A Waistcoat soaked in Tears

Douglas Johnson

• The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754-1762 by Maurice Cranston
  Allen Lane, 399 pp, £20.00, February 1991, ISBN 0 7139 9051 1
• Writings of Rousseau. Vol I: Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques. Dialogues. edited by Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly, translated by Judith Bush, Christopher Kelly and Roger Masters
  University Press of New England, 277 pp, $40.00, March 1990, ISBN 0 87451 495 9

About Rousseau, as about Romanticism, it is tempting to use the word ‘disorderly’. Maurice Cranston showed us in the first volume of this, the most masterly of biographies how he had spent his early life as a wanderer and adventurer, he had been an itinerant tutor, a humble music-copier, an ambitious composer; the lover of a Swiss countess and the secretary to a diplomat; he had become a fashionable writer with an obsession about preserving his independence; he was an uneasy Catholic who needed a religion and who thought that he had found it in Protestantism; he was someone who discovered that his waistcoat was soaked in tears but who had not been aware that he had been weeping.