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Rousseau and Hobbes Nature Free Will and the Passions
1st Edition Robin Douglass Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Robin Douglass
ISBN(s): 9780198724964, 0198724969
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 12.65 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
Rousseau and Hobbes
Rousseau and Hobbes
Nature, Free Will, and the Passions

Robin Douglass

3
3
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Acknowledgements

Many of the ideas in this book have been with me for some time. They began
to take shape while writing a Masters dissertation at the University of York, and
were first elaborated at length in my doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter.
I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by many inspiring teachers and fel-
low students in both the Political Philosophy cluster at York (2006–7) and the
Political Theory group at Exeter (2008–12). I owe a general intellectual debt to
everyone there at the time and above all to Jon Parkin, Timothy Stanton, and Iain
Hampsher-Monk, whose exemplary guidance is largely responsible for whatever
of scholarly merit might be found in my own work. I am also very grateful to the
C and JB Morrell Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for fund-
ing my postgraduate study at York and Exeter respectively. My present academic
home, King’s College London, has proved the perfect environment to complete
this book and I appreciate all the advice and support I have received from my new
colleagues in the Department of Political Economy.
Within days of commencing my doctoral research I discovered that Richard
Tuck had presented a series of lectures on Hobbes and Rousseau at Boston
University in 2000, a version of which he generously sent to me. I have benefitted
considerably from having access to these lectures from the earliest stages of my
research and, even where I disagree with some of Tuck’s particular arguments,
I have learned a great deal from engaging with his work.
At a few points in this book I have borrowed passages from articles I have
published previously and I thank the publishers of those journals for permit-
ting me to reuse that material here: ‘Rousseau’s Debt to Burlamaqui: The Ideal of
Nature and the Nature of Things’, Journal of the History of Ideas 72, no. 2 (2011);
‘Rousseau’s Critique of Representative Sovereignty: Principled or Pragmatic?’,
American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 3 (2013); ‘The Body Politic “is a ficti-
tious body”: Hobbes on Imagination and Fiction’, Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2 (2014).
Drafts of most of the chapters, in one form or another, have been presented to
conferences and workshops at the universities of Amsterdam, Bristol, Exeter,
Manchester, Sussex, Verona, York, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the
European University Institute. I am grateful for the instructive feedback received
from the audiences on each occasion. A number of people have discussed ele-
ments of this work with me in great depth and/or have generously taken the
time to comment on (in some cases multiple) drafts of the manuscript. I would
vi Acknowledgements

particularly like to thank Laurens van Apeldoorn, Jan Pieter Beetz, Adrian Blau,
Dario Castiglione, James Clarke, Christopher Fear, Stuart Ingham, Robert Lamb,
Christopher Nathan, Johan Olsthoorn, Andy Schapp, Benjamin Thompson,
Lee Ward, and the referees for Oxford University Press. Two people, above all,
have repeatedly pressed me to think more carefully about the issues involved in
this book than I ever would have done otherwise, and to them I am especially
indebted: Iain Hampsher-Monk, while supervising my doctoral thesis, and
Christopher Brooke, first as an external examiner of that thesis and later as a ref-
eree for Oxford University Press.
Contents

A Note on Sources and Translations ix

Introduction 1
Hobbes and Rousseau 4
Nature, Free Will, and the Passions 10
Methodological Problems 15
1. The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 21
Nicole, Bayle, and the Moral–Political Emphasis 24
Malebranche’s Critique of Hobbes 33
Barbeyrac, Burlamaqui, and Natural Law 37
Montesquieu Against Hobbes 46
Diderot and the Encyclopédie 51
Hobbes Before Rousseau 58
2. The State of Nature and the Nature of Man 61
The State of Nature and the State of War 68
Free Will and Man’s Moral Nature 76
Natural Goodness and the Recovery of the Golden Age 82
Harmony, Contradiction, and the Hobbesian Moment 93
Rousseau’s Critique, Reappraised 98
3. Sovereignty and Law 104
From the State of Nature to Political Society 107
Free Will, Slavery, and Obligation 114
Sovereignty Inverted 121
Freedom Preserved 127
Law, Nature, and Denaturing 137
Unity and Civil Religion 144
4. Ordering the Passions 149
Neutralizing amour-propre 152
Cultivating Love of Fatherland 160
Free Will and Virtue 167
Reason and the Passions 173
Hobbes and Fear 178
Of Love and Fear 185
viii Contents

Review and Conclusion 189

Rousseau’s Engagement with Hobbes in Context 190
Philosophical Oppositions and Affinities 193
Republics for the Naturally Good 198

Bibliography 203
Index 219
A Note on Sources and Translations

All references to Rousseau’s texts are given to the following collected editions of
his work:
OC Œuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols, ed. Bernard
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1995).
CC Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 52 vols, ed. Ralph
Alexander Leigh (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1965–1971;
Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1972–1977).
CW The Collected Writings of Rousseau, 13 vols, ed. Christopher Kelly and
Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,
1990–2010).
Where both are available, references are given to the French edition and then the
English translation, in each case by volume and page numbers (e.g. OC1:3/CW2:4).
The only exception is with references to Du contrat social, which are given simply
to book and chapter numbers for ease of reference with other editions (e.g. i.2).
References to Hobbes’s Elements of Law, De cive, and Leviathan are also given in
this form to chapter and section/paragraph numbers. Similarly, where appropri-
ate, references to other primary sources are given to book and/or chapter and/or
section numbers, rather than page numbers (e.g. iii.4, or v.vi.vii).
Where suitable, references are given to scholarly English translations of pri-
mary sources. Where these have been either unavailable or inadequate the trans-
lations provided are my own. Occasionally I have felt it necessary to alter (silently)
the English translation or preserve the original French term. Most notably, both
amour de soi-même and amour-propre are sometimes translated into English as
self-love, but given the importance Rousseau attached to the distinction between
these two varieties of self-love I have retained the French terms. I have also
standardized all translations of amour de la patrie to love of fatherland. I have
refrained from updating references to ‘man’ and usages of the male pronoun
into gender neutral language when discussing the ideas of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century authors, as it is often unclear (especially with Rousseau)
whether the referent is men alone or all humans.
 Introduction

In a word, I see no tolerable medium between the most austere democracy

and the most perfect Hobbism.
J.-J. Rousseau, ‘Lettre à Mirabeau’

On 18 July 1767, the French economist and Physiocrat, Victor Riqueti Marquis
de Mirabeau, wrote to Jean-Jacques Rousseau requesting his opinion on a recent
publication.1 The work in question, L’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés poli-
tiques (1767), was by fellow Physiocrat, Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière, and
supplied one of the most important statements of Physicoracy’s political and eco-
nomic proposals. Chief amongst the political proposals was the idea of legal des-
potism, which involved an enlightened absolute monarch executing positive laws
that are in accordance with the ‘natural and essential order’. A legal despotism,
so the Physiocrats thought, could ensure that laws which conform to the natural
order are authoritatively enforced, yet this would still count as rule by law, rather
than rule by the arbitrary will of a despot.2
Rousseau’s response to Mirabeau was emphatic. The idea of legal despot-
ism was completely wrongheaded because even if it is in a despot’s interest to
govern legally, his passions will too often lead him to act contrary to his real
or enlightened interest. For all of their attempts to calculate the despot’s true
interest, the Physiocrats had failed to study the human heart and the ‘play of the
passions’. The systems they proposed would thus be suitable only for ‘the people

1
‘Mirabeau à Rousseau, le 18 juillet 1767’, in Rousseau, CC33:239–240.
2
On the salient distinctions between legal and arbitrary despotism see Le Mercier de la Rivière,
L’ordre naturel, especially pp. 278–284, 305–317.
2 Introduction

of Utopia’ and not for ‘the children of Adam’.3 At best, legal despotism relied on
an ill-conceived understanding of human nature. At worst, it was simply an oxy-
moron. The problem of politics, Rousseau continued, is to find a form of govern-
ment where law is placed above man. The Physiocrats’ proposals failed to supply
a satisfactory resolution to this problem and, expressing his regret that such a
government could probably never be found, Rousseau instead claimed that it is
necessary to turn to the other extreme and establish the most arbitrary despot-
ism, or ‘the most perfect Hobbism’. There could be no tolerable middle ground,
for it is the conflict between man and law that throws the state into continual
civil war.4 These were the two extremes that Rousseau posited as being the only
tolerable and stable political conditions; either place man above law by making
the sovereign a mortal God, or place law above man, guided only by the celestial
voice of the general will.
The ‘Lettre à Mirabeau’ provides one of Rousseau’s most pessimistic reflec-
tions on eighteenth-century politics. Elsewhere, however, he appears to have
held out some hope that law could be placed above man; indeed, the problem
of doing so permeates his principal political writings. As early as the Discours
sur l’économie politique, originally composed for the fifth volume of the
Encyclopédie (1755), Rousseau wrote of how the rule of law could resolve the
problem of politics:
By what inconceivable art could the means have been found to subjugate men in order
to render them free? . . . How can it be that they obey and no one commands, that they
serve and have no master, and are all the more free, in fact, because under what appears
as subjugation, no one loses any of his freedom except what would harm the freedom of
another? These marvels are the work of the law. It is to law alone that men owe justice and
freedom.5

Rousseau’s most developed account of how law could be placed above man was
set out in his 1762 masterpiece, Du contrat social, which he later described as a
work ‘so decried, but so necessary; there you will see the Law put above men;
there you will see freedom laid claim to, but always under the authority of the
laws’.6 The concern was evidently still on Rousseau’s mind between 1771 and 1772
when he was drafting his last significant political work, the Considérations sur le

3
‘Rousseau à Mirabeau, le 26 juillet 1767’, CC33:239–240. Rousseau eventually permitted
Mirabeau to publish their correspondence, even though Mirabeau thought Rousseau had mis-
understood some of the Physiocrats’ key ideas. More generally see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge,
pp. 222–239.
4
‘Rousseau à Mirabeau, le 26 juillet 1767’, CC33:240.
5
Rousseau, Discours sur l’économie politique, OC3:248/CW3:146.
6
Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC3:811/CW9:234.
 Introduction 3

gouvernement de Pologne, in which, omitting any mention of Hobbism or civil

war, he reaffirmed that placing law above man is the fundamental problem of
politics.7
Rousseau insisted that every ‘legitimate Government is republican’ and on his
definition a republic was simply a state in which the prince is both guided by and
minister of the law, ‘for then alone the public interest governs and the public thing
means something’.8 Rousseau thought that Thomas Hobbes’s principles, by con-
trast, were ‘destructive of every republican government’.9 In Leviathan Hobbes
had ridiculed Aristotle for thinking that in a commonwealth ‘not Men should
govern, but the Laws’, since behind any law there is always either the will of one
man or the will of an assembly of men (be it aristocratic or democratic), and ‘with-
out such Arbitrary government . . . Warre must be perpetuall’.10 Although the
sovereign is well advised to govern by fixed and clearly promulgated laws, while
remaining ‘obliged by the Law of Nature’ (an obligation owed only to God ‘and to
none but him’),11 Hobbes’s account of sovereignty still challenged the very pos-
sibility of placing law above man and especially its association with republican
or democratic government. Rousseau probably never read Leviathan, in either
English or Latin, but he nonetheless appears to have viewed Hobbes’s political
proposals as being diametrically opposed to his own. That Rousseau viewed the
problem of politics and its potential resolution in such starkly dichotomous terms
provides the point of departure for my inquiry.
The main purpose of this study, then, is to analyse Rousseau’s engagement both
with the political thought of Hobbes and with Hobbes’s ideas as they were received
in eighteenth-century France and Geneva. As the quote from Rousseau suggests,
his target was often as much Hobbism as it was Hobbes’s ideas themselves, and
it is worth noting from the outset that these two targets were not one and the
same. The caricature of Hobbism with which Rousseau worked frequently mis-
represented the nuances of Hobbes’s thought. At times Rousseau appears to have
engaged directly with Hobbes’s work. Elsewhere he attacked what he took to be
the pervasive legacy of Hobbesian ideas on the political thought of his day, while
on other occasions he even subverted the prevalent understanding of Hobbism in
order to criticize his contemporaries.

7
Rousseau, Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projetée,
OC3:955/CW11:170.
8
Rousseau, Du contrat social, ou principes du droit politique, ii.6.
9
Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC3:811/CW9:235.
10
Hobbes, Leviathan, xlvi.35–36.
11
Hobbes, Leviathan, xxvi.15–16, xxx.1. Given these considerations it is not evident that Hobbes’s
theory really did exemplify arbitrary as opposed to legal despotism.
4 Introduction

Rousseau engaged with both Hobbism and Hobbes’s ideas in a number of

different contexts and for a variety of reasons, the nature and bearing of which
I seek to uncover and evaluate throughout this book. In doing so, I show that
some of Rousseau’s most important philosophical ideas were either set out in
direct opposition to Hobbes, or developed in an anti-Hobbesian context. What
emerges from this study is thus an original interpretation of Rousseau’s politi-
cal philosophy, which stresses and interweaves aspects of his thought that are
frequently understated or neglected.
I proceed in this chapter by discussing the rationale for further studying the
relationship between Hobbes and Rousseau, before providing a brief outline of
the structure of the argument developed in subsequent chapters. I then sketch
an overview of the reading of Rousseau’s political thought to be advanced,
highlighting three themes central to my interpretation. Finally, I bring this
chapter to a close by briefly addressing some methodological issues and assess-
ing which of Hobbes’s texts, if any, there is considerable evidence of Rousseau
actually having read.

Hobbes and Rousseau

The idea that the relationship between Hobbes and Rousseau is in need of fur-
ther examination might seem somewhat surprising. Comparisons between
the two thinkers recur throughout Rousseau scholarship and are frequently
found amongst more general studies in the history of political thought. It is
thus worth surveying some of the most prominent characteristics of the extant
scholarship to reveal where there remains scope for further analysis. For brev-
ity’s sake, what follows is confined to the main developments in the literature
since the middle of the twentieth century. The sample of studies I consider
is selective, but it represents some of the most important trends in shaping
the different ways in which the relationship between the two thinkers is now
understood.
Around the middle of the twentieth century a number of important stud-
ies advanced distinctively Hobbesian readings of Rousseau. According to Leo
Strauss, for example, Rousseau was greatly indebted to Hobbes, deferring
to his acceptance of the authority of modern natural science and attack on
classical natural law. Rousseau deviated from Hobbes only because he fully
appreciated the implications of his predecessor’s premises. It was thus on
truly Hobbesian principles that Rousseau originated the first crisis of mod-
ern thought by abandoning nature, or human nature, as a basis of right. On
Strauss’s reading, Rousseau struggled with his ancient and modern leanings
 Introduction 5

but finally succumbed to a modern and Hobbesian tradition of political thought

and natural right.12 The most thorough examination of Rousseau’s relationship with
this modern tradition remains Robert Derathé’s influential study, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, originally published in 1950. While rec-
ognizing that Rousseau set many of his ideas out against Hobbes, some of Derathé’s
most important contributions were in arguing for Hobbes’s influence on Rousseau.
Perhaps most notably, Derathé maintained that Rousseau’s psychology of man was
inspired by Hobbes’s.13 In much the same spirit, Georges Davy argued that Hobbes
laid down the very foundations for Du contrat social and, for Bertrand de Jouvenel,
Rousseau’s theory could simply be described as ‘Hobbism turned inside out’.14
Characteristic of many of the studies of this period, then, was an attempt to show
that Rousseau’s thought was really very Hobbesian, or at least a lot more so than he
would have willingly admitted.
Strauss’s influence looms large over much of the most important contemporary
scholarship on the relationship between the two thinkers, especially in America,
where Hobbes is more generally taken to represent a distinctively modern tradi-
tion of political thought in contrast to a classical tradition best represented by
Plato. Arthur Melzer reads Rousseau through the dichotomy of Plato or Hobbes
and even suggests that Rousseau’s intention was to reconcile the two.15 Conversely,
David Lay Williams has recently argued forcefully for the influence of Plato over
Hobbes in order to dispel Hobbesian readings of Rousseau (which he claims were
prominent for the best part of the twentieth century), yet his study is still struc-
tured around the Straussian dichotomy.16 To be sure, this dichotomy at times
proves instructive for understanding Rousseau’s thought, not least because the
Straussian reading of Hobbes—irrespective of whether or not it does Hobbes’s
thought any justice—shares some important resemblances with the ways in
which Hobbes’s ideas were read and discussed in much eighteenth-century
French thought. Williams’s study is invaluable for those interested in the rela-
tionship between Hobbes and Rousseau because it convincingly challenges at
least one prevalent line of interpretation. Nonetheless, Rousseau’s engagement
with Hobbesian ideas cannot be reduced to the question of Plato or Hobbes, since
this engagement permeated many other debates in which Plato and Platonism
were not the antonyms of Hobbes and Hobbism.

12
Strauss, Natural Right and History, especially pp. 266–274.
13
Derathé, Rousseau et la science politique, pp. 109–110, 137–141.
14
Davy, Hobbes et Rousseau, p. 14; Jouvenel, ‘Essay on Rousseau’s Politics’, p. 124. See also Taylor,
‘Rousseau’s Debt to Hobbes’.
15
Melzer, Natural Goodness, p. 115.
16
Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, especially pp. xv–xxx, 27–59.
6 Introduction

Even if not Straussian in influence, much of the existing literature on Hobbes

and Rousseau has adopted a predominantly ahistorical approach, conducting
philosophical evaluations and comparisons of some of the two thinkers’ key
ideas, such as the state of nature, the social contract, and sovereignty.17 These are
precisely the topics where there is evidence that Rousseau was engaging with
Hobbes, yet there is a marked absence of historically nuanced readings of the
ways in which he employed and refuted ideas he associated with Hobbes. Given
this, it is perhaps unsurprising that it has been historians associated with the
Cambridge approach to the history of ideas who have recently led the way in call-
ing for more scholarship examining the two thinkers. Quentin Skinner signalled
that insufficient research has been directed towards Rousseau’s reading of De
cive,18 and Richard Tuck is currently reassessing the relationship between Hobbes
and Rousseau in some depth. Building on his ideas from The Rights of War and
Peace,19 Tuck presented six Benedict Lectures at Boston University in 2000 on
Hobbes and Rousseau.20 These lectures provide the most extensive study of the
relationship between the two thinkers since the collection of essays by Howard
Cell and James MacAdam published in 1988.21 From a historical perspective,
Tuck’s scholarship is much more adequately informed than most of the extant
literature. Yet the Rousseau that emerges from his study remains a figure greatly
indebted to Hobbes, for Tuck is especially interested in uncovering, to use his
own words, the ‘Hobbesianism of Rousseau’.22 His project is largely concerned
with revealing the affinities between Hobbes and Rousseau, in part so that he
can defend Hobbes from some of Rousseau’s most pressing criticisms. Tuck’s
approach could be viewed as one that uses Rousseau to improve our understand-
ing of Hobbes, whereas the approach I pursue here is quite the reverse: to use
Hobbes to improve our understanding of Rousseau.

17
For a sample of contributions in this respect see Winch, ‘Man and Society’; Ryan, ‘The Nature
of Human Nature’; Mandle, ‘Rousseauian Constructivism’; Trachtenberg, ‘Subject and citizen’;
Steinberg, ‘Hobbes, Rousseau and the State’; Evrigenis, ‘Absolute Chaos, Absolute Order’; Shell,
‘Stalking Puer Robustus’; Chernilo, Natural Law Foundations, pp. 97–120.
18
Skinner, ‘Surveying the Foundations’, p. 256. In much of the Anglophone literature it is
assumed that Rousseau read Leviathan, or that what knowledge he had of Hobbes’s works is unim-
portant for analysis of the two thinkers.
19
Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 197–207.
20
Given that these lectures have not yet been worked up for publication, I have avoided engag-
ing directly with them and only reference arguments that Tuck has set out in The Rights of War and
Peace or in his other published works. Nonetheless, my general understanding of Tuck’s position
has been informed by the unpublished lectures.
21
In the preface to the collection the authors claimed that theirs was the first book-length study
of the two thinkers and invited further research of a similar depth, yet this invitation has largely
gone unanswered. See Cell and Macadam, Rousseau’s Response to Hobbes, p. vii.
22
Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 197–207.
 Introduction 7

Tuck’s analysis stresses the extent to which Rousseau appears to have endorsed
a number of Hobbesian positions that were widely dismissed by his contemporar-
ies, most notably the rejection of sociability as the foundation of natural right.23
These moves lend support to Tuck’s Hobbesian reading of Rousseau. Yet a num-
ber of important questions remain unresolved, convincing answers to which
have long eluded scholarship on the two thinkers. The most general problem has
never been satisfactorily answered. That is, if Rousseau was really so Hobbesian
then why did he repeatedly set his ideas out in opposition to Hobbes? Was he just
unaware of his Hobbism or did he seek to conceal it?24 In short—the question at
the heart of Tuck’s inquiry—what exactly did Rousseau think he was doing?25
I endeavour to answer these questions by situating Rousseau’s engagement
with Hobbes in its intellectual context and revealing the deeply polemical char-
acter of his critique. The most important text for understanding this critique is
Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité, and most of his subsequent ref-
erences and allusions to Hobbesian ideas can be traced back to, and are best
understood in light of, his arguments in the Discours. Where scholars such as
Tuck have interpreted Rousseau as siding with Hobbes over Hobbes’s critics in
the modern natural law tradition, I argue that the Discours was instead set out
against both Hobbes and his critics in this tradition. Rousseau aimed to show that
both Hobbes’s critics in the natural law tradition and contemporary proponents
of doux commerce theory actually rested their justifications of the social order on
fundamentally Hobbesian premises, despite their protestations to the contrary.
By showing that these critics were really no better than Hobbes, Rousseau sought
to challenge both Hobbes and Hobbes’s critics on new grounds.
Rousseau might sometimes appear to have endorsed Hobbesian positions pre-
cisely because he thought that the existing refutations of Hobbes were largely
unsatisfactory or mistaken. Yet to disagree with Hobbes’s critics is not neces-
sarily to agree with Hobbes and one has to be careful not to conflate evidence
of the former with that of the latter. Nonetheless, Rousseau did take very seri-
ously problems of a distinctively Hobbesian nature, occasionally leading him to
endorse positions that resembled Hobbes’s theory, although more often to set his
position out in opposition to Hobbes. While much of my argument is directed
against those who have interpreted Rousseau’s political thought as Hobbesian,
then, I resist the contrary temptation of presenting Rousseau’s thought as

23
Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 197–202.
24
For the description of Rousseau’s position as ‘Hobbism concealed’ see Evrigenis, Fear of
Enemies, pp. 134–138.
25
See also Glaziou, Hobbes en France, p. 234.
8 Introduction

unequivocally anti-Hobbesian. The relationship between the two thinkers is far

more nuanced than either the straightforwardly Hobbesian or anti-Hobbesian
characterizations of Rousseau’s political thought admit.
That Rousseau’s criticisms of Hobbes often resonated as much against Hobbes’s
critics as they did against Hobbes himself has not been appreciated previously
and the full elucidation of this aspect of Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbes
is the principal historical contribution of my study. Rousseau’s invocations of
Hobbes often served a polemical purpose—even if Hobbes was not always the tar-
get of that polemic—and while this is most evident in the Discours sur l’inégalité,
it remains the case through to at least Du contrat social. Yet Rousseau’s engage-
ment with Hobbes is not only of historical interest, for he set out some of his most
important philosophical ideas in direct opposition to positions he attributed to
Hobbes. With these in mind, I advance a distinctive interpretation of Rousseau’s
political philosophy, emerging from my reading of his encounter with Hobbesian
ideas. Before sketching out the salient features of this interpretation, I first pro-
vide a brief overview of the key findings and arguments of each of the following
chapters.
In the first chapter I set out the intellectual context for Rousseau’s engagement
with Hobbes by surveying Hobbes’s French reception during the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries. Rather than providing a comprehensive explo-
ration of Hobbes’s reception, my analysis focuses on those thinkers who may
plausibly be thought to have influenced Rousseau’s interpretation of Hobbes.
Attacks on Hobbes increased as the eighteenth century progressed and his repu-
tation underwent a marked deterioration during this period, even though many
of his ideas appear to have diffused into the thought of the time. If anything, this
serves only to obfuscate questions regarding Hobbes’s influence on Rousseau, for
it was frequently an indirect one, indicating why it is just as important to focus on
eighteenth-century Hobbism as it is on Hobbes’s texts themselves. Accordingly,
the focus of subsequent chapters does not always fall on ascertaining direct influ-
ence, but rather on considering how Hobbesian ideas framed the issues that
Rousseau confronted in his political writings.
The second and third chapters build on the historical reception of Hobbes’s
ideas and especially their opposition to modern natural law theories. In Chapter 2
I examine Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbesian ideas in the Discours sur
l’inégalité, in which he attempted to associate Hobbes’s odious reputation with
the arguments of his adversaries. Against the natural law theorists, Rousseau
sought to collapse the prevalent bifurcation between Pufendorfian sociabil-
ity and Hobbesian Epicureanism; and, against the doux commerce theorists, he
endeavoured to show that those who defended the role of commerce and luxury
 Introduction 9

in civilizing modern societies actually rested their defences on Hobbesian prem-

ises regarding man’s nature. At the same time, Rousseau explicated two of his key
principles in opposition to Hobbes: man’s free will and natural goodness. These
principles would animate Rousseau’s philosophy and much of the remainder of
the book involves showing how they play out in his political thought.
In the third chapter I assess the extent to which Rousseau’s political thought
was aimed at overcoming problems of a fundamentally Hobbesian nature. At
times Rousseau appears to have accepted that political society has to be justi-
fied against, and remedy the deficiencies within, Hobbes’s account of the state of
nature. Certain affinities between their political philosophies are thus evident,
most notably concerning the need for an absolute and incontestable sovereign,
and regarding the challenges that religion poses to political unity. Yet much of
Rousseau’s political thought was set out against both Hobbes and his critics in
the modern natural law tradition. Rousseau considered that his predecessors in
this tradition had offered only illegitimate justifications of the social order, which
involved the alienation of man’s freedom by establishing dependence on some-
one else’s will. To preserve man’s freedom in the social order Rousseau radically
inverted the Hobbesian account of sovereignty—so often used to justify the sub-
mission of the people—by directing it towards republican conclusions and show-
ing how law could stem from every individual’s will. Rousseau aimed to make law
sovereign, yet this should not be mistaken for the conventionalism that was to
become associated with Hobbes’s philosophy. Instead, to distance himself from
the likes of Hobbes and Pufendorf, Rousseau insisted that a legitimate social
order, although established by conventions, must be in accordance with nature as
a regulative normative standard.
Where in the third chapter I examine the significance of Rousseau’s theory
of free will for making sense of his opposition to Hobbes, in the fourth chapter
I focus principally on his account of natural goodness. I argue that the politi-
cal theories Hobbes and Rousseau each developed were largely shaped by their
rival accounts of human nature and the passions they thought natural to man.
Although both thinkers stressed the importance of ordering the passions to pre-
serve the unity of the body politic, the possibilities for doing so were in each case
constrained by their contrasting depictions of man’s natural state. Rousseau’s
theory of the passions is well understood in relation to the tradition of French
neo-Augustinianism, and in many respects the Augustinian account of man’s
post-lapsarian state resembled the Hobbesian picture of the state of nature.
On the Augustinian–Hobbesian account, man’s individualistic passions are
inflamed and political institutions would have to turn these passions to good
use for peace ever to be secured. Rousseau, however, rejected this post-lapsarian
10 Introduction

account of man’s nature and instead argued that well-ordered republican institu-
tions could cultivate man’s uncorrupted passions by channelling them towards
love of fatherland. While Rousseau’s concern with cultivating the right type
of love mirrored a prominent Augustinian theme, his repudiation of Original
Sin opened up the possibility of this love prevailing in the earthly city of men.
Hobbes and Rousseau both appreciated the importance of appealing to the pas-
sions, but their contrasting accounts of human nature entailed that the passion
central to their respective theories differed. For Hobbes, above all else, it was
man’s fear that needed to be rightly ordered in the commonwealth; for Rousseau,
it was man’s love.
Rousseau’s republican vision, I maintain, was one suited only for naturally
good men yet to be fully corrupted by the inequality and luxury that pervade
modern societies; indeed, this is precisely why the principle of natural goodness
is key to understanding his political thought. By way of conclusion, then, I draw
together my interpretation of Rousseau’s political philosophy and examine the
extent to which his republican vision remains viable today. Where many contem-
porary theorists have found Rousseau’s principles of political right to be of con-
tinuing inspiration,26 I instead emphasize the reasons why he viewed many of his
political ideas as deeply irreconcilable with the political and economic conditions
that prevail in modern states.

Nature, Free Will, and the Passions

While a principal aim of this book is to understand Rousseau’s engagement with
Hobbes in its historical context, my goal in doing so is equally to show how focus-
ing on this engagement leads to a better understanding of Rousseau’s thought.
To this end, I advance an interpretation of Rousseau’s political philosophy that
emphasizes the interplay of three key themes: the role of nature as a normative
standard, the centrality and significance of free will, and the importance of culti-
vating the passions in the body politic. The relationship between these aspects of
Rousseau’s thought often appears contradictory and I aim to show how they may
be rendered coherent, while dispelling some prominent misinterpretations of
Rousseau along the way. At this stage a preliminary outline of the main features
of this interpretation may be sketched with respect to each of these three themes.
One way of reading Rousseau (along Hobbesian lines), popularized by Strauss
amongst others, is of his having abandoned any attempt to find a basis for political

26
For a critical survey of the different ways in which contemporary political philosophers have
engaged with Rousseau see Spector, Au prisme de Rousseau.
 Introduction 11

right in nature, or in human nature.27 Given that Rousseau provided a histori-

cized account of the state of nature and development of society, in which man’s
constitution was irrevocably altered, there is some justification for concluding
that nature could not have provided a normative basis for his political thought.
Nonetheless, Rousseau also insisted that his writings were united by an adherence
to the principle of natural goodness, which one would expect to carry important
implications for his political thought. Arthur Melzer has provided the most com-
prehensive exploration of this principle, yet he finds no reference to natural good-
ness in Rousseau’s Du contrat social, which he claims was instead argued from
Hobbesian self-preservation.28 Laurence D. Cooper has examined Rousseau’s
understanding of nature in greater depth, but although Cooper maintains that
nature supplied a regulative normative standard for Rousseau, he also argues that
the life of a citizen in a well-ordered republic does not conform to this stand-
ard.29 Even amongst those who have taken the role of nature in Rousseau’s work
seriously, then, it still appears in tension with important aspects of his political
thought. By contrast, I argue not only that nature supplies a normative standard
throughout Rousseau’s philosophy, but also that a well-ordered republic would
meet his criteria for being in accordance with this standard.
To be sure, Rousseau sometimes referred to nature in a purely descriptive
sense, such as when he presented his account of natural man and the state of
nature. Yet he also referred to nature in a normative sense, such as when he wrote
of man’s inalienable gifts of nature and argued that what is just and right is so by
the nature of things. Rousseau’s principle of natural goodness was set out against
Augustinian and Hobbesian accounts of man, which he thought depicted man
as naturally evil. In opposition to these accounts of man’s post-lapsarian state,
Rousseau argued that man is naturally good and that his corruption is occasioned
only by the development of certain types of social relations. For man’s life to be in
accordance with nature, on the reading I advance, his inalienable gifts of nature
would have to be preserved and he would have to enjoy a harmonious and ordered
existence free from the contradictions of the social system that render life misera-
ble. This standard is indeterminate. It is met both in the pre-agricultural societies

27
In addition to Strauss, see Crocker, Rousseau’s Social Contract, p. 91; Plattner, Rousseau’s State
of Nature, p. 110; Horowitz, Rousseau, Nature, and History, p. 81; Shklar, Men and Citizens, p. 38;
Rapaczynski, Nature and Politics, pp. 277–278; Manent, History of Liberalism, p. 78; Schneewind,
Invention of Autonomy, p. 473.
28
Melzer, Natural Goodness, p. 115. Cf. Cohen, Rousseau, pp. 127–130, who argues that Rousseau’s
ideal political state is compatible with man’s nature only if man is naturally good.
29
Cooper, Rousseau, pp. 48–50.
12 Introduction

that Rousseau described as the ‘best for man’,30 and could equally be met in a
well-ordered republic with institutions capable of forestalling man’s corruption.
Rousseau’s appeal to nature as a normative standard allowed him to distance
his principles of political right from the idea that all justice is reducible to human
conventions, an idea often associated with Hobbes. Similarly, the theme of free
will is well understood in contrast to Hobbes’s materialism, especially since
Rousseau’s discussion of free will in the Discours sur l’inégalité drew on arguments
closely resembling those that his predecessors had formulated in direct response
to Hobbes. Indeed, one reason why it is of interest to examine the two thinkers
together concerns the ways in which their opposing positions on free will unfold
throughout their political thought and shape their arguments for the different
types of social order that they sought to legitimize. That Hobbes was a materialist
and did not believe in free will is uncontroversial. Those who talk of free will, he
remarked in Leviathan, do no more than abuse speech with their insignificant
words, ‘words . . . without meaning; that is to say, Absurd’.31 Rousseau was a dual-
ist and did believe in free will. What is more, his political thought makes little
sense without recourse to the concept. This is more controversial and warrants
some justification given that the importance of free will throughout his corpus
has often been neglected. Some have denied that Rousseau believed in free will,
others have concluded that his views on free will were ambiguous or could at least
be studied in isolation from the rest of his thought, and even on the occasions
where the importance of free will has been admitted, its implications for the rest
of his philosophy have not been fully extrapolated.
Rousseau considered Emile to be the most important of his works,32 central
to which was the ‘Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard’, which he deemed to be
‘the best and most useful Writing in the century during which [he] published
it’.33 In the ‘Profession de foi’, the Savoyard vicar argues forcefully for man’s free
will, which is the most developed discussion of the subject within Rousseau’s
œuvre. However, Roger Masters famously argued that, by placing the argument
in the mouthpiece of the vicar, Rousseau was distancing himself from the ideas
expressed and the ‘Profession de foi’ can therefore be detached from the rest of his
thought.34 This conclusion would be justified if Rousseau had anywhere indicated

30
Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes,
OC3:170–171/CW3:48.
31
Hobbes, Leviathan, v.5.
32
Rousseau, Les confessions de J.J. Rousseau, OC1:568, 573/CW5:475, 480; Rousseau juge de Jean
Jacques, Dialogues, OC1:687/CW1:23.
33
Rousseau, Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont, OC4:960/CW9:46–47.
34
Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau, p. 74.
 Introduction 13

that the ideas of the Savoyard vicar diverged significantly from his own, yet, to the
contrary, he repeatedly confirmed that the ‘Profession de foi’ reflected his own
views.35
If the ‘Profession de foi’ had been the only occasion on which Rousseau dis-
cussed the subject of free will then there might be some cause for question-
ing the sincerity of his belief. But this is not the case, and other confirmations
of Rousseau’s position can be found throughout his work, most notably in his
defence of Emile against the Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont, where he
claimed that the ‘Profession de foi’ was written ‘to combat modern material-
ism’ and affirmed his metaphysical dualism and belief in free will.36 There is one
piece of evidence indicating that Rousseau was not always committed to a belief
in free will. In an early fragment that was never published he wrote: ‘I have no
idea if the acts of my will are in my own power or if they follow an outside impe-
tus, and I care very little about knowing that . . . Therefore, I have no wish at
all to speak here about this metaphysical and moral Freedom.’37 This fragment
likely dates from around 1750–1 and the indecision could simply be a result of
him not having fully formed his views at that early stage.38 Moreover, by the
time of his first developed discussion of free will in his Discours sur l’inégalité,
Rousseau spoke explicitly of freedom being a metaphysical and moral capac-
ity,39 in the very terms that he had been sceptical of in the earlier fragment,
suggesting that he was by then committed on the precise problem over which he
had previously remained undecided.
Even amongst commentators who do not dispute Rousseau’s belief in free will,
its importance to his political philosophy remains understated. For instance,
in the preface to his otherwise excellent study of Rousseau’s theory of freedom,
Matthew Simpson claims that the problem of free will was deliberately set aside
in Du contrat social.40 Similarly, in a recent book dedicated to Rousseau’s account

35
‘Rousseau au ministre Paul-Claude Moultou, le 23 décembre 1761’, CC9:342; Lettres écrites de
la montagne, OC3:694, 721/CW9:139, 161; Les confessions, OC1:91–92/CW5:77; Les rêveries du prome-
neur solitaire, OC1:1018/CW8:22–23.
36
Rousseau, Lettre à Beaumont, OC4:936, 955, 996/CW9:28, 43, 75. See also Discours sur l’inégalité,
OC3:141–142, 183–184/CW3:25–26, 58–59; Discours sur l’économie politique, OC3:248/CW3:145;
‘Rousseau au ministre Jacob Vernes, le 18 février 1758’, CC5:33; Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, OC2:683–
684/CW6:561–562; Du contrat social, i.4, iii.1; Emile, ou de l’éducation, OC4:586–587/CW13:441–442;
‘Rousseau à l’abbé de Carondelet, le 4 mars 1764’, CC19:199; Histoire du gouvernement de Genève,
OC5:519/CW9:120; Lettre à M. de Franquières, OC4:1135–1145/CW8:261–269.
37
Rousseau, Fragment on Freedom, CW4:12.
38
See also Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, pp. 70–72.
39
Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, OC3:141–142/CW3:25–26.
40
Simpson, Rousseau’s Theory of Freedom, p. ix.
14 Introduction

of free will, Lee MacLean concludes that ‘Rousseau does not explain and draw out
the significance of free will to his teaching about political legitimacy’.41 By con-
trast, I maintain that Rousseau’s whole account of a legitimate contract presup-
poses the importance of free will in distinguishing moral from physical force. To
be sure, not all scholars have overlooked the importance of free will in Rousseau’s
thought, the most notable exception here being Patrick Riley’s work on the gen-
eral will.42 Yet Riley identifies significant tensions between Rousseau’s proposals
for cultivating the citizens’ wills by way of their passions and free will under-
stood in terms of autonomy.43 Riley suggests that this could be only a provisional
problem and at ‘the end of political time’ citizens could freely will the general
will without the need for seemingly coercive authority.44 However, this partial
defence of Rousseau does not explain away all the alleged contradictions to which
his political theory is subject, not least because of the problems of ascribing this
view of progressive political time to a thinker who was so pessimistic about the
chances of realizing his political ideal and thought that the body politic ‘begins
to die at the moment of its birth, and carries within itself the causes of its destruc-
tion’.45 The challenge remains, then, to demonstrate how the cultivation of man’s
passions in political society could be consistent with preserving his freedom. This
challenge can be met only by firmly dispelling certain proto-Kantian readings of
Rousseau, which is all the more necessary given that, amongst those commenta-
tors who have taken the role of free will seriously, there has been a tendency to
associate the concept with a Kantian notion of autonomy.46
Much as the proto-Kantian readings of Rousseau serve to obscure from under-
standing his conception of free will, so too they fail to account for the role he
accorded to the passions and their relationship with reason. For Rousseau, rea-
son and the passions were not in perpetual conflict with one another. The role of

41
MacLean, The Free Animal, p. 152. MacLean’s study barely considers the implications of free
will for Rousseau’s political philosophy, largely because he attributes a position of ‘metaphysical
ambivalence’ to Rousseau.
42
Patrick Riley’s position is comprehensively expounded in his chapter on Rousseau in Will and
Political Legitimacy, pp. 98–124. Riley has published reformulated versions of this account but the
essentials of his argument remain the same. The importance of free will for Rousseau’s political
thought is also explored in some depth by Miller, Dreamer of Democracy, pp. 165–201.
43
Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy, pp. 16–17.
44
Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy, p. 118. 45
Rousseau, Du contrat social, iii.11.
46
See principally Levine, Politics of Autonomy, especially pp. 57–58. The tendency to read
Rousseau’s account of free will in proto-Kantian terms stems back at least as far as Hegel, who
claimed that it should be associated with ‘the rational will, of the will in and for itself’, and that
Rousseau’s ideas furnished the transition to the Kantian philosophy, Lectures, pp. 400–402. For a
more recent proto-Hegelian reading of Rousseau’s account of free will see Neuhouser, ‘Freedom,
Dependence, and the General Will’, and for helpful analysis of this aspect of the Rousseau–Hegel
relationship see James, Rousseau and German Idealism, pp. 143–156.
 Introduction 15

reason was not to master or overcome the passions, but simply to order them and
prevent them from conflicting with one another. In this respect, his understand-
ing of the relationship between reason and the passions was closer to Hobbes’s,
and later to Hume’s, than it was to Kant’s. Where Rousseau’s ideas on nature and
free will may profitably be understood in opposition to Hobbes’s, the importance
he accorded to the passions in human understanding and maintaining political
order has some notable affinities with Hobbes.
Throughout this study I stress the importance that both Hobbes and Rousseau
placed on ordering the passions to secure political unity. In particular, I focus on
Rousseau’s account of amour-propre and its relationship to the neo-Augustinian
tradition of moral thought, in which corrupt amour-propre characterizes man’s
post-lapsarian state. To be sure, Rousseau conceptualized amour-propre in a
unique way by giving it a more specific meaning than it had for many French mor-
alists before him (for whom it was often used to refer to any aspect of self-love).
Nonetheless, the language of amour-propre retained important moral and theo-
logical connotations, even as the precise conceptual content that the word was
taken to signify changed. In the Discours sur l’inégalité Rousseau recounted
a secularized version of the Augustinian story of man’s fall, with Original Sin
recast in terms of the development of entrenched relations of inequality and the
onset of luxury. In this state man’s amour-propre was inflamed and in constant
opposition to his primitive amour de soi-même, with the disorder of the passions
in modern society proving to be a principal cause of human misery. However,
if a well-ordered republic could be based on man’s pre-lapsarian passions then
amour-propre could be turned positive by being brought into accord with man’s
amour de soi-même. Rousseau’s republican vision entailed ordering the passions
in such a way as to prevent the contradictions in man’s existence from developing.
My interpretation of Rousseau’s political philosophy thus shows how his vision
of a well-ordered republic was based on cultivating man’s pre-lapsarian passions,
while respecting and generalizing man’s inalienable gifts of nature—his life and
freedom—in order to render the life of the virtuous citizen in accordance with
nature as a normative standard.

Methodological Problems
Any study of Rousseau inevitably encounters a number of problems regarding
precisely how one should read his corpus and interpret his various arguments.
While I address many specific issues as and when they arise, a few preliminary
remarks may be worthwhile concerning some of the most arresting methodo-
logical problems. My interpretation of Rousseau’s political philosophy draws on
16 Introduction

a wide range of his texts and assumes that one can speak coherently of his politi-
cal philosophy in general terms, rather than viewing him as having articulated a
number of distinct and perhaps quite inconsistent positions across his different
works. In doing so, however, I seek neither to impose a ‘mythology of coherence’
on his corpus,47 nor to deny that important aspects of his philosophy developed
considerably between his various works; indeed, I highlight the most important
of these developments as I proceed. Rousseau, of course, seems to have thought
that his œuvre amounted to something of a coherent and systematic whole,48 but
it would be naïve to assume that all of his ideas came to him fully formed, perhaps
during his celebrated epiphany on the road to Vincennes.49
Of the aspects of his philosophy that I emphasize, Rousseau’s commitment to
free will and the principle of natural goodness appear to have been fully devel-
oped by at least the completion of the Discours sur l’inégalité, and would remain
central to much of his thought from then onwards. The more difficult issue for my
interpretation concerns his theory of the passions, which continued to undergo
important modifications up to at least the publication of Emile in 1762. When ana-
lysing Rousseau’s theory of the passions, especially in the fourth chapter, I rely
largely on the accounts developed in Emile and his subsequent political writings,
and simply note where these deviate from his earlier accounts. Even if there were
some important changes to Rousseau’s theory, the more general idea that con-
flicting passions are a cause of human misery is a consistent theme throughout his
work and, at least, is nowhere contradicted. Similarly, the significance Rousseau
attached to cultivating virtue by appealing to the passions is evident from as early
as the Discours sur l’économie politique, and remains important down to his later
proposals for Corsica and especially Poland. With respect to the defining features
of my reading of Rousseau, then, they permeate enough of his corpus to warrant
the claim that they form a distinctive interpretation of his political philosophy in
general.
Given that this study focuses on Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbes and
Hobbism, it is also worth briefly highlighting some of the ways in which I deal
with the problem of identifying intellectual influence. Throughout the study
I endeavour to reconstruct the ways in which ideas associated with Hobbes were

47
For this criticism, specifically directed at readings of Rousseau, see Skinner, ‘Meaning and
Understanding’, p. 17.
48
For various statements to this effect and Rousseau’s defence against the charge of contra-
diction see Préface d’une seconde lettre à Bordes, OC3:105/CW2:183; Emile, OC4:345/CW13:243;
Lettre à M. de Malsherbes, OC1:1136/CW5:575; Lettre à Beaumont, OC4:928/CW9:22; Dialogues,
OC1:930/CW1:209.
49
For Rousseau’s account of this illumination see Lettre à Malsherbes, OC1:1135–1136/ CW5:575;
Les confessions, OC1:351/CW5:294.
 Introduction 17

understood and utilized by those who engaged with his works directly, which
was, of course, often somewhat different to how Hobbes is understood in much
scholarship today. In doing so, especially in the first chapter, I rely predominantly
on sources that refer explicitly to Hobbes, or at least to passages from Hobbes’s
works (even if unacknowledged), as long as there is little doubt about their prov-
enance. I set these authors’ invocations of Hobbes in the wider context of their
political and philosophical concerns, not to claim that they arrived at those con-
cerns through their study of Hobbes, but simply to understand better why they
addressed Hobbes’s ideas in a certain way.
While textual references provide fairly conclusive evidence indicating where
different authors had Hobbes on their minds, it is far more difficult to dis-
cern whether any of their specific doctrines or ideas were directly influenced
by Hobbes. For this reason I generally refrain from making specific claims
about, for example, what ideas Rousseau took from Hobbes. Instead, my aim
is to elucidate what Rousseau thought was at stake in targeting Hobbes at vari-
ous points in his thought, that is, why he engaged with Hobbes in a given way.
That said, I am equally concerned to evaluate the philosophical significance
of Rousseau’s encounter with Hobbes for understanding both of their politi-
cal philosophies, even if Rousseau’s takes centre stage. With this goal in view,
I often analyse where their arguments and ideas diverge or are in agreement,
but, unless otherwise stated, the claim that Rousseau’s philosophy resembled
Hobbes’s in a particularly striking way should not be mistaken for the claim
that Rousseau derived that particular aspect of his thought from Hobbes. As
I hope to show, philosophical comparison of Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s ideas
remains a most fruitful enterprise, but it is all the more so when underpinned
by a secure understanding of the problems that they each saw themselves as
addressing, for which it is necessary to reconstruct the various intellectual con-
texts that shaped those problems.
Over the course of this book I focus on a number of different intellectual con-
texts to give a plausible, although by no means exhaustive, account of the way that
certain debates were framed when Rousseau addressed them. Where my account
of the context is subject to considerable scholarly debate I provide some justifica-
tion, but there is one problem of great consequence that merits some attention
right from the outset, since it bears on many of the historical claims I advance
regarding Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbes. Rousseau never referenced
Hobbes by anything more than name and his correspondence provides no clues
as to whether or when he read Hobbes. There is, in fact, no definitive evidence
proving that Rousseau read Hobbes at all, although there are some good reasons
for concluding that he was probably familiar with at least De cive, based on both
18 Introduction

the availability of Hobbes’s texts at the time and Rousseau’s own references to
Hobbes.
Rousseau’s correspondence from his time in England indicates that he had
limited knowledge of English.50 It is, therefore, worth detailing the editions
of Hobbes’s work that would have been available in both French and Latin.51
Rousseau began learning Latin towards the end of the 1730s, which he retrospec-
tively described as ‘my most painful study, and one in which I have never made
great progress’.52 Although he would later become fluent enough to read Latin,
where both Latin and French editions of the same work were available it is more
than likely that he would have opted for the latter.
Translations of two of Hobbes’s works circulated in French during the
mid-eighteenth century. The most famous was Samuel Sorbière’s translation of
De cive, published in Amsterdam in 1649. François du Verdus also translated the
work, with two editions appearing in Paris in 1660 and a third in 1665, although
these circulated less widely than Sorbière’s edition. De corpore politico, the second
part of the Elements of Law, was translated into French and appeared in editions
published in 1652 and 1653. Although the translation has long been attributed to
Sorbière, Noel Malcolm has examined the many problems with this attribution
and instead suggests that it might have been conducted by the Englishman John
Davies. Even so, the full details of the translation and place of publication remain
uncertain.
By far the most popular of Hobbes’s works across Europe was De cive, sec-
ond to which was the Opera philosophica, a collection of Hobbes’s Latin works
arranged by Johan Blaeu and published in Amsterdam in 1688. This included the
Latin Leviathan, De cive, De corpore, De homine, as well as some of Hobbes’s other
works on mathematics and physics. Yves Glaziou’s analysis of thirty-eight private
eighteenth-century French libraries indicates that De cive would have probably
been the most widely read, with fourteen holding it in French, and ten holding it

50
‘Rousseau à Marie-Madeleine de Brémond d’Ars, le 22 janvier 1766’, CC28:218. Evidence has
recently been found suggesting that Rousseau might have been better at English than is generally
recognized. At some point between 1747 and 1751 Rousseau gave Denis Diderot a copy of William
Petty’s Several Essays in Political Arithmetic and the dedication indicates that Rousseau was famil-
iar with the content of the work. See Hobson, ‘Rousseau and Diderot in the late 1740s’, pp. 59–64.
There was no French translation of Petty’s Essays available at the time, although it is of course pos-
sible that Rousseau’s knowledge of the work was secondhand. It is also possible that Rousseau could
read English competently without speaking it particularly well, but there remains insufficient evi-
dence to assume that he would have read any of Hobbes’s texts in English.
51
A magisterial account of the availability of Hobbes’s works across Europe is provided by
Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 459–469. See also Glaziou, Hobbes en France, pp. 19–20. My
account here is no more than a brief summary of these findings.
52
Rousseau, Les confessions, OC1:238–239/CW5:200.
 Introduction 19

in Latin. Thirteen possessed the Opera philosophica, and six held the French transla-
tion of De corpore politico.
Little is known of Rousseau’s personal library but the foregoing details suggest
that De cive would have been the most readily available of Hobbes’s works, probably
in Sorbière’s French translation. In one of the few studies of his library, Marguerite
Richebourg suggests that Rousseau’s references to Hobbes were drawn from the
French translation of De corpore politico, yet no evidence is adduced in support of
this claim.53 Similarly, Bruno Bernardi confidently asserts that Rousseau read both
De corpore politico and De cive but did not read Leviathan, knowledge of which he
ascertained only indirectly. Bernardi draws attention to the influence of Hobbes,
amongst others, on Rousseau’s use of the concept of the ‘body politic’ (corps poli-
tique), which is, unsurprisingly, most prominent in De corpore politico.54 However, as
Bernardi recognizes, the language of the body politic could easily have been drawn
from De cive and it thus seems problematical to draw such strong conclusions as to
whether or not Rousseau read De corpore politico.
Robert Wokler has even claimed that Rousseau might have had no firsthand
knowledge of Hobbes and that his references could have all been derived from
intermediary sources.55 Yet, as Wokler recognizes, there is one piece of textual
evidence that appears to indicate that Rousseau was familiar with De cive. In the
Discours sur l’inégalité Rousseau criticized Hobbes for thinking that the evil man
is like a robust child, ‘un Enfant robuste’.56 The term ‘enfant robuste’ is unique to
the French translation of De cive and I have found no references to it in French
commentaries on Hobbes published prior to the Discours. The term was picked
up subsequently by Claude Helvétius in De l’esprit (1758) and in the Encyclopédie
articles ‘Hobbisme’ and ‘Homme’, which first appeared in the eighth volume of
1765.57 The article ‘Hobbisme’ was by Denis Diderot and could have existed in draft
form from the early 1750s (prior to the publication of the Discours). If this was the
case then it is possible that Rousseau would have been familiar with the draft,
given that he and Diderot saw each other on an almost daily basis at the time, and
Wokler notes that Rousseau might have borrowed his analysis of Hobbes’s ‘enfant
robuste’ from Diderot.58 Yet it is more probable that Diderot borrowed his analysis

53
Richebourg, ‘La bibliothèque de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, p. 221.
54
Bernardi, La fabrique des concepts, pp. 91–95.
55
Wokler, Rousseau on Society, p. 180.
56
Rousseau, Discours sur l’inégalité, OC3:153–154/CW3:35; see also Emile, OC4:288/CW13:196. Cf.
Hobbes, De cive, ‘Preface’. All English translations of De cive are from the Tuck and Silverthorne
edition, On the Citizen, and all French translations from Sorbière’s translation, Le citoyen.
57
Helvétius, De l’Esprit, ii.2; Diderot, Political Writings, p. 28; Charles-George Le Roy, ‘Homme’,
in Encyclopédie, ed. Diderot and d’Alembert, vol. 8, p. 275.
58
Wokler, Rousseau on Society, p. 91.
20 Introduction

from Rousseau and not vice versa, especially given that ‘Hobbisme’, as with many
of the Encyclopédie articles, relied heavily on other sources. Moreover, Diderot’s
reference to the ‘enfant robuste’ occurs in a passage comparing Hobbes’s and
Rousseau’s conceptions of the state of nature, which it is fairly safe to assume
would have been written after the completion of the Discours sur l’inégalité.
Some commentators have argued that Rousseau changed his opinion of Hobbes
during the 1750s, indicating that he may well have been (re-)reading Hobbes’s
works at the time.59 This is plausible as Rousseau altered his view of Hobbes in
his different discussions of civil religion. Rousseau criticized Hobbes’s religious
intolerance in both his letter to Voltaire, written in 1755 (and published the follow-
ing year), and in the first draft of Du contrat social.60 Yet, by 1762, Rousseau had
come to the conclusion that Hobbes was the only Christian philosopher to have
understood that political and religious authority must be united, for man can-
not be bound by two rival sovereigns.61 Even if this change of heart indicates that
Rousseau re-evaluated his opinion of Hobbes during the 1750s, it does not shed
any light on which of Hobbes’s texts he actually read.
Although it is possible that Rousseau never read any of Hobbes’s works, the
evidence I examine throughout this book suggests that it is far more probable
that his understanding of Hobbes was developed from (at least) a reading of De
cive and knowledge of the most familiar references to Hobbes proliferating the
thought of his time. For this reason I cite De cive as the principal work of Hobbes,
at least throughout the following three chapters (where the discussion is at its
most historical), and I reference Hobbes’s other works only where Rousseau could
not have gained the relevant knowledge from De cive alone. On each of these
occasions it is at least as plausible that the aspects of Hobbes’s thought in ques-
tion were derived via intermediaries and I indicate the relevant sources. It is with
these sources and their place in shaping the French reception of Hobbes that my
study begins.

59
See Taylor, ‘Rousseau’s Debt to Hobbes’, p. 301; Glaziou, Hobbes en France, pp. 280–281.
60
Rousseau, Lettre à Monsieur de Voltaire, OC4:1072/CW3:119; Du contrat social, ou essai sur la
forme de la république, (première version), better known and hereafter referred to as the Manuscrit
de Genève, OC3:341/CW4:122.
61
Rousseau, Du contrat social, iv.8.
 1
The French Reception of
Thomas Hobbes

No one argues with greater rigour or reason. Take care not to go beyond
his first principles, if you do not wish to follow him everywhere he cares
to lead you.
D. Diderot, ‘Hobbisme’

There is little doubt that Rousseau was concerned with the philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes. That is, at least, if one takes the criticisms found in some of his most
important works—the Discours sur l’inégalité, Du contrat social, and Emile—at
face value. By contrast, it is not generally thought that Hobbes was a particularly
important point of reference or inspiration for many late seventeenth and early
eighteenth-century French authors, and it has even been argued that between
Pierre Bayle and Rousseau no major French thinker engaged with Hobbes’s
thought in any depth.1 Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that scholarship
examining the relationship between Hobbes and Rousseau has frequently been
conducted at a predominantly theoretical and ahistorical level, with little regard
to how others had responded to Hobbes prior to Rousseau.
Although taking such an approach may be of some philosophical inter-
est, it offers a less nuanced understanding of the place that Hobbes occupied in
Rousseau’s thought. To make inroads into the latter problem it is necessary to
have some idea of the context in which Rousseau engaged with Hobbes and an
impression of exactly what Hobbism entailed in eighteenth-century France and
Geneva. In this chapter I examine the ways in which Hobbes’s reputation and

1
Israel, Enlightenment Contested, pp. 228–230.
22 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

ideas were characterized throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, shaping the context in which Rousseau would have encountered them.
Rousseau was aware of existing interpretations of Hobbes, sometimes follow-
ing them and on other occasions either rejecting or inverting them. Hobbes’s
name carried great rhetorical weight in the eighteenth century, perhaps sur-
passed by only that of Spinoza, and the two were often presented together as the
most subversive of all philosophers.2 The response to such thinkers, more often
than not, was to dismiss their principles authoritatively, without great analysis,
rather than to engage in the detailed critique their writings merited. Any credible
thinker sought to avoid the charge of Hobbism, and when such an accusation sur-
faced it could occasion great controversy. Protestations against Hobbism, how-
ever, often concealed the influence of, or affinities with, Hobbes that pervaded
much of the thought of the time, some of which appear to have been recognized,
or at least exposed, only by Rousseau.
It is sometimes tempting to dismiss aspects of Rousseau’s critique of Hobbes as
being naïve misrepresentations of his predecessor’s thought. Yet viewed through
the lenses of eighteenth-century French discussions of Hobbes, Rousseau emerges
as one of his most sophisticated commentators. However, the Hobbes in question
was as much the one characterized by Bayle and Barbeyrac, or Montesquieu and
Diderot, as it was simply the author of De cive and Leviathan as he is read today.
The reception history of Hobbes has attracted considerable scholarly attention,
yet existing research has predominantly focused on charting how his ideas were
received in England, and relatively less scholarship has been directed towards
the European and especially French reception of his thought.3 The immediate
impact of Hobbes’s work in France is well documented and it is worth summa-
rizing this briefly to provide some background to this chapter. Most notably,
through an examination of his correspondence during the mid-seventeenth
century, Quentin Skinner has provided evidence of the intimate intellectual con-
tacts that Hobbes developed with many members of Marin Mersenne’s circle.
Skinner accords Hobbes a prominent place in an important phase of the Scientific
Revolution in France, as, in comparison to England, Hobbes’s works were there
met with an enthusiastic response. In particular, Hobbes was celebrated for his
attempts to provide mechanistic explanations for every type of phenomenon,

2
Indeed, it is in precisely this context that one of Rousseau’s earliest references to Hobbes is
located, Discours sur les sciences et les arts, OC3:28/CW2:20.
3
See principally Lamprecht, ‘Hobbes and Hobbism’; Mintz, Hunting of Leviathan; Goldie, ‘The
Reception of Hobbes’; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan; Rogers, ‘Hobbes and his Contemporaries’. For
notable exceptions see Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England’; Wilson,
Influence of Hobbes and Locke; Glaziou, Hobbes en France; Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 457–545.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 23

while there was relatively less interest in the political dimensions of his thought.4
To be sure, Hobbes was also recognized as an authority in political philosophy,
especially (and unsurprisingly) by those who translated his political works into
French. Samuel Sorbière eulogized Hobbes as ‘the father of politics and its lead-
ing expert’,5 an opinion echoed by François de Verdus, for whom Hobbes was
alone in having ‘taught the true, good political philosophy’.6 Nonetheless, it was
Hobbes’s mechanistic and geometrical explanations that occasioned the great-
est discussion and acclamation in France at the time. This impression of Hobbes
is worth noting precisely because it differs in crucial respects from that which
would develop amongst his later French readers. Indeed, there is little evidence
of this scientific reception having extended into the eighteenth century and,
as Noel Malcolm observes, Hobbes’s ‘reputation as a writer on non-political
and non-theological matters was in something of a decline from the mid-1650s
onwards’.7
Even when the reception of Hobbes’s thought in eighteenth-century France
has been examined, little consideration has been given to how this might have
influenced the ways in which Rousseau criticized and adopted the ideas he asso-
ciated with Hobbes.8 The purpose of this chapter, then, is by no means to pro-
vide a survey of all the references to Hobbes, both explicit and implicit, that can
be identified in French works during the first half of the eighteenth century.9
Instead, my intention is to offer something that is strikingly absent from existing
scholarship, that is, a contextual background for reading Rousseau’s engagement
with Hobbes.
Such a study must be somewhat selective. I focus on those thinkers who there
is good reason to believe might have shaped both Rousseau’s reading of Hobbes
and the ways in which he framed his discussion of Hobbesian ideas. The authors
and works selected are either ones that Rousseau discussed or referenced explic-
itly, ones where his work reveals a strong familiarity with the ideas in question,
or works that were so well disseminated in eighteenth-century France that it
would seem improbable that he was not acquainted with them. While I keep

4
Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England’, pp. 160–166.
5
‘Samuel Sorbière to Hobbes, 31 March 1660’, in Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 517.
6
‘François de Verdus to Hobbes, 20 April 1665’, in Hobbes, Correspondence, p. 673.
7
Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, p. 498.
8
For example, Glaziou’s study of Hobbes’s reception, which culminates in an extended analysis
of Hobbes and Rousseau, treats the two thinkers mainly in abstraction and neglects to consider
how Rousseau’s treatment of Hobbes differed from or resembled those provided by his contempo-
raries. See Glaziou, Hobbes en France, pp. 231–282.
9
For surveys of this type see Wilson, Influence of Hobbes and Locke, and Glaziou, Hobbes en
France.
24 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

other theorists and works in mind, my claims concerning Rousseau’s reading of

Hobbes will be all the stronger to the extent that conjecture can be avoided over
the intellectual context to which they belong.
The picture that emerges is an eclectic one and I make no attempt to weave a
grand narrative into the French reception of Hobbes. Instead, I illuminate various
threads that characterize Hobbes’s reputation in different ways, some of which
are taken up and some neglected by each commentator in turn. Those threads
that lead to Rousseau provide the focus and my aim is to do no more than indicate
the probable contexts that shaped the intellectual milieu in which he wrote about
Hobbes. Although my focus is on Hobbes’s reception in the eighteenth century,
this was in part shaped by those writing before the turn of the century, and I dis-
cuss works from the late seventeenth century where their impact clearly extended
well into the following century.
A brief word is also required here on what I mean by the ‘French’ reception of
Hobbes. My focus is on French as a language and therefore those works originally
written in French are of primary concern, although I also consider those trans-
lated and published in French editions. Of course, it should be remembered that
at a time when the language of scholarly treatises was shifting from Latin to local
vernaculars, many French theorists were fluent in Latin, if not in other European
languages, and so had a much wider array of sources available to them than only
those written in French. While I consider such caveats throughout, it remains
possible to identify a distinctively French reception of Hobbes’s thought.

Nicole, Bayle, and the Moral–Political Emphasis

Pierre Bayle’s article ‘Hobbes’, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, would
prove to be one of the principal sources for many discussions of Hobbes’s thought
in eighteenth-century France. It was one of the most influential points of reference
for many writers—sometimes, it would appear, even more so than Hobbes’s texts
themselves. Bayle was greatly admired by the philosophes, and the Dictionnaire
(first published in 1697 and substantially revised and extended for the 1702 second
edition) had a profound effect on the development of French thought in the eight-
eenth century, becoming the most widely held book in private French libraries.10
Rousseau owned a copy.11
Whereas Hobbes’s French friends in the middle of the seventeenth century
had been mostly interested in his mechanistic and scientific explanations, after

10
Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter Enlightenment, p. 73.
11
‘Rousseau à Jacques Barrillot, entre avril et octobre 1736’, CC1:38.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 25

Bayle it would be the more overtly political and moral aspects of his thought that
received the greatest attention. Yet the separation of Hobbes’s politics and meta-
physics was by no means original to Bayle. French Cartesians such as Jacques du
Roure and Pierre-Sylvain Regis drew heavily on the political theory of De cive
in their philosophical textbooks, summarizing and sometimes even just trans-
lating Hobbes’s arguments, while eschewing his materialism and underlying
philosophical principles.12 Arguably the most important discussion of Hobbes’s
political theory in France prior to Bayle, however, was supplied by Pierre Nicole,
which is worth examining as Bayle was influenced by Nicole and would repro-
duce his quasi-Hobbesian theory in the Dictionnaire.13
Hobbes’s depiction of men in the state of nature was especially attractive to
many neo-Augustinians, since it provided a political story compatible with man’s
post-lapsarian state. Nicole was the most Hobbesian of the neo-Augustinian
thinkers in seventeenth-century France and his Essais de morale—originally pub-
lished in four volumes between 1672 and 1678—are shot through with Hobbesian
themes and ideas.14 Nicole endorsed an overtly Hobbesian theory of the origin of
society, averring that men are in a state of war with one another:
. . . and if he who said that they are born into a state of war, and that each man is natu-
rally enemy of all other men, had only wanted to represent by his words the disposition
of men’s hearts each towards the others, without claiming to make it pass as legitimate
and just, he would have said a thing also in conformity with truth and experience, as that
which he maintains is contrary to reason and to justice.15

According to Nicole, the amour-propre of other men is in constant opposition

to all of one’s own desires, and his only qualification of Hobbes’s account was to
stress that this state is contrary to both reason and justice. It is man’s unruly pas-
sions alone that disturb the order of society and the only means by which peace
can be secured is by regulating these passions.16 This involved rightly directing
man’s amour-propre, which takes care to ‘disguise itself by covering the passions
with a veil of justice’.17
The idea that Hobbes founded all justice or society on amour-propre, which
recurred in many criticisms of his thought, was little more than a literal read-
ing for his French audience. In the first chapter of De cive Hobbes argued that
all societies exist for the sake of either glory (the good opinion of oneself) or
utility (one’s own advantage) and are therefore the product of self-love, which

12
For discussion see Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 500–502.
13
See James, Pierre Nicole, pp. 155–159; Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, pp. 294–298;
Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, p. 510.
14
See Stiker-Métral, Narcisse contrarié, pp. 202–205. 15
Nicole, Œuvres, p. 180.
16
Nicole, Œuvres, pp. 208–209. 17
Nicole, Œuvres, p. 233.
26 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

in Samuel Sorbière’s French edition was translated as all societies ‘sont con-
tractées par l’amour-propre’. The term amour-propre here means self-love in a
very general sense, which encompasses the French terms gloire and utilité.18
Yet for neo-Augustinians, like Nicole, amour-propre characterized man’s
post-lapsarian state, irrespective of the aspect of self-love to which it referred, and
this Augustinian association between amour-propre and Original Sin was wide-
spread in France from the 1640s onwards.19
Nicole denied that amour-propre could be the source of all justice insisting
that it was diametrically opposed to charity or true virtue.20 Nonetheless, when
brought into accordance with reason, amour-propre could imitate charity per-
fectly; men would seek the love of others to satisfy their own amour-propre
and this would provide the source of all civility.21 In short, men would regu-
late the unsocial manifestations of amour-propre for the sake of their enlight-
ened amour-propre. Nicole, like Hobbes before him, claimed that it would
be in men’s interest to moderate their passions by placing themselves under
the direction of civil laws. Just as Nicole’s account of the state of war echoed
Hobbes’s, so too, in proposing a remedy for this state, he told a very Hobbesian
story and affirmed that the ‘fear of death is thus the first bond of civil soci-
ety, and the first brake on amour-propre’.22 Moreover, the original spring of all
forms of government was the choice of the people, yet once the constitution
has been set the people retained no rights to change it and it would therefore
never be lawful to rebel against the sovereign or engage in civil war.23
In Nicole’s thought there is a conceptual and moral gulf between virtue and
amour-propre, but in so far as each leads men to observe the civil laws and pro-
cure peace there is no discernible difference. God alone would be able to dis-
tinguish between the two.24 Hobbes had given men self-interested reasons to
submit unreservedly to the civil sovereign and obey the laws, underwritten
by a portrayal of the deplorable state of their existence if they failed to do so.
Nicole’s Augustinian pessimism regarding human nature led him to embrace
the Hobbesian account of the origin of civil society. Bayle, in turn, would adopt
Hobbes’s and Nicole’s view of human nature and address Hobbes’s thought in a
strikingly similar context.

18
Hobbes, De cive, i.2.
19
See Stiker-Métral, Narcisse contrarié, especially pp. 69–137; Chapter 4, ‘Neutralizing
amour-propre’.
20
Nicole, Œuvres, p. 179. 21
Nicole, Œuvres, pp. 185–190, 268, 397–399.
22
Nicole, Œuvres, p. 181. 23
Nicole, Œuvres, pp. 390–391.
24
Nicole, Œuvres, p. 200.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 27

In his earliest major work, the Pensées diverses sur la comète (1684), Hobbes is
not mentioned once and Bayle may not have even been familiar with Hobbes’s
writings in any depth at the time.25 Nevertheless, the work proves revealing when
considering Bayle’s philosophical affinities with Hobbes and indicates why he
would later become interested in the overtly political aspects of Hobbes’s thought.
Central to Bayle’s argument was the claim that it is civil laws rather than reli-
gion that upholds the social order, which led him famously to contend that a
society of atheists could subsist perfectly well. In his defence of toleration, Bayle
maintained that it is not men’s religious persuasions that lead them to observe
the laws of society but rather their fear of breaking those laws and their interest
in obeying them. He employed a plethora of different arguments in support of
this position, yet a recurrent theme was that man’s state without civil laws would
be a miserable one in which conflict would arise, and that this is just as true of a
Christian society as it is of any other:
For the greatest number remain so engaged in vice that if human laws did not impose
order, all societies of Christians would soon be destroyed. And I am certain that, absent
a continual miracle, a city like Paris would be reduced in two weeks to the saddest condi-
tion in the world, if no other remedy were used against vice than the remonstrances of
preachers and confessors.26

Man’s condition is one in which an infinite number of illusions and prejudices

prevail, and Christians are equally unable to avoid the disorders into which all
other men fall. This is a wretched state, where the passions of ambition, avarice,
envy, and the sources of all vice are to be found everywhere.27 Man’s condition
without civil laws resembles the Hobbesian state of nature, one in which noth-
ing, not even religion, can secure order and peace. In portraying man’s condition
without laws as miserable, Bayle’s aim was to demonstrate that it is civil laws and
not religion that preserve the social order, for ‘religion is not a brake capable of
restraining our passions’.28
Although there is no reference to Hobbes in his discussion, Bayle would later
deploy similar arguments in his Dictionnaire when claiming that ‘Man is wicked
and miserable . . . [and] history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the
human race’.29 As a descriptive device, Hobbes’s account of the state of war proved
accurate and Bayle explicitly endorsed this depiction of man’s natural state:
In this state of nature man was a wolf to man; everything belonged to the first who had it;
no one was the master of anything except by force. In order to get out of this abyss each

25
Bost, Pierre Bayle, pp. 136–137. 26
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 162.
27
Bayle, Various Thoughts, pp. 117, 169. 28
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 204.
29
Bayle, Selections, pp. 146–147.
28 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

agreed to give up his rights to the whole so that he would be given the ownership of some
part. They entered into agreements; war ceased.30

When Hobbes wrote that ‘Man is a wolf to Man’ he was actually referring to
the relations between commonwealths, not to those between individuals.31
Nonetheless, it was taken to be an apt description of the relationship between
individuals in the state of nature and recurred as such in many French commen-
taries on Hobbes following Bayle.
For Bayle, the state of nature could be remedied only by civil laws and not by
religion. In fact, religion often undermined the social order by providing reasons
that would motivate men to fight one another even when it was contrary to their
interest in maintaining peace. Bayle elucidated this argument at length in his
Commentaire philosophique (1686), where he stressed that the disorders and dis-
turbances occasioned by religion are principally due to intolerance and the denial
of liberty of conscience on the part of religious authorities.32 Liberty of conscience
was of paramount importance for Bayle, as he held as a fundamental principle
that ‘whatever is done against the Dictates of Conscience is a Sin’.33
Although Bayle would not agree with Hobbes regarding the extent to which the
sovereign should be granted control over the externals of religion, the similarities
between the two extend beyond their depictions of man’s unruly state without
civil laws, overrun by violent passions that were often further inflamed by religion.
Bayle was at his most Hobbesian, whether consciously or not, when he proposed
his remedy for man’s condition, arguing for the autonomy of the political realm
and maintaining that the sovereign must assert authority over the challenges of
ecclesiastical influence from which intolerance and rebellion arise to threaten
the state.34 Bayle granted the sovereign an essential and inalienable right to enact
laws for the preservation of society and insisted that any opinions that tend ‘to
the Disturbance of the State, and the endangering of the Sovereign’s Authority’
should in no way be tolerated. This meant that on purely civil grounds the sover-
eign need not tolerate those, such as members of the Church of Rome, who would
attempt to hold a tyrannical rule over the consciences of men. Toleration should
be extended only to all those who endorse liberty of conscience.35
Returning to his Pensées diverses, Bayle’s Hobbism is never explicit; indeed,
it may well have been mediated through Nicole’s Essais de morale, which Bayle

30
Bayle, Selections, p. 150. 31
Hobbes, De cive, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’.
32
Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, especially pp. 56–58, 199–211.
33
Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, p. 226.
34
See also Weinstein, ‘Bayle’s Atheistic Politics’, pp. 206–210.
35
Bayle, Philosophical Commentary, pp. 185–198.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 29

considered a ‘masterpiece’ and the influence of which is evident throughout the

work.36 For Bayle, as for Nicole, people deceive themselves when they think that
all of their praiseworthy actions are motivated by love of God, as they are usually
performed from more selfish principles.37 Nonetheless, man’s sinful amour-propre
could still be turned to good use and lead men to perform all the virtues; it would
even provide a sufficient motive for atheists to perform religious duties.38
Bayle would later stress that the virtuous actions of atheists proceed from their
amour-propre alone, whereas Christians may perform them from love of God.
But at the same time he insisted, again echoing Nicole, that it was an incontest-
able maxim that ‘the fear and the love of the Divinity are not always the most active
principles motivating the actions of men’.39 Bayle pursued this line of argument to
conclusions that Nicole would have been unwilling to endorse, ultimately declar-
ing that if amour-propre rather than love of God could motivate the appearance
of virtue then there was no reason why a society of atheists would not be able to
subsist just as well as a society of pagans or, implicitly, of Christians:
I will not hesitate to say that if one wants to know my conjecture concerning what a society of
atheists would be like in regard to morals and civil actions, it would be very much like a soci-
ety of pagans. It is true that very severe laws would be necessary there, ones very well executed
with a view to the punishment of criminals. But are they not necessary everywhere? . . . One
can say without being a ranter that human justice constitutes the virtue of the majority of
the world, for when it relaxes the check on a given sin, few persons keep themselves from it.40

At every turn, Bayle argued that pagan societies were at least as successful as
Christian ones in preserving the social order and that rarely does religion moti-
vate men to observe the civil laws beyond the force that those laws generate in and
of themselves. Justice must be thought about in terms of the social rather than
the religious order, in which case there is no reason why atheists should not be
tolerated. Particular differences about the role of religion in society aside, then,
Hobbes and Bayle were in general agreement that separate ecclesiastical powers
would only ever undermine the authority of the civil sovereign, and, as Hobbes
put it in Behemoth (1679), that the ‘Vertue of a Subject is comprehended wholly in
obedience to the Laws of the Common wealth’.41

36
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 106. At first glance, the opinion of Bayle’s Dictionnaire article on
Nicole does not appear so positive, as he argued that Nicole’s works (the Essais de morale excluded)
‘can unfortunately encourage in their perverse dispositions all who have a leaning towards
Pyrrhonism’. See Bayle, Political Writings, p. 200. Given Bayle’s irony and scepticism, however, this
could of course be read as a veiled compliment.
37
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 205. 38
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 173.
39
Bayle, Political Writings, p. 313. 40
Bayle, Various Thoughts, p. 200.
41
Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 165.
30 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

Even if Bayle’s Hobbism was less than explicit in his earlier works, there is
a continuity of interest that runs throughout his thought, which provides the
context for the discussion of Hobbes that is to be found in his Dictionnaire.
Turning now to that article, there are several elements worth highlighting.
The first is the positive light in which Hobbes is presented. Bayle introduced
Hobbes as ‘one of the greatest minds of the seventeenth century’, a man who
loved his country and was loyal to his king.42 Of De cive, he wrote that despite
taking some things too far, the ‘fundamentals of politics had never previously
been analysed so well’, and Bayle quoted Descartes to support his claim that
Hobbes was more skilled as a moralist than in physics or metaphysics, thereby
clearing the way for the moral and political emphasis that would follow.43
Bayle’s article is not unreservedly positive, yet the most interesting aspects are
those where Hobbes is praised and the similarities between Hobbes and Bayle
are revealed.
Bayle’s positive portrayal was, in part, an attempt to defend Hobbes from the
charge of atheism. Bayle insisted that it is ‘undeniable that no accusation has been
more seriously abused than that of atheism’, a comment that could as equally be
applied to his own treatment as to that of Hobbes.44 In defending Hobbes, Bayle’s
account further disclosed the affinities that he perceived them to have shared.
Despite having been thought an atheist, Bayle asserted that Hobbes believed ‘that
there is a God who is the origin of all things but who ought not to be circum-
scribed within the sphere of our narrow reason’. Bayle here offered a sceptical
interpretation of Hobbes’s religious beliefs and presented them as closer to fide-
ism than to atheism. This, however, was not the thrust of Bayle’s article, for even if
Hobbes was taken to be an atheist, anyone who knew him would confirm that he
both valued and loved virtue, of which his works proved further testimony.45 Not
only was atheism a false accusation to level at Hobbes, it was also irrelevant to the
issue of his virtue and love for his country.
Bayle’s article is especially interesting as it was fairly unique, at least in French
commentaries of the time, in placing Hobbes’s thought in its historical con-
text.46 Both De cive and Leviathan are set against the political controversies of
seventeenth-century England and, with this context in mind, Bayle stressed that
the central message of Leviathan was the importance of seeking peace:

42
Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 79–80. 43
Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 84–87.
44
Whether or not Bayle himself was an atheist is a question that has proved almost as contentious
as Hobbes’s alleged atheism. For discussion see Weinstein, ‘Bayle’s Atheistic Politics’, pp. 197–198.
45
Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 88–89.
46
Bayle’s own references reveal that much of this context was drawn from the Latin edition of the
Life of Hobbes (1682), Political Writings, pp. 80–81.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 31

The précis of this work is that without peace there is no safety in a state, and that peace
cannot exist without command, nor command without arms; and that arms are worth
nothing if they are not in the hands of one person; and that fear of arms cannot bring
peace to those who are motivated to fight one another through an evil more terri-
ble than death, that is to say: through dissension over matters that are necessary for
salvation.47

It is well to remember that no French edition of Leviathan existed in the eight-

eenth century and, although the Latin version would have been available, Bayle’s
article proved a principal source for many discussions of the work and its author.
Apart from being a fairly accurate overview of the central message of Leviathan,
the passage is of note for at least two other reasons. Hobbes was quite rightly
taken to be a supporter of monarchy, and when Bayle claimed that he thought
that arms have to be in the hands of ‘one person’, there is little to suggest anything
other than a natural reading of the word ‘person’ was intended. For Hobbes, of
course, the ‘one person’ was a single moral body, namely the sovereign, yet this
need not be a single individual. Whether or not Bayle recognized this would be
difficult to prove either way. Nonetheless, the monarchical misinterpretation that
Hobbes’s sovereign had to be one individual person would become commonplace
in eighteenth-century French references to Hobbes, and Bayle’s article could eas-
ily have helped to shape this view.
The other reason why the passage is of interest is that it once again reflects
concerns from Bayle’s earliest works by signalling that the use of religion is fre-
quently opposed to peace as it motivates people to fight by promising rewards
in an afterlife. Bayle followed Hobbes in arguing that the power of the Church
is often a great threat to the civil power—and with it peace and security—
and therefore must not possess independent authority. Bayle was unique in
defending Hobbes on this issue at the time, and it is a matter of some irony that
when Rousseau later invoked Hobbes in his discussion of civil religion as ‘the
only one who correctly saw the evil and the remedy’, he did so while opposing
Bayle’s ideas.48
A final point to highlight in Bayle’s article is that he situated Hobbes’s thought
in the context of political controversies between republicans and monarchists.
Bayle traced this theme throughout Hobbes’s writings, beginning with his trans-
lation of Thucydides, in which he sought to illustrate the ‘disorders and confu-
sions of democratic government’. In doing so Hobbes opposed ‘the works of the
Greeks and Romans in which anti-monarchical theories abound, and where

47
Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 87–88.
48
Rousseau, Du contrat social, iv.8; see also Chapter 3, ‘Unity and Civil Religion’.
32 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

there are many examples of the love of liberty’.49 Bayle viewed republicanism in
contradistinction to monarchy,50 and although this element of Hobbes’s thought
would be largely neglected by many eighteenth-century French commentators,
Rousseau followed Bayle in reading Hobbes as someone who wrote against the
claims of all republics.51
Bayle’s article is a key reference point for considering Hobbes’s eighteenth-
century French reception, but to understand how Bayle’s concerns with Hobbes
were shaped the article needs to be situated in the wider context of his thought.
Bayle’s was certainly not the first to focus predominantly on Hobbes’s political
thought; his most significant forerunner being Nicole and, in many respects,
Bayle presents a progression of Nicole’s theory. Yet there were good reasons why,
with Bayle, the political and moral dimensions of Hobbes’s thought took centre
stage, for, like Hobbes, Bayle sought to identify a distinctively political realm free
from the influence of religious authorities.
While Bayle did not discuss Hobbes’s state of nature theory in any detail in his
Dictionnaire article, his other writings reveal that he endorsed Hobbes’s depic-
tion of man’s state without civil laws and account of the passions that give rise to
conflict. Bayle was by no means unique in doing so, with Nicole having stated that
as a descriptive device Hobbes’s account was accurate, even if it should be deemed
morally unacceptable. It is thus worth highlighting that at the turn of the eight-
eenth century Hobbes’s state of nature theory, which would frequently be chal-
lenged following Barbeyrac and Montesquieu, was not subjected to significant
criticism by many of his French readers.
Bayle’s interest in Hobbes was primarily political and he evaded Hobbes’s met-
aphysical arguments and mechanistic philosophy with a dismissive quote from
Descartes. This would in turn characterize much of Hobbes’s eighteenth-century
reception. There are, of course, other important considerations that would lead to
the predominantly political emphasis of this reception, not least that the French
translation of De cive was the most readily available of his works. Yet this emphasis
was also due to the contingent interests that Bayle (and Nicole before him) shared
with Hobbes, which shaped the account of his influential Dictionnaire entry. At
the turn of the eighteenth century, however, this political emphasis remained far
from ubiquitous, and an important counterpoint can be found in the writings of
Nicolas Malebranche.

49
Bayle, Political Writings, pp. 79–84.
50
This opposition is perhaps clearest in Bayle’s article on Bodin, Political Writings, pp. 19–20.
51
Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne, OC3:811/CW9:235.
 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes 33

Malebranche’s Critique of Hobbes

There is some reason to think that Malebranche all but neglected Hobbes, since
his references are fleeting and reveal no great depth of engagement with Hobbes’s
work.52 Moreover, Malebranche’s thought was frequently neglected or repudiated
by the French philosophes, who were generally more influenced by Locke. Yet,
as Patrick Riley has been foremost in demonstrating, Rousseau’s thought was
greatly indebted to Malebranche,53 and the criticisms that Malebranche levelled at
Hobbes foreshadow those that Rousseau would later employ against his material-
ist contemporaries.
While commentators like Nicole and Bayle focused principally on the political
and moral aspects of Hobbes’s thought, Malebranche’s criticisms also stemmed
from epistemological, metaphysical, and theological concerns. Malebranche’s
references thus reveal him to have been concerned with aspects of Hobbes’s
thought that were in decline towards the end of the seventeenth century and into
the eighteenth century in France. For this reason his remarks are of added inter-
est as they go some way to bridging Hobbes’s initial readers’ focus on his scientific
and natural philosophy, with the emphasis on his more overtly political thought
that characterized the French reception in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Where Hobbes’s immediate reception in France was positive, Malebranche’s
opinion was unreservedly negative; where the Mersenne circle had applauded
Hobbes’s mechanistic philosophy, it was this that Malebranche found most objec-
tionable. Malebranche strongly opposed the empiricism and materialism that he
viewed Hobbes and Locke as sharing. In his Entretien sur l’existence et le nature de
Dieu (1707), Malebranche argued that both Hobbes and Locke had dissolved the
distinction between ideas and the perceptions that we have of them. Whereas per-
ceptions might differ between individuals or might be deceptive—or, in short, are
subjective—ideas are eternal and immutable, and to neglect this was to commit the
most dangerous of errors.54 Malebranche explicated the nature of this danger in a
letter written to François de Fénelon in 1713, in which he reiterated his objections
against Hobbes and Locke and further claimed that if ideas are not distinguished
from our perceptions then Pyrrhonism would be established and there would be
no truth or falsity in the world, no justice or injustice, no science or morality.55

52
Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 498–499.
53
Riley, General Will Before Rousseau, pp. 181–250. Rousseau was reading Malebranche dur-
ing the late 1730s; see Les confessions, OC1:237/CW5:198–199; Le verger de Madame de Warens,
OC2:1128/CW12:8.
54
Malebranche, Œuvres, vol. 15, pp. 51–52. 55
Malebranche, Œuvres, vol. 19, p. 842.
34 The French Reception of Thomas Hobbes

For Malebranche, moral ideas could not arise from perception alone and
empiricism is unable to give an adequate account of moral necessity. To reduce all
phenomena to properties of matter in motion is to explain everything in physi-
cal terms, effacing the moral realm associated with the mind as a distinct entity.
Malebranche’s radical dualism entailed mind and matter having little impact on
one another,56 whereas Hobbes’s materialism dissolved the very distinction that
Malebranche thought so essential. If human action followed from empirical per-
ceptions then there would be no real distinction between perceiving and willing.
A dualistic account of mind and matter was therefore necessary to preserve man’s
freedom and in turn all morality. This is a theme that Rousseau would later adopt
throughout his attacks on the materialist philosophy of his contemporaries,
objecting that they had failed to comprehend the respective properties of mind
and matter, while invoking a Plato or a Samuel Clarke to refute their reliance on
Locke’s metaphysics: ‘Then explaining to them the distinction between the two
substances, he would have proven to them by the very properties of matter that,
whatever Locke may say about it, the supposition of matter thinking is a genuine
absurdity’.57
The materialism of the philosophes owed a great deal to Locke, who in
eighteenth-century France was frequently read as a materialist, a determinist,
and an opponent of free will.58 This reading of Locke, however, was actually very
Hobbesian. Voltaire even praised Hobbes for anticipating Locke’s argument that
God could communicate thought to matter, an argument that Voltaire thought
revealed the sophistry behind the philosophy of Clarke and Malebranche.59
Although he explicitly attacked Locke’s legacy, it is quite possible that Rousseau
followed Malebranche in thinking that Hobbes and Locke shared equally erro-
neous accounts of the properties of mind and matter. Moreover, criticism of
Hobbes’s materialism was not confined to Malebranche, and it is well to note that
Clarke’s A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, which was trans-
lated into French in 1717, was set out directly against the doctrines and followers
of Hobbes and Spinoza. Like Malebranche, Clarke charged Hobbes with having
confused the properties of mind and matter and having rested his philosophy
on, ‘that prodigiously absurd Supposition, that All Matter, as Matter, is indued

56
Indeed, God provided the only connection: what man wills serves as the occasion for God to
bring about the corresponding actions in his body.
57
Rousseau, Lettre à Franquières, OC4:1135–1136/CW8:261. Rousseau also invoked the authority
of the ‘illustrious Clarke’ in the ‘Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard’ in Emile, OC4:570/CW13:429.
58
Hutchison, Locke in France, pp. 160–201.
59
‘Voltaire to Jean Baptiste Nicolas Formont, c. 15 August 1733’, in Voltaire’s Correspondence, vol.
3, pp. 127–128.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
“Can it wound Achilles to receive the affirmation of his quality?” said
the old man, whose voice was like a knell.
Dodson’s veins felt a sharper chill.
“They are both mad,” he muttered, “hopelessly mad!”
The old man took Dodson’s arm in a grip of which none could have
suspected him to be capable; and his pale and wasted features had
now become as imperious as those of the sightless poet.
“You must tell him the truth,” said the white-haired man, whose
countenance was so strangely transfigured, “you must deny nothing
to one who is consumed by the divine hunger for recognition. It is
meet that the creator should be told that his work is good. It is the
crown of his superhuman labours that they should receive the
sanction of those for whom they have wrought.”
“You do not speak to me,” said the poet, in a voice that was rare and
strange. “Is it, friend, that you are no longer——? No, I will not
doubt one whom I love.”
“Speak,” said the old man in the voice of a raven. “The days of
Achilles are now few. Speak, that the faithful may render that which
he needs.”
Dodson felt his own silence to be destroying him.
“I will speak,” he said in terror and despair. “I—I am no scholar, old
boy, as you know. I don’t understand Greek; I know hardly a word
of Latin; but I’ll just say this——” The unhappy Dodson clenched his
hands in desperation. “I’ll just say this—to my mind there is nothing
—there is nothing in the whole of the world——”
The dying poet, whose eyes were sightless, quivered like a stricken
bird.
“Courage, Achilles!” he muttered faintly, pressing his frail hands to
his heart. Then, stretching them forth, he turned his gaunt and grey
face upon his friend. “Give to me those honest hands which I know
to be trembling violently,” he said.
Dodson yielded his hands to those of the blind poet.
“How they tremble, how they tremble!” said the poet. “They have a
rarer eloquence than your lips, my friend. Let them embrace me; let
them embrace me.”
As the unhappy Dodson clasped the frail broken form in his strong
arms, he seemed to learn quite suddenly why those once so lustrous
eyes had the hard glare of stone.
“Oh, Luney, Luney!” he cried in a kind of wail as the truth revealed
itself, “do not tell me that you have been blind all these days and
that I have not known it!”
“A man’s blindness is no affliction,” said the dying poet, “if only he
be secure in his friends. The sight of his eyes is as nothing in
comparison with that which is given to his right hand. My great
labours are near to their fruition, and I have a friend. And I am very
happy, O my friend, and it is in this: the gentle and beneficent Earth,
my mother, who has smitten her son with her caresses, bids me
commit to your care the little treatise I have wrought on human life,
on the life of man, on the life of the proudest of her children. Faithful
friend and servant, I ask you to be the good angel of the public
need. These eyes of mine are now void, as were those of my peers
long ago; and the aged man, my father, is infirm and white-haired
and unlearned in the ways of men—therefore, I confide to your care
this which I have wrought. I ask you to take it away and print it
immediately, and spread it broadcast among all the streets of the
great city; and when all the street-persons have looked on what a
lost soul in Hades has fashioned out of blood and tears, in order that
they may find new sustenance, this weak and frail implement which
has revealed the will of the Most High, shall return again to Earth,
his mother, and weary with his great labours, she shall take him
gently upon her breasts.”
The blind poet uttered these strange words with a noble simplicity
which yet filled his friend with dismay. As the great bulk of writing
was committed by the poet into the care of the unhappy Dodson,
the young man, powerful and materialistic as he was, seemed
almost to faint under their intolerable burden.
“Take it, friend,” said the dying poet. “Keep it jealously; it is a thing
without price. And remember that I now count my days. And further
remember my task is not accomplished until your own is fulfilled.
Take this treatise straightway to that great house of publishers,
which is the first of this country, wherein I, a slave, spent seven
years of my existence upon the earth; and see that it is printed and
bound with all the haste possible, and further that it is spread
broadcast among all the persons in the streets of the great city,
because until that is done, I cannot lie at peace.”
The unhappy Dodson stood as one all broken with pain.
“Y-yes,” he said feebly, “I will take them to the office to-morrow—
and—and, old boy, I will tell them to set it up at once. I—I will tell
them that the author is impatient—that he has not much time—that
—that his time is nearly up—and—and that he wants to know that
others know what he has done for them before he goes.”
With a sinking heart the unhappy Dodson made the great pile of
manuscript into a parcel with the aid of brown paper and string, in
precisely the fashion that in former days he had instructed his
protégé. As suddenly he recalled his demeanour towards one who
had now acquired a transcendent sanctity, his own eyes grew blind
with their tears. Yet over and above his intolerable emotion, that
which dominated his thoughts, was the knowledge that the mission
to which he was pledged was foredoomed to fail.
“I don’t know much about literature—don’t pretend to,” said the
unhappy young man, as he slipped the string round the parcel in a
kind of dull anguish, “but it wouldn’t surprise me at all, old boy, if
this doesn’t turn out to be the longest poem in the English
language.”
“I believe it is a little less than three times the length of the Paradise
Lost,” said the poet, with absolute composure, yet touched by that
curious irony that his friend had never understood. “And I am
reminded that I would have them print it with great clearness in
three honest tomes. Each volume should coincide with a phase of
the poem; you will observe that there are three phases to our little
treatise, which correspond with those of human life—three phases
through which the soul of man must pass in its terrestrial
journeyings. On the first page, only the name of the poem must be
set forth; the name of the poet must not appear. And further, good
friend, I urge you to observe the profoundest secrecy as to the
authorship of this treatise upon human life. The identity of the
author must never be disclosed.”
“Why must the identity of the author never be disclosed, old boy?”
asked Jimmy Dodson, whose bewilderment and consternation were
ever increasing.
“I am fearful,” said the dying poet, with that curious smile that was
at once proud, gaunt, and melancholy. “I am fearful lest my
countrymen should incur the mockery of future ages by seeking to
re-embody the life of the first among their authors.”
 L
Days passed ere Jimmy Dodson returned again to the little room.
They were fraught with dire anxiety for the blind poet and the aged
man, his father. In his heart the old man was filled with despair, and
he knew not how to obtain the strength wholly to conceal his fears.
What if he to whom they had entrusted their priceless treasure
should never return to them again! He had neither the devotion nor
the blind faith of the dying man.
“They are printing it, they are printing it!” the poet would exclaim
many times in the day as he kept the chair beside the hearth.
“What if that strange street-person were never to return to us?” the
old man was moved to ask in his despair on the evening of the sixth
day.
“Ah, thou dost not know that brave and faithful one, my father,” said
the dying poet. “He will overcome fire and the sword rather than his
ministry should fail in these last hours of our necessity.”
And on the evening of the seventh day there came a gentle tapping
upon the shutters of the shop. With a cry of eagerness the old man
opened the door in response, and the forlorn figure of Dodson was
seen upon the threshold, his face all drawn with suffering.
“Welcome, welcome,” cried the old man in tones that were thin and
overwrought. “Have you brought back the printed book?”
Dodson recoiled from the old man in a kind of harsh rage. He laid
one hand upon his coat, and said in a morose whisper, “You will
have to know the truth!”
“The truth,” said the old man, with an unsuspectingness which
seemed to exasperate the man from the street. “The truth! Why fear
to tell it?”
“The truth is this,” said Dodson. “There is not a publisher in London
who would print poor Luney’s poem.”
The old man fell back against the door of the shop with a little cry.
“But—but the first mind of the age lies at the point of dissolution!”
he exclaimed. “They owe it to themselves that they cherish its fruits.
Do they not know that death itself respects his labours, and awaits
some token of homage from those for whom he wrought?”
“Yes, yes,” said Jimmy Dodson mournfully. “I know all that, my good
old man; I have heard it all before; but you and I must not be high-
flown. We must look the facts in the face. We must deal with things
as they are. A week ago I carried it to Octavius—Octavius, you
know, is the head of our firm, which is the chief, in fact the only
publishing house in London, and therefore, you know, in the world.
Well, as soon as Octavius saw the first page he said, ‘I am afraid, Mr.
Dodson, this will never do,’ I am giving you the precise words he
used; it is no use for you and me to deceive ourselves, is it?”
“Oh, oh,” said the old man incredulously. “But that is the verdict of
only one man, a single street-person, an ignorant man who is
neither gentle nor simple.”
“You may be right,” said Dodson, “and yet again you may be wrong.
But I must tell you, old man, that the house of Crumpett and
Hawker has nothing to learn. What they think to-day, the trade
thinks to-morrow. What they don’t know is not business. And you
must understand that I did not rest content with the opinion of
Octavius. I took it down-stairs and showed it to W. P. Walkinshaw, a
highly cultivated man. And although he does sit down-stairs, he has
had a large and varied experience. And as soon as I had told him
what it was, he said, ‘Really, Dodson, one has no need to look. A
poem in blank verse, three times the length of Paradise Lost—why,
really, my good fellow, there is not a publishing house in this country
who would take the string off the parcel.’”
“No, no, no,” said the old man, beating his fingers upon the counter
of the shop. “These unbelievers must not be permitted to speak in
ignorance. Is it possible that the human soul can remain insensible
to the nobility of its god-like power?”
“Well, as it happens,” said Dodson mournfully, “I did ask Pa to be
kind enough to pay particular attention to it. But as soon as Pa cast
his eyes over it, he used the identical words that were used by
Octavius. ‘I am afraid, Dodson,’ he said, ‘this will never do.’”
“Can it be possible,” cried the old man, “the noblest achievement of
the modern world to be thus discarded!”
“And I didn’t stop at Octavius, and I didn’t stop at Pa,” said the
mournful emissary. “I went up-stairs again to Robert Brigstock, who
gives Octavius a hand with the belles lettres, and who is on the staff
of the Journal of Literature. And as soon as Robert Brigstock read
that accursed first page, he said, ‘May I ask, Mr. Dodson, has the
writer of this an established reputation?’ ‘Oh, no,’ I had to confess,
‘he is quite a young chap who has never published anything at all.’
‘Well, then, Mr. Dodson,’ said Robert Brigstock, who as I say is on
the staff of the Journal of Literature, ‘no one deprecates more firmly
than I do the amazing presumption that is here revealed. The writer
sets out to write a treatise on human life—a somewhat timeworn
theme, Mr. Dodson—which is three times the length of Paradise
Lost’—I am telling you word for word what Robert Brigstock said
—‘and he does this in a metre which Homer and Virgil would
certainly not have used had they had to deal with the English
language. Can anything be more presumptuous, than that an
unknown writer—who surely has been to neither of our universities,
or most certainly he would never have proposed to perpetrate such
a gratuitous piece of effrontery—that a man who has not received a
regular education should attempt that which would give pause to all
the foremost of our English poets, from Chaucer to the Poet
Laureate, poets, Mr. Dodson, whose reputations have long been
established beyond the range of controversy?’ And if you had seen
Robert Brigstock, who as a rule is the mildest and most amiable and
most polite of all fellows imaginable, who is a bit of a poet himself,
begin to work himself up into a kind of frenzy over that first page,
you would have understood, old man, far more clearly than I can
hope to make you understand, how hopeless it is to get any
publisher—I don’t care who—to undertake poor Luney’s effort on his
own responsibility.”
The aged father of the dying poet gave a groan of despair. He lifted
up his feeble arms, which seemed to be smitten with palsy, and
uttered a high quavering cry of imprecation.
“Are these the tidings we must bear to the dying Achilles!” he cried.
“Must we thus affront that mighty warrior who lies all spent and
broken from his great labours!”
“Well, old man,” said Dodson, who could not forbear to pity such a
distress as this, yet whose robust common-sense in the crisis they
had reached had never been so valiant, “well, old man, there is only
one thing we can do if we are to bring poor Luney’s poem to the
public notice. We must print it and publish it at our own expense.”
“Yes, yes,” said the old man eagerly, “of course we must do that.
And we must do it immediately because the sands of life are running
out.”
“Yes, I have thought of all that,” said Dodson, “and I have made
some inquiries of the firm. But of course it is going to cost money.”
“Money!” said the old man.
“A lot of money. I have talked to Octavius about it. I am on very
good terms with Octavius, and as a sort of special favour to me,
Octavius says Crumpett and Hawker will break through their
invariable rule of not publishing on commission; and they are
prepared to place their imprint—their very valuable imprint—on poor
Luney’s poem, providing it is written grammatically—you know
Crumpett and Hawker would not publish the Laureate himself if he
failed to write grammatically—and also, providing that its tendency is
not too agnostic, that is to say, agnosticism impinging on paganism,
that is to say that it contains a definite idea of God—these are
Octavius’s own words I am using—and further that it is not open to
the charge of immorality in any shape or form, in other words, as
Octavius says, that it is the kind of thing that any young girl may
place in the hands of her grandmother. Well, now, everything being
all right, Crumpett and Hawker are prepared to put it in hand at
once, and to print two hundred and fifty copies—they won’t do less
—and to issue the poem in three volumes at one guinea net. The
cost, however, will be two hundred pounds, which must be borne by
the author. For this sum they will use good paper, clear type, and
they will bind it in superior cloth, and they will send out fifty copies
for review to the leading London and provincial journals; but
Octavius assures me that Crumpett and Hawker will touch the book
only on these terms, and on no other.”
The old man gave a gasp of consternation.
“Two hundred pounds,” he said weakly, “two hundred pounds!”
“Yes,” said Dodson, “two hundred pounds is a lot of money; but it
will have to be found if poor Luney is to hold his book in his hands
before he dies.”
“I have not a tithe of that great sum among the whole of my worldly
possessions,” said the old man forlornly.
“Nor I,” said Dodson. “I have hardly a red cent. laid by, because you
know I have now to support my people; but if I could lay my hands
at this moment on two hundred pounds, poor Luney’s book should
be through the press before he hears his name called.”
“Come into the shop,” said the old man feebly, “and tell me if you
think some of the venerable tomes on the shelves might produce
that—that large sum.”
Dodson entered the shop and the old man struck a match and lit the
gas. A very brief examination of what Dodson conceived to be a
useless mass of lumber, for all the volumes were very black, faded,
dusty, and stained with time, sufficed to enable him to form a
verdict.
“I don’t suppose,” said he with a candour which numbed the old
man’s veins, “the whole lot together would fetch two hundred pence.
I never saw such a collection—never!”
“I must pray for a miracle to happen again,” said the old man. “One
happened to us on a day.”
“Did it indeed?” said Dodson.
“Yes,” said the old man. “The great Achilles was threatened with
expulsion from his little room. Unless I, his custodian, could obtain
the sum of twenty pounds by a certain day, it was ordained that he
should be cast out into the streets of the great city. Yet on the eve of
that day, when all hope had been abandoned, a man out of the
street, a street-person, walked into this shop, looked upon all these
shelves, and took down one after another of these venerable tomes,
and paying over to me the sum of two hundred pounds, walked out
of the shop with one of these old volumes in his care.”
“What was the old volume?” said Dodson, with an air of keen
interest.
“A Shakespeare of the first folio,” said the old man.
Dodson gave a low whistle.
“Oh, was it?” he said. “Then I should think that that street-person
was not such a bad judge after all.” James Dodson turned his
attention again to the shelves, in which were many gaps, with a
livelier curiosity. “There don’t appear to be many first-folio
Shakespeares left now,” he said in a tone of keen disappointment.
“But it is no good supposing that there would be; these things have
been pretty well gone through. Some street-person has picked all
the pearls these many years, I expect. All that is left is hardly worth
carting away. As I say, all that remains on your shelves, old man,
would barely fetch two hundred pence.”
“Can we do nothing to obtain the sum of two hundred pounds?” said
the old man. “Surely in this extremity a miracle must happen to us
again.”
“I am no believer in miracles myself,” said James Dodson. “I have no
faith in ghosts, spiritualism and sea-serpents either. But it is clear to
my mind that that two hundred pounds has got to be found
somehow; yet it looks as though a miracle will have to happen
before it turns up.”
“And the hours are so brief,” said the old man in his impotence.
“Each day is beyond price; the great Achilles grows frail.”
For a space Dodson was plunged in deep thought. He was not of the
mettle that yields lightly to despair.
“By the way,” he said, “what was that very funny-looking old volume
I saw on the table in your little room—you know, the funny old
volume that seemed to have its pages scrawled over in red ink?
Well, now it has struck me that those pages—I didn’t look at them
carefully—were of the finest vellum of the sort they don’t make now-
a-days. If that is the case a dealer might be willing to pay a good
price for it, if the red scrawl was nicely cleaned off.”
At these words, uttered with singular carelessness, the old man
staggered back against the counter of the shop. He trembled in
every limb, his face was piteous to see.
“You mean the Book of the Ages,” he said. His voice seemed
unrelated to anything in nature.
“I don’t know what you call it,” said Dodson, “but it looks very heavy
and well-bound, and I dare say it is valuable in its way. Vellum of the
old monastic sort fetches a rare good price now-a-days if you know
where to take it. I shall send a chap with a handcart for it to-
morrow, and he shall take it to Temple and Ward, the dealers in
Bond Street, and we will see what can be raised.”
“The Book of the Ages!” said the old man hoarsely; “the Book of the
Ages!”
“Yes,” said Dodson indifferently, “the Book of the Ages—rather a
good name for it. If that vellum is as old as I think it is, and that red
scrawl is nicely got off, and the edges are trimmed, and the surface
is cleaned up a bit, there may be money in it. People do buy such
rum things now-a-days by way of curios, and they don’t seem to
mind paying fancy prices for them either.”
“The Book of the Ages!” the old man repeated. In his peering eyes
were a horror and a consternation that were truly dreadful, yet they
were totally unnoticed by his visitor.
“Of course, you know,” Dodson continued, pursuing this new idea,
which, remote as it was, seemed to afford the only prospect of
obtaining two hundred pounds, “I shall have to pitch a tale about it
to the dealers. I must fix up some sort of a history, you know, about
its being found in the tomb of the Pharaohs, or its being the very
identical sheepskin upon which the Scriptures were written. But you
must leave that to me. I shall go round and see Temple and Ward
to-morrow, and you can lay to it, old man, that I shall have thought
of something by then. But, in the meantime, if you really do believe
that miracles happen—I wish I could believe it myself—you had
better think about it, old man, as much as you possibly can, for I’ve
read somewhere that when you do want a thing to happen, it is a
good plan to keep your mind on it all the time.”
Before the old man could consent to a suggestion which he did not
know how to derive the power to sanction, the voice of him who sat
in the little room was heard to summon James Dodson.
“Why don’t you come to me?” said the voice from within. “I can hear
the voice of my friend. Why don’t you come to me with the printed
sheets?”
In some trepidation Dodson obeyed a summons, which sounded
almost imperious upon the lips of him from whom it proceeded.
“The printed sheets,” said the dying poet, stretching out his hands.
“Please place the printed sheets into my hands. I would have my
father read what is printed there, because this little treatise must go
forth without fault or sully.”
“They have not started to print it yet, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson
dismally.
“Why—why is that?” cried the dying poet, with a consternation that
was almost petulant. “Do they not know that a term has been placed
to my days, that the sands of life are running out in the glass?”
“Yes, old boy, they know all about that,” said Jimmy Dodson; “they
know all about that, and—and——”
“And—and!” said the stricken poet with an imperiousness that was
regal. “Are these the words that are brought to me by one whom I
love?” In a controlled excitement, that was almost stern, the stricken
man raised himself in his chair. “Your arm, Jimmy,” he said, with a
look of such authority that it filled the unhappy Dodson with dismay.
“Lead me to the printers. I must speak to them myself.”
The poet sank back in his chair in the tender arms of his friend. The
little strength that remained to him was no longer sufficient to bear
his frame.
“Yes, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, “be quite calm, and sit there
quietly. There is no need for you to excite yourself. I—I will go round
to the printers early to-morrow and—and I—I will tell them just what
you say. I will see that they hurry, although by nature, old boy,
printers, as you know, are dreadfully slow.”
“So be it,” said the poet, with an expression of noble magnanimity
upon his beautiful face; “do not think that I reproach you—it would
break my heart.”
At these words Dodson, who, throughout his interview with the
father, had remained so calm and self-secure, now turned away
hastily from him who was sightless, with a half-strangled sob.
“You do not tell me in what manner Crumpett and Hawker received
our little treatise,” said the poet.
Dodson found it a great matter to recover his wise self-possession,
but by the time the poet had repeated the question he had regained
it.
“Why—why, in what manner could they receive it, old boy?” said
Jimmy Dodson. “What could they say to it? What does a religious
chap say to the Bible? What does a scholar say to Homer? What
does everybody say to Shakespeare?”
“It is almost more than I can realize,” said the poet, with a look of
rapture that seemed to sear the veins of his unhappy friend.
 LI
Dodson promised bravely, recklessly, despairingly that the next time
he entered the little room he would bring the first printed sheets of
the book. For the poet’s insistence that each line must undergo a
rigorous scrutiny before it was given to the world was reiterated
again and again that evening with an imperiousness that, in one
formerly so gentle and timid, astonished its witness beyond
measure.
“Luney, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson in a rather bewildered manner
after several of these austere reminders, “I am not accustomed to
move in royal circles, I have never been spoken to by a king, but if
ever I was, old boy, I should expect him to speak to me just like
that. You make me feel, old boy, that I have no right to call you
Luney any longer—it seems almost like an act of presumption—you
make me feel, old boy, that I ought to address you as ‘my lord,’ or as
‘sire’.”
The poet laughed a strange, rarefied note of laughter.
“Ah, dear Jimmy,” he said, “in the presence of the faithful we will not
insist on our royalty too much.”
Dodson could frame no reply. Such words appeared to transcend
those bounds indicated by human intelligence which the speaker had
seemed to overstep so many times already. But, to the amazement
of the beholder, the white-haired old man, who all this time had sat
at the table with his eyes pressed devoutly to the Book of the Ages,
rose at these words of the dying poet, and with a grave deliberation
sank upon his knees before him who was blind.
“My liege,” said the old man humbly, “I would not have you consider
your servants to be insensible of your quality if they do not address
you in the fashion which it would seem to demand. Sire, your
servants do not esteem your royalty to be the less because they do
not wear its livery upon their lips.”
Smiling his secret and beautiful smile, the dying poet extended his
right hand, so white, so fragile, and so transparent towards the aged
man, his father, with the sweet air of a great prince, and the old
man, still kneeling, bore it to his lips.
Ever smiling in the same manner, the dying poet then extended the
fragile hand again, this time towards the astonished Jimmy Dodson,
whose every faculty seemed to be atrophied by so strange a
situation.
“We would have thee also make obeisance, faithful servant,” said the
poet gently. “It is not for this insignificant flesh that we seek thy
homage; it is not to appease an unworthy pride, which too often
devours princes, that we would crave thy vassalage. Rather it is that
we would have all who are gentle and simple offer their devotion to
that which alone makes the life of man comprehensible, of which
this broken clay is the too frail custodian.”
With a shamefaced trepidation, which only recently he had been
taught to feel, James Dodson sank to his knees before his dying
friend, and, in the fashion of the white-haired old man, he bore the
fragile hand to his lips. He then rose, and, without venturing to give
a look to either of the occupants of the little room, he made a
headlong flight through the shop into the all-enfolding, ever-
welcome darkness of the streets.
 LII
The poet and his father passed that night together, as they had
passed so many others, in the little room. The blind man, seated by
the fire, alternately dreamed and mused, while his father conned the
book which was spread open on the table. For the last time he
conned it with the blood like water in his veins. Yet in him now was
the mute acceptance of those who have passed through the whole
gamut of their suffering, upon whom experience has nothing more
to confer.
In the dead of the night, while the dying poet was murmuring
strange words in his sleep, the old man took for the last time from
their receptacle the chalice, the bistoury and the stylus. A hundred
times had his flesh been pierced in vain by that inexorable point, yet
again this night he made trial of it, and for the last time.
And now his trial was not without reward. No sooner had he dipped
the stylus in the red blood of his veins than it began to traverse the
page. For the first time since those fingers had grasped the pen, the
fruit of eighty years of vicissitude upon the wonderful earth flowed
to the parchment. Line by line grew the writing. That which he had
laboured these long years to express, that for which he had prayed,
fasted and kept vigil, was now born without a pang in this brief but
magic hour.
Faint with joy, yet also filled with a nameless fear, the old man
addressed the poet as soon as he awoke.
“Achilles,” he said, “wilt thou write thy page in the Book of the Ages,
in order that our dynasty may continue itself?”
“Nay, my father,” said the poet, with a noble conviction; “it is not for
me to inscribe my page in the Book. For are not the conditions
fulfilled by which our dynasty shall cease? A thousand years, my
father, has it striven to affirm itself; and it is written that in the
magic hour it shall achieve its apotheosis, it shall be effaced, in
obedience to Universal Law. Yet be of good courage, O my father, for
it perishes only to achieve re-embodiment in an ampler notation. In
the hour this little treatise upon human life is wrought, the archives
of our dynasty are as seed scattered broadcast upon the four winds
for the service of all the peoples in the world.”
Such words of high authority proceeding from those revered lips
filled the old man with a courage and a resolute acceptance of that
which was about to befall, which he had never hoped to achieve.
“Is it seemly, O Achilles,” said the old man, having derived a vital
strength from the poet’s wisdom, “to efface the means by which a
new lustre is given to the heavens?”
“It is as seemly, O my father,” the poet answered, “as it is to pluck
the ripe fruit from the stalk.”
It was therefore in no mood of passion, of wild soul-searching, that
the old man yielded those magic parchments which for a thousand
years had been as the archives of his race. He bowed to the decree
of fate with that calm acceptancy which, in the end, had ever been
the crown that awaited each individual destiny.
Yet, when this volume, which was a thousand years old, had passed
for ever from the precincts of the little room, he did not reveal the
marvellous circumstance to him who was blind.
However, in the evening of that day, the poet said, as if armed by a
prophetic vision, “My father, why dost thou turn no more to the Book
of the Ages?”
The old man took the poet’s fragile hand to his lips with a humble
gesture of obeisance.
“Because, O Achilles,” he said, “is it not seemly, since thou thyself
wouldst have it so, that when the ripe fruit is plucked the stalk shall
be discarded?”
“Verily, my father, thy wisdom is commendable,” said the poet,
speaking in the perfect simplicity of the blood royal.
 LIII
After the Book of the Ages had been dispersed among the great
world out of doors, many were the days that elapsed ere the dying
poet’s faithful emissary was seen again in the little room. The old
man was thrown into a fever of dread lest so strange an envoy
should never return; but even in the extremity of his fears he was
consoled by the noble courage of the poet. From day to day he who
kept the chimney-side, and whose hours could be numbered as they
passed, retained a superhuman serenity throughout the whole of
this cruel period, which seemed to gnaw at the vitals of both. In his
invincible fortitude he even sought to assuage the distress of the
aged man, his father.
“He will never return, O Achilles,” wailed the old man.
“Our honest servant will not fail one who is the comrade of kingly
death, O my father,” said the blind poet, smiling in his faith.
“Must I pray for a miracle, Achilles?” said the old man, who looked to
him in all things now.
“We would have thee be of good faith, my father,” said the poet.
“Never yet was a destiny but that it fulfilled itself. The printing-
presses are groaning under these pages of ours. To-morrow they will
be strown like autumn leaves all about the floor of this little room.”
Yet the morrow came and the emissary did not return. Another
morrow dawned and yet he came not. Day succeeded day; the dying
poet became as one who has scarce the strength to raise his limbs;
the sands grew less and less in the glass; yet still no breathless
messenger issued forth from the streets of the great city.
In this long-drawn suspense such an anguish of despair besieged
the old man, that again and again he turned to the poet for the
sustenance which it was his to give.
“Be of good courage, O my father,” said the dying poet, yet at this
time the whole of his right side was become paralyzed, so that he
could no longer raise his right hand.
After listening full many weary nights and days for the ever-expected
tap upon the shutters of the shop, there came at last the familiar
sound in a December evening.
With unsteady limbs the old man went forth to unbar the door. Upon
the threshold stood Dodson, worn and pale.
“Do not tell me the miracle has not happened,” cried the old man in
a high, quavering tone.
“Yes, the miracle has happened,” said Dodson in a voice that was
thin and unstrung.
“And—and they have printed the mighty pages?” cried the old man.
“Yes,” said Dodson, “they are printing the cursed pages. I have the
proofs of the first volume under my coat. The others will be through
the press in a few days.”
The old man gave a cry of joy.
“Then the miracle has happened for the second time,” he said. “The
Book of the Ages was cherished by the world of men.”
“Call it what you like,” said Dodson. “Call it a miracle, call it a
business transaction, or call it a daylight robbery, or anything you
please. I can only say that James Dodson had to scour heaven and
earth to get that miserable two hundred pounds. I lied to the dealer;
I drew up a false pedigree for those infernal pages of parchments; I
cajoled them into believing that black was white; I proved to their
satisfaction that that cursed writing in red ink was that of the
Pharaohs, and was supposed to be indelible, because, do what they
would with their chemicals, they could not get it to come off.”
“Oh yes, yes,” said the old man, breathing heavily. “I should have
made it known to you that the writing in the Book of the Ages can
never be effaced.”
“Whatever that infernal writing was,” said Dodson, “it was the cause
of my not being able to get the two hundred pounds I asked for
from the dealers. Do what I would, say what I would, it was only by
sheer good fortune that I was able to get one. They happened to
take a fancy to the clasp of that infernal volume; and as I had the
presence of mind to tell them it was formerly the clasp of an ancient
Roman libellus, they wrote out a cheque for one hundred pounds,
less five per cent. for cash. And after that I had enormous difficulties
to raise the other hundred. Talk about the labours of Hercules; what
are they to the labours of one who attempts to raise a hundred
pounds upon no security in this Christian country? I lied to my aunt;
I put my name to an instrument that may land me in gaol; I lied to
Octavius; I cheated an insurance company; and, as a consequence
of all this, the great house of Crumpett and Hawker have undertaken
to send out this three-volume poem for review on the twelfth of
January. And let me tell you, old man, that in all the long and
honourable history of that world-famous publishing house, James
Dodson is the only man who has ever caused it to betray signs of
what you might call undignified haste.”
“No words of mine can requite you, sir,” said the white-haired man,
whose eyes welled with gratitude. “But yet the proud consciousness
is yours that unborn ages will be your debtors.”
“Their monickers on a note of hand or on a three months’ bill don’t
go for much at this hour of the day,” said James Dodson. “I too, like
poor Luney, appear to have made the mistake of being born before
my time. And it seems to me that of all the mistakes a man can
commit, there is none quite so bad as that.”
However, no sooner had Jimmy Dodson come again into the
presence of him who kept the little room, than all these tribulations
to which he had given so free an expression in the shop, yielded
immediately to that solicitude, mingled with awe, with which he had
come to regard him.
“Ah, friend,” said the dying poet, “so here are the printed pages at
last.”
“Yes, old boy, here they are at last,” said Jimmy Dodson.
“Give them to me,” said the poet, extending his left hand, which he
could scarcely raise.
Dodson placed a few of the printed sheets upon the extended palm,
which shook like gossamer; and as the poet, with a look of
composed passion, held them up before his sightless eyes, it seemed
almost that those dead orbs were again endowed with life.
“The paper is good,” said the poet, rubbing the pages against his
cheek in order that he might know its quality. “I hope the printing is
clear.”
“Yes, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, “a brand new fount, beautifully
clear.”
“Liberal margins, such as are beloved of the gentle reader?”
“Yes, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, “beautiful wide margins. It will
make a fine page.”
“And they are printing the poem in three volumes?” asked the poet,
“with a new phase in each; and also they are omitting the name of
the author from the title page?”
“Yes, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, “they are doing all that. All your
instructions are being carried out to the letter. By the way, would you
like a frontispiece in the first volume of the Wayfarer communing for
the first time with Earth, his Mother? I could get a chap I know to
draw it; last year he had a picture accepted at the Academy; and
Octavius would raise no objection.”
“No, no,” said the poet almost sternly.
“It was only a suggestion, you know, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson
with nervous humility. “You are not offended, old boy, are you?”
In answer the poet extended that weak left hand which he could
hardly raise. Dodson’s first impulse was to clasp the fragile fingers in
his own, which were of such power; but a glance at the countenance
of the blind poet caused this impulse to yield to a finer instinct.
Without in the least knowing why, Dodson sank to his knees and
saluted the extended hand with a reverence he could not have
exceeded had it been that of his sovereign.
 LIV
Every evening thenceforward until the third volume had been set up
in type, James Dodson would return to the little room with further
instalments of the printed pages, newly from the press. And full
many weary hours did the poet’s aged father labour through the day
and night to compare the manuscript with the printed work. Weak
and frail as the old man now was, half sightless as were his eyes, he
yet addressed himself to this task with a joyful rapture. Sometimes,
in the stress of the gladness that overcame him, he would read
aloud to the poet in his thin, quavering tones, some of those
passages whose quality he could not forbear to acclaim.
At these times the blind poet, ever sitting by the hearth, would
listen, breathing deep, with head uplifted, and with strange emotions
flitting across his inexpressibly beautiful face. And then when
through sheer weariness the voice of the aged man had ceased to
utter the wonderful music, he himself, in his rich and rare tones,
would take up the theme; and he would speak the lines of ineffable
majesty with a justice so delicate that his aged father needed no
longer to look at the manuscript, but was able to verify the printed
page by the poet’s voice.
Sometimes these labours would even be conducted in the presence
of James Dodson. And although that robust denizen of the great
world out of doors, whenever he found himself in his natural
element, could never bring himself to believe that the labours he
was undertaking with such an all-consuming zeal were being
conducted in the cause of reason and sanity, no sooner did he enter
the little room of an evening than his scepticism fell from him like an
outer garment.
It was not for him to understand the words that the poet and his
father recited with such a holy submission; they had no meanings
for his unaccustomed ears; but the dominion of the poet’s presence,
which sprang from that which was now upon his face, the wonderful
serenity of that sightless aspect filled the young man with an awe
and a credulity which he could not recognize as belonging to himself.
“I am going wrong,” he would say in his perplexity as he went his
ways about the great city, “and, of course, they are as wrong as
they can be—yet the marvellous thing is that they make you feel
that all the world is wrong, and that they are the only reasonable
people in it!”
One evening, after Jimmy Dodson had sat in a kind of entrancement
for several hours while the poet had recited many passages, he was
moved to ask with dry lips, “I say, old boy, Homer and Milton were
blind, weren’t they?”
“Tradition has it so,” said the poet, and his sightless aspect was
suffused with that secret and beautiful smile that had come to haunt
poor Dodson in his dreams. “But what is ‘tradition’ but an
adumbration of the light that never was?”
On the evening that the last line of the poem had been passed for
the press with an astonishing thoroughness and celerity by the co-
operation of two minds which had to be almost independent of the
use of the eyes, the poet committed these final pages to the care of
his faithful emissary with further injunctions for their prosperity in
the great world out of doors.
“Let our little treatise have reticence, chastity, sobriety,” he said.
“I wish you could see the binding I have chosen,” said Jimmy
Dodson. “Octavius calls it very chaste indeed—you can’t think what
an interest Octavius is taking in the publication. Octavius made one
error in his life, which we will not refer to now, but he has turned
out trumps over this. He would give his ears to know the name of
the author!”
“That is a secret you are pledged to respect,” said William Jordan in
his voice of soft irony.
“You can be quite easy about that, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson.
“Wild horses shall not drag it from me; and, of course, there is not a
soul in the world who would ever suspect that the author is you.”
“I trust you,” said the poet simply. “And there is only one further
charge with which I shall tax our friendship. I shall ask you to collect
all the papers that bear the impress of my hand, and lodge them at
the English Museum, in the custody of the English nation.”
James Dodson contrived to dissemble his bewildered surprise.
“Of course I will do so, old boy,” he said gravely and promptly. “I will
make a parcel of the manuscript now. It is too late to take it round
there to-night; but the first thing to-morrow I will take an hour off
from the office, and I will carry it to the English Museum myself.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said the poet. “I thank you in the name of
truth and of ages yet to be.”
 LV
Some time during the forenoon of the following day the
unprepossessing outline of an undersized young man with a short
black bristling moustache, who wore a bowler hat, a pair of smart
brown boots, and trim overcoat of blue melton cloth with a velvet
collar, might have been observed in conference with one of the
stalwart custodians of the portals of a massive building in the
purlieus of Bloomsbury. The young man, who was somewhat pale
and rather excited in his manner, bore under his right arm a brown-
paper parcel of not inconsiderable bulk.
“Can’t deal with it ’ere,” said the custodian of the portals, without
any display of amiability that would have incurred the charge of
excessive. “Better take it round to Mr. Tovey. First to the left, second
to the right when you come to the top of the second flight of stairs.”
In the course of a few minutes the bearer of the brown-paper parcel
had made his way into the presence of Mr. Tovey—a bald-headed
and black-coated gentleman whose mien was one of determined and
unalterable impassiveness.
Mr. Tovey viewed the bearer of the parcel, and particularly the parcel
itself, with a polite disfavour, which, however, did not in any sense
transcend the bounds indicated by an official courtesy.
“The English Museum Authorities,” said Mr. Tovey, as his visitor took
the liberty of depositing the brown-paper parcel upon a table
without seeking permission to do so, “the English Museum
Authorities are not empowered to undertake the care of the written
manuscripts or typescripts of living persons.”
“Yes, but you see,” said the bearer of the parcel anxiously, “but you
see, the poor chap happens to be dying.”
“I am afraid, sir,” said Mr. Tovey, with a sympathy that was very
nicely poised, “that even that unfortunate contingency is not
sufficient to justify the Museum Authorities from breaking through
their fixed rule. That rule is perfectly explicit; it cannot admit the
manuscripts or typescripts of living persons.”
“Are there no exceptions?” said the bearer of the parcel.
“If exceptions there are,” said Mr. Tovey impressively, “and as I
speak there are none I can call to mind, they would only be in
favour of persons of such remarkable distinction that they would
form no precedent.”
“That is all right, then,” said the bearer of the parcel with an air of
relief, “because it happens that this is the work of the greatest poet
in the world.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Tovey with a very well-bred air.
The bearer of the parcel repeated his assertion.
“Is not that a somewhat comprehensive claim to advance on behalf
of a living person?” said Mr. Tovey, enunciating his words very
delicately.
“Well, he seems to think so, at any rate,” said the bearer of the
parcel, “and I suppose he ought to know.”
“Would you mind informing me of the name of this accomplished
person?” said Mr. Tovey, with an effective combination of polite
interest and equally polite deprecation.
“His name is to be kept a secret,” said the bearer of the parcel. “He
doesn’t want it to be known.”
“I assume that his poems have been published?” said Mr. Tovey.
“Not yet,” said the bearer of the parcel; “but,” he added, with an air
of weight that was not without its effect, “they are going to be
published by Crumpett and Hawker on the twelfth of January.”
“Curious, curious,” said Mr. Tovey.
However, the announcement itself seemed in some measure to
reassure this very courteous black-coated gentleman, since he
requested the bearer of the parcel to untie the string that he might
take a glance at the manuscript. This the young man proceeded to
do; and it must be said that for one whose proud boast had once
been that his self-possession was invincible, his heart began to beat
with a preposterous violence, as soon as Mr. Tovey came to examine
the contents of the parcel.
Jimmy Dodson narrowly scrutinized Mr. Tovey’s impassive
countenance as he ran his fingers through the pages of the
manuscript, all stained and defaced by contact with compositors’
pencils and with printers’ thumbs.
“Rather incoherent, is it not?” said Mr. Tovey mildly, as he turned the
pages over. “Is it not somewhat pagan in tone—that is, as far as
there is a tone—there does not appear to be any very definite
conception of Deity—and rather incoherent—rather incoherent. I am
afraid this will never do.”
The last by now familiar phrase seemed to pierce the heart and
brain of James Dodson.
“I—I suppose, sir,” he said with scared eyes, “you occupying a
responsible position in the English Museum, you would be rather a
judge of poetry?”
“I am not accustomed to make such a claim on my own behalf,” said
Mr. Tovey, in whose well-regulated bosom a sympathetic chord
seemed to have been touched, for at least he seemed to unbend a
little and he seemed to do it very nicely, “but perhaps I am entitled
to say that the Oxbridge Press paid me the compliment of inviting
me to edit their Chaucer, their Spenser, their Keats, their Felicia
Hemans, and their James Russell Lowell. And I have also competed
for the Newdigate Prize.”
Jimmy Dodson strangled a groan. He clenched his hands in
desperation.
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