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LETTER XXVI.: Hume's Account of his Quarrel with Rousseau. - David Hume, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan [1756]Edition used:Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888).
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LETTER XXVI.Hume's Account of his Quarrel with Rousseau.
Oct. 17661. ] DearSir,My Friends at Paris have thought it absolutely necessary to publish an Account which I sent them, of my Transactions with Rousseau, together with the original Papers: The Affair had made a great Noise every where, and he had been such a Fool, as to write Defiances against me to all parts of Europe; so that the Justification of my Character they thought requir’d a Publication, which, however, is very much against my Will, coud it have been prevented2. . The whole will compose a pretty large Pamphlet, which, I fancy, the Curiosity of the Public will make tolerably saleable. I desire you to take upon you the printing and publishing of it; and if any Profit result from it to you, I shall be very happy; reserving the after property and Disposal of the Pamphlet to myself. You will take in what Bookseller you please3. ; Becket4. or Caddel5. or any other: For Mr. Millar woud not think such a Trifle worthy of his Attention. I shall immediatly send you up a Copy of the original Manuscript, which is partly English, partly French; but more of the latter Language, which must be translated. I shall employ Mr. Coutt's Cover6. . The Method the Translator must proceed is this7. : My Friends at Paris are to send me over in a Parcel ten Copies, which will be deliverd to Miss Elliot8. . I have desird her to send them to you; open the Parcel and take out one Copy for your own Use. Get a discreet and careful Translator9. : Let him compare exactly the French Narration with my English: Where they agree, let him insert my English: Where they differ, let him follow the French and translate it: The Reason of this is, that I allowd my Friends at Paris to make what alterations they thought proper10. ; and I am desirous of following exactly the Paris Edition. All my Letters must be printed verbatim, conformable to the Manuscript I send you. My Parisian Friends are to add a Preface of their own composing, which must be translated: Add, by way of Nota bene, that the Original Letters will all be deposited in the Musæum11. . The Reason of this is, that Rousseau has been so audacious as to write, that I dare not publish his Letters without falsifying them12. . If you think, that a Republication of the French Edition will answer the Expence, I am also willing you should do it13. . Of the remaining nine Copies, send one to Lord Hertford, lower Grosvenor Street, another to Mr. Secretary Conway, another to Horace Walpole, Arlington Street14. , another to Lady Hervey15. , St. James Place. Send the remaining five to me by any private hand or by the Waggon. Mr. Kincaid16. tells me, that two Years ago he sent enclosd in a Parcel of Yours a corrected Quarto Copy of my History to be deliverd to Mr. Millar. Yet Mr. Millar told me in London that he had never seen any such thing. I suppose he has forgot and will be able to find it upon Search. Try, if you can recollect and put him in mind of it17. . I am Dear Sir Your most obedient humble ServantDavid Hume. [1.]Note 1. Hume returned to Edinburgh late in this summer. Millar writing to him from Kew Green, on Oct. 4, says:—‘I could scold you most heartily if you were here, and so could Mrs. Millar, for breaking your appointment with friends that love you sincerely, when they had provided a turtle, and a fine haunch of forest venison for your entertainment, and to be disappointed of you and Geo. Scott two such heroes was too much, though we had tolerable heroes: both your losses was very mortifying, and I am sure to more cordial friends you could not go, though perhaps to more powerful.’ Hume replied from Edinburgh, on Oct. 21:—‘I hope to be often merry with you and Mrs. Millar in your House in Pall Mall; and I wish both of you much Health and Satisfaction in enjoying it.’ M. S. R. S. E. [2.]Note 2. The following extracts shew the opinions formed by Hume and others as to the expediency of publication:— [3.]Note 3. Strahan, I think, had no shop. His chief business was that of a printer, but he was also a publisher. In that capacity he would need to ‘take in a Bookseller’ as his partner in the venture. Thus Johnson's Political Tracts bear at the foot of the title page:—‘Printed for W. Strahan; and T. Cadell in the Strand.’ While Cadell's address is given, Strahan's is not. [4.]Note 4. It was published by Becket and his partner under the following title:—A Concise and Genuine Account of the Dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau; with the Letters that passed between them during their Controversy. As also the Letters of the Hon. Mr. Walpole and Mr. d’Alembert, relative to this extraordinary Affair. Translated from the French. London. Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, near Surry-street, in the Strand. MDCCLXVI. Becket was the publisher of Ossian, and, it should seem, not over-scrupulous. ‘What does Becket mean,’ wrote Boswell, ‘by the Originals of Fingal and other poems of Ossian, which he advertises to have lain in his shop?’ Boswell's Johnson, ii. 294. [5.]Note 5. Thomas Cadell was born at Bristol in 1742. In 1758 he was apprenticed to Andrew Millar. In 1765 he became his partner, and in 1767 his successor, In conjunction with Strahan he published the Histories of Robertson and Gibbon, the later editions of Hume's Works, and some of the later Works of Johnson. They were part proprietors also of Blackstone's Commentaries. Gibbon described him as ‘that honest and liberal bookseller.’ Stewart's Robertson, p. 366. It was at his house that the dinner was given, at which Hume, by his own request, met ‘as many of the persons who had written against him as could be collected.’ Rogers's Table Talk, p. 106. In 1793 he retired, ‘leaving the business which he had established, as the first in Great Britain,’ to his son Thomas, and to William Davies. In 1798 he was elected Alderman of Walbrook Ward. He died on Dec. 27, 1802. See Nichols's Lit. Anec. iii. 388, 696; vi. 441; and Dict. of Nat. Biog. viii. 179. He was not related to Scott's publisher, Robert Cadell of Edinburgh, though it was ‘from the respectable house of Cadell and Davies in the Strand, that appeared in the course of January 1802, the first two volumes of the Minstrelsy, which may be said to have first introduced Scott as an original writer to the English public.’ Lockhart's Scott, ed. 1839, ii. 79. [6.]Note 6. James Coutts, a banker in the Strand, was member for Edinburgh City (Parl. Hist. xv. 1099), and so could frank letters. He wrote to Hume, probably soon after his election in 1762, a modest letter in which he complains of his unfitness for his new position. He says:—‘With all pleasures there are great mixtures of mortification, and every instant my limited education stares me more and more in the face. I have hardly lookt on any but Manuscript folios since I was 14. You’ll say from idleness or want of taste. I say no, but from too much business and bad health. My constitution will probably be always unfit for deep study; but pray is there no remedying this great defect a little without much study, for rather as (sic) suffer such mortifications I had better continue a Banker still, which I‘m convinced would enable me better to purchase Merse Acres. But seriously I wish you would give me some advice on this head, what abridgements to read, &c.’ In another letter to Hume (also undated) he writes:—‘Coll. Graeme and Mr. Drummond Blair are candidates for Perthshire; the former will carry it unless the Pretender dies, and leaves some old fools at liberty to take the oaths.’ M. S. R. S. E. [7.]Note 7. Hume sent Strahan a copy of the manuscript which he had placed in the hands of his French friends for publication in France. It contained his own narrative, and such part of his correspondence with Rousseau as he had preserved. Rousseau's letters to him were in French, and his to Rousseau in English. Each of the translators therefore had but a portion of the document to translate. The French editors, however, had his leave to make whatever alterations in his account they pleased. All these alterations are, he says, to be adopted, and his own narrative in such passages is not to be followed. In his next letter he gives contrary directions; for by that time he had seen the Paris editions and been displeased with some of the changes. His French translator was Suard, who translated Robertson's Charles V (Stewart's Robertson, p. 218). Gibbon, writing in 1776 about the first volume of his Decline and Fall, which had lately appeared, says:—‘To-morrow I write to Suard, a very skilful translator of Paris, who was here in the spring with the Neckers, to get him (if not too late) to undertake it.’ Gibbon's Misc. Works, ii. 176. It was, no doubt, at this visit to London that ‘Suard at Reynolds's saw Burke for the first time, when Johnson touched him on the shoulder, and said, “Le grand Burke.”’ Boswell's Johnson, iv. 20, n. 1. When in 1774 he was admitted into the French Academy, Voltaire wrote to him:—‘Je vais relire votre Discours pour la quatrième fois.’ Œuvres de Voltaire, lvi. 387. It was to him that Mrs. Montagu made her clever reply, when Voltaire's ‘invective’ against Shakespeare was read at the Academy. He said to her:—‘Je crois, Madame, que vous êtes un peu fâchée de ce que vous venez d’entendre.’ She replied, ‘Moi, Monsieur, point du tout! Je ne suis pas amie de M. Voltaire.’ Walpole's Letters, vi. 394. [8.]Note 8. ‘I shall lodge in Miss Elliot's, Lisle Street, Leicester Fields,’ Hume wrote on June 29, 1761. Burton's Hume, ii. 90. She was, I fancy, the lady for whose creature comforts he wished to provide in a letter written from London on May 15, 1759. ‘If you pass by Edinburgh, please bring me two pounds of rapee, such as Peggy Elliot uses to take. You will get it at Gillespy's near the Cross.’ The letter which thus begins with Peggy Elliot and her snuff ends with compliments to Adam Smith, and from Dr. Warburton. Ib. p. 62. She is again mentioned in an amusing letter dated July 6 of the same year, in which Hume shows his imagination in inventing extravagant news. ‘Miss Elliot,’ he writes, ‘yesterday morning declared her Marriage with Dr. Armstrong [the Poet]; but we were surprised in the afternoon to find Mr. Short, the Optician, come in and challenge her for his Wife. It seems she has been married privately for some time to both of them.’ M. S. R. S. E. No doubt she was a decent elderly body, the last person to give grounds for any scandal. [9.]Note 9. The English translator was scarcely up to his work, as the following passages show. [10.]Note 10. With some of these alterations Hume was displeased. Writing to Horace Walpole he says:—'several passages in my narrative in which I mention you are all altered in the translation, and rendered much less obliging than I wrote them.’ He suspected d’Alembert of having had this done through malevolence towards Walpole. Walpole's Works, ed. 1798, iv. 262, 7. [11.]Note 11. Hume wrote to the Librarian of the British Museum on Jany. 23, 1767:—‘I was obliged to say in my Preface that the originals would be consigned in the Museum. I hope you have no objection to the receiving them. I send them by my friend Mr. Ramsay. Be so good as to give them the corner of any drawer. I fancy few people will trouble you by desiring a sight of them.’ The Trustees refused to accept them. Dr. Maty wrote to Hume on April 22:—‘I longed to have some conversation with you on the subject of the papers, which were remitted to me by the hands of Mr. Ramsay, and, as our Trustees did not think proper to receive them, to restore them into yours.’ They are in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Burton's Hume, ii. 359–360. Dr. Maty was Under-Librarian of the Museum. He became Principal Librarian in 1772. Knight's Eng. Cyclo. of Biog. iv. 153. Perhaps the refusal to receive the papers was due to idleness. The Librarian may have dreaded troublesome visitors. How badly the Museum was managed eighteen years later is shown by W. Hutton in his Journey to London, p. 114. He paid two shillings for a ticket of admission, and was then ‘hackneyed through the rooms with violence,’ being allowed just thirty minutes to see everything. [12.]Note 12. ‘Wooton, le 2 Aoῦt. M. Hume écrit, dit-on, qu’il veut publier toutes les pièces relatives à cette affaire. C‘est, j‘en réponds, ce qu’il se gardera de faire, ou ce qu’il se gardera bien au moins de faire fidèlement…. Plus je pense à la publication promise par M. Hume, moins je puis concevoir qu’il l’exécute. S‘il l’ose faire, à moins d’énormes falsifications, je prédis hardiment, que malgré son extrême adresse et celle de ses amis, sans même que je m’en mêle, M. Hume est un homme démasqué. Rousseau to M. Guy. Œuvres de Rousseau, ed. 1782, xxiv. 387. [13.]Note 13. It was published under the title of Exposé succinct de la contestacion qui s‘est élevée entre M. Hume et M. Rousseau, avec les pièces justificatives. Londres, 1766, 12°. British Museum Catalogue. [14.]Note 14. ‘I was born,’ writes Horace Walpole, ‘in Arlington Street, near St. James's, London, September 24, 1717, O. S.’ Letters, i. lxi. Writing on Dec. 1, 1768, he says:—‘From my earliest memory Arlington Street has been the ministerial street. The Duke of Grafton is actually coming into the house of Mr. Pelham, which my Lord President is quitting, and which occupies too the ground on which my father lived; and Lord Weymouth has just taken the Duke of Dorset's.’ lb. v. 136. On Nov. 6, 1766, having received Hume's pamphlet, he wrote to him:—‘You have, I own, surprised me by suffering your quarrel with Rousseau to be printed, contrary to your determination when you left London, and against the advice of all your best friends here; I may add, contrary to your own nature, which has always inclined you to despise literary squabbles, the jest and scorn of all men of sense…. You have acted, as I should have expected if you would print, with sense, temper, and decency; and, what is still more uncommon, with your usual modesty. I cannot say so much for your editors. But editors and commentators are seldom modest. Even to this day that race ape the dictatorial tone of commentators at the restoration of learning, when the mob thought that Greek and Latin could give men the sense which they wanted in their native languages. But Europe1 is grown a little wiser, and holds these magnificent pretensions now in proper contempt.’ Ib. v. 23. [15.]Note 15. Lady Hervey was the widow of John, Lord Hervey, whom Pope, in the Prologue to the Satires (l. 305), attacked as Sporus with a brutality that defeated itself. Her brother-in-law was ‘Harry Hervey,’ of whom Johnson said:—‘He was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey I shall love him.’ Boswell's Johnson, i. 106. She was the Mary Lepell whom Pope introduces in his Answer to the Question of Mrs. Howe, What is prudery?
Elwin and Courthorpe's Pope, iv. 447.
Swift wrote to Arbuthnot on Nov. 8, 1726:—‘I gave your service to Lady Harvey. She is in a little sort of a miff about a ballad that was writ on her to the tune of Molly Mogg, and sent to her in the name of a begging poet.’ Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xvii. 97. [16.]Note 16. Alexander Kincaid, Printer and Stationer to his Majesty for Scotland, died on Jany. 21, 1777, in his year of office as Lord Provost of Edinburgh. Gent. Mag. 1777, p. 48. Dr. Blair wrote to Strahan on Jany. 28, 1777:—‘I am just come from the burials of our friend poor Kincaid. He was interred with all the public honours which could be given him; and his funeral was indeed the most numerous and magnificent procession I ever saw here. The whole inhabitants were either attendants or spectators.’ Barker MSS. [17.]Note 17. Hume, writing to Millar from Paris on April 23, 1764, about a new edition of his History, says:—‘You were in the wrong to make any edition without informing me; because I left in Scotland a copy very fully corrected with a few alterations, which ought to have been followed. I shall write to my sister to send it to you.’ Burton's Hume, ii. 201. On Oct. 21, 1766, he wrote to him:—‘Kincaid sent you the corrected copy in a parcel of Strahan's. This circumstance is entered by Kincaid in his minute book of 16 of Oct. 1764. When in London I asked you about this copy, and you told me that you had never heard of it. I suppose this is only a defect of memory…. If you recover it, be so good as to send it me by the wagon.’ M. S. R. S. E. Hume seems to imply that Millar was not telling the truth. Later on he learnt that on another matter he had lied to him (post, Letter of March 19, 1773). On Nov. 2 Millar replied that he had the corrected copy. M. S. R. S. E. [1.]Note 1. Hume returned to Edinburgh late in this summer. Millar writing to him from Kew Green, on Oct. 4, says:—‘I could scold you most heartily if you were here, and so could Mrs. Millar, for breaking your appointment with friends that love you sincerely, when they had provided a turtle, and a fine haunch of forest venison for your entertainment, and to be disappointed of you and Geo. Scott two such heroes was too much, though we had tolerable heroes: both your losses was very mortifying, and I am sure to more cordial friends you could not go, though perhaps to more powerful.’ Hume replied from Edinburgh, on Oct. 21:—‘I hope to be often merry with you and Mrs. Millar in your House in Pall Mall; and I wish both of you much Health and Satisfaction in enjoying it.’ M. S. R. S. E. [2.]Note 2. The following extracts shew the opinions formed by Hume and others as to the expediency of publication:— [14.]Note 14. ‘I was born,’ writes Horace Walpole, ‘in Arlington Street, near St. James's, London, September 24, 1717, O. S.’ Letters, i. lxi. Writing on Dec. 1, 1768, he says:—‘From my earliest memory Arlington Street has been the ministerial street. The Duke of Grafton is actually coming into the house of Mr. Pelham, which my Lord President is quitting, and which occupies too the ground on which my father lived; and Lord Weymouth has just taken the Duke of Dorset's.’ lb. v. 136. On Nov. 6, 1766, having received Hume's pamphlet, he wrote to him:—‘You have, I own, surprised me by suffering your quarrel with Rousseau to be printed, contrary to your determination when you left London, and against the advice of all your best friends here; I may add, contrary to your own nature, which has always inclined you to despise literary squabbles, the jest and scorn of all men of sense…. You have acted, as I should have expected if you would print, with sense, temper, and decency; and, what is still more uncommon, with your usual modesty. I cannot say so much for your editors. But editors and commentators are seldom modest. Even to this day that race ape the dictatorial tone of commentators at the restoration of learning, when the mob thought that Greek and Latin could give men the sense which they wanted in their native languages. But Europe1 is grown a little wiser, and holds these magnificent pretensions now in proper contempt.’ Ib. v. 23. [1]Johnson defines Bag as An ornamental purse of silk tied to men's hair. [1]Walpole, writing from Paris on Nov. 21, 1765, had spoken with scorn both of Hume and Rousseau. ‘I desire,’ he says, ‘to die when I have nobody left to laugh with me. I have never yet seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedists, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history, Mr. Pitt, all are to me impostors in their various ways.’ Walpole's Letters, iv. 441.
[1]Walpole in italicising Europe refers to Hume's statement that ‘Roussean had sent letters of defiance all over Europe.’ Aute, pp. 90, 91. |
