A History of Britain, Volume 3 Read Free Page B

nature by culture, but in precisely the reverse. Towns, which imposed an obligation to conduct one’s life according to the dictates of fashion, commerce and wit, were a web of vicious hypocrites and predators. Towns enslaved; the countryside – provided it too had not been infected with urban evils – liberated. Towns contaminated and sickened their inhabitants; the country cleansed and invigorated them. Rather than education assuming its mission to be the taming of children’s natural instincts within the pen of cultivated arts and manners it ought to do precisely the opposite – preserving, for as long as possible, the innocence, artlessness, frankness and simplicity of those instincts. No books, then, before 12 at least; instead, romps in the fields, stories beneath the trees and lots of nature walks.
    All of which made Rousseau’s brief, dizzy stay in London, in the winter of 1766, disconcerting to guest and host alike. He had come to England, on the warm invitation of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, because he had run out of asylums and because he had been reliably informed that the country was the sanctuary of liberty. In absolutist, Catholic France his writings had been burned by the public hangman. In his Calvinist native city of Geneva he had not fared much better, falling foul of the local oligarchy when he had rashly and publicly sided with challenges to their monopoly of power. For a brief period he had found an idyllic refuge, together with his mistress, Thérèse Levasseur, on the islet of St Pierre, near Bienne, where he went for botanizing walks or rowed a little boat. His last shelter was the estate of an English-naturalized Swiss, Rodolphe Vautravers, but the long arm of authority, in the shape of the Bishop of Berne’s proscription for irreligion, caught up with him. Finally, he accepted Hume’s invitation and travelled with him across the Channel.
    It was not a pleasure trip. Rousseau arrived at Dover seasick, wet, tearful and cold. In London, where Hume attempted to introduce him to like-minded friends including the actor David Garrick, Prospective Men and Women of Feeling lined up to offer gushing admiration, tearfully sympathetic consolation, discreet applause. But although he came out of his shell enough to drink in the appreciation, and began to appear in his pseudo-‘Armenian’ peasant’s costume of fur cap and tunic, it took no time at all before Rousseau’s unique gift for alienating his well-wishers surfaced. When David Hume attempted to recommend him to George III for a royal pension, it was perversely interpreted by Rousseau as a conspiracy. It probably didn’t help when, to pre-empt Rousseau’s excuse that babysitting his dog, Sultan, prevented him from going to the theatre in Drury Lane to meet the king, Hume locked the dog on the inside of the apartment, and, with Rousseau on the outside, insisted on taking him to the show. What Hume thought was a good-natured attempt to bring Rousseau a harmless degree of benign public attention was perceived by its intended beneficiary as a plot to subject him to ‘enslavement’ and ridicule. Rousseau even believed that Hume was the author of a hoax invitation from Frederick the Great urging him to come to Prussia. (The writer was actually Horace Walpole.) An ugly public row ensued. Hume himself began to realize, depressingly, that his guest was perhaps a little mad.
    Escape to the country, in Rousseau’s fevered mind, became virtually a matter of life or death. A house was found for him – where else? – in Wales. But there were delays in getting it ready, which of course further heated the philosopher’s already seething suspicions about his hosts. Instead, he accepted the offer of a philanthropist, Richard Davenport, to vacate his country house at Wootton in Staffordshire, on the Derbyshire border and thus close to some of the loveliest scenery in England. Rousseau walked through Dovedale in his strange ‘Armenian’ costume