Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland

New Prospects

A. Esterhammer, D. Piccitto, P. Vincent, A. Esterhammer, D. Piccitto, P. Vincent

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137475862
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection brings together current research on topics that are perennially important to Romantic studies: the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the landscape and history of his native Switzerland.

1

Introduction

Patrick Vincent, Diane Piccitto, and Angela Esterhammer

When Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped and settled in the gothic-styled cottage of Plas Newydd close to Llangollen in the early 1780s, their thoughts naturally turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘Sunday, December 4th – At one the Whalleys arrived. Mrs. Whalley wretchedly ill. After dinner talked of Rome. Talked of Rousseau. Switzerland. North Wales. The exquisite pleasures of retirement and the Luxury of Purchasing Books. At nine they went away […] My Heart’s darling and I sat by the Kitchen Fire, talking of our Poverty’ (65). Throughout the winter of 1785, Butler read Rousseau to her ‘darling’ while they practised their needlework. In their diary, one finds miscellaneous remarks on Jean-Jacques’s life and character, Genevan politics, Swiss landscape, and general rural simplicity and contentment. Robert Darnton has called such archetypal scenes of Rousseauean reading the ‘fabrication of Romantic sensitivity’ (215). Like the Ladies of Llangollen, thousands of readers across Europe, eager to break free from the stifling conventions of their century, picked up Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), a strong moral work written in defence of Roman virtues and against Parisian sophistication. Deliberately choosing to ‘become in spirit a provincial’ (Darnton 231–2), readers sought to experience feelings unmediated by the dominant values of literature and society and to test more authentic forms of sociability. They found their moral resources in the revolutionary ‘ethics of Clarens’ (Markovitz 323), that loving middle-class community wisely governed in book 5 by Wolmar, whose benevolent paternalism incarnated at the domestic level the utopian republicanism that Rousseau would apply to the entire nation in his Social Contract (1762).

As with Rousseau, the decision of the Ladies of Llangollen to live in retirement only increased their notoriety: by the 1810s, fashionable celebrities such as the Duke of Wellington and Princess Charlotte but also many of the period’s best known writers, including Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott, travelled to Wales to pay their homage. Nature and feeling had become the spirit of the age, and these women’s romantic community à deux prefigured more famous experiments in Romantic community, including the Lake School in Cumbria and the Byron-Shelley circle in Geneva and Pisa. It was also at Llangollen that William Hazlitt read a letter from the New Heloise to celebrate his twentieth birthday in 1798. The young Hazlitt was an unrepentant Rousseauphile who wholly identified with the Citizen of Geneva. He was staying in the village inn en route to his first meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Nether Stowey. Twenty-four years later, the writer would mark the event as the birth of his own intellectual career by associating his discovery of the Welsh valley with St Preux’s first sight of the Pays de Vaud upon returning from Parisian exile, itself a repetition of Rousseau’s return to his homeland in 1754. The Swiss and Welsh prospects similarly fill their viewers with sentiments of ‘LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE’, all of which ‘have since faded into the light of common day’ (Hazlitt, ‘On Going a Journey’ 167).

These anecdotes remind us of the close association in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century readers’ minds between Rousseau, Switzerland, and the revolution in sensibility now known as Romanticism. They also indicate the ease with which this sensibility could be imaginatively displaced onto other settings, including Wales and the Lake District, hiding from sight the role that Switzerland played as an origin and primary locus of Romantic feeling. Earlier Swiss writers such Conrad Gessner, Josias Simmler, Albrecht von Haller, and Salomon Gessner had celebrated the country’s sublime landscapes and republican institutions before Rousseau, whereas British writers on the Grand Tour, including Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Coxe, helped disseminate this myth of mountain virtue back home (Schama 447–90). But it was in large part thanks to the New Heloise’s phenomenal success that Switzerland captivated the European imagination between 1750 and 1850. For many Romantic travellers, visiting Switzerland was tantamount to re-experiencing the community of feeling fictionalized by Rousseau. As his reputation began to suffer after his quarrel with David Hume in 1766, but especially after the posthumous publication of the Confessions in 1781 and the outbreak of revolutionary violence in the 1790s, a distinction began to be made between the writer’s celebrated romance Julie, with its contagious sensibility, and his more controversial autobiographical, pedagogical, and political texts. ‘[E]lsewhere he is the sensualist, the madman, the egotist, the wretched politician, the worse moralist – but in Clarens he is at home – the “Child of Nature”, in her loveliest scene – the Rousseau, not of the Confessions, but of the Heloise’, writes Constantine Henry Phipps in one of his own Rousseauean romances, published in 1827 (2: 5). For Hazlitt, however, such a distinction was absurd; neither could Rousseau be confined to the shores of Lake Geneva. In ‘On the Character of Rousseau’ (1816), he brilliantly diagnoses Rousseau’s acute self-consciousness, that ‘morbid feeling of all that is related to his own impressions’, as the source of his genius and the origin of all his radically modern ideas. Moreover, he argues for a close affinity between Rousseau’s sensibility and Wordsworth’s: ‘we will confidently match the Citizen of Geneva’s adventures on the lake of Bienne against the Cumberland Poet’s floating dreams on the lake of Grasmere’ (93).

Despite the ease with which Rousseauean sensibility could be adapted to Grasmere and elsewhere, a large number of Romantic-period travel accounts and literary works, many of which have become exemplary of Romanticism, are set at least partially in Switzerland. Few British Romantic authors did not write about the Swiss cantons, visit them, or both. Often these texts also revisit Rousseau through a rich intertextual web of citation, annotation, translation, and imitation. For example, in the second edition of Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1780), the eighteenth century’s most influential guide to Switzerland and the Alps, the Reverend William Coxe recounts touring Clarens with the New Heloise in hand. While Rousseau’s notoriety obliges him to distance himself in a footnote, he is unable to hide his enthusiasm for the places described in the novel: ‘no man has a more just sense and abhorrence of the pernicious tendency of Rousseau’s writings than himself. But he presumes, that to reprobate his principles as a moralist, is by no means inconsistent with admiring his pencil as a landscape-painter’ (265). It was with Louis Ramond de Carbonnières’ French translation of Coxe’s pocket guide that the young William Wordsworth and his Welsh companion Robert Jones set off on their walking tour to the ‘distant Alps’ in 1790. The nature that was ‘sovereign in [his] heart’ (1805 Prelude, book 6, lines 342, 346) was the landscape tantalizingly set forth in Ramond de Carbonnières’ sublime footnote on the Alps (143), itself inspired by Rousseau’s ‘Letter on the Valais’. While William Godwin presents a more ambivalent picture of Rousseauean feeling in Fleetwood (1805), his daughter Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley rushed to Switzerland in 1814 in a transparent and ill-planned attempt to mimic the ethics of the New Heloise on site, hoping to ‘seek in that romantic and interesting country some cottage where we might dwell in peace and solitude’ (Shelley 45). The irony of their first visit was that neither of them had yet read Rousseau’s romance, basing themselves instead on Godwin’s novel. Mary picked up the New Heloise in 1815, whereas Percy Shelley eventually read it in situ during his sail with Byron around Lake Geneva in July 1816, a trip that re-enacted a similar boat trip by Rousseau in 1754 and halted at all the novel’s most emotionally charged locations. According to Edward Duffy, Shelley’s discovery of the novel ‘marks a dramatic turning point’ in his understanding of Rousseau (88), the energy of the moment reflected in his letter-journal to Peacock of 12 July 1816 in which he describes the journey as ‘on every account delightful, but most especially, because then I first knew the divine beauty of Rousseau’s imagination, as it exhibits itself in Julie’ (Shelley 107). Byron and Shelley’s voyage fast became the best known of the Romantic period’s sentimental pilgrimages in the tracks of Jean-Jacques, encouraging hundreds of other travellers to follow in their turn. As late as 1825, Hazlitt would again evoke the Jura scene from the New Heloise on his tour of Switzerland, and rent a farmhouse close to Vevey for three months to live in the same enchanted surroundings as Julie and her tutor St Preux (Notes 383, 403).

While critics since Hazlitt – including Duffy, Jacques Voisine, W. J. T. Mitchell, Thomas McFarland, and Gregory Dart – have not lost sight of Rousseau’s significance for British Romanticism, this relationship is rarely considered in terms of Rousseau’s embeddedness within Swiss culture and landscape. Only Voisine remarks in his magisterial study that ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, did much to popularize in England the image at the same time of an heroic and idyllic Switzerland’ (151). For Jean-Luc Nancy, Rousseau is ‘the first thinker of community’, meaning that he was the first to analyse his own society’s sentiment of a rupture in community, a consciousness subsequently inherited by the Romantics (9). Rousseau’s awareness of this loss and his desire to overcome it to produce a free, sovereign community arose not only from his reading of the classics, but also from his constant comparisons between the society and institutions of his native country and those of France, where he spent just over half his life. ‘It is from having had to live among slaves that I felt the full value of liberty’, Rousseau wrote to a Genevan friend in 1751 (C’est à force de vivre parmi des esclaves que j’ai senti tout le prix de la liberté [Correspondance 2: 154]). Although France has always been eager to claim him as one of her own, Rousseau remained proud of having been born a free citizen of Geneva, a city that was known for its turbulent experiments in republican liberty and that maintained special ties to Britain. ‘I am happy, every time I meditate about Governments’, he states in the opening lines of the Social Contract, ‘always to find in my research new reasons to love that of my country!’ (131). If Rousseau renounced his Genevan citizenship on 12 May 1763 after the city magistrates banned his Emile and Social Contract, and closed his Confessions on a sour note by calling Switzerland a ‘homicidal land’ (549), he nevertheless died a citizen of Neuchâtel, a Prussian principality allied, like Geneva, to the Swiss Confederation. Throughout his life he never ceased to consider himself as Swiss.

A number of scholars, including François Jost and Helena Rosenblatt, have demonstrated the influence of Rousseau’s Swiss background on almost all his ideas and themes, from the most general – the importance of nature, walking, the simple life, personal autonomy, domestic virtue, local attachment, and love of freedom – to the more specific – his mistrust of political representation, his advocacy of sumptuary laws to lessen the effects of commerce and luxury, his fondness for patriotic education, songs, and public celebrations, his praise of citizen militias, and his insistence on the necessity of small states to guarantee popular sovereignty. Part of the unity that Ernst Cassirer found long ago in Rousseau’s oeuvre may be attributed to the ideas on morality, society, and politics that Rousseau drew from Swiss history, notably from the liberation myths of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from the manners and institutions of the rural direct democracies of central and eastern Switzerland, from other Swiss Enlightenment writers such as Johann Bodmer and his Zurich patriot circle, and from his own experience of Genevan society, politics, and religion. Switzerland helped Rousseau above all to imagine his socio-political ideal of the republic as patrie. Patriotism, here understood as the love of liberty and of one’s country, was for him necessary to ensure the survival of any sovereign political community formed by social contract. Rousseau shared Burke’s respect for custom and patriotic attachment (Cameron 127–8), and much like Swiss culture itself, his ideal republic was at once conservative in its respect for custom, domesticity, and local attachment, and radical in its egalitarian challenge to dominant socio-political forms based on class difference and wealth. Such an understanding of Rousseau flies in the face of the anti-Jacobin myth of the Genevan citizen as a philosophe whose abstract theories had no grounding in reality, but also of the Romantic myth of Rousseau as an overly sensitive, misanthropic recluse whose expressive individualism has been used to define modern man. As Victor Goldschmidt writes, ‘even in his most extreme solitude, Rousseau was willing to judge himself and be judged according to the standards of the good citizen’ (160–1).

Readers are often most familiar with Rousseau’s representations of rural Switzerland, meant to illustrate the myth of the state of nature theorized in his Discourse on Inequality (1754) as a critical foil to modernity. This association of Rousseau with cultural primitivism corresponds to the high point of Rousseaumania in Britain in the 1760s. English readers liked to imagine the Swiss writer as ‘a latter-day Cato’, ‘the champion of simple manners, and the inheritor of an ancient republican tradition cherished as the nurse of virtue’ (Duffy 12, 10). The Letter to D’Alembert (1758) first established his English reputation. As in the two letters to the Maréchal de Luxembourg of 20 and 28 January 1763, which depict Switzerland as a picturesque combination of country and city, wild and cultivated nature, where one can find ‘factories in precipices’ and the whole country is like ‘a big city, divided into thirteen neighbourhoods’ (Lettres sur la Suisse 35–9), the Letter to d’Alembert praises the rustic autonomy, equality, and independence of the Swiss, good citizens and brave soldiers despite their petty foibles and the fact that commerce and French manners have corrupted their simplicity. Rousseau more specifically idealizes Genevan manners, which he opposes to the effeminate Parisian society. The only form of entertainment he supports is that of a public theatre inspired by the rural democracies’ Festspiel and meant as a sort of public assembly to inspire patriotic feeling. Calvinist Geneva, unlike the Catholic republics of central and eastern Switzerland, was not a rural democracy, but a commercial city dominated by an aristocratic oligarchy. Yet Rousseau imagined his own republic as he and his fellow patriots wished to see it. In fact, his Social Contract, which draws its utopian ideal of political community from the ancients, was also shaped by the author’s intimate understanding of Genevan history, society, and institutions as well as by his more bookish knowledge of central Switzerland’s so-called Forest Cantons.

Even more influential than the Letter to D’Alembert is Rousseau’s description of an Alpine community in book 1, letter 23 of the New Heloise, better known as his ‘Letter on the Valais’ that was excerpted in the Monthly Review (24 [April 1761]: 228–35). Rousseau had first travelled through the canton of Valais in 1744 on his return from Venice and then briefly visited a second time in 1754 during his tour of Lake Geneva. The se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Romantic Education, Concealment, and Orchestrated Desire in Rousseau’s Emile and Frances Brooke’s Julia Mandeville
• 3 Romantic Suicide, Contagion, and Rousseau’s Julie
• 4 Seeing Jean-Jacques’ Nature: Rousseau’s Call for a Botanist Reader
• 5 Rousseau’s Pygmalion and Automata in the Romantic Period
• 6 Rousseau on the Tourist Trail
• 7 James Boswell and Rousseau in Môtiers: Re-inscribing Childhood and Its (Auto)biographical Prospects
• 8 Prints, Panoramas, and Picturesque Travel in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Tour on the Continent
• 9 Visionary Republics: Virtual Representations of Switzerland and Wordsworth’s Lake District
• 10 A ‘Melancholy Occurrence’ in the Alps: Switzerland, Mont Blanc, and an Early Critique of Mountaineering
• 11 Manfred, Freedom, and the Swiss Alps: The Transformation of the Byronic Hero
• 12 Legendary Late-Romantic Switzerlands: Baillie, Polidori, Hemans, and Scott
• 13 Rodolphe Töpffer’s Earliest Comic Strips and the Tools of the Picturesque: Teaching the Art of Perception
• Index