We need not, however, reproach the good Hume. Before six months were over, he admits that he is sometimes inclined to blame his publication, and always to regret it.[371] And his regret was not verbal merely. When Rousseau had returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically serviceable.[372]
Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in Paris and London in a cloud. The Succinct Exposure was followed by succinct rejoinders. Walpole officiously printed his own account of his own share in the matter. Boswell officiously wrote to the newspapers defending Rousseau and attacking Walpole. King George followed the battle with intense curiosity. Hume with solemn formalities sent the documents to the British Museum. There was silence only in one place, and that was at Wootton. The unfortunate person who had done all the mischief printed not a word.
The most prompt and quite the least instructive of the remarks invariably made upon any one who has acted in an unusual manner, is that he must be mad. This universal criticism upon the unwonted really tells us nothing, because the term may cover any state of mind from a warranted dissent from established custom, down to absolute dementia. Rousseau was called mad when he took to wearing convenient clothes and living frugally. He was called mad when he quitted the town and went to live in the country. The same facile explanation covered his quarrel with importunate friends at the Hermitage. Voltaire called him mad for saying that if there were perfect harmony of taste and temperament between the king's daughter and the executioner's son, the pair ought to be allowed to marry. We who are not forced by conversational necessities to hurry to a judgment, may hesitate to take either taste for the country, or for frugal living, or even for democratic extravagances, as a mark of a disordered mind.[373] That Rousseau's conduct towards Hume was inconsistent with perfect mental soundness is quite plain. But to say this with crude trenchancy, teaches us nothing. Instead of paying ourselves with phrases like monomania, it is more useful shortly to trace the conditions which prepared the way for mental derangement, because this is the only means of understanding either its nature, or the degree to which it extended. These conditions in Rousseau's case are perfectly simple and obvious to any one who recognises the principle, that the essential facts of such mental disorder as his must be sought not in the symptoms, but from the whole range of moral and intellectual constitution, acted on by physical states and acting on them in turn.
Rousseau was born with an organisation of extreme sensibility. This predisposition was further deepened by the application in early youth of mental influences specially calculated to heighten juvenile sensibility. Corrective discipline from circumstance and from formal instruction was wholly absent, and thus the particular excess in his temperament became ever more and more exaggerated, and encroached at a rate of geometrical progression upon all the rest of his impulses and faculties; these, if he had been happily placed under some of the many forms of wholesome social pressure, would then on the contrary have gradually reduced his sensibility to more normal proportion. When the vicious excess had decisively rooted itself in his character, he came to Paris, where it was irritated into further activity by the uncongeniality of all that surrounded him. Hence the growth of a marked unsociality, taking literary form in the Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso:—
Dieser Pfad
Verleitet uns, durch einsames Gebüsch,
Durch stille Thäler fortzuwandern; mehr
Und mehr verwöhnt sich das Gemüth und strebt
Die goldne Zeit, die ihm von aussen mangelt,
In seinem Innern wieder herzustellen,
So wenig der Versuch gelingen will.
Then came harsh and unjust treatment prolonged for many months, and this introduced a slight but genuinely misanthropic element of bitterness into what had hitherto been an excess of feeling about himself, rather than any positive feeling of hostility or suspicion about others. Finally and perhaps above all else, he was the victim of tormenting bodily pain, and of sleeplessness which resulted from it. The agitation and excitement of the journey to England, completed the sum of the conditions of disturbance, and as soon as ever he was settled at Wootton, and had leisure to brood over the incidents of the few weeks since his arrival in England, the disorder which had long been spreading through his impulses and affections, suddenly but by a most natural sequence extended to the faculties of his intelligence, and he became the prey of delusion, a delusion which was not yet fixed, but which ultimately became so.