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INTRODUCTION

Many readers will no doubt be tempted to exclaim on seeing my title: “Rousseau and no end!” The outpour of books on Rousseau had indeed in the period immediately preceding the war become somewhat portentous.¹ This preoccupation with Rousseau is after all easy to explain. It is his somewhat formidable privilege to represent more fully than any other one person a great international movement. To attack Rousseau or to defend him is most often only a way of attacking or defending this movement.

Many readers will no doubt be tempted to exclaim on seeing my title: “Rousseau and no end!” The outpour of books on Rousseau had indeed in the period immediately preceding the war become somewhat portentous. This preoccupation with Rousseau is after all easy to explain. It is his somewhat formidable privilege to represent more fully than any other one person a great international movement. To attack Rousseau or to defend him is most often only a way of attacking or defending this movement.

It is from this point of view at all events that the present work is conceived. I have not undertaken a systematic study of Rousseau’s life and doctrines. The appearance of his name in my title is justified, if at all, simply because he comes at a fairly early stage in the international movement the rise and growth of which I am tracing, and has on the whole supplied me with the most significant illustrations of it. I have already put forth certain views regarding this movement in three previous volumes.² Though each one of these volumes attempts to do justice to a particular topic, it is at the same time intended to be a link in a continuous argument. I hope that I may be allowed to speak here with some frankness of the main trend of this argument both on its negative and on its positive, or constructive, side.

Perhaps the best key to both sides of my argument is found in the lines of Emerson I have taken as epigraph for “Literature and the American College”:

 
There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled, —
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.
 

On its negative side my argument is directed against this undue emphasis on the “law for thing,” against the attempt to erect on naturalistic foundations a complete philosophy of life. I define two main forms of naturalism – on the one hand, utilitarian and scientific and, on the other, emotional naturalism. The type of romanticism I am studying is inseparably bound up with emotional naturalism.

This type of romanticism encouraged by the naturalistic movement is only one of three main types I distinguish and I am dealing for the most part with only one aspect of it. But even when thus circumscribed the subject can scarcely be said to lack importance; for if I am right in my conviction as to the unsoundness of a Rousseauistic philosophy of life, it follows that the total tendency of the Occident at present is away from rather than towards civilization.

On the positive side, my argument aims to reassert the “law for man,” and its special discipline against the various forms of naturalistic excess. At the very mention of the word discipline I shall be set down in certain quarters as reactionary. But does it necessarily follow from a plea for the human law that one is a reactionary or in general a traditionalist? An American writer of distinction was once heard to remark that he saw in the world to-day but two classes of persons, – the mossbacks and the mountebanks, and that for his part he preferred to be a mossback. One should think twice before thus consenting to seem a mere relic of the past. The ineffable smartness of our young radicals is due to the conviction that, whatever else they may be, they are the very pink of modernity. Before sharing their conviction it might be well to do a little preliminary defining of such terms as modern and the modern spirit. It may then turn out that the true difficulty with our young radicals is not that they are too modern but that they are not modern enough. For, though the word modern is often and no doubt inevitably used to describe the more recent or the most recent thing, this is not its sole use. It is not in this sense alone that the word is used by writers like Goethe and Sainte-Beuve and Renan and Arnold. What all these writers mean by the modern spirit is the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things on authority. This is what Renan means, for example, when he calls Petrarch the “founder of the modern spirit in literature,” or Arnold when he explains why the Greeks of the great period seem more modern to us than the men of the Middle Ages.³

Now what I have myself tried to do is to be thoroughly modern in this sense. I hold that one should not only welcome the efforts of the man of science at his best to put the natural law on a positive and critical basis, but that one should strive to emulate him in one’s dealings with the human law; and so become a complete positivist. My main objection to the movement I am studying is that it has failed to produce complete positivists. Instead of facing honestly the emergency created by its break with the past the leaders of this movement have inclined to deny the duality of human nature, and then sought to dissimulate this mutilation of man under a mass of intellectual and emotional sophistry. The proper procedure in refuting these incomplete positivists is not to appeal to some dogma or outer authority but rather to turn against them their own principles. Thus Diderot, a notable example of the incomplete positivist and a chief source of naturalistic tendency, says that “everything is experimental in man.” Now the word experimental has somewhat narrowed in meaning since the time of Diderot. If one takes the saying to mean that everything in man is a matter of experience one should accept it unreservedly and then plant oneself firmly on the facts of experience that Diderot and other incomplete positivists have refused to recognize.

The man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience, is an individualist. To be modern in the sense I have defined is not only to be positive and critical, but also – and this from the time of Petrarch – to be individualistic. The establishment of a sound type of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem. It is right here that the failure of the incomplete positivist, the man who is positive only according to the natural law, is most conspicuous. What prevails in the region of the natural law is endless change and relativity; therefore the naturalistic positivist attacks all the traditional creeds and dogmas for the very reason that they aspire to fixity. Now all the ethical values of civilization have been associated with these fixed beliefs; and so it has come to pass that with their undermining by naturalism the ethical values themselves are in danger of being swept away in the everlasting flux. Because the individual who views life positively must give up unvarying creeds and dogmas “anterior, exterior, and superior” to himself, it has been assumed that he must also give up standards. For standards imply an element of oneness somewhere, with reference to which it is possible to measure the mere manifoldness and change. The naturalistic individualist, however, refuses to recognize any such element of oneness. His own private and personal self is to be the measure of all things and this measure itself, he adds, is constantly changing. But to stop at this stage is to be satisfied with the most dangerous of half-truths. Thus Bergson’s assertion that “life is a perpetual gushing forth of novelties” is in itself only a dangerous half-truth of this kind. The constant element in life is, no less than the element of novelty and change, a matter of observation and experience. As the French have it, the more life changes the more it is the same thing.

If, then, one is to be a sound individualist, an individualist with human standards – and in an age like this that has cut loose from its traditional moorings, the very survival of civilization would seem to hinge on its power to produce such a type of individualist – one must grapple with what Plato terms the problem of the One and the Many. My own solution of this problem, it may be well to point out, is not purely Platonic. Because one can perceive immediately an element of unity in things, it does not follow that one is justified in establishing a world of essences or entities or “ideas” above the flux. To do this is to fall away from a positive and critical into a more or less speculative attitude; it is to risk setting up a metaphysic of the One. Those who put exclusive emphasis on the element of change in things are in no less obvious danger of falling away from the positive and critical attitude into a metaphysic of the Many.⁴ This for example is the error one finds in the contemporary thinkers who seem to have the cry, thinkers like James and Bergson and Dewey and Croce. They are very far from satisfying the requirements of a complete positivism; they are seeking rather to build up their own intoxication with the element of change into a complete view of life, and so are turning their backs on one whole side of experience in a way that often reminds one of the ancient Greek sophists. The history of philosophy since the Greeks is to a great extent the history of the clashes of the metaphysicians of the One and the metaphysicians of the Many. In the eyes of the complete positivist this history therefore reduces itself largely to a monstrous logomachy.

Life does not give here an element of oneness and there an element of change. It gives a oneness that is always changing. The oneness and the change are inseparable. Now if what is stable and permanent is felt as real, the side of life that is always slipping over into something else or vanishing away entirely is, as every student of psychology knows, associated rather with the feeling of illusion. If a man attends solely to this side of life he will finally come, like Leconte de Lisle, to look upon it as a “torrent of mobile chimeras,” as an “endless whirl of vain appearances.” To admit that the oneness of life and the change are inseparable is therefore to admit that such reality as man can know positively is inextricably mixed up with illusion. Moreover man does not observe the oneness that is always changing from the outside; he is a part of the process, he is himself a oneness that is always changing. Though imperceptible at any particular moment, the continuous change that is going on leads to differences – those, let us say, between a human individual at the age of six weeks and the same individual at the age of seventy – which are sufficiently striking: and finally this human oneness that is always changing seems to vanish away entirely. From all this it follows that an enormous element of illusion – and this is a truth the East has always accepted more readily than the West – enters into the idea of personality itself. If the critical spirit is once allowed to have its way, it will not rest content until it has dissolved life into a mist of illusion. Perhaps the most positive and critical account of man in modern literature is that of Shakespeare:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

But, though strictly considered, life is but a web of illusion and a dream within a dream, it is a dream that needs to be managed with the utmost discretion, if it is not to turn into a nightmare. In other words, however much life may mock the metaphysician, the problem of conduct remains. There is always the unity at the heart of the change; it is possible, however, to get at this real and abiding element and so at the standards with reference to which the dream of life may be rightly managed only through a veil of illusion. The problem of the One and the Many, the ultimate problem of thought, can therefore be solved only by a right use of illusion. In close relation to illusion and the questions that arise in connection with it is all that we have come to sum up in the word imagination. The use of this word, at least in anything like its present extension, is, one should note, comparatively recent. Whole nations and periods of the past can scarcely be said to have had any word corresponding to imagination in this extended sense. Yet the thinkers of the past have treated, at times profoundly, under the head of fiction or illusion the questions that we should treat under the head of imagination.⁵ In the “Masters of Modern French Criticism” I was above all preoccupied with the problem of the One and the Many and the failure of the nineteenth century to deal with it adequately. My effort in this present work is to show that this failure can be retrieved only by a deeper insight into the imagination and its all-important rôle in both literature and life. Man is cut off from immediate contact with anything abiding and therefore worthy to be called real, and condemned to live in an element of fiction or illusion, but he may, I have tried to show, lay hold with the aid of the imagination on the element of oneness that is inextricably blended with the manifoldness and change and to just that extent may build up a sound model for imitation. One tends to be an individualist with true standards, to put the matter somewhat differently, only in so far as one understands the relation between appearance and reality – what the philosophers call the epistemological problem. This problem, though it cannot be solved abstractly and metaphysically, can be solved practically and in terms of actual conduct. Inasmuch as modern philosophy has failed to work out any such solution, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that modern philosophy is bankrupt, not merely from Kant, but from Descartes.

The supreme maxim of the ethical positivist is: By their fruits shall ye know them. If I object to a romantic philosophy it is because I do not like its fruits. I infer from its fruits that this philosophy has made a wrong use of illusion. “All those who took the romantic promises at their face value,” says Bourget, “rolled in abysses of despair and ennui.”⁶ If any one still holds, as many of the older romanticists held, that it is a distinguished thing to roll in abysses of despair and ennui, he should read me no further. He will have no sympathy with my point of view. If any one, on the other hand, accepts my criterion but denies that Rousseauistic living has such fruits, it has been my aim so to accumulate evidence that he will be confronted with the task of refuting not a set of theories but a body of facts. My whole method, let me repeat, is experimental, or it might be less ambiguous to say if the word were a fortunate one, experiential. The illustrations I have given of any particular aspect of the movement are usually only a small fraction of those I have collected – themselves no doubt only a fraction of the illustrations that might be collected from printed sources. M. Maigron’s investigation⁷ into the fruits of romantic living suggests the large additions that might be made to these printed sources from manuscript material.

My method indeed is open in one respect to grave misunderstanding. From the fact that I am constantly citing passages from this or that author and condemning the tendency for which these passages stand, the reader will perhaps be led to infer a total condemnation of the authors so quoted. But the inference may be very incorrect. I am not trying to give rounded estimates of individuals – delightful and legitimate as that type of criticism is – but to trace main currents as a part of my search for a set of principles to oppose to naturalism. I call attention for example to the Rousseauistic and primitivistic elements in Wordsworth but do not assert that this is the whole truth about Wordsworth. One’s views as to the philosophical value of Rousseauism must, however, weigh heavily in a total judgment of Wordsworth. Criticism is such a difficult art because one must not only have principles but must apply them flexibly and intuitively. No one would accuse criticism at present of lacking flexibility. It has grown so flexible in fact as to become invertebrate. One of my reasons for practicing the present type of criticism, is the conviction that because of a lack of principles the type of criticism that aims at rounded estimates of individuals is rapidly ceasing to have any meaning.

I should add that if I had attempted rounded estimates they would often have been more favorable than might be gathered from my comments here and elsewhere on the romantic leaders. One is justified in leaning towards severity in the laying down of principles, but should nearly always incline to indulgence in the application of them. In a sense one may say with Goethe that the excellencies are of the individual, the defects of the age. It is especially needful to recall distinctions of this kind in the case of Rousseau himself and my treatment of him. M. Lanson has dwelt on the strange duality of Rousseau’s nature. “The writer,” he says, “is a poor dreamy creature who approaches action only with alarm and with every manner of precaution, and who understands the applications of his boldest doctrines in a way to reassure conservatives and satisfy opportunists. But the work for its part detaches itself from the author, lives its independent life, and, heavily charged with revolutionary explosives which neutralize the moderate and conciliatory elements Rousseau has put into it for his own satisfaction, it exasperates and inspires revolt and fires enthusiasms and irritates hatreds; it is the mother of violence, the source of all that is uncompromising, it launches the simple souls who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest of the absolute, an absolute to be realized now by anarchy and now by social despotism.”⁸ I am inclined to discover in the Rousseau who, according to M. Lanson, is merely timorous, a great deal of shrewdness and at times something even better than shrewdness. The question is not perhaps very important, for M. Lanson is surely right in affirming that the Rousseau who has moved the world – and that for reasons I shall try to make plain – is Rousseau the extremist and foe of compromise; and so it is to this Rousseau that as a student of main tendencies I devote almost exclusive attention. I am not, however, seeking to make a scapegoat even of the radical and revolutionary Rousseau. One of my chief objections, indeed, to Rousseauism, as will appear in the following pages, is that it encourages the making of scapegoats.

If I am opposed to Rousseauism because of its fruits in experience, I try to put what I have to offer as a substitute on the same positive basis. Now experience is of many degrees: first of all one’s purely personal experience, an infinitesimal fragment; and then the experience of one’s immediate circle, of one’s time and country, of the near past and so on in widening circles. The past which as dogma the ethical positivist rejects, as experience he not only admits but welcomes. He can no more dispense with it indeed than the naturalistic positivist can dispense with his laboratory. He insists moreover on including the remoter past in his survey. Perhaps the most pernicious of all the conceits fostered by the type of progress we owe to science is the conceit that we have outgrown this older experience. One should endeavor, as Goethe says, to oppose to the aberrations of the hour, the masses of universal history. There are special reasons just now why this background to which one appeals should not be merely Occidental. An increasing material contact between the Occident and the Far East is certain. We should be enlightened by this time as to the perils of material contact between men and bodies of men who have no deeper understanding. Quite apart from this consideration the experience of the Far East completes and confirms in a most interesting way that of the Occident. We can scarcely afford to neglect it if we hope to work out a truly ecumenical wisdom to oppose to the sinister one-sidedness of our current naturalism. Now the ethical experience of the Far East may be summed up for practical purposes in the teachings and influence of two men, Confucius and Buddha.⁹ To know the Buddhistic and Confucian teachings in their true spirit is to know what is best and most representative in the ethical experience of about half the human race for over seventy generations.

A study of Buddha and Confucius suggests, as does a study of the great teachers of the Occident, that under its bewildering surface variety human experience falls after all into a few main categories. I myself am fond of distinguishing three levels on which a man may experience life – the naturalistic, the humanistic, and the religious. Tested by its fruits Buddhism at its best confirms Christianity. Submitted to the same test Confucianism falls in with the teaching of Aristotle and in general with that of all those who from the Greeks down have proclaimed decorum and the law of measure. This is so obviously true that Confucius has been called the Aristotle of the East. Not only has the Far East had in Buddhism a great religious movement and in Confucianism a great humanistic movement, it has also had in early Taoism¹⁰ a movement that in its attempts to work out naturalistic equivalents of humanistic or religious insight, offers almost startling analogies to the movement I am here studying.

Thus both East and West have not only had great religious and humanistic disciplines which when tested by their fruits confirm one another, bearing witness to the element of oneness, the constant element in human experience, but these disciplines have at times been conceived in a very positive spirit. Confucius indeed, though a moral realist, can scarcely be called a positivist; he aimed rather to attach men to the past by links of steel. He reminds us in this as in some other ways of the last of the great Tories in the Occident, Dr. Johnson. Buddha on the other hand was an individualist. He wished men to rest their belief neither on his authority¹¹ nor on that of tradition.¹² No one has ever made a more serious effort to put religion on a positive and critical basis. It is only proper that I acknowledge my indebtedness to the great Hindu positivist: my treatment of the problem of the One and the Many, for example, is nearer to Buddha than to Plato. Yet even if the general thesis be granted that it is desirable to put the “law for man” on a positive and critical basis, the question remains whether the more crying need just now is for positive and critical humanism or for positive and critical religion. I have discussed this delicate and difficult question more fully in my last chapter, but may give at least one reason here for inclining to the humanistic solution. I have been struck in my study of the past by the endless self-deception to which man is subject when he tries to pass too abruptly from the naturalistic to the religious level. The world, it is hard to avoid concluding, would have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting out to be superhuman; and this consideration would seem to apply with special force to a generation like the present that is wallowing in the trough of naturalism. After all to be a good humanist is merely to be moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier for a man to deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural lights than it is regarding the degree to which he is moderate and sensible and decent.

The past is not without examples of a positive and critical humanism. I have already mentioned Aristotle. If by his emphasis on the mediatory virtues he reminds one of Confucius, by his positive method and intensely analytical temper he reminds one rather of Buddha. When Aristotle rises to the religious level and discourses of the “life of vision” he is very Buddhistic. When Buddha for his part turns from the religious life to the duties of the layman he is purely Aristotelian. Aristotle also deals positively with the natural law. He is indeed a complete positivist, and not, like the man of the nineteenth century, positive according to the natural law alone. The Aristotle that should specially concern us, however, is the positive and critical humanist – the Aristotle, let us say, of the “Ethics” and “Politics” and “Poetics.” Just as I have called the point of view of the scientific and utilitarian naturalist Baconian,¹³ and that of the emotional naturalist Rousseauistic, so I would term the point of view that I am myself seeking to develop Aristotelian. Aristotle has laid down once for all the principle that should guide the ethical positivist. “Truth,” he says, “in matters of moral action is judged from facts and from actual life. … So what we should do is to examine the preceding statements [of Solon and other wise men] by referring them to facts and to actual life, and when they harmonize with facts we may accept them, when they are at variance with them conceive of them as mere theories.”¹⁴

It is in this sense alone that I aspire to be called an Aristotelian; for one risks certain misunderstandings in using the name of Aristotle.¹⁵ The authority of this great positivist has been invoked innumerable times throughout the ages as a substitute for direct observation. Aristotle was not only the prop and mainstay of dogma for centuries during the Middle Ages, but dogmatic Aristotelianism survived to no small extent, especially in literature, throughout the neo-classical period. It was no doubt natural enough that the champions of the modern spirit should have rejected Aristotle along with the traditional order of which he had been made a support. Yet if they had been more modern they might have seen in him rather a chief precursor. They might have learned from him how to have standards and at the same time not be immured in dogma. As it is, those who call themselves modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life. “On desperate seas long wont to roam,” they have lost more and more the sense of what is normal and central in human experience. But to get away from what is normal and central is to get away from wisdom. My whole argument on the negative side, if I may venture on a final summing up, is that the naturalistic movement in the midst of which we are still living had from the start this taint of eccentricity. I have tried to show in detail the nature of the aberration. As for the results, they are being written large in disastrous events. On its constructive side, my argument, if it makes any appeal at all, will be to those for whom the symbols through which the past has received its wisdom have become incredible, and who, seeing at the same time that the break with the past that took place in the eighteenth century was on unsound lines, hold that the remedy for the partial positivism that is the source of this unsoundness, is a more complete positivism. Nothing is more perilous than to be only half critical. This is to risk being the wrong type of individualist – the individualist who has repudiated outer control without achieving inner control. “People mean nowadays by a philosopher,” says Rivarol, “not the man who learns the great art of mastering his passions or adding to his insight, but the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues.” That view of philosophy has not ceased to be popular. The whole modern experiment is threatened with breakdown simply because it has not been sufficiently modern. One should therefore not rest content until one has, with the aid of the secular experience of both the East and the West, worked out a point of view so modern that, compared with it, that of our young radicals will seem antediluvian.

CHAPTER I
THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

The words classic and romantic, we are often told, cannot be defined at all, and even if they could be defined, some would add, we should not be much profited. But this inability or unwillingness to define may itself turn out to be only one aspect of a movement that from Rousseau to Bergson has sought to discredit the analytical intellect – what Wordsworth calls “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” However, those who are with Socrates rather than with Rousseau or Wordsworth in this matter, will insist on the importance of definition, especially in a chaotic era like the present; for nothing is more characteristic of such an era than its irresponsible use of general terms. Now to measure up to the Socratic standard, a definition must not be abstract and metaphysical, but experimental; it must not, that is, reflect our opinion of what a word should mean, but what it actually has meant. Mathematicians may be free at times to frame their own definitions, but in the case of words like classic and romantic, that have been used innumerable times, and used not in one but in many countries, such a method is inadmissible. One must keep one’s eye on actual usage. One should indeed allow for a certain amount of freakishness in this usage. Beaumarchais, for example, makes classic synonymous with barbaric.¹⁶ One may disregard an occasional aberration of this kind, but if one can find only confusion and inconsistency in all the main uses of words like classic and romantic, the only procedure for those who speak or write in order to be understood is to banish the words from their vocabulary.

Now to define in a Socratic way two things are necessary: one must learn to see a common element in things that are apparently different and also to discriminate between things that are apparently similar. A Newton, to take the familiar instance of the former process, saw a common element in the fall of an apple and the motion of a planet; and one may perhaps without being a literary Newton discover a common element in all the main uses of the word romantic as well as in all the main uses of the word classic; though some of the things to which the word romantic in particular has been applied seem, it must be admitted, at least as far apart as the fall of an apple and the motion of a planet. The first step is to perceive the something that connects two or more of these things apparently so diverse, and then it may be found necessary to refer this unifying trait itself back to something still more general, and so on until we arrive, not indeed at anything absolute – the absolute will always elude us – but at what Goethe calls the original or underlying phenomenon (Urphänomen). A fruitful source of false definition is to take as primary in a more or less closely allied group of facts what is actually secondary – for example, to fix upon the return to the Middle Ages as the central fact in romanticism, whereas this return is only symptomatic; it is very far from being the original phenomenon. Confused and incomplete definitions of romanticism have indeed just that origin – they seek to put at the centre something that though romantic is not central but peripheral, and so the whole subject is thrown out of perspective.

My plan then is to determine to the best of my ability, in connection with a brief historical survey, the common element in the various uses of the words classic and romantic; and then, having thus disposed of the similarities, to turn to the second part of the art of defining and deal, also historically, with the differences. For my subject is not romanticism in general, but only a particular type of romanticism, and this type of romanticism needs to be seen as a recoil, not from classicism in general, but from a particular type of classicism.

I

The word romantic when traced historically is found to go back to the old French roman of which still elder forms are romans and romant. These and similar formations derive ultimately from the mediæval Latin adverb romanice. Roman and like words meant originally the various vernaculars derived from Latin, just as the French still speak of these vernaculars as les langues romanes; and then the word roman came to be applied to tales written in the various vernaculars, especially in old French. Now with what features of these tales were people most struck? The reply to this question is found in a passage of a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript:¹⁷ “From the reading of certain romantics, that is, books of poetry composed in French on military deeds which are for the most part fictitious.”¹⁸ Here the term romantic is applied to books that we should still call romantic and for the very same reason, namely, because of the predominance in these books of the element of fiction over reality.

In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violates the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all the uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique,¹⁹ etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class. In this sense medical men may speak correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when it belongs to a high class or to the best class.

The type of romanticism referred to in the fifteenth-century manuscript was, it will be observed, the spontaneous product of the popular imagination of the Middle Ages. We may go further and say that the uncultivated human imagination in all times and places is romantic in the same way. It hungers for the thrilling and the marvellous and is, in short, incurably melodramatic. All students of the past know how, when the popular imagination is left free to work on actual historical characters and events, it quickly introduces into these characters and events the themes of universal folk-lore, and makes a ruthless sacrifice of reality to the love of melodramatic surprise. For example, the original nucleus of historical fact has almost disappeared in the lurid melodramatic tale “Les quatre fils Aymon,” which has continued, as presented in the “Bibliothèque Bleue,” to appeal to the French peasant down to our own times. Those who look with alarm on recent attacks upon romanticism should therefore be comforted. All children, nearly all women and the vast majority of men always have been, are and probably always will be romantic. This is true even of a classical period like the second half of the seventeenth century in France. Boileau is supposed to have killed the vogue of the interminable romances of the early seventeenth century which themselves continue the spirit of the mediæval romances. But recent investigations have shown that the vogue of these romances continued until well on into the eighteenth century. They influenced the imagination of Rousseau, the great modern romancer.

But to return to the history of the word romantic. The first printed examples of the word in any modern tongue are, it would seem, to be found in English. The Oxford Dictionary cites the following from F. Greville’s “Life of Sidney” (written before 1628, published in 1652): “Doe not his Arcadian romantics live after him?” – meaning apparently ideas or features suggestive of romance. Of extreme interest is the use of the word in Evelyn’s “Diary” (3 August, 1654): “Were Sir Guy’s grot improved as it might be, it were capable of being made a most romantic and pleasant place.” The word is not only used in a favorable sense, but it is applied to nature; and it is this use of the word in connection with outer nature that French and German literatures are going to derive later from England. Among the early English uses of the word romantic may be noted: “There happened this extraordinary case – one of the most romantique that ever I heard in my life and could not have believed,”²⁰ etc. “Most other authors that I ever read either have wild romantic tales wherein they strain Love and Honor to that ridiculous height that it becomes burlesque,”²¹ etc. The word becomes fairly common by the year 1700 and thousands of examples could be collected from English writers in the eighteenth century. Here are two early eighteenth-century instances:

“The gentleman I am married to made love to me in rapture but it was the rapture of a Christian and a man of Honor, not a romantic hero or a whining coxcomb.”²²

 
Whether the charmer sinner it or saint it
If folly grow romantick I must paint it.²³
 

The early French and German uses of the word romantic seem to derive from England. One important point is to be noted as to France. Before using the word romantique the French used the word romanesque in the sense of wild, unusual, adventurous – especially in matters of sentiment, and they have continued to employ romanesque alongside romantique, which is now practically used only of the romantic school. A great deal of confusion is thus avoided into which we fall in English from having only the one word romantic, which must do duty for both romantique and romanesque. An example of romantique is found in French as early as 1675;²⁴ but the word owed its vogue practically to the anglomania that set in about the middle of the eighteenth century. The first very influential French example of the word is appropriately found in Rousseau in the Fifth Promenade (1777): “The shores of the Lake of Bienne are more wild and romantic than those of the Lake of Geneva.” The word romantique was fashionable in France especially as applied to scenery from about the year 1785, but without any thought as yet of applying it to a literary school.

In Germany the word romantisch as an equivalent of the French romanesque and modern German romanhaft, appears at the end of the seventeenth century and plainly as a borrowing from the French. Heidigger, a Swiss, used it several times in his “Mythoscopia romantica,”²⁵ an attack on romances and the wild and vain imaginings they engender. According to Heidigger the only resource against romanticism in this sense is religion. In Germany as in France the association of romantic with natural scenery comes from England, especially from the imitations and translations of Thomson’s “Seasons.”

In the second half of the eighteenth century the increasingly favorable use of words like Gothic and enthusiastic as well as the emergence of words like sentimental and picturesque are among the symptoms of a new movement, and the fortunes of the word romantic were more or less bound up with this movement. Still, apart from its application to natural scenery, the word is as yet far from having acquired a favorable connotation if we are to believe an essay by John Foster on the “Application of the Epithet Romantic” (1805). Foster’s point of view is not unlike that of Heidigger. Romantic, he says, had come to be used as a term of vague abuse, whereas it can be used rightly only of the ascendancy of imagination over judgment, and is therefore synonymous with such words as wild, visionary, extravagant. “A man possessing so strong a judgment and so subordinate a fancy as Dean Swift would hardly have been made romantic … if he had studied all the books in Don Quixote’s library.” It is not, Foster admits, a sign of high endowment for a youth to be too coldly judicial, too deaf to the blandishments of imaginative illusion. Yet in general a man should strive to bring his imagination under the control of sound reason. But how is it possible thus to prevail against the deceits of fancy? Right knowing, he asserts very un-Socratically, is not enough to ensure right doing. At this point Foster changes from the tone of a literary essay to that of a sermon, and, maintaining a thesis somewhat similar to that of Pascal in the seventeenth century and Heidigger in the eighteenth, he concludes that a man’s imagination will run away with his judgment or reason unless he have the aid of divine grace.

II

When Foster wrote his essay there was no question as yet in England of a romantic school. Before considering how the word came to be applied to a particular movement we need first to bring out more fully certain broad conflicts of tendency during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conflicts that are not sufficiently revealed by the occasional uses during this period of the word romantic. In the contrast Foster established between judgment and imagination he is merely following a long series of neo-classical critics and this contrast not only seemed to him and these critics, but still seems to many, the essential contrast between classicism and romanticism. We shall be helped in understanding how judgment (or reason) and imagination came thus to be sharply contrasted if we consider briefly the changes in the meaning of the word wit during the neo-classical period, and also if we recollect that the contrast between judgment and imagination is closely related to the contrast the French are so fond of establishing between the general sense (le sens commun) and the private sense or sense of the individual (le sens propre).

In the sixteenth century prime emphasis was put not upon common sense, but upon wit or conceit or ingenuity (in the sense of quickness of imagination). The typical Elizabethan strove to excel less by judgment than by invention, by “high-flying liberty of conceit”; like Falstaff he would have a brain “apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.” Wit at this time, it should be remembered, was synonymous not only with imagination but with intellect (in opposition to will). The result of the worship of wit in this twofold sense was a sort of intellectual romanticism. Though its origins are no doubt mediæval, it differs from the ordinary romanticism of the Middle Ages to which I have already referred in being thus concerned with thought rather than with action. Towards the end of the Renaissance and in the early seventeenth century especially, people were ready to pursue the strange and surprising thought even at the risk of getting too far away from the workings of the normal mind. Hence the “points” and “conceits” that spread, as Lowell put it, like a “cutaneous eruption” over the face of Europe; hence the Gongorists, and Cultists, the Marinists and Euphuists, the précieux and the “metaphysical” poets. And then came the inevitable swing away from all this fantasticality towards common sense. A demand arose for something that was less rare and “precious” and more representative.

This struggle between the general sense and the sense of the individual stands out with special clearness in France. A model was gradually worked out by aid of the classics, especially the Latin classics, as to what man should be. Those who were in the main movement of the time elaborated a great convention, that is they came together about certain things. They condemned in the name of their convention those who were too indulgent of their private sense, in other words, too eccentric in their imaginings. A Théophile, for example, fell into disesteem for refusing to restrain his imagination, for asserting the type of “spontaneity” that would have won him favor in any romantic period.²⁶

The swing away from intellectual romanticism can also be traced in the changes that took place in the meaning of the word wit in both France and England. One of the main tasks of the French critics of the seventeenth century and of English critics, largely under the lead of the French, was to distinguish between true and false wit. The work that would have been complimented a little earlier as “witty” and “conceited” is now censured as fantastic and far-fetched, as lacking in judicial control over the imagination, and therefore in general appeal. The movement away from the sense of the individual towards common sense goes on steadily from the time of Malherbe to that of Boileau. Balzac attacks Ronsard for his individualistic excess, especially for his audacity in inventing words without reference to usage. Balzac himself is attacked by Boileau for his affectation, for his straining to say things differently from other people. In so far his wit was not true but false. La Bruyère, in substantial accord with Boileau, defines false wit as wit which is lacking in good sense and judgment and “in which the imagination has too large a share.”²⁷

What the metaphysical poets in England understood by wit, according to Dr. Johnson, was the pursuit of their thoughts to their last ramifications, and in this pursuit of the singular and the novel they lost the “grandeur of generality.” This imaginative quest of rarity led to the same recoil as in France, to a demand for common sense and judgment. The opposite extreme from the metaphysical excess is reached when the element of invention is eliminated entirely from wit and it is reduced, as it is by Pope, to rendering happily the general sense —

What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.

Dr. Johnson says that the decisive change in the meaning of the word wit took place about the time of Cowley. Important evidences of this change and also of the new tendency to depreciate the imagination is also found in certain passages of Hobbes. Hobbes identifies the imagination with the memory of outer images and so looks on it as “decaying sense.”²⁸ “They who observe similitudes,” he remarks elsewhere, making a distinction that was to be developed by Locke and accepted by Addison, “in case they be such as are but rarely observed by others are said to have a good wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a good fancy” (wit has here the older meaning). “But they who distinguish and observe differences,” he continues, “are said to have a good judgment. Fancy without the help of judgment is not worthy of commendation, whereas judgment is commended for itself without the help of fancy. Indeed without steadiness and direction to some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness.” “Judgment without fancy,” he concludes, “is wit” (this anticipates the extreme neo-classical use of the word wit), “but fancy without judgment, not.”

Dryden betrays the influence of Hobbes when he says of the period of incubation of his “Rival Ladies”: “Fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished and either chosen or rejected by judgment.” Fancy or imagination (the words were still synonymous), as conceived by the English neo-classicists, often shows a strange vivacity for a faculty that is after all only “decaying sense.” “Fancy without judgment,” says Dryden, “is a hot-mouthed jade without a curb.” “Fancy,” writes Rymer in a similar vein, “leaps and frisks, and away she’s gone; whilst reason rattles the chain and follows after.” The following lines of Mulgrave are typical of the neo-classical notion of the relation between fancy and judgment:

 
As all is dullness when the Fancy’s bad,
So without Judgment, Fancy is but mad.
Reason is that substantial, useful part
Which gains the Head, while t’ other wins the Heart.²⁹
 

The opposition established by the neo-classicist in passages of this kind is too mechanical. Fancy and judgment do not seem to coöperate but to war with one another. In case of doubt the neo-classicist is always ready to sacrifice fancy to the “substantial, useful part,” and so he seems too negative and cool and prosaic in his reason, and this is because his reason is so largely a protest against a previous romantic excess. What had been considered genius in the time of the “metaphysicals” had too often turned out to be only oddity. With this warning before them men kept their eyes fixed very closely on the model of normal human nature that had been set up, and imitated it very literally and timorously. A man was haunted by the fear that he might be “monstrous,” and so, as Rymer put it, “satisfy nobody’s maggot but his own.” Correctness thus became a sort of tyranny. We suffer to the present day from this neo-classical failure to work out a sound conception of the imagination in its relation to good sense. Because the neo-classicist held the imagination lightly as compared with good sense the romantic rebels, were led to hold good sense lightly as compared with imagination. The romantic view in short is too much the neo-classical view turned upside down; and, as Sainte-Beuve says, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling.

III

Because the classicism against which romanticism rebelled was inadequate it does not follow that every type of classicism suffers from a similar inadequacy. The great movement away from imaginative unrestraint towards regularity and good sense took place in the main under French auspices. In general the French have been the chief exponents of the classic spirit in modern times. They themselves feel this so strongly that a certain group in France has of late years inclined to use interchangeably the words classicist and nationalist. But this is a grave confusion, for if the classic spirit is anything at all it is in its essence not local and national, but universal and human. To be sure, any particular manifestation of classicism will of necessity contain elements that are less universal, elements that reflect merely a certain person or persons, or a certain age and country. This is a truth that we scarcely need to have preached to us; for with the growth of the historical method we have come to fix our attention almost exclusively on these local and relative elements. The complete critic will accept the historical method but be on his guard against its excess. He will see an element in man that is set above the local and the relative; he will learn to detect this abiding element through all the flux of circumstance; in Platonic language, he will perceive the One in the Many.

Formerly, it must be admitted, critics were not historical enough. They took to be of the essence of classicism what was merely its local coloring, especially the coloring it received from the French of the seventeenth century. If we wish to distinguish between essence and accident in the classic spirit we must get behind the French of the seventeenth century, behind the Italians of the sixteenth century who laid the foundations of neo-classical theory, behind the Romans who were the immediate models of most neo-classicists, to the source of classicism in Greece. Even in Greece the classic spirit is very much implicated in the local and the relative, yet in the life of no other people perhaps does what is universal in man shine forth more clearly from what is only local and relative. We still need, therefore, to return to Greece, not merely for the best practice, but for the best theory of classicism; for this is still found in spite of all its obscurities and incompleteness in the Poetics of Aristotle. If we have recourse to this treatise, however, it must be on condition that we do not, like the critics of the Renaissance, deal with it in an abstract and dogmatic way (the form of the treatise it must be confessed gave them no slight encouragement), but in a spirit akin to Aristotle’s own as revealed in the total body of his writings – a spirit that is at its best positive and experimental.

Aristotle not only deals positively and experimentally with the natural order and with man so far as he is a part of this order, but he deals in a similar fashion with a side of man that the modern positivist often overlooks. Like all the great Greeks Aristotle recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure. This insistence on restraint and proportion is rightly taken to be of the essence not merely of the Greek spirit but of the classical spirit in general. The norm or standard that is to set bounds to the ordinary self is got at by different types of classicists in different ways and described variously: for example, as the human law, or the better self, or reason (a word to be discussed more fully later), or nature. Thus when Boileau says, “Let nature be your only study,” he does not mean outer nature, nor again the nature of this or that individual, but representative human nature. Having decided what is normal either for man or some particular class of men the classicist takes this normal “nature” for his model and proceeds to imitate it. Whatever accords with the model he has thus set up he pronounces natural or probable, whatever on the other hand departs too far from what he conceives to be the normal type or the normal sequence of cause and effect he holds to be “improbable” and unnatural or even, if it attains an extreme of abnormality, “monstrous.” Whatever in conduct or character is duly restrained and proportionate with reference to the model is said to observe decorum. Probability and decorum are identical in some of their aspects and closely related in all.³⁰ To recapitulate, a general nature, a core of normal experience, is affirmed by all classicists. From this central affirmation derives the doctrine of imitation, and from imitation in turn the doctrines of probability and decorum.

But though all classicists are alike in insisting on nature, imitation, probability and decorum, they differ widely, as I have already intimated, in what they understand by these terms. Let us consider first what Aristotle and the Greeks understand by them. The first point to observe is that according to Aristotle one is to get his general nature not on authority or second hand, but is to disengage it directly for himself from the jumble of particulars that he has before his eyes. He is not, says Aristotle, to imitate things as they are, but as they ought to be. Thus conceived imitation is a creative act. Through all the welter of the actual one penetrates to the real and so succeeds without ceasing to be individual in suggesting the universal. Poetry that is imitative in this sense is, according to Aristotle, more “serious” and “philosophical” than history. History deals merely with what has happened, whereas poetry deals with what may happen according to probability or necessity. Poetry, that is, does not portray life literally but extricates the deeper or ideal truth from the flux of circumstance. One may add with Sydney that if poetry is thus superior to history in being more serious and philosophical it resembles history and is superior to philosophy in being concrete.

The One that the great poet or artist perceives in the Many and that gives to his work its high seriousness is not a fixed absolute. In general the model that the highly serious man (ὁ σπουδαῖος) imitates and that keeps his ordinary self within the bounds of decorum is not to be taken as anything finite, as anything that can be formulated once for all. This point is important for on it hinges every right distinction not merely between the classic and the romantic, but between the classic and the pseudo-classic. Romanticism has claimed for itself a monopoly of imagination and infinitude, but on closer examination, as I hope to show later, this claim, at least so far as genuine classicism is concerned, will be found to be quite unjustified. For the present it is enough to say that true classicism does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of models but on an immediate insight into the universal. Aristotle is especially admirable in the account he gives of this insight and of the way it may manifest itself in art and literature. One may be rightly imitative, he says, and so have access to a superior truth and give others access to it only by being a master of illusion. Though the great poet “breathes immortal air,” though he sees behind the shows of sense a world of more abiding relationships, he can convey his vision not directly but only imaginatively. Aristotle, one should observe, does not establish any hard and fast opposition between judgment and imagination, an opposition that pervades not only the neo-classical movement but also the romantic revolt from it. He simply affirms a supersensuous order which one can perceive only with the help of fiction. The best art, says Goethe in the true spirit of Aristotle, gives us the “illusion of a higher reality.” This has the advantage of being experimental. It is merely a statement of what one feels in the presence of a great painting, let us say, or in reading a great poem.

IV

After this attempt to define briefly with the help of the Greeks the classical spirit in its essence we should be prepared to understand more clearly the way in which this spirit was modified in neo-classical times, especially in France. The first thing that strikes one about the classicism of this period is that it does not rest on immediate perception like that of the Greeks but on outer authority. The merely dogmatic and traditional classicist gave a somewhat un-Greek meaning to the doctrines of nature and imitation. Why imitate nature directly, said Scaliger, when we have in Virgil a second nature? Imitation thus came to mean the imitation of certain outer models and the following of rules based on these models. Now it is well that one who aims at excellence in any field should begin by a thorough assimilation of the achievements of his great predecessors in this field. Unfortunately the neo-classical theorist tended to impose a multitude of precepts that were based on what was external rather than on what was vital in the practice of his models. In so far the lesson of form that the great ancients can always teach any one who approaches them in the right spirit degenerated into formalism. This formalistic turn given to the doctrine of imitation was felt from the outset to be a menace to originality; to be incompatible, and everything hinges at last on this point, with the spontaneity of the imagination. There was an important reaction headed by men like Boileau, within the neo-classical movement itself, against the oppression of the intuitive side of human nature by mere dogma and authority, above all against the notion that “regularity” is in itself any guarantee of literary excellence. A school of rules was succeeded by a school of taste. Yet even to the end the neo-classicist was too prone to reject as unnatural or even monstrous everything that did not fit into one of the traditional pigeon-holes. One must grant, indeed, that much noble work was achieved under the neo-classical dispensation, work that shows a genuine insight into the universal, but it is none the less evident that the view of the imagination held during this period has a formalistic taint.

This taint in neo-classicism is due not merely to its dogmatic and mechanical way of dealing with the doctrine of imitation but also to the fact that it had to reconcile classical with Christian dogma; and the two antiquities, classical and Christian, if interpreted vitally and in the spirit, were in many respects divergent and in some respects contradictory. The general outcome of the attempts at reconciliation made by the literary casuists of Italy and France was that Christianity should have a monopoly of truth and classicism a monopoly of fiction. For the true classicist, it will be remembered, the two things are inseparable – he gets at his truth through a veil of fiction. Many of the neo-classicists came to conceive of art as many romanticists were to conceive of it later as a sort of irresponsible game or play, but they were, it must be confessed, very inferior to the romanticists in the spontaneity of their fiction. They went for this fiction as for everything else to the models, and this meant in practice that they employed the pagan myths, not as imaginative symbols of a higher reality – it is still possible to employ them in that way – but merely in Boileau’s phrase as “traditional ornaments” (ornements reçus). The neo-classicist to be sure might so employ his “fiction” as to inculcate a moral; in that case he is only too likely to give us instead of the living symbol, dead allegory; instead of high seriousness, its caricature, didacticism. The traditional stock of fiction became at last so intolerably trite as to be rejected even by some of the late neo-classicists. “The rejection and contempt of fiction,” said Dr. Johnson (who indulged in it himself on occasion) “is rational and manly.” But to reject fiction in the larger sense is to miss the true driving power in human nature – the imagination. Before concluding, however, that Dr. Johnson had no notion of the rôle of the imagination one should read his attack on the theory of the three unities³¹ which was later to be turned to account by the romanticists.

Now the three unities may be defended on an entirely legitimate ground – on the ground namely that they make for concentration, a prime virtue in the drama; but the grounds on which they were actually imposed on the drama, especially in connection with the Quarrel of the Cid, illustrate the corruption of another main classical doctrine, that of probability or verisimilitude. In his dealings with probability as in his dealings with imitation, the neo-classical formalist did not allow sufficiently for the element of illusion. What he required from the drama in the name of probability was not the “illusion of a higher reality,” but strict logic or even literal deception. He was not capable of a poetic faith, not willing to suspend his disbelief on passing from the world of ordinary fact to the world of artistic creation. Goethe was thinking especially of the neo-classical French when he said: “As for the French, they will always be arrested by their reason. They do not recognize that the imagination has its own laws which are and always must be problematic for the reason.”

It was also largely under French influence that the doctrine of decorum, which touches probability at many points, was turned aside from its true meaning. Decorum is in a way the peculiar doctrine of the classicist, is in Milton’s phrase “the grand masterpiece to observe.” The doctrines of the universal and the imitation of the universal go deeper indeed than decorum, so much deeper that they are shared by classicism with religion. The man who aspires to live religiously must no less than the humanist look to some model set above his ordinary self and imitate it. But though the classicist at his best meditates, he does not, like the seeker after religious perfection, see in meditation an end in itself but rather a support for the mediatory virtues, the virtues of the man who would live to the best advantage in this world rather than renounce it; and these virtues may be said to be summed up in decorum. For the best type of Greek humanist, a Sophocles let us say, decorum was a vital and immediate thing. But there enters into decorum even from the time of the Alexandrian Greeks, and still more into French neo-classical decorum, a marked element of artificiality. The all-roundness and fine symmetry, the poise and dignity that come from working within the bounds of the human law, were taken to be the privilege not of man in general but of a special social class. Take for instance verbal decorum: the French neo-classicists assumed that if the speech of poetry is to be noble and highly serious it must coincide with the speech of the aristocracy. As Nisard puts it, they confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. Decorum was thus more or less merged with etiquette, so that the standards of the stage and of literature in general came to coincide, as Rousseau complains, with those of the drawing-room. More than anything else this narrowing of decorum marks the decline from the classic to the pseudo-classic, from form to formalism.

While condemning pseudo-decorum one should remember that even a Greek would have seen something paradoxical in a poem like Goethe’s “Hermann und Dorothea” and its attempt to invest with epic grandeur the affairs of villagers and peasants. After all, dignity and elevation and especially the opportunity for important action, which is the point on which the classicist puts prime emphasis, are normally though not invariably associated with a high rather than with a mean social estate. In general one should insist that the decorum worked out under French auspices was far from being merely artificial. The French gentleman (honnête homme) of the seventeenth century often showed a moderation and freedom from over-emphasis, an exquisite tact and urbanity that did not fall too far short of his immediate model, Horace, and related him to the all-round man of the Greeks (καλὸς κἀγαθός). To be sure an ascetic Christian like Pascal sees in decorum a disguise of one’s ordinary self rather than a real curb upon it, and feels that the gap is not sufficiently wide between even the best type of the man of the world and the mere worldling. One needs, however, to be very austere to disdain the art of living that has been fostered by decorum from the Greeks down. Something of this art of living survives even in a Chesterfield, who falls far short of the best type of French gentleman and reminds one very remotely indeed of a Pericles. Chesterfield’s half-jesting definition of decorum as the art of combining the useful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions of vice points the way to its ultimate corruption. Talleyrand, who marks perhaps this last stage, was defined by Napoleon as “a silk stocking filled with mud.” In some of its late exemplars decorum had actually become, as Rousseau complains, the “mask of hypocrisy” and the “varnish of vice.”

One should not however, like Rousseau and the romanticists, judge of decorum by what it degenerated into. Every doctrine of genuine worth is disciplinary and men in the mass do not desire discipline. “Most men,” says Aristotle, “would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.” But most men do not admit any such preference – that would be crude and inartistic. They incline rather to substitute for the reality of discipline some art of going through the motions. Every great doctrine is thus in constant peril of passing over into some hollow semblance or even, it may be, into some mere caricature of itself. When one wishes therefore to determine the nature of decorum one should think of a Milton, let us say, and not of a Talleyrand or even of a Chesterfield.

Milton imitated the models, like any other neo-classicist, but his imitation was not, in Joubert’s phrase, that of one book by another book, but of one soul by another soul. His decorum is therefore imaginative; and it is the privilege of the imagination to give the sense of spaciousness and infinitude. On the other hand, the unimaginative way in which many of the neo-classicists held their main tenets – nature, imitation, probability, decorum – narrowed unduly the scope of the human spirit and appeared to close the gates of the future. “Art and diligence have now done their best,” says Dr. Johnson of the versification of Pope, “and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity.” Nothing is more perilous than thus to seem to confine man in some pinfold; there is something in him that refuses to acquiesce in any position as final; he is in Nietzsche’s phrase the being who must always surpass himself. The attempt to oppose external and mechanical barriers to the freedom of the spirit will create in the long run an atmosphere of stuffiness and smugness, and nothing is more intolerable than smugness. Men were guillotined in the French Revolution, as Bagehot suggests, simply because either they or their ancestors had been smug. Inert acceptance of tradition and routine will be met sooner or later by the cry of Faust: Hinaus ins Freie!

Before considering the value of the method chosen by Rousseau and the romanticists for breaking up the “tiresome old heavens” and escaping from smugness and stuffiness, one should note that the lack of originality and genius which they lamented in the eighteenth century – especially in that part of it known as the Enlightenment – was not due entirely to pseudo-classic formalism. At least two other main currents entered into the Enlightenment: first the empirical and utilitarian current that goes back to Francis Bacon, and some would say to Roger Bacon; and secondly the rationalistic current that goes back to Descartes. English empiricism gained international vogue in the philosophy of Locke, and Locke denies any supersensuous element in human nature to which one may have access with the aid of the imagination or in any other way. Locke’s method of precise naturalistic observation is in itself legitimate; for man is plainly subject to the natural law. What is not truly empirical is to bring the whole of human nature under this law. One can do this only by piecing out precise observation and experiment with dogmatic rationalism. One side of Locke may therefore be properly associated with the father of modern rationalists, Descartes. The attempt of the rationalist to lock up life in some set of formulæ produces in the imaginative man a feeling of oppression. He gasps for light and air. The very tracing of cause and effect and in general the use of the analytical faculties – and this is to fly to the opposite extreme – came to be condemned by the romanticists as inimical to the imagination. Not only do they make endless attacks on Locke, but at times they assail even Newton for having mechanized life, though Newton’s comparison of himself to a child picking up pebbles on the seashore would seem to show that he had experienced “the feeling infinite.”

The elaboration of science into a closed system with the aid of logic and pure mathematics is as a matter of fact to be associated with Descartes rather than with Newton. Neither Newton nor Descartes, one scarcely needs add, wished to subject man entirely to the natural law and the nexus of physical causes; they were not in short determinists. Yet the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment was in the main of Cartesian origin. This Cartesian influence ramifies in so many directions and is related at so many points to the literary movement, and there has been so much confusion about this relationship, that we need to pause here to make a few distinctions.

Perhaps what most strikes one in the philosophy of Descartes is its faith in logic and abstract reasoning and the closely allied processes of mathematical demonstration. Anything that is not susceptible of clear proof in this logical and almost mathematical sense is to be rejected. Now this Cartesian notion of clearness is fatal to a true classicism. The higher reality, the true classicist maintains, cannot be thus demonstrated; it can only be grasped, and then never completely, through a veil of imaginative illusion. Boileau is reported to have said that Descartes had cut the throat of poetry; and this charge is justified in so far as the Cartesian requires from poetry a merely logical clearness. This conception of clearness was also a menace to the classicism of the seventeenth century which rested in the final analysis not on logic but on tradition. This appeared very clearly in the early phases of the quarrel between ancients and moderns when literary Cartesians like Perrault and Fontenelle attacked classical dogma in the name of reason. In fact one may ask if any doctrine has ever appeared so fatal to every form of tradition – not merely literary but also religious and political – as Cartesianism. The rationalist of the eighteenth century was for dismissing as “prejudice” everything that could not give a clear account of itself in the Cartesian sense. This riot of abstract reasoning (la raison raisonnante) that prepared the way for the Revolution has been identified by Taine and others with the classic spirit. A more vicious confusion has seldom gained currency in criticism. It is true that the French have mixed a great deal of logic with their conception of the classic spirit, but that is because they have mixed a great deal of logic with everything. I have already mentioned their tendency to substitute a logical for an imaginative verisimilitude; and strenuously logical classicists may be found in France from Chapelain to Brunetière. Yet the distinction that should keep us from confusing mere logic with the classic spirit was made by a Frenchman who was himself violently logical and also a great geometrician – Pascal. One should keep distinct, says Pascal, the esprit de géométrie and the esprit de finesse. The esprit de finesse is not, like the esprit de géométrie, abstract, but very concrete.³² So far as a man possesses the esprit de finesse he is enabled to judge correctly of the ordinary facts of life and of the relationships between man and man. But these judgments rest upon such a multitude of delicate perceptions that he is frequently unable to account for them logically. It is to intuitive good sense and not to the esprit de géométrie that the gentleman (honnête homme) of the neo-classical period owed his fine tact. Pascal himself finally took a stand against reason as understood both by the Cartesian and by the man of the world. Unaided reason he held is unable to prevail against the deceits of the imagination; it needs the support of intuition – an intuition that he identifies with grace, thus making it inseparable from the most austere form of Christianity. The “heart,” he says, and this is the name he gives to intuition, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” A Plato or an Aristotle would not have understood this divorce between reason and intuition.³³

Pascal seems to get his insight only by flouting ordinary good sense. He identifies this insight with a type of theological dogma of which good sense was determined to be rid; and so it tended to get rid of the insight along with the dogma. Classical dogma also seemed at times to be in opposition to the intuitive good sense of the man of the world. The man of the world therefore often inclined to assail both the classical and the Christian tradition in the name of good sense, just as the Cartesian inclined to assail these traditions in the name of abstract reason. Perhaps the best exponent of anti-traditional good sense in the seventeenth century was Molière. He vindicated nature, and by nature he still meant in the main normal human nature, from arbitrary constraints of every kind whether imposed by an ascetic Christianity or by a narrow and pedantic classicism. Unfortunately Molière is too much on the side of the opposition. He does not seem to put his good sense into the service of some positive insight of his own. Good sense may be of many degrees according to the order of facts of which it has a correct perception. The order of facts in human nature that Molière’s good sense perceived is not the highest and so this good sense appears at times too ready to justify the bourgeois against the man who has less timid and conventional views. So at least Rousseau thought when he made his famous attack on Molière.³⁴ Rousseau assailed Molière in the name of instinct as Pascal would have assailed him in the name of insight, and fought sense with sensibility. The hostility of Rousseau to Molière, according to M. Faguet, is that of a romantic Bohemian to a philistine of genius.³⁵ One hesitates to call Molière a philistine, but one may at least grant M. Faguet that Molière’s good sense is not always sufficiently inspired.

I have been trying to build up a background that will make clear why the reason of the eighteenth century (whether we understand by reason logic or good sense) had come to be superficial and therefore oppressive to the imagination. It is only with reference to this “reason” that one can understand the romantic revolt. But neo-classical reason itself can be understood only with reference to its background – as a recoil namely from a previous romantic excess. This excess was manifested not only in the intellectual romanticism of which I have already spoken, but in the cult of the romantic deed that had flourished in the Middle Ages. This cult and the literature that reflected it continued to appeal, even to the cultivated, well on into the neo-classical period. It was therefore felt necessary to frame a definition of reason that should be a rebuke to the extravagance and improbability of the mediæval romances. When men became conscious in the eighteenth century of the neo-classical meagerness on the imaginative side they began to look back with a certain envy to the free efflorescence of fiction in the Middle Ages. They began to ask themselves with Hurd whether the reason and correctness they had won were worth the sacrifice of a “world of fine fabling.”³⁶ We must not, however, like Heine and many others, look on the romantic movement as merely a return to the Middle Ages. We have seen that the men of the Middle Ages themselves understood by romance not simply their own kind of speech and writing in contrast with what was written in Latin, but a kind of writing in which the pursuit of strangeness and adventure predominated. This pursuit of strangeness and adventure will be found to predominate in all types of romanticism. The type of romanticism, however, which came in towards the end of the eighteenth century did not, even when professedly mediæval, simply revert to the older types. It was primarily not a romanticism of thought or of action, the types we have encountered thus far, but a romanticism of feeling. The beginnings of this emotional romanticism antedate considerably the application of the word romantic to a particular literary school. Before considering how the word came to be thus applied we shall need to take a glance at eighteenth-century sentimentalism, especially at the plea for genius and originality that, from about the middle of the century on, were opposed to the tameness and servile imitation of the neo-classicists.

CHAPTER II
ROMANTIC GENIUS

Romanticism, it has been remarked, is all that is not Voltaire. The clash between Rousseau and Voltaire is indeed not merely the clash between two men, it is the clash between two incompatible views of life. Voltaire is the end of the old world, as Goethe has put it, Rousseau the beginning of the new.

One is not to suppose, however, that Voltaire was a consistent champion of the past. He is indeed with all his superficial clearness one of the most incoherent of writers. At the same time that he defended classical tradition he attacked Christian tradition, spreading abroad a spirit of mockery and irreverence that tended to make every traditional belief impossible. The “reason” to which he appeals has all the shallowness that I have noticed in the “reason” of the eighteenth century. Though he does not fall into the Cartesian excess of abstract reasoning, and though the good sense that he most often understands by reason is admirably shrewd within certain bounds, he nevertheless falls very far short of the standards of a true classicism. He delights in the philosophy of Locke and has little sense for Greek philosophy or for the higher aspects of Greek literature. He is quite lacking in the quality of imagination that is needful if one is to communicate with what is above the ordinary rational level. So far from being capable of high seriousness, he is scarcely capable of ordinary seriousness. And so the nobility, elegance, imitation, and decorum that he is constantly preaching have about them a taint of formalism. Perhaps this taint appears most conspicuously in his conception of decorum. A man may be willing to impose restrictions on his ordinary self – and every type of decorum is restrictive – if he is asked to do so for some adequate end. The end of the decorum that an Aristotle, for example, would impose is that one may become more human and therefore, as he endeavors to show in a highly positive fashion, happier. The only art and literature that will please a man who has thus become human through the observance of true decorum is an art and literature that are themselves human and decorous. Voltaire for his part wishes to subject art and literature to an elaborate set of restrictions in the name of decorum, but these restrictions are not joined to any adequate end. The only reward he holds out to those who observe all these restrictions is “the merit of difficulty overcome.” At bottom, like so many of the Jesuits from whom he received his education, he looks upon art as a game – a very ingenious and complicated game. The French muse he compares to a person executing a difficult clog dance on a tight rope, and he argues from this comparison, not that the French muse should assume a less constrained posture, but that she should on the contrary be exemplary to the nations. No wonder the romanticists and even Dr. Johnson demurred at Voltaire’s condemnation of Shakespeare in the name of this type of decorum.

Voltaire is therefore, in spite of all his dazzling gifts, one of the most compromising advocates of classicism. Pope also had eminent merits, but from the truly classical point of view he is about as inadequate as Voltaire; and this is important to remember because English romanticism tends to be all that is not Pope. The English romanticists revolted especially from the poetic diction of which Pope was one of the chief sources, and poetic diction, with its failure to distinguish between nobility of language and the language of the nobility, is only an aspect of artificial decorum. However, the revolt from poetic diction and decorum in general is not the central aspect of the great movement that resulted in the eclipse of the wit and man of the world and in the emergence of the original genius. What the genius wanted was spontaneity, and spontaneity, as he understood it, involves a denial, not merely of decorum, but of something that, as I have said, goes deeper than decorum – namely the doctrine of imitation. According to Voltaire genius is only judicious imitation. According to Rousseau the prime mark of genius is refusal to imitate. The movement away from imitation, however, had already got well started before it thus came to a picturesque head in the clash between Rousseau and Voltaire, and if we wish to understand this movement we need to take a glance at its beginnings – especially in England.

There are reasons why this supposed opposition between imitation and genius should have been felt in England more keenly than elsewhere. The doctrine of imitation in its neo-classical form did not get established there until about the time of Dryden. In the meanwhile England had had a great creative literature in which the freedom and spontaneity of the imagination had not been cramped by a too strict imitation of models. Dryden himself, though he was doing more than any one else to promote the new correctness that was coming in from France, felt that this correctness was no equivalent for the Elizabethan inspiration. The structure that he and his contemporaries were erecting might be more regular, but lacked the boldness and originality of that reared by the “giant race before the flood”:

 
Our age was cultivated thus at length;
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius cursed;
The second temple was not like the first.³⁷
 

This contrast between the imitator and the inspired original was developed by Addison in a paper (“Spectator,” 160) that was destined to be used against the very school to which he himself belonged. For Addison was in his general outlook a somewhat tame Augustan. Nevertheless he exalts the “natural geniuses” who have something “nobly wild and extravagant” in them above the geniuses who have been “refined by conversation, reflection and the reading of the most polite authors”; who have “formed themselves by rules and submitted the greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of art.” “The great danger in these latter kind of geniuses, is lest they cramp their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves altogether upon models, without giving full play to their own natural parts. An imitation of the best authors is not to compare with a good original; and I believe we may observe that very few writers make an extraordinary figure in the world, who have not something in their way of thinking or expressing themselves that is peculiar to them, and entirely their own.”

Another main influence that was making against the doctrine of imitation was also largely of English origin. This was the idea of progress through scientific observation and experiment. As a result of this type of positivism, discovery was being added to discovery. Science was kindling man’s imagination and opening up before him what he really craves, the vista of an endless advance. Why should not literature likewise do something new and original instead of sticking forever in the same rut of imitation? In its Greek form the doctrine of imitation was, as I have tried to show, not only flexible and progressive, but in its own way, positive and experimental. But in modern times the two main forms of imitation, the classical and the Christian, have worked within the limits imposed by tradition and traditional models. The imitation of models, the Christian imitation of Christ, let us say, or the classical imitation of Horace, may indeed be a very vital thing, the imitation of one soul by another soul; but when carried out in this vital way, the two main forms of imitation tend to clash, and the compromise between them, as I have already said, resulted in a good deal of formalism. By its positive and critical method science was undermining every traditional belief. Both the Christian and the classical formalists would have been the first to deny that the truths of imitation for which they stood could be divorced from tradition and likewise put on a positive and critical basis. The fact is indubitable in any case that the discrediting of tradition has resulted in a progressive lapse from the religious and the humanistic to the naturalistic level. An equally indubitable fact is that scientific or rationalistic naturalism tended from the early eighteenth century to produce emotional naturalism, and that both forms of naturalism were hostile to the doctrine of imitation.

The trend away from the doctrine of imitation towards emotional naturalism finds revolutionary expression in the literary field in such a work as Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759). Addison had asserted, as we have seen, the superiority of what is original in a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by conscious effort and culture. Young, a personal friend of Addison’s, develops this contrast between the “natural” and the “artificial” to its extreme consequences. “Modern writers,” he says, “have a choice to make. … They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation.” “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of preëxistent materials not their own.” “We may as well grow good by another’s virtue, or fat by another’s food, as famous by another’s thought.” One evidence that we are still living in the movement of which Young is one of the initiators is that his treatise will not only seem to most of us a very spirited piece of writing – that it certainly is – but doctrinally sound. And yet it is only one of those documents very frequent in literary history which lack intrinsic soundness, but which can be explained if not justified as a recoil from an opposite extreme. The unsoundness of Young’s work comes out clearly if one compares it with the treatise on the “Sublime” attributed to Longinus which is not a mere protest against a previous excess, but a permanently acceptable treatment of the same problem of genius and inspiration. Longinus exalts genius, but is at the same time regardful of culture and tradition, and even emphasizes the relation between inspiration and the imitation of models. Young insinuates, on the contrary, that one is aided in becoming a genius by being brainless and ignorant. “Some are pupils of nature only, nor go further to school.” “Many a genius probably there has been which could neither write nor read.” It follows almost inevitably from these premises that genius flourishes most in the primitive ages of society before originality has been crushed beneath the superincumbent weight of culture and critics have begun their pernicious activities. Young did not take this step himself, but it was promptly taken by others on the publication of the Ossianic poems (1762). Ossian is at once added to the list of great originals already enumerated by Addison – Homer, Pindar, the patriarchs of the Old Testament and Shakespeare (whom Young like the later romanticists opposes to Pope). “Poetry,” says Diderot, summing up a whole movement, “calls for something enormous, barbaric and savage.”

This exaltation of the virtues of the primitive ages is simply the projection into a mythical past of a need that the man of the eighteenth century feels in the present – the need to let himself go. This is what he understands by his “return to nature.” A whole revolution is implied in this reinterpretation of the word nature. To follow nature in the classical sense is to imitate what is normal and representative in man and so to become decorous. To be natural in the new sense one must begin by getting rid of imitation and decorum. Moreover, for the classicist, nature and reason are synonymous. The primitivist, on the other hand, means by nature the spontaneous play of impulse and temperament, and inasmuch as this liberty is hindered rather than helped by reason, he inclines to look on reason, not as the equivalent but as the opposite of nature.

If one is to understand this development, one should note carefully how certain uses of the word reason, not merely by the neo-classicists but by the anti-traditionalists, especially in religion, tended to produce this denial of reason. It is a curious fact that some of those who were attacking the Christian religion in the name of reason, were themselves aware that mere reason, whether one understood by the word abstract reasoning or uninspired good sense, does not satisfy, that in the long run man is driven either to rise higher or to sink lower than reason. St. Evremond, for example, prays nature to deliver man from the doubtful middle state in which she has placed him – either to “lift him up to angelic radiance,” or else to “sink him to the instinct of simple animals.”³⁸ Since the ascending path, the path that led to angelic radiance, seemed to involve the acceptance of a mass of obsolete dogma, man gradually inclined to sink below the rational level and to seek to recover the “instinct of simple animals.” Another and still more fundamental fact that some of the rationalists perceived and that militated against their own position, is that the dominant element in man is not reason, but imagination, or if one prefers, the element of illusion. “Illusion,” said Voltaire himself, “is the queen of the human heart.” The great achievement of tradition at its best was to be at once a limit and a support to both reason and imagination and so to unite them in a common allegiance. In the new movement, at the same time that reason was being encouraged by scientific method to rise up in revolt against tradition, imagination was being fascinated and drawn to the naturalistic level by scientific discovery and the vista of an endless advance that it opened up. A main problem, therefore, for the student of this movement is to determine what forms of imaginative activity are possible on the naturalistic level. A sort of understanding was reached on this point by different types of naturalists in the course of the eighteenth century. One form of imagination, it was agreed, should be displayed in science, another form in art and literature.³⁹ The scientific imagination should be controlled by judgment and work in strict subordination to the facts. In art and literature, on the other hand, the imagination should be free. Genius and originality are indeed in strict ratio to this freedom. “In the fairy land of fancy,” says Young, “genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.” (The empire of chimeras was later to become the tower of ivory.) This sheer indiscipline of the literary imagination might seem in contrast with the discipline of the scientific imagination an inferiority; but such was not the view of the partisans of original genius. Kant, indeed, who was strongly influenced in his “Critique of Æsthetic Judgment” by these English theorists,⁴⁰ inclined to deny genius to the man of science for the very reason that his imagination is so strictly controlled. The fact would seem to be that a great scientist, a Newton let us say, has as much right to be accounted a genius as Shakespeare. The inferiority of the genius of a Newton compared with that of a Shakespeare lies in a certain coldness. Scientific genius is thus cold because it operates in a region less relevant to man than poetic genius; it is, in Bagehot’s phrase, more remote from the “hearth of the soul.”

The scientific and the literary imagination are indeed not quite so sharply contrasted by most of the theorists as might be inferred from what I have said; most of them do not admit that the literary imagination should be entirely free to wander in its own “empire of chimeras.” Even literary imagination, they maintain, should in some measure be under the surveillance of judgment or taste. One should observe, however, that the judgment or taste that is supposed to control or restrict genius is not associated with the imagination. On the contrary, imagination is associated entirely with the element of novelty in things, which means, in the literary domain, with the expansive eagerness of a man to get his own uniqueness uttered. The genius for the Greek, let us remind ourselves, was not the man who was in this sense unique, but the man who perceived the universal; and as the universal can be perceived only with the aid of the imagination, it follows that genius may be defined as imaginative perception of the universal. The universal thus conceived not only gives a centre and purpose to the activity of the imagination, but sets bounds to the free expansion of temperament and impulse, to what came to be known in the eighteenth century as nature.

Kant, who denies genius to the man of science on grounds I have already mentioned, is unable to associate genius in art or literature with this strict discipline of the imagination to a purpose. The imagination must be free and must, he holds, show this freedom not by working but by playing. At the same time Kant had the cool temper of a man of the Enlightenment, and looked with the utmost disapproval on the aberrations that had marked in Germany the age of original genius (die Geniezeit). He was not in the new sense of the word nor indeed in any sense, an enthusiast. And so he wished the reason, or judgment, to keep control over the imagination without disturbing its free play; art is to have a purpose which is at the same time not a purpose. The distinctions by which he works out the supposed relationship between judgment and imagination are at once difficult and unreal. One can indeed put one’s finger here more readily perhaps than elsewhere on the central impotence of the whole Kantian system. Once discredit tradition and outer authority and then set up as a substitute a reason that is divorced from the imagination and so lacks the support of supersensuous insight, and reason will prove unable to maintain its hegemony. When the imagination has ceased to pull in accord with the reason in the service of a reality that is set above them both, it is sure to become the accomplice of expansive impulse, and mere reason is not strong enough to prevail over this union of imagination and desire. Reason needs some driving power behind it, a driving power that, when working in alliance with the imagination, it gets from insight. To suppose that man will long rest content with mere naked reason as his guide is to forget that “illusion is the queen of the human heart”; it is to revive the stoical error. Schiller, himself a Kantian, felt this rationalistic rigor and coldness of his master, and so sought, while retaining the play theory of art, to put behind the cold reason of Kant the driving power it lacked; for this driving power he looked not to a supersensuous reality, not to insight in short, but to emotion. He takes appropriately the motto for his “Æsthetic Letters” from Rousseau: Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment qui le conduit. He retains Kant’s play theory of art without even so much offset to this play as is implied in Kant’s “purposiveness without purpose.” The nobility of Schiller’s intentions is beyond question. At the same time, by encouraging the notion that it is possible to escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the æsthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality. In art, according to Schiller, both imagination and feeling should be free and spontaneous, and the result of all this freedom, as he sees it, will be perfectly “ideal.” His suspicion of a purpose is invincible. As soon as anything has a purpose it ceases to be æsthetic and in the same measure suffers a loss of dignity. Thus the æsthetic moment of the lion, he says, is when he roars not with any definite design, but out of sheer lustiness, and for the pure pleasure of roaring.

One may assume safely the æsthetic attitude, or what amounts to the same thing, allow one’s self to be guided by feeling, only on the assumption that feeling is worthy of trust. As appears in the very motto he took for his “Æsthetic Letters” Schiller was helped to this faith in man’s native goodness by Rousseau. We need to pause for a moment at this point and consider the background of this belief which finds not only in Schiller but in Rousseau himself, with whom it is usually associated, a rather late expression. The movement that took its rise in the eighteenth century involves, we should recollect, a break not with one but with two traditions – the classical and the Christian. If the plea for genius and originality is to be largely explained as a protest against the mechanical imitation and artificial decorum of a certain type of classicist, the assertion of man’s natural goodness is to be understood rather as a rebound from the doctrine of total depravity that was held by the more austere type of Christian. This doctrine had even in the early centuries of the faith awakened certain protests like that of Pelagius, but for an understanding of the Rousseauistic protest one does not need to go behind the great deistic movement of the early eighteenth century. God, instead of being opposed to nature, is conceived by the deist as a power that expresses his goodness and loveliness through nature. The oppressive weight of fear that the older theology had laid upon the human spirit is thus gradually lifted. Man begins to discover harmonies instead of discords in himself and outer nature. He not only sees virtue in instinct but inclines to turn virtue itself into a “sense,” or instinct. And this means in practice to put emotional expansion in the place of spiritual concentration at the basis of life and morals. In studying this drift towards an æsthetic or sentimental morality one may most conveniently take one’s point of departure in certain English writers of deistic tendency, especially in Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson. Considered purely as an initiator, Shaftesbury is probably more important than Rousseau. His influence ramifies out in every direction, notably into Germany.

The central achievement of Shaftesbury from a purely psychological point of view may be said to be his transformation of conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion. He is thus enabled to set up an æsthetic substitute not merely for traditional religion but for traditional humanism. He undermines insidiously decorum, the central doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be defending it. For decorum also implies a control upon the expansive instincts of human nature, and Shaftesbury is actually engaged in rehabilitating “nature,” and insinuating that it does not need any control. He attains this expansiveness by putting æsthetic in the place of spiritual perception, and so merging more or less completely the good and the true with the beautiful. He thus points the way very directly to Rousseau’s rejection of both inner and outer control in the name of man’s natural goodness. Once accept Shaftesbury’s transformation of conscience and one is led almost inevitably to look on everything that is expansive as natural or vital and on everything that restricts expansion as conventional or artificial. Villers wrote to Madame de Staël (4 May, 1803): “The fundamental and creative idea of all your work has been to show primitive, incorruptible, naïve, passionate nature in conflict with the barriers and shackles of conventional life. … Note that this is also the guiding idea of the author of ‘Werther.’” This contrast between nature and convention is indeed almost the whole of Rousseauism. In permitting his expansive impulses to be disciplined by either humanism or religion man has fallen away from nature much as in the old theology he has fallen away from God, and the famous “return to nature” means in practice the emancipation of the ordinary or temperamental self that had been thus artificially controlled. This throwing off of the yoke of both Christian and classical discipline in the name of temperament is the essential aspect of the movement in favor of original genius. The genius does not look to any pattern that is set above his ordinary spontaneous ego and imitate it. On the contrary, he attains to the self-expression that other men, intimidated by convention, weakly forego.

In thus taking a stand for self-expression, the original genius is in a sense on firm ground – at least so far as the mere rationalist or the late and degenerate classicist is concerned. No conventions are final, no rules can set arbitrary limits to creation. Reality cannot be locked up in any set of formulæ. The element of change and novelty in things, as the romanticists are never tired of repeating, is at once vital and inexhaustible. Wherever we turn, we encounter, as a romantic authority, Jacob Boehme, declares, “abysmal, unsearchable and infinite multiplicity.” Perhaps not since the beginning of the world have two men or indeed two leaves or two blades of grass been exactly alike. Out of a thousand men shaving, as Dr. Johnson himself remarked, no two will shave in just the same way. A person carries his uniqueness even into his thumbprint – as a certain class in the community has learned to its cost. But though all things are ineffably different they are at the same time ineffably alike. And this oneness in things is, no less than the otherwiseness, a matter of immediate perception. This universal implication of the one in the many is found even more marked than elsewhere in the heart of the individual. Each man has his idiosyncrasy (literally his “private mixture”). But in addition to his complexion, his temperamental or private self, every man has a self that he possesses in common with other men. Even the man who is most filled with his own uniqueness, or “genius,” a Rousseau, for example, assumes this universal self in every word he utters. “Jove nods to Jove behind us as we talk.” The word character, one may note, is ambiguous, inasmuch as it may refer either to the idiosyncratic or to the universal human element in a man’s dual nature. For example, an original genius like William Blake not only uses the word character in a different sense from Aristotle – he cannot even understand the Aristotelian usage. “Aristotle,” he complains, “says characters are either good or bad; now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with Character. An apple tree, a pear tree, a horse, a lion are Characters; but a good apple tree or a bad is an apple tree still, etc.” But character as Aristotle uses the word implies something that man possesses and that a horse or tree does not possess – the power namely to deliberate and choose. A man has a good or bad character, he is ethical or unethical, as one may say from the Greek word for character in this sense (ἦθος), according to the quality of his choice as it appears in what he actually does. This distinction between a man’s private, peculiar character (χαρακτήρ) and the character he possesses when judged with reference to something more general than his own complexion is very similar to the French distinction between the sens propre and the sens commun.

The general sense or norm that is opposed to mere temperament and impulse may rest upon the ethos of a particular time and country – the traditional habits and customs that the Rousseauist is wont to dismiss as “artificial” – or it may rest in varying degrees upon immediate perception. For example, the Ismene and Antigone of Sophocles are both ethical; but Ismene would abide by the law of the state, whereas Antigone opposes to this law something still more universal – the “unwritten laws of heaven.” This insight of Antigone into a moral order that is set not only above her ordinary self but above the convention of her time and country is something very immediate, something achieved, as I shall try to show more fully later, with the aid of the imagination.

It is scarcely necessary to add that such a perfect example of the ethical imagination as one finds in Antigone – the imagination that works concentric with the human law – is rare. In actual life for one Antigone who obeys the “unwritten laws of heaven” there will be a thousand Ismenes who will be guided in their moral choices by the law of the community. This law, the convention of a particular place and time, is always but a very imperfect image, a mere shadow indeed of the unwritten law which being above the ordinary rational level is, in a sense to be explained later, infinite and incapable of final formulation. And yet men are forced if only on practical grounds to work out some approximation to this law as a barrier to the unchained appetites of the individual. The elements that enter into any particular attempt to circumscribe the individual in the interests of the community are very mixed and in no small measure relative. Yet the things that any group of men have come together about – their conventions in the literal meaning of the word – even the tabus of a savage tribe, are sure to reflect, however inadequately, the element of oneness in man, the element which is opposed to expansive impulse, and which is no less real, no less a matter of immediate experience, than the element of irreducible difference. The general sense therefore should never be sacrificed lightly to the sense of the individual. Tabu, however inferior it may be to insight, deserves to rank higher after all than mere temperament.⁴¹

The original genius proceeds upon the opposite assumption. Everything that limits temperamental expansion is dismissed as either artificial or mechanical; everything on the contrary that makes for the emancipation of temperament, and so for variety and difference, he welcomes as vital, dynamic, creative. Now, speaking not metaphysically but practically and experimentally, man may, as I have said, follow two main paths: he may develop his ethical self – the self that lays hold of unity – or he may put his main emphasis on the element within him and without him that is associated with novelty and change. In direct proportion as he turns his attention to the infinite manifoldness of things he experiences wonder; if on the other hand he attends to the unity that underlies the manifoldness and that likewise transcends him, he experiences awe. As a man grows religious, awe comes more and more to take the place in him of wonder. The humanist is less averse from the natural order and its perpetual gushing forth of novelties than the man who is religious, yet even the humanist refuses to put his final emphasis on wonder (his motto is rather nil admirari). To illustrate concretely, Dr. Johnson can scarcely conceal his disdain for the wonderful, but being a genuinely religious spirit, is very capable of awe. Commenting on Yalden’s line

An eccentricity so extreme as to be almost or quite indistinguishable from madness is then the final outcome of the revolt of the original genius from the regularity of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century had, one must confess, become too much like the Happy Valley from which Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought an egress. It was fair to the eye and satisfied all man’s ordinary needs, but it seemed at the same time to hem him in oppressively, and limit unduly his horizons. For the modern man, as for the prince in Johnson’s tale, a regular round of assured felicities has counted for nought as compared with the passion for the open; though now that he has tasted strange adventures, the modern man will scarcely decide at the end, like the prince, to “return to Abyssinia.” I have already spoken of the rationalistic and pseudo-classic elements in the eighteenth century that the romantic rebels found so intolerable. It is impossible to follow “reason,” they said in substance, and also to slake one’s thirst for the “infinite”; it is impossible to conform and imitate and at the same time to be free and original and spontaneous. Above all it is impossible to submit to the yoke of either reason or imitation and at the same time to be imaginative. This last assertion will always be the main point at issue in any genuine debate between classicist and romanticist. The supreme thing in life, the romanticist declares, is the creative imagination, and it can be restored to its rights only by repudiating imitation. The imagination is supreme the classicist grants but adds that to imitate rightly is to make the highest use of the imagination. To understand all that is implied in this central divergence between classicist and romanticist we shall need to study in more detail the kind of imaginative activity that has been encouraged in the whole movement extending from the rise of the original genius in the eighteenth century to the present day.

CHAPTER III
ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

I have already spoken of the contrast established by the theorists of original genius in the eighteenth century between the different types of imagination – especially between the literary and the scientific imagination. According to these theorists, it will be remembered, the scientific imagination should be strictly subordinated to judgment, whereas the literary imagination, freed from the shackles of imitation, should be at liberty to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras, or, at all events, should be far less sharply checked by judgment. It is easy to follow the extension of these English views of genius and imagination into the France of Rousseau and Diderot, and then the elaboration of these same views, under the combined influence of both France and England, in Germany. I have tried to show that Kant, especially in his “Critique of Judgment,” and Schiller in his “Æsthetic Letters” (1795) prepare the way for the conception of the creative imagination that is at the very heart of the romantic movement. According to this romantic conception, as we have seen, the imagination is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from all constraint whatever. This extreme romantic emancipation of the imagination was accompanied by an equally extreme emancipation of the emotions. Both kinds of emancipation are, as I have tried to show, a recoil partly from neo-classical judgment – a type of judgment which seemed to oppress all that is creative and spontaneous in man under a weight of outer convention; partly, from the reason of the Enlightenment, a type of reason that was so logical and abstract that it seemed to mechanize the human spirit, and to be a denial of all that is immediate and intuitive. The neo-classical judgment, with its undue unfriendliness to the imagination, is itself a recoil, let us remember, from the imaginative extravagance of the “metaphysicals,” the intellectual romanticists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also, if we take a sufficiently wide view, from the Quixotic type of romanticism, the romanticism of action, that we associate with the Middle Ages.

Now not only are men governed by their imaginations (the imagination, as Pascal says, disposes of everything), but the type of imagination by which most men are governed may be defined in the widest sense of the word as romantic. Nearly every man cherishes his dream, his conceit of himself as he would like to be, a sort of “ideal” projection of his own desires, in comparison with which his actual life seems a hard and cramping routine. “Man must conceive himself what he is not,” as Dr. Johnson says, “for who is pleased with what he is?” The ample habitation that a man rears for his fictitious or “ideal” self often has some slight foundation in fact, but the higher he rears it the more insecure it becomes, until finally, like Perrette in the fable, he brings the whole structure down about his ears by the very gesture of his dream. “We all of us,” La Fontaine concludes in perhaps the most delightful account of the romantic imagination in literature, “wise as well as foolish, indulge in daydreams. There is nothing sweeter. A flattering illusion carries away our spirits. All the wealth in the world is ours, all honors and all women,”⁵² etc. When Johnson descants on the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,”⁵³ and warns us to stick to “sober probability,” what he means is the dangerous prevalence of day-dreaming. The retreat of the Rousseauist into some “land of chimeras” or tower of ivory assumes forms almost incredibly complex and subtle, but at bottom the ivory tower is only one form of man’s ineradicable longing to escape from the oppression of the actual into some land of heart’s desire, some golden age of fancy. As a matter of fact, Rousseau’s imaginative activity often approaches very closely to the delights of day-dreaming as described by La Fontaine. He was never more imaginative, he tells us, than when on a walking-trip – especially when the trip had no definite goal, or at least when he could take his time in reaching it. The Wanderlust of body and spirit could then be satisfied together. Actual vagabondage seemed to be an aid to the imagination in its escape from verisimilitude. One should note especially Rousseau’s account of his early wandering from Lyons to Paris and the airy structures that he raised on his anticipations of what he might find there. Inasmuch as he was to be attached at Paris to the Swiss Colonel Godard, he already traced for himself in fancy, in spite of his short-sightedness, a career of military glory. “I had read that Marshal Schomberg was short-sighted, why shouldn’t Marshal Rousseau be so too?” In the meanwhile, touched by the sight of the groves and brooks, “I felt in the midst of my glory that my heart was not made for so much turmoil, and soon without knowing how, I found myself once more among my beloved pastorals, renouncing forever the toils of Mars.”

Thus alongside the real world and in more or less sharp opposition to it, Rousseau builds up a fictitious world, that pays des chimères, which is alone, as he tells us, worthy of habitation. To study his imaginative activity is simply to study the new forms that he gives to what I have called man’s ineradicable longing for some Arcadia, some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compares the illusions that man nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. The important thing from the point of view of sanity is that a man should not blur the boundaries between the two populations, that he should not cease to discriminate between his fact and his fiction. If he confuses what he dreams himself to be with what he actually is, he has already entered upon the pathway of madness. It was, for example, natural for a youth like Rousseau who was at once romantic and musical, to dream that he was a great composer; but actually to set up as a great composer and to give the concert at Lausanne, shows an unwillingness to discriminate between his fictitious and his real world that is plainly pathological. If not already a megalomaniac, he was even then on the way to megalomania.

To wander through the world as though it were an Arcadia or enchanted vision contrived for one’s especial benefit is an attitude of childhood – especially of imaginative childhood. “Wherever children are,” says Novalis, “there is the golden age.” As the child grows and matures there is a more or less painful process of adjustment between his “vision” and the particular reality in which he is placed. A little sense gets knocked into his head, and often, it must be confessed, a good deal of the imagination gets knocked out. As Wordsworth complains, the vision fades into the light of common day. The striking fact about Rousseau is that, far more than Wordsworth, he held fast to his vision. He refused to adjust it to an unpalatable reality. During the very years when the ordinary youth is forced to subordinate his luxurious imaginings to some definite discipline he fell under the influence of Madame de Warens who encouraged rather than thwarted his Arcadian bent. Later, when almost incurably confirmed in his penchant for revery, he came into contact with the refined society of Paris, an environment requiring so difficult an adjustment that no one we are told could accomplish the feat unless he had been disciplined into the appropriate habits from the age of six. He is indeed the supreme example of the unadjusted man, of the original genius whose imagination has never suffered either inner or outer constraint, who is more of an Arcadian dreamer at sixty perhaps than he was at sixteen. He writes to the Bailli de Mirabeau (31 January, 1767):

“The fatigue of thinking becomes every day more painful to me. I love to dream, but freely, allowing my mind to wander without enslaving myself to any subject. … This idle and contemplative life which you do not approve and which I do not excuse, becomes to me daily more delicious; to wander alone endlessly and ceaselessly among the trees and rocks about my dwelling, to muse or rather to be as irresponsible as I please, and as you say, to go wool-gathering; … finally to give myself up unconstrainedly to my fantasies which, thank heaven, are all within my power: that, sir, is for me the supreme enjoyment, than which I can imagine nothing superior in this world for a man at my age and in my condition.”

Rousseau, then, owes his significance not only to the fact that he was supremely imaginative in an age that was disposed to deny the supremacy of the imagination, but to the fact that he was imaginative in a particular way. A great multitude since his time must be reckoned among his followers, not because they have held certain ideas but because they have exhibited a similar quality of imagination. In seeking to define this quality of imagination we are therefore at the very heart of our subject.

It is clear from what has already been said that Rousseau’s imagination was in a general way Arcadian, and this, if not the highest, is perhaps the most prevalent type of imagination. In surveying the literature of the world one is struck not only by the universality of the pastoral or idyllic element, but by the number of forms it has assumed – forms ranging from the extreme of artificiality and conventionalism to the purest poetry. The very society against the artificiality of which Rousseau’s whole work is a protest is itself in no small degree a pastoral creation. Various elements indeed entered into the life of the drawing-room as it came to be conceived towards the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Marquise de Rambouillet and others who set out at this time to live in the grand manner were in so far governed either by genuine or by artificial decorum. But at the same time that the creators of le grand monde were aiming to be more “decent” than the men and women of the sixteenth century, they were patterning themselves upon the shepherds and shepherdesses of D’Urfé’s interminable pastoral “l’Astrée.” They were seeking to create a sort of enchanted world from which the harsh cares of ordinary life were banished and where they might be free, like true Arcadians, to discourse of love. This discourse of love was associated with what I have defined as intellectual romanticism. In spite of the attacks by the exponents of humanistic good sense (Molière, Boileau, etc.) on this drawing-room affectation, it lingered on and still led in the eighteenth century, as Rousseau complained, to “inconceivable refinements.”⁵⁴ At the same time we should recollect that there is a secret bond between all forms of Arcadian dreaming. Not only was Rousseau fascinated, like the early précieux and précieuses, by D’Urfé’s pastoral, but he himself appealed by his renewal of the main pastoral theme of love to the descendants of these former Arcadians in the polite society of his time. The love of Rousseau is associated not like that of the précieux, with the intellect, but with the emotions, and so he substitutes for a “wire-drawn and super-subtilized gallantry,” the ground-swell of elemental passion.⁵⁵ Moreover, the definitely primitivistic coloring that he gave to his imaginative renewal of the pastoral dream appealed to an age that was reaching the last stages of over-refinement. Primitivism is, strictly speaking, nothing new in the world. It always tends to appear in periods of complex civilization. The charms of the simple life and of a return to nature were celebrated especially during the Alexandrian period of Greek literature for the special delectation no doubt of the most sophisticated members of this very sophisticated society. “Nothing,” as Dr. Santayana says, “is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive.” Primitivistic dreaming was also popular in ancient Rome at its most artificial moment. The great ancients, however, though enjoying the poetry of the primitivistic dream, were not the dupes of this dream. Horace, for example, lived at the most artificial moment of Rome when primitivistic dreaming was popular as it had been at Alexandria. He descants on the joys of the simple life in a well-known ode. One should not therefore hail him, like Schiller, as the founder of the sentimental school “of which he has remained the unsurpassed model.”⁵⁶ For the person who plans to return to nature in Horace’s poem is the old usurer Alfius, who changes his mind at the last moment and puts out his mortgages again. In short, the final attitude of the urbane Horace towards the primitivistic dream – it could hardly be otherwise – is ironical.

Rousseau seems destined to remain the supreme example, at least in the Occident, of the man who takes the primitivistic dream seriously, who attempts to set up primitivism as a philosophy and even as a religion. Rousseau’s account of his sudden illumination on the road from Paris to Vincennes is famous: the scales, he tells us, fell from his eyes even as they had from the eyes of Paul on the road to Damascus, and he saw how man had fallen from the felicity of his primitive estate; how the blissful ignorance in which he had lived at one with himself and harmless to his fellows had been broken by the rise of intellectual self-consciousness and the resulting progress in the sciences and arts. Modern students of Rousseau have, under the influence of James, taken this experience on the road to Vincennes to be an authentic case of conversion,⁵⁷ but this is merely one instance of our modern tendency to confound the subrational with the superrational. What one finds in this alleged conversion when one looks into it, is a sort of “subliminal uprush” of the Arcadian memories of his youth, especially of his life at Annecy and Les Charmettes, and at the same time the contrast between these Arcadian memories and the hateful constraints he had suffered at Paris in his attempts to adjust himself to an uncongenial environment.

We can trace even more clearly perhaps the process by which the Arcadian dreamer comes to set up as a seer, in Rousseau’s relation of the circumstances under which he came to compose his “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.” He goes off on a sort of picnic with Thérèse into the forest of St. Germain and gives himself up to imagining the state of primitive man. “Plunged in the forest,” he says, “I sought and found there the image of primitive times of which I proudly drew the history; I swooped down on the little falsehoods of men; I ventured to lay bare their nature, to follow the progress of time and of circumstances which have disfigured it, and comparing artificial man (l’homme de l’homme) with natural man, to show in his alleged improvement the true source of his miseries. My soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity. Seeing from this vantage point that the blind pathway of prejudices followed by my fellows was also that of their errors, misfortunes and crimes, I cried out to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear: Madmen, who are always complaining of nature, know that all your evils come from yourselves alone.”

The golden age for which the human heart has an ineradicable longing is here presented not as poetical, which it certainly is, but as a “state of nature” from which man has actually fallen. The more or less innocent Arcadian dreamer is being transformed into the dangerous Utopist. He puts the blame of the conflict and division of which he is conscious in himself upon the social conventions that set bounds to his temperament and impulses; once get rid of these purely artificial restrictions and he feels that he will again be at one with himself and “nature.” With such a vision of nature as this it is not surprising that every constraint is unendurable to Rousseau, that he likes, as Berlioz was to say of himself later, to “make all barriers crack.” He is ready to shatter all the forms of civilized life in favor of something that never existed, of a state of nature that is only the projection of his own temperament and its dominant desires upon the void. His programme amounts in practice to the indulgence of infinite indeterminate desire, to an endless and aimless vagabondage of the emotions with the imagination as their free accomplice.

This longing of the highly sophisticated person to get back to the primitive and naïve and unconscious, or what amounts to the same thing, to shake off the trammels of tradition and reason in favor of free and passionate self-expression, underlies, as I have pointed out, the conception of original genius which itself underlies the whole modern movement. A book reflecting the primitivistic trend of the eighteenth century, and at the same time pointing the way, as we shall see presently, to the working out of the fundamental primitivistic contrast between the natural and the artificial in the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, is Schiller’s “Essay on Simple and Sentimental Poetry.” The poetry that does not “look before or after,” that is free from self-questioning and self-consciousness, and has a childlike spontaneity, Schiller calls simple or naïve. The poet, on the other hand, who is conscious of his fall from nature and who, from the midst of his sophistication, longs to be back once more at his mother’s bosom, is sentimental. Homer and his heroes, for example, are naïve; Werther, who yearns in a drawing-room for the Homeric simplicity, is sentimental. The longing of the modern man for nature, says Schiller, is that of the sick man for health. It is hard to see in Schiller’s “nature” anything more than a development of Rousseau’s primitivistic Arcadia. To be sure, Schiller warns us that, in order to recover the childlike and primitive virtues still visible in the man of genius, we must not renounce culture. We must not seek to revert lazily to an Arcadia, but must struggle forward to an Elysium. Unfortunately Schiller’s Elysium has a strange likeness to Rousseau’s Arcadia; and that is because Schiller’s own conception of life is, in the last analysis, overwhelmingly sentimental. His most Elysian conception, that of a purely æsthetic Greece, a wonderland of unalloyed beauty, is also a bit of Arcadian sentimentalizing. Inasmuch as Rousseau’s state of nature never existed outside of dreamland, the Greek who is simple or naïve in this sense is likewise a myth. He has no real counterpart either in the Homeric age or any other age of Greece. It is hard to say which is more absurd, to make the Greeks naïve, or to turn Horace into a sentimentalist. One should note how this romantic perversion of the Greeks for which Schiller is largely responsible is related to his general view of the imagination. We have seen that in the “Æsthetic Letters” he maintains that if the imagination is to conceive the ideal it must be free; and that to be free it must be emancipated from purpose and engage in a sort of play. If the imagination has to subordinate itself to a real object it ceases in so far to be free. Hence the more ideal the imagination the farther it gets away from a real object. By his theory of the imagination, Schiller thus encourages that opposition between the ideal and the real which figures so largely in romantic psychology. A man may consent to adjust a mere dream to the requirements of the real, but when his dream is promoted to the dignity of an ideal it is plain that he will be less ready to make the sacrifice. Schiller’s Greece is very ideal in the sense I have just defined. It hovers before the imagination as a sort of Golden Age of pure beauty, a land of chimeras that is alone worthy of the æsthete’s habitation. As an extreme type of the romantic Hellenist, one may take Hölderlin, who was a disciple at once of Schiller and of Rousseau. He begins by urging emancipation from every form of outer and traditional control in the name of spontaneity. “Boldly forget,” he cries in the very accents of Rousseau, “what you have inherited and won – all laws and customs – and like new-born babes lift up your eyes to godlike nature.” Hölderlin has been called a “Hellenizing Werther,” and Werther, one should recollect, is only a German Saint-Preux, who is in turn, according to Rousseau’s own avowal, only an idealized image of Rousseau. The nature that Hölderlin worships and which is, like the nature of Rousseau, only an Arcadian intoxication of the imagination, he associates with a Greece which is, like the Greece of Schiller, a dreamland of pure beauty. He longs to escape into this dreamland from an actual world that seems to him intolerably artificial. The contrast between his “ideal” Greece and reality is so acute as to make all attempt at adjustment out of the question. As a result of this maladjustment his whole being finally gave way and he lingered on for many years in madness.

The acuteness of the opposition between the ideal and the real in Hölderlin recalls Shelley, who was also a romantic Hellenist, and at the same time perhaps the most purely Rousseauistic of the English romantic poets. But Shelley was also a political dreamer, and here one should note two distinct phases in his dream: a first phase that is filled with the hope of transforming the real world into an Arcadia⁵⁸ through revolutionary reform; and then a phase of elegiac disillusion when the gap between reality and his ideal refuses to be bridged.⁵⁹ Something of the same radiant political hope and the same disillusion is found in Wordsworth. In the first flush of his revolutionary enthusiasm, France seemed to him to be “standing on the top of golden hours” and pointing the way to a new birth of human nature:

 
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times,
In which the meagre stale forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
 

When it became evident that the actual world and Utopia did not coincide after all, when the hard sequences of cause and effect that bind the present inexorably to the past refused to yield to the creations of the romantic imagination, what ensued in Wordsworth was not so much an awakening to true wisdom as a transformation of the pastoral dream. The English Lake Country became for him in some measure as it was later to be for Ruskin, the ivory tower into which he retreated from the oppression of the real. He still continued to see, if not the general order of society, at least the denizens of his chosen retreat through the Arcadian mist, and contrasted their pastoral felicity with the misery of men “barricadoed in the walls of cities.” I do not mean to disparage the poetry of humble life or to deny that many passages may be cited from Wordsworth that justify his reputation as an inspired teacher: I wish merely to point out here and elsewhere what is specifically romantic in the quality of his imagination.

After all it is to Rousseau himself even more than to his German or English followers that one needs to turn for the best examples of the all-pervasive conflict between the ideal and the actual. The psychology of this conflict is revealed with special clearness in the four letters that he wrote to M. de Malesherbes, and into which he has perhaps put more of himself than into any other similar amount of his writing. His natural indolence and impatience at the obligations and constraints of life were, he avows to M. de Malesherbes, increased by his early reading. At the age of eight he already knew Plutarch by heart and had read “all novels” and shed tears over them, he adds “by the pailful.” Hence was formed his “heroic and romantic taste” which filled him with aversion for everything that did not resemble his dreams. He had hoped at first to find the equivalent of these dreams among actual men, but after painful disillusions he had come to look with disdain on his age and his contemporaries. “I withdrew more and more from human society and created for myself a society in my imagination, a society that charmed me all the more in that I could cultivate it without peril or effort and that it was always at my call and such as I required it.” He associated this dream society with the forms of outer nature. The long walks in particular that he took during his stay at the Hermitage were, he tells us, filled with a “continual delirium” of this kind. “I peopled nature with beings according to my heart. … I created for myself a golden age to suit my fancy.” It is not unusual for a man thus to console himself for his poverty in the real relations of life by accumulating a huge hoard of fairy gold. Where the Rousseauist goes beyond the ordinary dreamer is in his proneness to regard his retirement into some land of chimeras as a proof of his nobility and distinction. Poetry and life he feels are irreconcilably opposed to each other, and he for his part is on the side of poetry and the “ideal.” Goethe symbolized the hopelessness of this conflict in the suicide of the young Werther. But though Werther died, his creator continued to live, and more perhaps than any other figure in the whole Rousseauistic movement perceived the peril of this conception of poetry and the ideal. He saw phantasts all about him who refused to be reconciled to the gap between the infinitude of their longing and the platitude of their actual lot. Perhaps no country and time ever produced more such phantasts than Germany of the Storm and Stress and romantic periods – partly no doubt because it did not offer any proper outlet for the activity of generous youths. Goethe himself had been a phantast, and so it was natural in works like his “Tasso” that he should show himself specially preoccupied with the problem of the poet and his adjustment to life. About the time that he wrote this play, he was, as he tells us, very much taken up with thoughts of “Rousseau and his hypochondriac misery.” Rousseau for his part felt a kinship between himself and Tasso, and Goethe’s Tasso certainly reminds us very strongly of Rousseau. Carried away by his Arcadian imaginings, Tasso violates the decorum that separates him from the princess with whom he has fallen in love. As a result of the rebuffs that follow, his dream changes into a nightmare, until he finally falls like Rousseau into wild and random suspicion and looks on himself as the victim of a conspiracy. In opposition to Tasso is the figure of Antonio, the man of the world, whose imagination does not run away with his sense of fact, and who is therefore equal to the “demands of the day.” The final reconciliation between Tasso and Antonio, if not very convincing dramatically, symbolizes at least what Goethe achieved in some measure in his own life. There were moments, he declares, when he might properly look upon himself as mad, like Rousseau. He escaped from this world of morbid brooding, this giddy downward gazing into the bottomless pit of the romantic heart against which he utters a warning in Tasso, by his activity at the court of Weimar, by classical culture, by scientific research. Goethe carries the same problem of reconciling the ideal to the real a stage further in his “Wilhelm Meister.” The more or less irresponsible and Bohemian youth that we see at the beginning learns by renunciation and self-limitation to fit into a life of wholesome activity. Goethe saw that the remedy for romantic dreaming is work, though he is open to grave criticism, as I shall try to show elsewhere, for his unduly naturalistic conception of work. But the romanticists as a rule did not wish work in any sense and so, attracted as they were by the free artistic life of Meister at the beginning, they looked upon his final adjustment to the real as a base capitulation to philistinism. Novalis described the book as a “Candide directed against poetry,” and set out to write a counterblast in “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” This apotheosis of pure poetry, as he meant it to be, is above all an apotheosis of the wildest vagabondage of the imagination. Novalis did not, however, as a result of the conflict between the ideal and the real, show any signs of going mad like Hölderlin, or of simply fading from life like his friend Wackenroder. Like E. T. A. Hoffmann and a certain number of other phantasts he had a distinct gift for leading a dual life – for dividing himself into a prosaic self which went one way, and a poetical self which went another.

This passage may be said to foreshadow the two types of art and literature that have been prevalent since Rousseau – romantic art and the so-called realistic art that tended to supplant it towards the middle of the nineteenth century.⁷¹ This so-called realism does not represent any fundamental change of direction as compared with the earlier romanticism; it is simply, as some one has put it, romanticism going on all fours. The extreme of romantic unreality has always tended to produce a sharp recoil. As the result of the wandering of the imagination in its own realm of chimeras, one finally comes to feel the need of refreshing one’s sense of fact; and the more trivial the fact, the more certain one is that one’s feet are once more planted on terra firma. Don Quixote is working for the triumph of Sancho Panza. Besides this tendency of one extreme to produce the other, there are special reasons that I shall point out more fully later for the close relationship of the romanticism and the so-called realism of the nineteenth century. They are both merely different aspects of naturalism. What binds together realism and romanticism is their common repudiation of decorum as something external and artificial. Once get rid of decorum, or what amounts to the same thing, the whole body of “artificial” conventions, and what will result is, according to the romanticist, Arcadia. But what actually emerges with the progressive weakening of the principle of restraint is la bête humaine. The Rousseauist begins by walking through the world as though it were an enchanted garden, and then with the inevitable clash between his ideal and the real he becomes morose and embittered. Since men have turned out not to be indiscriminately good he inclines to look upon them as indiscriminately bad and to portray them as such. At the bottom of much so-called realism therefore is a special type of satire, a satire that is the product of violent emotional disillusion. The collapse of the Revolution of 1848 produced a plentiful crop of disillusion of this kind. No men had ever been more convinced of the loftiness of their idealism than the Utopists of this period, or failed more ignominiously when put to the test. All that remained, many argued, was to turn from an ideal that had proved so disappointing to the real, and instead of dreaming about human nature to observe men as coolly, in Flaubert’s phrase, as though they were mastodons or crocodiles. But what lurks most often behind this pretence to a cold scientific impassiveness in observing human nature is a soured and cynical emotionalism and a distinctly romantic type of imagination. The imagination is still idealistic, still straining, that is, away from the real, only its idealism has undergone a strange inversion; instead of exaggerating the loveliness it exaggerates the ugliness of human nature; it finds a sort of morose satisfaction in building for itself not castles but dungeons in Spain. What I am saying applies especially to the French realists who are more logical in their disillusion than the men of other nations. They often establish the material environment of their heroes with photographic literalness, but in their dealings with what should be the specifically human side of these characters they often resemble Rousseau at his worst: they put pure logic into the service of pure emotion, and this is a way of achieving, not the real, but a maximum of unreality. The so-called realistic writers abound in extreme examples of the romantic imagination. The peasants of Zola are not real, they are an hallucination. If a man is thus to let his imagination run riot, he might, as Lemaître complains, have imagined something more agreeable.

The same kinship between realism and romanticism might be brought out in a writer whom Zola claimed as his master – Balzac. I do not refer to the side of Balzac that is related to what the French call le bas romantisme– his lapses into the weird and the melodramatic, his occasional suggestions of the claptrap of Anne Radcliffe and the Gothic romance – but to his general thesis and his handling of it. Balzac’s attitude towards the society of his time is, like the attitude of Rousseau towards the society of his time, satirical, but on entirely different grounds: he would show the havoc wrought in this society by its revolutionary emancipation from central control of the kind that had been provided traditionally by the monarchy and the Catholic Church, and the consequent disruption of the family by the violent and egoistic expansion of the individual along the lines of his ruling passion. But Balzac’s imagination is not on the side of his thesis; not, that is, on the side of the principle of control; on the contrary, it revels in its vision of a world in which men are overstepping all ethical bounds in their quest of power and pleasure, of a purely naturalistic world that is governed solely by the law of cunning and the law of force. His imagination is so fascinated by this vision that, like the imagination of Rousseau, though in an entirely different way, he simply parts company with reality. Judged by the ultimate quality of his imagination, and this, let me repeat, is always the chief thing to consider in a creative artist, Balzac is a sort of inverted idealist. Compared with the black fictions he conjures up in his painting of Paris, the actual Paris seems pale and insipid. His Paris is not real in short, but an hallucination – a lurid land of heart’s desire. As Leslie Stephen puts it, for Balzac Paris is hell, but then hell is the only place worth living in. The empire of chimeras over which he holds sway is about as far on one side of reality as George Sand’s kingdom of dreams is on the other. George Sand, more perhaps than any other writer of her time, continues Rousseau in his purely idyllic manner. Her idealized peasants are not any further from the truth and are certainly more agreeable than the peasants of Balzac, who foreshadow the peasants of Zola.

The writer, however, who shows the conflict between the romantic imagination and the real better than either Balzac or Zola, better than any other writer perhaps of the modern French movement, is Flaubert. The fondness of this founder of realism for reality may be inferred from a passage in one of his letters to George Sand: “I had in my very youth a complete presentiment of life. It was like a sickly kitchen smell escaping from a basement window.” In his attitude towards the society of his time, he is, in the same sense, but in a far greater degree than Rousseau, satirical. The stupidity and mediocrity of the bourgeois are his target, just as Rousseau’s target is the artificiality of the drawing-room. At the same time that he shrinks back with nausea from this reality, Flaubert is like Gautier “full of nostalgias,” even the nostalgia of the Middle Ages. “I am a Catholic,” he exclaims, “I have in my heart something of the green ooze of the Norman Cathedrals.” Yet he cannot acquiesce in a mediæval or any other dream. Even Rousseau says that he was “tormented at times by the nothingness of his chimeras.” Flaubert was tormented far more by the nothingness of his. Perhaps indeed the predominant flavor in Flaubert’s writing as a whole is that of an acrid disillusion. He portrays satirically the real and at the same time mocks at the ideal that he craves emotionally and imaginatively (this is only one of the innumerable forms assumed by the Rousseauistic warfare between the head and the heart). He oscillates rapidly between the pole of realism as he conceives it, and the pole of romance, and so far as any serious philosophy is concerned, is left suspended in the void. Madame Bovary is the very type of the Rousseauistic idealist, misunderstood in virtue of her exquisite faculty of feeling. She aspires to a “love beyond all loves,” an infinite satisfaction that her commonplace husband and environment quite deny her. At bottom Flaubert’s heart is with Madame Bovary. “I am Madame Bovary,” he exclaims. Yet he exposes pitilessly the “nothingness of her chimeras,” and pursues her to the very dregs of her disillusion. I have already mentioned Flaubert’s cult for “Don Quixote.” His intellectual origins were all there, he says; he had known it by heart even when a boy. It has been said that “Madame Bovary” bears the same relationship to æsthetic romanticism that “Don Quixote” does to the romanticism of actual adventure of the Middle Ages. Yet “Don Quixote” is the most genial, “Madame Bovary” the least genial of masterpieces. This difference comes out no less clearly in a comparison of M. Homais with Sancho Panza than in a comparison of Madame Bovary with the Knight, and is so fundamental as to throw doubt on the soundness of the whole analogy.

In M. Homais and like figures Flaubert simply means to symbolize contemporary life and the immeasurable abyss of platitude in which it is losing itself through its lack of imagination and ideal. Yet this same platitude exercises on him a horrid fascination. For his execration of the philistine is the nearest approach in his idealism to a positive content, to an escape from sheer emptiness and unreality. This execration must therefore be cherished if he is to remain convinced of his own superiority. “If it were not for my indignation,” he confesses in one place, “I should fall flat.” Unfortunately we come to resemble what we habitually contemplate. “By dint of railing at idiots,” says Flaubert, “one runs the risk of becoming idiotic one’s self.”

In his discourse on the “Immortality of the Soul” (1659) Henry More speaks of “that imagination which is most free, such as we use in romantic inventions.” The price that the romantic imagination pays for its freedom should by this time be obvious: the freer it becomes the farther it gets away from reality. We have seen that the special form of unreality encouraged by the æsthetic romanticism of Rousseau is the dream of the simple life, the return to a nature that never existed, and that this dream made its special appeal to an age that was suffering from an excess of artificiality and conventionalism. Before entering upon the next stage of our subject it might be well to consider for a moment wherein the facts of primitive life, so far as we can ascertain them, differ from Rousseau’s dream of primitive life; why we are justified in assuming that the noble savage of Rousseau, or the Greek of Schiller, or Hölderlin, or the man of the Middle Ages of Novalis never had any equivalent in reality. More or less primitive men have existed and still exist and have been carefully studied. Some of them actually recall by various traits, their gentleness, for example, Rousseau’s aboriginal man, and the natural pity that is supposed to guide him. Why then will any one familiar with the facts of aboriginal life smile when Rousseau speaks of the savage “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his own will,”⁷² and therefore displaying independence and initiative? The answer is of course that genuine savages are, with the possible exception of children, the most conventional and imitative of beings. What one takes to be natural in them is often the result of a long and, in the Rousseauistic sense, artificial discipline. The tendency to take for pure and unspoiled nature what is in fact a highly modified nature is one that assumes many forms. “When you see,” says Rousseau, “in the happiest people in the world bands of peasants regulate the affairs of state under an oak-tree and always behave sensibly, can you keep from despising the refinements of other nations which make themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?” Rousseau is viewing these peasants through the Arcadian glamour. In much the same way Emerson saw a proof of the consonance of democracy with human nature in the working of the New England town-meeting. But both Rousseau’s Swiss and Emerson’s New Englanders had been moulded by generations of austere religious discipline and so throw little light on the relation of democracy to human nature in itself.

A somewhat similar illusion is that of the man who journeys into a far country and enjoys in the highest degree the sense of romantic strangeness. He has escaped from the convention of his own society and is inclined to look on the men and women he meets in the foreign land as Arcadian apparitions. But these men and women have not escaped from their convention. On the contrary, what most delights him in them (for example, what most delighted Lafcadio Hearn in the Japanese) may be the result of an extraordinarily minute and tyrannical discipline imposed in the name of the general sense upon the impulses of the individual.

The relation of convention to primitive life is so well understood nowadays that the Rousseauist has reversed his argument. Since primitive folk (let us say the Bushmen of Australia) are more conventional than the Parisian and Londoner we may infer that at some time in the future when the ideal is at last achieved upon earth, conventions will have disappeared entirely. But this is simply to transfer the Golden Age from the past to the future, and also to miss the real problem: for there is a real problem – perhaps indeed the gravest of all problems – involved in the relation of the individual to convention. If we are to grasp the nature of this problem we should perceive first of all that the significant contrast is not that between conditions more or less primitive and civilization, but that between a civilization that does not question its conventions and a civilization that has on the contrary grown self-conscious and critical. Thus the Homeric Greeks, set up by Schiller as exemplars of the simple life, were plainly subject to the conventions of an advanced civilization. The Periclean Greeks were also highly civilized, but unlike the Homeric Greeks, were becoming self-conscious and critical. In the same way the European thirteenth century, in some respects the most civilized that the world has seen, was governed by a great convention that imposed very strict limits upon the liberty of the individual. The critical spirit was already awake and tugging at the leashes of the outer authority that confined it, but it did not actually break them. Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas did not, for example, inquire into the basis of the mediæval convention in the same way that Socrates and the sophists inquired into the traditional opinions of Greece. But in the eighteenth century, especially in France, and from that time down to the present day, the revolt against convention has assumed proportions quite comparable to anything that took place in ancient Greece. Perhaps no other age has witnessed so many individuals who were, like Berlioz, eager to make all traditional barriers crack in the interest of their “genius” and its full expression. The state of nature in the name of which Rousseau himself assailed convention, though in itself only a chimera, a mere Arcadian projection upon the void, did indeed tend in a rationalistic pseudo-classic age, to new forms of imaginative activity. In the form that concerns us especially the imagination is free to give its magic and glamour and infinitude to the emancipated emotions. This type of romanticism did not result in any recovery of the supposed primitive virtues, but it did bring about a revaluation of the received notions of morality that can scarcely be studied too carefully.

CHAPTER IV
ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL

The period that began in the late eighteenth century and in the midst of which we are still living has witnessed an almost unparalleled triumph, as I have just said, of the sense of the individual (sens propre) over the general sense of mankind (sens commun). Even the collectivistic schemes that have been opposed to individualism during this period are themselves, judged by traditional standards, violently individualistic. Now the word individualism needs as much as any other general term to be treated Socratically: we need in the interests of our present subject to discriminate between different varieties of individualism. Perhaps as good a working classification as any is to distinguish three main varieties: a man may wish to act, or think, or feel, differently from other men, and those who are individualistic in any one of these three main ways may have very little in common with one another. To illustrate concretely, Milton’s plea in his “Areopagitica” for freedom of conscience makes above all for individualism of action. (La foi qui n’agit pas est-ce une foi sincère?) Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, pleads in his Dictionary and elsewhere for tolerance, not so much because he wishes to act or feel in his own way as because he wishes to think his own thoughts. Rousseau is no less obviously ready to subordinate both thought and action to sensibility. His message is summed up once for all in the exclamation of Faust, “Feeling is all.” He urges war on the general sense only because of the restrictions it imposes on the free expansion of his emotions and the enhancing of these emotions by his imagination.

Now the warfare that Rousseau and the individualists of feeling have waged on the general sense has meant in practice a warfare on two great traditions, the classical and the Christian. I have already pointed out that these two traditions, though both holding the idea of imitation, were not entirely in accord with one another, that the imitation of Horace differs widely from the imitation of Christ. Yet their diverging from one another is as nothing compared with their divergence from the individualism of the primitivist. For the man who imitates Christ in any traditional sense this world is not an Arcadian dream but a place of trial and probation. “Take up your cross and follow me.” The following of this great exemplar required that the instinctive self, which Rousseau would indulge, should be either sternly rebuked or else mortified utterly. So far from Nature and God being one, the natural man is so corrupt, according to the more austere Christian, that the gap between him and the divine can be traversed only by a miracle of grace. He should therefore live in fear and trembling as befits a being upon whom rests the weight of the divine displeasure. “It is an humble thing to be a man.” Humility indeed is, in the phrase of Jeremy Taylor, the special ornament and jewel of the Christian religion, and one is tempted to add, of all religion in so far as it is genuine. Genuine religion must always have in some form the sense of a deep inner cleft between man’s ordinary self and the divine. But some Christians were more inclined from the start, as we can see in the extreme forms of the doctrine of grace, to push their humility to an utter despair of human nature. The historical explanation of this despair is obvious: it is a sharp rebound from the pagan riot; an excessive immersion in this world led to an excess of otherworldliness. At the same time the conviction as to man’s helplessness was instilled into those, who, like St. Augustine, had witnessed in some of its phases the slow disintegration of the Roman Empire. Human nature had gone bankrupt; and for centuries it needed to be administered, if I may continue the metaphor, in receivership. The doctrine of grace was admirably adapted to this end.

The pagan riot from which the church reacted so sharply, was not, however, the whole of the ancient civilization. I have already said that there was at the heart of this civilization at its best a great idea – the idea of proportionateness. The ancients were in short not merely naturalistic but humanistic, and the idea of proportion is just as fundamental in humanism as is humility in religion. Christianity, one scarcely need add, incorporated within itself, however disdainfully, many humanistic elements from Greek and Roman culture. Yet it is none the less true that in his horror at the pagan worldliness the Christian tended to fly into the opposite extreme of unworldliness, and in this clash between naturalism and supernaturalism the purely human virtues of mediation were thrust more or less into the background. Yet by its very defect on the humanistic side the doctrine of grace was perhaps all the better fitted for the administration of human nature in receivership. For thus to make man entirely distrustful of himself and entirely dependent on God, meant in practice to make him entirely dependent on the Church. Man became ignorant and fanatical in the early Christian centuries, but he also became humble, and in the situation then existing that was after all the main thing. The Church as receiver for human nature was thus enabled to rescue civilization from the wreck of pagan antiquity and the welter of the barbarian invasions. But by the very fact that the bases of life in this world gradually grew more secure man became less otherworldly. He gradually recovered some degree of confidence in himself. He gave increasing attention to that side of himself that the ascetic Christian had repressed. The achievements of the thirteenth century which mark perhaps the culmination of Christian civilization were very splendid not only from a religious but also from a humanistic point of view. But although the critical spirit was already beginning to awake, it did not at that time, as I have already said, actually break away from the tutelage of the Church.

This emancipation of human nature from theological restraint took place in far greater measure at the Renaissance. Human nature showed itself tired of being treated as a bankrupt, of being governed from without and from above. It aspired to become autonomous. There was in so far a strong trend in many quarters towards individualism. This rupture with external authority meant very diverse things in practice. For some who, in Lionardo’s phrase, had caught a glimpse of the antique symmetry it meant a revival of genuine humanism; for others it meant rather a revival of the pagan and naturalistic side of antiquity. Thus Rabelais, in his extreme opposition to the monkish ideal, already proclaims, like Rousseau, the intrinsic excellence of man, while Calvin and others attempted to revive the primitive austerity of Christianity that had been corrupted by the formalism of Rome. In short, naturalistic, humanistic, and religious elements are mingled in almost every conceivable proportion in the vast and complex movement known as the Renaissance; all these elements indeed are often mingled in the same individual. The later Renaissance finally arrived at what one is tempted to call the Jesuitical compromise. There was a general revamping of dogma and outer authority, helped forward by a society that had taken alarm at the excesses of the emancipated individual. If the individual consented to surrender his moral autonomy, the Church for its part consented to make religion comparatively easy and pleasant for him, to adapt it by casuistry and other devices to a human nature that was determined once for all to take a less severe and ascetic view of life. One might thus live inwardly to a great extent on the naturalistic level while outwardly going through the motions of a profound piety. There is an unmistakable analogy between the hollowness of a religion of this type and the hollowness that one feels in so much neo-classical decorum. There is also a formalistic taint in the educational system worked out by the Jesuits – a system in all respects so ingenious and in some respects so admirable. The Greek and especially the Latin classics are taught in such a way as to become literary playthings rather than the basis of a philosophy of life; a humanism is thus encouraged that is external and rhetorical rather than vital, and this humanism is combined with a religion that tends to stress submission to outer authority at the expense of inwardness and individuality. The reproach has been brought against this system that it is equally unfitted to form a pagan hero or a Christian saint. The reply to it was Rousseau’s educational naturalism – his exaltation of the spontaneity and genius of the child.

Voltaire says that every Protestant is a Pope when he has his Bible in his hand. But in practice Protestantism has been very far from encouraging so complete a subordination of the general sense to the sense of the individual. In the period that elapsed between the first forward push of individualism in the Renaissance and the second forward push in the eighteenth century, each important Protestant group worked out its creed or convention and knew how to make it very uncomfortable for any one of its members who rebelled against its authority. Protestant education was also, like that of the Jesuits, an attempt to harmonize Christian and classical elements.

I have already spoken elsewhere of what was menacing all these attempts, Protestant as well as Catholic, to revive the principle of authority, to put the general sense once more on a traditional and dogmatic basis and impose it on the sense of the individual. The spirit of free scientific enquiry in the Renaissance had inspired great naturalists like Kepler and Galileo, and had had its prophet in Bacon. So far from suffering any setback in the seventeenth century, science had been adding conquest to conquest. The inordinate self-confidence of the modern man would seem to be in large measure an outcome of this steady advance of scientific discovery, just as surely as the opposite, the extreme humility that appears in the doctrine of grace, reflects the despair of those who had witnessed the disintegration of the Roman Empire. The word humility, if used at all nowadays, means that one has a mean opinion of one’s self in comparison with other men, and not that one perceives the weakness and nothingness of human nature in itself in comparison with what is above it. But it is not merely the self-confidence inspired by science that has undermined the traditional disciplines, humanistic and religious, and the attempts to mediate between them on a traditional basis; it is not merely that science has fascinated man’s imagination, stimulated his wonder and curiosity beyond all bounds and drawn him away from the study of his own nature and its special problems to the study of the physical realm. What has been even more decisive in the overthrow of the traditional disciplines is that science has won its triumphs not by accepting dogma and tradition but by repudiating them, by dealing with the natural law, not on a traditional but on a positive and critical basis. The next step that might logically have been taken, one might suppose, would have been to put the human law likewise on a positive and critical basis. On the contrary the very notion that man is subject to two laws has been obscured. The truths of humanism and religion, being very much bound up with certain traditional forms, have been rejected along with these forms as obsolescent prejudice, and the attempt has been made to treat man as entirely the creature of the natural law. This means in practice that instead of dying to his ordinary self, as the austere Christian demands, or instead of imposing a law of decorum upon his ordinary self, as the humanist demands, man has only to develop his ordinary self freely.

At the beginning, then, of the slow process that I have been tracing down in briefest outline from mediæval Christianity, we find a pure supernaturalism; at the end, a pure naturalism. If we are to understand the relationship of this naturalism to the rise of a romantic morality, we need to go back, as we have done in our study of original genius, to the England of the early eighteenth century. Perhaps the most important intermediary stage in the passage from a pure supernaturalism to a pure naturalism is the great deistic movement which flourished especially in the England of this period. Deism indeed is no new thing. Deistic elements may be found even in the philosophy of the Middle Ages. But for practical purposes one does not need in one’s study of deism to go behind English thinkers like Shaftesbury and his follower Hutcheson. Shaftesbury is a singularly significant figure. He is not only the authentic precursor of innumerable naturalistic moralists in England, France, and Germany, but one may also trace in his writings the connection between modern naturalistic morality and ancient naturalistic morality in its two main forms – Stoic and Epicurean. The strict Christian supernaturalist had maintained that the divine can be known to man only by the outer miracle of revelation, supplemented by the inner miracle of grace. The deist maintains, on the contrary, that God reveals himself also through outer nature which he has fitted exquisitely to the needs of man, and that inwardly man may be guided aright by his unaided thoughts and feelings (according to the predominance of thought or feeling the deist is rationalistic or sentimental). Man, in short, is naturally good and nature herself is beneficent and beautiful. The deist finally pushes this harmony in God and man and nature so far that the three are practically merged. At a still more advanced stage God disappears, leaving only nature and man as a modification of nature, and the deist gives way to the pantheist who may also be either rationalistic or emotional. The pantheist differs above all from the deist in that he would dethrone man from his privileged place in creation, which means in practice that he denies final causes. He no longer believes, for example, like that sentimental deist and disciple of Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre, that Providence has arranged everything in nature with an immediate eye to man’s welfare; that the markings on the melon, for instance, “seem to show that it is destined for the family table.”⁷³

Rousseau himself, though eschewing this crude appeal to final causes, scarcely got in theory at least beyond the stage of emotional deism. The process I have been describing is illustrated better in some aspects by Diderot who began as a translator of Shaftesbury and who later got so far beyond mere deism that he anticipates the main ideas of the modern evolutionist and determinist. Diderot is at once an avowed disciple of Bacon, a scientific utilitarian in short, and also a believer in the emancipation of the emotions. Rousseau’s attack on science is profoundly significant for other reasons, but it is unfortunate in that it obscures the connection that is so visible in Diderot between the two sides of the naturalistic movement. If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good. There was another reason why men were eager to be told that they were naturally good and that they could therefore trust the spontaneous overflow of their emotions. This reason is to be sought in the inevitable recoil from the opposite doctrine of total depravity and the mortal constraint that it had put on the instincts of the natural man. I have said that many churchmen, notably the Jesuits, sought to dissimulate the full austerity of Christian doctrine and thus retain their authority over a world that was moving away from austerity and so threatening to escape them. But other Catholics, notably the Jansenists, as well as Protestants like the Calvinists, were for insisting to the full on man’s corruption and for seeking to maintain on this basis what one is tempted to call a theological reign of terror. One whole side of Rousseau’s religion can be understood only as a protest against the type of Christianity that is found in a Pascal or a Jonathan Edwards. The legend of the abyss that Pascal saw always yawning at his side has at least a symbolical value. It is the wont of man to oscillate violently between extremes, and each extreme is not only bad in itself but even worse by the opposite extreme that it engenders. From a God who is altogether fearful, men are ready to flee to a God who is altogether loving, or it might be more correct to say altogether lovely. “Listen, my children,” said Mother Angélique of Port-Royal to her nuns a few hours before her death, “listen well to what I say. Most people do not know what death is, and never give the matter a thought. But my worst forebodings were as nothing compared with the terrors now upon me.” In deliberate opposition to such expressions of the theological terror, Rousseau imagined the elaborate complacency and self-satisfaction of the dying Julie, whose end was not only calm but æsthetic (le dernier jour de sa vie en fut aussi le plus charmant).

It is not enough to say of the representatives of both sides of this great naturalistic movement that they eliminate the veto power from human nature while continuing to use the old words, like virtue and conscience, that imply a veto power. We have seen that they actually attack the veto power as synonymous with evil. The devil is conceived as the spirit that always says no. A purely affirmative morality is almost necessarily an emotional morality. If there is no region of insight above the reason which is felt by the natural man as an element of vital control, and if cold reason, reason unsupported by insight, never has done anything illustrious, as Rousseau truly says, it follows that the only way to put driving power behind reason is to turn virtue into a passion, – a passion that differs from other passions merely in its greater imperiousness. For the beautiful soul virtue, as we have seen in the case of Robespierre, is not only a tender, imperious and voluptuous passion but even an intoxication. “I was, if not virtuous,” says Rousseau, “at least intoxicated with virtue.” In its extreme manifestations romantic morality is indeed only one aspect, and surely the most singular aspect, of the romantic cult of intoxication. No student of romanticism can fail to be struck by its pursuit of delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake. It is important to see how all these things are closely related to one another and how they all derive from the attempt to put life on an emotional basis. To rest conscience, for example, on emotion is to rest it on what is always changing, not only from man to man but from moment to moment in the same man. “If,” as Shelley says, “nought is, but that it feels itself to be,” it will feel itself to be very different things at different times. No part of man is exempt from the region of flux and change. There is, as James himself points out, a kinship between such a philosophy of pure motion and vertigo. Faust after all is only consistent when having identified the spirit that says no, which is the true voice of conscience, with the devil, he proceeds to dedicate himself to vertigo (dem Taumel weih’ ich mich). Rousseau also, as readers of the “Confessions” will remember, deliberately courted giddiness by gazing down on a waterfall from the brink of a precipice (making sure first that the railing on which he leaned was good and strong). This naturalistic dizziness became epidemic among the Greeks at the critical moment of their break with traditional standards. “Whirl is King,” cried Aristophanes, “having driven out Zeus.” The modern sophist is even more a votary of the god Whirl than the Greek, for he has added to the mobility of an intellect that has no support in either tradition or insight the mobility of feeling. Many Rousseauists were, like Hazlitt, attracted to the French Revolution by its “grand whirling movements.”

Even more significant than the cult of vertigo is the closely allied cult of intoxication. “Man being reasonable,” says Byron, with true Rousseauistic logic, “must therefore get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.” The subrational and impulsive self of the man who has got drunk is not only released from the surveillance of reason in any sense of the word, but his imagination is at the same tune set free from the limitations of the real. If many Rousseauists have been rightly accused of being “lovers of delirium,” that is because in delirium the fancy is especially free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras. To compose a poem, as Coleridge is supposed to have composed “Kubla Khan,” in an opium dream without any participation of his rational self is a triumph of romantic art. “I should have taken more opium when I wrote it,” said Friedrich Schlegel in explanation of the failure of his play “Alarcos.” What more specially concerns our present topic is the carrying over of this subrational “enthusiasm” into the field of ethical values, and this calls for certain careful distinctions. Genuine religion – whether genuine Christianity or genuine Buddhism – is plainly unfriendly in the highest degree to every form of intoxication. Buddhism, for example, not only prohibits the actual use of intoxicants but it pursues implacably all the subtler intoxications of the spirit. The attitude of the humanist towards intoxication is somewhat more complex. He recognizes how deep in man’s nature is the craving for some blunting of the sharp edge of his consciousness and at least a partial escape from reason and reality; and so he often makes a place on the recreative side of life for such moments of escape even if attained with the aid of wine. Dulce est desipere in loco. Pindar, who displays so often in his verse the high seriousness of the ethical imagination, is simply observing the decorum of the occasion when he celebrates in a song for the end of a feast “the time when the wearisome cares of men have vanished from their reasons and on a wide sea of golden wealth we are all alike voyaging to some visionary shore. He that is penniless is then rich, and even they that are wealthy find their hearts expanding, when they are smitten by the arrows of the vine.” The true Greek, one scarcely needs add, put his final emphasis, as befitted a child of Apollo, not on intoxication but on the law of measure and sobriety – on preserving the integrity of his mind, to render literally the Greek word for the virtue that he perhaps prized the most.¹¹¹ One must indeed remember that alongside the Apollonian element in Greek life is the orgiastic or Dyonisiac element. But when Euripides sides imaginatively with the frenzy of Dionysus, as he does in his “Bacchae,” though ostensibly preaching moderation, we may affirm that he is falling away from what is best in the spirit of Hellas and revealing a kinship with the votaries of the god Whirl. The cult of intoxication has as a matter of fact appeared in all times and places where men have sought to get the equivalent of religious vision and the sense of oneness that it brings without rising above the naturalistic level. True religious vision is a process of concentration, the result of the imposition of the veto power upon the expansive desires of the ordinary self. The various naturalistic simulations of this vision are, on the contrary, expansive, the result of a more or less complete escape from the veto power, whether won with the aid of intoxicants or not. The emotional romanticists from Rousseau down have left no doubt as to the type of vision they represented. Rousseau dilates with a sort of fellow feeling on the deep potations that went on in the taverns of patriarchal Geneva.¹¹² Renan looks with disfavor on those who are trying to diminish drunkenness among the common people. He merely asks that this drunkenness “be gentle, amiable, accompanied by moral sentiments.” Perhaps this side of the movement is best summed up in the following passage of William James: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”¹¹³

The American distiller who named one of his brands “Golden Dream Whiskey” was evidently too modest. If an adept in the new psychology he might have set up as a pure idealist, as the opener up of an especially radiant pathway to the “truth.”

The primitivist then attacks sober discrimination as an obstacle both to warm immediacy of feeling and to unity. He tends to associate the emotional unity that he gains through intoxication with the unity of instinct which he so admires in the world of the subrational. “The romantic character,” says Ricarda Huch, “is more exposed to waste itself in debaucheries than any other; for only in intoxication, whether of love or wine, when the one half of its being, consciousness, is lulled to sleep, can it enjoy the bliss for which it envies every beast – the bliss of feeling itself one.”¹¹⁴ The desires of the animal, however, work within certain definite limits. They are not, like those of the primitivist, inordinate, the explanation being that they are less stimulated than the desires of the primitivist by the imagination. Even if he gets rid of intellect and moral effort, the primitivist cannot attain the unity of instinct because he remains too imaginative; at the same time he proclaims and proclaims rightly that the imagination is the great unifying power – the power that can alone save us from viewing things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.” We should attend carefully at this point for we are coming to the heart of the great romantic sophism. The Rousseauist does not attain to the unity of the man whose impulses and desires are controlled and disciplined to some ethical centre. He does not, in spite of all his praise of the unconscious and of the “sublime animals,” attain to the unity of instinct. In what sense then may he be said to attain unity? The obvious reply is that he attains unity only in dreamland. For the nature to which he would return, one cannot repeat too often, is nothing real, but a mere nostalgic straining of the imagination away from the real. It is only in dreamland that one can rest unity on the expansive forces of personality that actually divide not only one individual from another but the same individual from himself. It is only in dreamland that, in the absence of both inner and outer control, “all things” will “flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” Such a unity will be no more than a dream unity, even though one term it the ideal and sophisticate in its favor all the traditional terms of religion and morality. A question that forces itself at every stage upon the student of this movement is: What is the value of unity without reality? For two things are equally indubitable: first, that romanticism on the philosophical side, is a protest in the name of unity against the disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist; second, that what the primitivist wants in exchange for analysis is not reality but illusion. Rousseau who inclines like other æsthetes to identify the true with the beautiful was, we are told, wont to exclaim: “There is nothing beautiful save that which is not”; a saying to be matched with that of “La Nouvelle Héloïse”: “The land of chimeras is alone worthy of habitation.” Similar utterances might be multiplied from French, English, and German romanticists.¹¹⁵ To be sure, the word “reality” is perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain recent votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have promised us that if we surrender to the flux we shall have a “vision” not only of unity but also of reality; and so they have transferred to the cult of their divinity all the traditional language of religion.

We do not, however, need for the present to enter into a discussion as to the nature of reality, but simply to stick to strict psychological observation. From this point of view it is not hard to see that the primitivist makes his primary appeal not to man’s need for unity and reality but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this need is in his tale (“The Island”) of a ship’s crew that overpowered its officers and then set sail for Otaheite; what impelled these Arcadian mutineers was not the desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life with its rigid conventions, but

 
The wish – which ages have not yet subdued
In man – to have no master save his mood.
 

Now to have no master save one’s mood is to be wholly temperamental. In Arcadia – the ideal of romantic morality – those who are wholly temperamental unite in sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to consider more fully what this triumph of temperament means in the real world.

CHAPTER V
ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE REAL

The fundamental thing in Rousseauistic morality is not, as we have seen, the assertion that man is naturally good, but the denial of the “civil war in the cave.” Though this denial is not complete in Rousseau himself, nothing is more certain than that his whole tendency is away from this form of dualism. The beautiful soul does the right thing not as a result of effort, but spontaneously, unconsciously and almost inevitably. In fact the beautiful soul can scarcely be said to be a voluntary agent at all. “Nature” acts in him and for him. This minimizing of moral struggle and deliberation and choice, this drift towards a naturalistic fatalism, as it may be termed, is a far more significant thing in Rousseau than his optimism. One may as a matter of fact eliminate dualism in favor of nature and at the same time look on nature as evil. This is precisely what one is likely to do if one sees no alternative to temperamental living, while judging those who live temperamentally not by their “ideal,” that is by their feeling of their own loveliness, but by what they actually do. One will become a realist in the sense that came to be attached to this word during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rousseau himself is often realistic in this sense when he interrupts his Arcadian visions to tell us what actually occurred. In the “Confessions,” as I have said, passages that recall Lamartine alternate with passages that recall Zola, and the transition from one type of passage to the other is often disconcertingly sudden. In reading these realistic passages of Rousseau we are led to reflect that his “nature” is not, in practice, so remote from Taine’s nature as might at first appear. “What we call nature,” says Taine, “is this brood of secret passions, often maleficent, generally vulgar, always blind, which tremble and fret within us, ill-covered by the cloak of decency and reason under which we try to disguise them; we think we lead them and they lead us; we think our actions our own, they are theirs.”¹¹⁶

The transition from an optimistic to a pessimistic naturalism can be followed with special clearness in the stages by which the sentimental drama of the eighteenth century passes over into the realistic drama of a later period. Petit de Julleville contrasts the beginning and the end of this development as follows: “[In the eighteenth century] to please the public you had to say to it: ‘You are all at least at bottom good, virtuous, full of feeling. Let yourselves go, follow your instincts; listen to nature and you will do the right thing spontaneously.’ How changed times are! Nowadays¹¹⁷ any one who wishes to please, to be read and petted and admired, to pass for great and become very rich, should address men as follows: ‘You are a vile pack of rogues, and profligates, you have neither faith nor law; you are impelled by your instincts alone and these instincts are ignoble. Do not try though to mend matters, that would be of no use at all.’”¹¹⁸

The connecting link between these different forms of the drama is naturalistic fatalism, the suppression of moral responsibility for either man’s goodness or badness. Strictly speaking, the intrusion of the naturalistic element into the realm of ethical values and the subversion by it of deliberation and choice and of the normal sequence of moral cause and effect is felt from the human point of view not as fate at all, but as chance. Emotional romanticism joins at this point with other forms of romanticism, which all show a proclivity to prefer to strict motivation, to probability in the Aristotelian sense, what is fortuitous and therefore wonderful. This is only another way of saying that the romanticist is moving away from the genuinely dramatic towards melodrama. Nothing is easier than to establish the connection between emotional romanticism and the prodigious efflorescence of melodrama, the irresponsible quest for thrills, that has marked the past century. What perhaps distinguishes this movement from any previous one is the attempt to invest what is at bottom a melodramatic view of life with philosophic and even religious significance. By suppressing the “civil war in the cave” one strikes at the very root of true drama. It does not then much matter from the dramatic point of view whether the burden of responsibility for good or evil of which you have relieved the individual is shifted upon “nature” or society. Shelley, for example, puts the blame for evil on society. “Prometheus Unbound,” in which he has developed his conception, is, judged as a play, only an ethereal melodrama. The unaccountable collapse of Zeus, a monster of unalloyed and unmotivated badness, is followed by the gushing forth in man of an equally unalloyed and unmotivated goodness. The whole genius of Hugo, again, as I have said in speaking of his use of antithesis, is melodramatic. His plays may be described as parvenu melodramas. They abound in every variety of startling contrast and strange happening, the whole pressed into the service of “problems” manifold and even of a philosophy of history. At the same time the poverty of ethical insight and true dramatic motivation is dissimulated under profuse lyrical outpourings and purple patches of local color. His Hernani actually glories in not being a responsible agent, but an “unchained and fatal force,”¹¹⁹ and so more capable of striking astonishment into himself and others. Yet the admirers of Hugo would not only promote him to the first rank of poets, but would have us share his own belief that he is a seer and a prophet.

It may be objected that the great dramatists of the past exalt this power of fate and thus diminish moral responsibility. But the very sharpest distinction must be drawn between the subrational fate of the emotional romanticist and the superrational fate of Greek tragedy. The fate of Æschylean tragedy, for instance, so far from undermining moral responsibility rather reinforces it. It is felt to be the revelation of a moral order of which man’s experience at any particular moment is only an infinitesimal fragment. It does not seem, like the subrational fate of the emotional romanticist, the intrusion into the human realm of an alien power whether friendly or unfriendly. This point might be established by a study of the so-called fate drama in Germany (Schicksaltragödie), which, though blackly pessimistic, is closely related to the optimistic sentimental drama of the eighteenth century.¹²⁰ The German fate drama is in its essence ignoble because its characters are specimens of sensitive morality – incapable, that is, of opposing a firm human purpose to inner impulse or outer impression. The fate that thus wells up from the depths of nature and overwhelms their wills is not only malign and ironical, but as Grillparzer says, makes human deeds seem only “throws of the dice in the blind night of chance.”¹²¹ It would be easy to follow similar conceptions of fate down through later literature at least to the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Some of the earlier exponents of the sentimental drama, like Diderot, were not so certain as one might expect that the discarding of traditional decorum in favor of “nature” would result practically in a reign of pure loveliness. At one moment Diderot urges men to get rid of the civil war in the cave in order that they may be Arcadian, like the savages of the South Sea, but at other moments – as in “Rameau’s Nephew” – he shows a somewhat closer grip on the problem of what will actually come to pass when a man throws off the conventions of a highly organized civilization and sets out to live temperamentally. Diderot sees clearly that he will be that least primitive of all beings, the Bohemian. Rameau’s nephew, in his irresponsibility and emotional instability, in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of his mood, anticipates all the romantic Bohemians and persons of “artistic temperament” who were to afflict the nineteenth century. But he is more than a mere æsthete. At moments we can discern in him the first lineaments of the superman, who knows no law save the law of might. One should recollect that the actual influence of Diderot in France fell in the second rather than in the first half of the nineteenth century – was upon the realists rather than upon the romanticists. The same men that had a cult for Diderot admired the Vautrins and the Rastignacs of Balzac and the Julien Sorel of Stendhal. These characters are little Napoleons. They live temperamentally in the midst of a highly organized society, but they set aside its conventions of right and wrong in favor, not of æsthetic enjoyment, but of power.

The ideal of romantic morality, as was seen in the last chapter, is altruism. The real, it should be clear from the examples I have been citing, is always egoism. But egoism may assume very different forms. As to the main forms of egoism in men who have repudiated outer control without acquiring self-control we may perhaps revive profitably the old Christian classification of the three lusts – the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. Goethe indeed may be said to have treated these three main ways of being temperamental in three of his early characters – the lust of knowledge in “Faust,” the lust of sensation in “Werther,” and the lust of power in “Götz.” If we view life solely from the naturalistic level and concern ourselves solely with the world of action, we are justified in neglecting, like Hobbes, the other lusts and putting supreme emphasis on the lust for power.¹²² Professor F.J. Mather, Jr., has distinguished between “hard” and “soft” sentimentalists.¹²³ His distinction might perhaps be brought more closely into line with my own distinctions if I ventured to coin a word and to speak of hard and soft temperamentalists. The soft temperamentalist will prove unable to cope in the actual world with the hard temperamentalist, and is very likely to become his tool. Balzac has very appropriately made Lucien de Rubempré, the romantic poet and a perfect type of a soft temperamentalism, the tool of Vautrin, the superman.

Here indeed is the supreme opposition between the ideal and the real in romantic morality. The ideal to which Rousseau invites us is either the primitivistic anarchy of the “Second Discourse,” in which egoism is tempered by “natural pity,” or else a state such as is depicted in the “Social Contract,” in which egoism is held in check by a disinterested “general will.” The preliminary to achieving either of these ideals is that the traditional checks on human nature should be removed. But in exact proportion as this programme of emancipation is carried out what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but the ego and its fundamental will to power. Give a bootblack half the universe, according to Carlyle, and he will soon be quarreling with the owner of the other half. He will if he is a very temperamental bootblack. Perhaps indeed all other evils in life may be reduced to the failure to check that something in man that is reaching out for more and ever for more. In a society in which the traditional inhibitions are constantly growing weaker, the conflict I have just sketched between the ideal and the real is becoming more and more acute. The soft temperamentalists are overflowing with beautiful professions of brotherly love, and at the same time the hard temperamentalists are reaching out for everything in sight; and inasmuch as the hard temperamentalists operate not in dreamland, but in the real world, they are only too plainly setting the tone. Very often, of course, the same temperamentalist has his hard and his soft side. The triumph of egoism over altruism in the relations between man and man is even more evident in the relations between nation and nation. The egoism that results from the inbreeding of temperament on a national scale runs in the case of the strong nations into imperialism.¹²⁴ We have not reflected sufficiently on the fact that the soft temperamentalist Rousseau is more than any other one person the father of Kultur;¹²⁵ and that the exponents of Kultur in our own day have been revealed as the hardest of hard temperamentalists.

To understand the particular craving that is met by Rousseauistic idealism one would need to go with some care into the psychology of the half-educated man. The half-educated man may be defined as the man who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not sufficient to acquire the new standards that come with a more thorough cultivation. It was pointed out long ago that the characteristic of the half-educated man is that he is incurably restless; that he is filled with every manner of desire. In contrast with him the uncultivated man, the peasant, let us say, and the man of high cultivation have few and simple desires. Thus Socrates had fewer and simpler desires than the average Athenian. But what is most noteworthy about the half-educated man is not simply that he harbors many desires and is therefore incurably restless, but that these desires are so often incompatible. He craves various good things, but is not willing to pay the price – not willing to make the necessary renunciations. He pushes to an extreme what is after all a universal human proclivity – the wish to have one’s cake and eat it too. Thus, while remaining on the naturalistic level, he wishes to have blessings that accrue only to those who rise to the humanistic or religious levels. He wishes to live in “a universe with the lid off,” to borrow a happy phrase from the pragmatist, and at the same time to enjoy the peace and brotherhood that are the fruits of restraint. The moral indolence of the Rousseauist is such that he is unwilling to adjust himself to the truth of the human law; and though living naturalistically, he is loath to recognize that what actually prevails on the naturalistic level is the law of cunning and the law of force. He thus misses the reality of both the human and the natural law and in the pursuit of a vague Arcadian longing falls into sheer unreality. I am indeed overstating the case so far as Rousseau is concerned. He makes plain in the “Emile” that the true law of nature is not the law of love but the law of force. Emile is to be released from the discipline of the human law and given over to the discipline of nature; and this means in practice that he will have “to bow his neck beneath the hard yoke of physical necessity.” In so far the “nature” of Emile is no Arcadian dream. Where the Arcadian dreaming begins is when Rousseau assumes that an Emile who has learned the lesson of force from Nature herself, will not pass along this lesson to others, whether citizens of his own or some other country, but will rather display in his dealings with them an ideal fraternity. In the early stages of the naturalistic movement, in Hobbes and Shaftesbury, for example, egoism and altruism, the idea of power and the idea of sympathy, are more sharply contrasted than they are in Rousseau and the later romanticists. Shaftesbury assumes in human nature an altruistic impulse or will to brotherhood that will be able to cope successfully with the will to power that Hobbes declares to be fundamental. Many of the romanticists, as we have seen, combine the cult of power with the cult of brotherhood. Hercules, as in Shelley’s poem, is to bow down before Prometheus, the lover of mankind. The extreme example, however, is probably William Blake. He proclaims himself of the devil’s party, he glorifies a free expansion of energy, he looks upon everything that restricts this expansion as synonymous with evil. At the same time he pushes his exaltation of sympathy to the verge of the grotesque.¹²⁶

Such indeed is the jumble of incompatibles in Blake that he would rest an illimitable compassion on the psychology of the superman. For nothing is more certain than that the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is among other things a fairly complete anticipation of Nietzsche. The reasons are worth considering why the idea of power and the idea of sympathy which Blake and so many other romanticists hoped to unite have once more come to seem antipodal, why in the late stages of the movement one finds a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy, just as in its early stages one finds a Hobbes and a Shaftesbury. It is plain, first of all, that what brought the two cults together for a time was their common hatred of the past. With the triumph over the past fairly complete, the incompatibility of power and sympathy became increasingly manifest. Nietzsche’s attitude is that of a Prometheus whose sympathy for mankind has changed to disgust on seeing the use that they are actually making of their emancipation. Humanitarian sympathy seemed to him to be tending not merely to a subversion, but to an inversion of values, to a positive preference for the trivial and the ignoble. He looked with special loathing on that side of the movement that is symbolized in its homage to the ass. The inevitable flying apart of power and sympathy was further hastened in Nietzsche and others by the progress of evolution. Darwinism was dissipating the Arcadian mist through which nature had been viewed by Rousseau and his early followers. The gap is wide between Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and claw” and the tender and pitiful nature of Wordsworth.¹²⁷ Nietzsche’s preaching of ruthlessness is therefore a protest against the sheer unreality of those who wish to be natural and at the same time sympathetic. But how are we to get a real scale of values to oppose to an indiscriminate sympathy? It is here that Nietzsche shows that he is caught in the same fatal coil of naturalism as the humanitarian. He accepts the naturalistic corruption of conscience which underlies all other naturalistic corruptions. “The will to overcome an emotion,” he says, “is ultimately only the will of another or of several other emotions.”¹²⁸ All he can do with this conception of conscience is to set over against the humanitarian suppression of values a scale of values based on force and not a true scale of values based on the degree to which one imposes or fails to impose on one’s temperamental self a human law of vital control. The opposition between a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy is therefore not specially significant; it is only that between the hard and the soft temperamentalist. To be sure Nietzsche can on occasion speak very shrewdly about the evils that have resulted from temperamentalism – especially from the passion for an untrammeled self-expression. But the superman himself is a most authentic descendant of the original genius in whom we first saw this passion dominant. The imagination of the superman, spurning every centre of control, traditional or otherwise, so coöperates with his impulses and desires as to give them “infinitude,” that is so as to make them reach out for more and ever for more. The result is a frenzied romanticism.¹²⁹

We have seen that as a result of this transformation of conscience, temperament is emancipated from both inner and outer control and that this emancipation tends in the real world to the rise of two main types – the Bohemian and the superman, both unprimitive, inasmuch as primitive man is governed not by temperament but by convention; and that what actually tends to prevail in such a temperamental world in view of the superior “hardness” of the superman, is the law of cunning and the law of force. So far as the Rousseauists set up the mere emancipation of temperament as a serious philosophy, they are to be held responsible for the results of this emancipation whether displayed in the lust of power or the lust of sensation. But the lust of power and the lust of sensation, such as they appear, for example, in the so-called realism of the later nineteenth century, are not in themselves identical with romanticism. Many of the realists, like Flaubert, as I have already pointed out, are simply bitter and disillusioned Rousseauists who are expressing their nausea at the society that has actually arisen from the emancipation of temperament in themselves and others. The essence of Rousseauistic as of other romance, I may repeat, is to be found not in any mere fact, not even in the fact of sensation, but in a certain quality of the imagination. Rousseauism is, it is true, an emancipation of impulse, especially of the impulse of sex. Practically all the examples I have chosen of the tense and beautiful moment are erotic. But what one has even here, as the imagination grows increasingly romantic, is less the reality than the dream of the beautiful moment, an intensity that is achieved only in the tower of ivory. This point can be made clear only by a fuller study of the romantic conception of love.

CHAPTER VI
ROMANTIC LOVE

What first strikes one in Rousseau’s attitude towards love is the separation, even wider here perhaps than elsewhere, between the ideal and the real. He dilates in the “Confessions” on the difference of the attachment that he felt when scarcely more than a boy for two young women of Geneva, Mademoiselle Vulson and Mademoiselle Goton. His attachment for the latter was real in a sense that Zola would have understood. His attachment for Mademoiselle Vulson reminds one rather of that of a mediæval knight for his lady. The same contrast runs through Rousseau’s life. “Seamstresses, chambermaids, shop-girls,” he says, “attracted me very little. I had to have fine ladies.”¹⁴⁴ So much for the ideal; the real was Thérèse Levasseur.

We are not to suppose that Rousseau’s love even when most ideal is really exalted above the fleshly level. Byron indeed says of Rousseau that “his was not the love of living dame but of ideal beauty,” and if this were strictly true Rousseau might be accounted a Platonist. But any particular beautiful object is for Plato only a symbol or adumbration of a supersensuous beauty; so that an earthly love can be at best only a stepping-stone to the Uranian Aphrodite. The terrestrial and the heavenly loves are not in short run together, whereas the essence of Rousseauistic love is this very blending. “Rousseau,” says Joubert, “had a voluptuous mind. In his writings the soul is always mingled with the body and never distinct from it. No one has ever rendered more vividly the impression of the flesh touching the spirit and the delights of their marriage.” I need not, however, repeat here what I have said elsewhere¹⁴⁵ about this confusion of the planes of being, perhaps the most important aspect of romantic love.

Though Rousseau is not a true Platonist in his treatment of love, he does, as I have said, recall at times the cult of the mediæval knight for his lady. One may even find in mediæval love something that is remotely related to Rousseau’s contrast between the ideal and the actual; for in its attitude towards woman as in other respects the Middle Ages tended to be extreme. Woman is either depressed below the human level as the favorite instrument of the devil in man’s temptation (mulier hominis confusio), or else exalted above this level as the mother of God. The figure of Mary blends sense and spirit in a way that is foreign to Plato and the ancients. As Heine says very profanely, the Virgin was a sort of heavenly dame du comptoir whose celestial smile drew the northern barbarians into the Church. Sense was thus pressed into the service of spirit at the risk of a perilous confusion. The chivalric cult of the lady has obvious points of contact with the worship of the Madonna. The knight who is raised from one height of perfection to another by the light of his lady’s eyes is also pressing sense into the service of spirit with the same risk that the process may be reversed. The reversal actually takes place in Rousseau and his followers: spirit is pressed into the service of sense in such wise as to give to sense a sort of infinitude. Baudelaire pays his homage to a Parisian grisette in the form of a Latin canticle to the Virgin.¹⁴⁶ The perversion of mediæval love is equally though not quite so obviously present in many other Rousseauists.

I have said that the Middle Ages inclined to the extreme; mediæval writers are, however, fond of insisting on “measure”; and this is almost inevitable in view of the large amount of classical, especially Aristotelian, survival throughout this period. But the two distinctively mediæval types, the saint and the knight, are neither of them mediators. They stand, however, on an entirely different footing as regards the law of measure. Not even Aristotle himself would maintain that the law of measure applies to saintliness, and in general to the religious realm. The saint in so far as he is saintly has undergone conversion, has in the literal sense of the word faced around and is looking in an entirely different direction from that to which the warnings “nothing too much” and “think as a mortal” apply. Very different psychic elements may indeed appear in any particular saint. A book has been published recently on the “Romanticism of St. Francis.” The truth seems to be that though St. Francis had his romantic side, he was even more religious than romantic. One may affirm with some confidence of another mediæval figure, Peter the Hermit, that he was, on the other hand, much more romantic than religious. For all the information we have tends to show that he was a very restless person and a man’s restlessness is ordinarily in inverse ratio to his religion.

If the saint transcends in a way the law of measure, the knight on the other hand should be subject to it. For courage and the love of woman – his main interests in life – belong not to the religious but to the secular realm. But in his conception of love and courage the knight was plainly not a mediator but an extremist: he was haunted by the idea of adventure, of a love and courage that transcend the bounds not merely of the probable but of the possible. His imagination is romantic in the sense I have tried to define – it is straining, that is, beyond the confines of the real. Ruskin’s violent diatribe against Cervantes¹⁴⁷ for having killed “idealism” by his ridicule of these knightly exaggerations, is in itself absurd, but interesting as evidence of the quality of Ruskin’s own imagination. Like other romanticists I have cited, he seems to have been not unaware of his own kinship to Don Quixote. The very truth about either the mediæval or modern forms of romantic love – love which is on the secular level and at the same time sets itself above the law of measure – was uttered by Dr. Johnson in his comment on the heroic plays of Dryden: “By admitting the romantic omnipotence of love he has recommended as laudable and worthy of imitation that conduct which through all ages the good have censured as vicious and the bad have despised as foolish.”

The man of the Middle Ages, however extravagant in his imaginings, was often no doubt terrestrial enough in his practice. The troubadour who addressed his high-flown fancies to some fair châtelaine (usually a married woman) often had relations in real life not unlike those of Rousseau with Thérèse Levasseur. Some such contrast indeed between the “ideal” and the “real” existed in the life of one of Rousseau’s favorite poets, Petrarch. The lover may, however, run together the ideal and the real. He may glorify some comparatively commonplace person, crown as queen of his heart some Dulcinea del Toboso. Hazlitt employs appropriately in describing his own passion for the vulgar daughter of a London boarding-house keeper the very words of Cervantes: “He had courted a statue, hunted the wind, cried aloud to the desert.” Hazlitt like other lovers of this type is in love not with a particular person but with his own dream. He is as one may say in love with love. No subject indeed illustrates like this of love the nostalgia, the infinite indeterminate desire of the romantic imagination. Something of this diffusive longing no doubt came into the world with Christianity. There is a wide gap between the sentence of St. Augustine that Shelley has taken as epigraph for his “Alastor”¹⁴⁸ and the spirit of the great Greek and Roman classics. Yet such is the abiding vitality of Greek mythology that one finds in Greece perhaps the best symbol of the romantic lover. Rousseau could not fail to be attracted by the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. His lyrical “monodrama” in poetical prose, “Pygmalion,” is important not only for its literary but for its musical influence. The Germans in particular (including the youthful Goethe) were fascinated. To the mature Goethe Rousseau’s account of the sculptor who became enamored of his own creation and breathed into it actual life by the sheer intensity of his desire seemed a delirious confusion of the planes of being, an attempt to drag ideal beauty down to the level of sensuous realization. But a passion thus conceived exactly satisfies the romantic requirement. For though the romanticist wishes to abandon himself to the rapture of love, he does not wish to transcend his own ego. The object with which Pygmalion is in love is after all only a projection of his own “genius.” But such an object is not in any proper sense an object at all. There is in fact no object in the romantic universe – only subject. This subjective love amounts in practice to a use of the imagination to enhance emotional intoxication, or if one prefers, to the pursuit of illusion for its own sake.

This lack of definite object appears just as clearly in the German symbol of romantic love – the blue flower. The blue flower resolves itself at last, it will be remembered, into a fair feminine face¹⁴⁹– a face that cannot, however, be overtaken. The color typifies the blue distance in which it always loses itself, “the never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire.” The object is thus elusive because, as I have said, it is not, properly speaking, an object at all but only a dalliance of the imagination with its own dream. Cats, says Rivarol, do not caress us, they caress themselves upon us. But though cats may suffer from what the new realist calls the egocentric predicament, they can scarcely vie in the subtle involutions of their egoism with the romantic lover. Besides creating the symbol of the blue flower, Novalis treats romantic love in his unfinished tale “The Disciples at Saïs.” He contemplated two endings to this tale – in the one, when the disciple lifts the veil of the inmost sanctuary of the temple at Saïs, Rosenblütchen (the equivalent of the blue flower) falls into his arms. In the second version what he sees when he lifts the mysterious veil is – “wonder of wonders – himself.” The two endings are in substance the same.

The story of Novalis’s attachment for a fourteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn, and of his plans on her death for a truly romantic suicide – a swooning away into the night – and then of the suddenness with which he transferred his dream to another maiden, Julie von Charpentier, is familiar. If Sophie had lived and Novalis had lived and they had wedded, he might conceivably have made her a faithful husband, but she would no longer have been the blue flower, the ideal. For one’s love is for something infinitely remote; it is as Shelley says, in what is perhaps the most perfect expression of romantic longing:

 
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
 

The sphere of Shelley’s sorrow at the time he wrote these lines to Mrs. Williams was Mary Godwin. In the time of Harriet Westbrook, Mary had been the “star.”

The romantic lover often feigns in explanation of his nostalgia that in some previous existence he had been enamored of a nymph – an Egeria – or a woman transcending the ordinary mould – “some Lilith or Helen or Antigone.”¹⁵⁰ Shelley inquires eagerly in one of his letters about the new poem by Horace Smith, “The Nympholept.” In the somewhat unclassical sense that the term came to have in the romantic movement, Shelley is himself the perfect example of the nympholept. In this respect as in others, however, he merely continues Rousseau. “If it had not been for some memories of my youth and Madame d’Houdetot,” says Jean-Jacques, “the loves that I have felt and described would have been only with sylphids.”¹⁵¹

Chateaubriand speaks with aristocratic disdain of Rousseau’s Venetian amours, but on the “ideal” side he is not only his follower but perhaps the supreme French example of nympholepsy. He describes his lady of dreams sometimes like Rousseau as the “sylphid,” sometimes as his “phantom of love.” He had been haunted by this phantom almost from his childhood. “Even then I glimpsed that to love and be loved in a way that was unknown to me was destined to be my supreme felicity. … As a result of the ardor of my imagination, my timidity and solitude, I did not turn to the outer world, but was thrown back upon myself. In the absence of a real object, I evoked by the power of my vague desires a phantom that was never to leave me.” To those who remember the closely parallel passages in Rousseau, Chateaubriand will seem to exaggerate the privilege of the original genius to look on himself as unique when he adds: “I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another example of this nature.”¹⁵² The pursuit of this phantom of love gives the secret key to Chateaubriand’s life. He takes refuge in the American wilderness in order that he may have in this primitive Arcadia a more spacious setting for his dream.¹⁵³

If one wishes to see how very similar these nympholeptic experiences are not only from individual to individual, but from country to country, one has only to compare the passages I have just been quoting from Chateaubriand with Shelley’s “Epipsychidion.” Shelley writes of his own youth:

 
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps; on an imagined shore,
Under the gray beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
That I beheld her not, etc.
 

At the time of writing “Epipsychidion” the magic vision happened to have coalesced for the moment with Emilia Viviani, though destined soon to flit elsewhere. Shelley invites his “soul’s sister,” the idyllic “she,” who is at bottom only a projection of his own imagination, to set sail with him for Arcady. “Epipsychidion,” indeed, might be used as a manual to illustrate the difference between mere Arcadian dreaming and a true Platonism.

Chateaubriand is ordinarily and rightly compared with Byron rather than with Shelley. He is plainly, however, far more of a nympholept than Byron. Mr. Hilary, indeed, in Peacock’s “Nightmare Abbey” says to Mr. Cypress (Byron): “You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.”¹⁵⁴ Certain distinctions would have to be made if one were attempting a complete study of love in Byron; yet after all the love of Don Juan and Haidée is one that Sappho or Catullus or Burns would have understood; and these poets were not nympholepts. They were capable of burning with love, but not, as Rousseau says of himself, “without any definite object.”¹⁵⁵ Where Chateaubriand has some resemblance to Byron is in his actual libertinism. He is however nearer than Byron to the libertine of the eighteenth century – to the Lovelace who pushes the pursuit of pleasure to its final exasperation where it becomes associated with the infliction of pain. Few things are stranger than the blend in Chateaubriand of this Sadic fury¹⁵⁶ with the new romantic revery. Indeed almost every type of egotism that may manifest itself in the relations of the sexes and that pushed to the superlative pitch, will be found in this theoretical classicist and champion of Christianity. Perhaps no more frenzied cry has ever issued from human lips than that uttered by Atala¹⁵⁷ in describing her emotions when torn between her religious vow and her love for Chactas: “What dream did not arise in this heart overwhelmed with sorrow. At times in fixing my eyes upon you, I went so far as to form desires as insensate as they were guilty; at one moment I seemed to wish that you and I were the only living creatures upon the earth; and then again, feeling a divinity that held me back in my horrible transports, I seemed to want this divinity to be annihilated provided that clasped in your arms I should roll from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and the world.” Longing is here pushed to a pitch where it passes over, as in Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” into the desire for annihilation.

Actual libertinism is no necessary concomitant of nympholeptic longing. There is a striking difference in this respect between Poe, for example, and his translator and disciple, Baudelaire. Nothing could be less suggestive of voluptuousness than Poe’s nostalgia. “His ecstasy,” says Stedman, “is that of the nympholept seeking an evasive being of whom he has glimpses by moonlight, starlight, even fenlight, but never by noonday.” The embodiments of his dream that flit through his tales and poems, enhanced his popularity with the ultra-romantic public in France. These strange apparitions nearly all of whom are epileptic, cataleptic, or consumptive made a natural appeal to a school that was known among its detractors as l’école poitrinaire. “Tender souls,” says Gautier, “were specially touched by Poe’s feminine figures, so vaporous, so transparent and of an almost spectral beauty.” Perhaps the nympholepsy of Gérard de Nerval is almost equally vaporous and ethereal. He pursued through various earthly forms the queen of Sheba whom he had loved in a previous existence and hanged himself at last with what he believed to be her garter: an interesting example of the relation between the extreme forms of the romantic imagination and madness.¹⁵⁸

The pursuit of a phantom of love through various earthly forms led in the course of the romantic movement to certain modifications in a famous legend – that of Don Juan. What is emphasized in the older Don Juan is not merely his libertinism but his impiety – the gratification of his appetite in deliberate defiance of God. He is animated by Satanic pride, by the lust of power as well as by the lust of sensation. In Molière’s treatment of the legend we can also see the beginnings of the philanthropic pose.¹⁵⁹ With the progress of Rousseauism Don Juan tends to become an “idealist,” to seek to satisfy in his amorous adventures not merely his senses but his “soul” and his thirst for the “infinite.”¹⁶⁰ Along with this idealistic Don Juan we also see appearing at a very early stage in the movement the exotic Don Juan who wishes to have a great deal of strangeness added to his beauty. In his affair with the “Floridiennes,” Chateaubriand shows the way to a long series of exotic lovers.

 
I said to my heart between sleeping and waking,
Thou wild thing that always art leaping or aching,
What black, brown or fair, in what clime, in what nation,
By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-pat-ation?
 

These lines are so plainly meant for Pierre Loti that one learns with surprise that they were written about 1724 by the Earl of Peterborough.¹⁶¹

Byron’s Don Juan is at times exotic in his tastes, but, as I have said, he is not on the whole very nympholeptic – much less so than the Don Juan of Alfred de Musset, for example. Musset indeed suggests in many respects a less masculine Byron – Mademoiselle Byron as he has been called. In one whole side of his art as well as his treatment of love he simply continues like Byron the eighteenth century. But far more than Byron he aspires to ideal and absolute passion; so that the Musset of the “Nuits” is rightly regarded as one of the supreme embodiments, and at the same time the chief martyr, of the romantic religion of love. The outcome of his affair with George Sand may symbolize fitly the wrecking of thousands of more obscure lives by this mortal chimera. Musset and George Sand sought to come together, yet what they each sought in love is what the original genius seeks in all things – self-expression. What Musset saw in George Sand was not the real woman but only his own dream. But George Sand was not content thus to reflect back passively to Musset his ideal. She was rather a Galatea whose ambition it was to create her own Pygmalion. “Your chimera is between us,” Musset exclaims; but his chimera was between them too. The more Titan and Titaness try to meet, the more each is driven back into the solitude of his own ego. They were in love with love rather than with one another: and to be thus in love with love means on the last analysis to be in love with one’s own emotions. “To love,” says Musset, “is the great point. What matters the mistress? What matters the flagon provided one have the intoxication?”¹⁶² He then proceeds to carry a love of this quality up into the presence of God and to present it to him as his justification for having lived. The art of speaking in tones of religious consecration of what is in its essence egoistic has never been carried further than by the Rousseauistic romanticist. God is always appearing at the most unexpected moments.¹⁶³ The highest of which man is capable apparently is to put an uncurbed imagination into the service of an emancipated temperament. The credo that Perdican recites at the end of the second act of “On ne badine pas avec l’Amour”¹⁶⁴ throws light on this point. Men and women according to this credo are filled with every manner of vileness, yet there is something “sacred and sublime,” and that is the union of two of these despicable beings.

The confusion of ethical values here is so palpable as scarcely to call for comment. It is precisely when men and women set out to love with this degree of imaginative and emotional unrestraint that they come to deserve all the opprobrious epithets Musset heaps upon them. This radiant apotheosis of love and the quagmire in which it actually lands one is, as I have said, the whole subject of “Madame Bovary.” I shall need to return to this particular disproportion between the ideal and the real when I take up the subject of romantic melancholy.

The romantic lover who identifies the ideal with the superlative thrill is turning the ideal into something very transitory. If the summum bonum is as Browning avers the “kiss of one girl,” the summum bonum is lost almost as soon as found. The beautiful moment may however be prolonged in revery. The romanticist may brood over it in the tower of ivory, and when thus enriched by being steeped in his temperament it may become more truly his own than it was in reality. “Objects make less impression upon me than my memory of them,” says Rousseau. He is indeed the great master of what has been termed the art of impassioned recollection. This art is far from being confined in its application to love, though it may perhaps be studied here to the best advantage. Rousseau, one should note, had very little intellectual memory, but an extraordinarily keen memory of images and sensations. He could not, as he tells us in the “Confessions,” learn anything by heart, but he could recall with perfect distinctness what he had eaten for breakfast about thirty years before. In general he recalls his past feelings with a clearness and detail that are perhaps more feminine than masculine. “He seems,” says Hazlitt, one of his chief disciples in the art of impassioned recollection, “to gather up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years.”¹⁶⁵ This highly developed emotional memory is closely associated with the special quality of the romantic imagination – its cult of Arcadian illusion and the wistful backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood and youth when illusion was most spontaneous. “Let me still recall [these memories],” says Hazlitt, “that they may breathe fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and romantic pleasure over again! Talk of the ideal! This is the only true ideal – the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life.”¹⁶⁶ Hazlitt converts criticism itself into an art of impassioned recollection. He loves to linger over the beautiful moments of his own literary life. The passing years have increased the richness of their temperamental refraction and bestowed upon them the “pathos of distance.” A good example is his account of the two years of his youth he spent in reading the “Confessions” and the “Nouvelle Héloïse,” and in shedding tears over them. “They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet is the dew of their memory and pleasant the balm of their recollection.”¹⁶⁷

Rousseau’s own Arcadian memories are usually not of reading, like Hazlitt’s, but of actual incidents, though he does not hesitate to alter these incidents freely, as in his account of his stay at Les Charmettes, and to accommodate them to his dream. He neglected the real Madame de Warens at the very time that he cherished his recollection of her because this recollection was the idealized image of his own youth. The yearning that he expresses at the beginning of his fragmentary Tenth Promenade, written only a few weeks before his death, is for this idyllic period rather than for an actual woman.¹⁶⁸ A happy memory, says Musset, repeating Rousseau, is perhaps more genuine than happiness itself. Possibly the three best known love poems of Lamartine, Musset, and Hugo respectively – “Le Lac,” “Souvenir,” and “La Tristesse d’Olympio,” all hinge upon impassioned recollection and derive very directly from Rousseau. Lamartine in particular has caught in the “Le Lac” the very cadence of Rousseau’s reveries.¹⁶⁹

Impassioned recollection may evidently be an abundant source of genuine poetry, though not, it must be insisted, of the highest poetry. The predominant rôle that it plays in Rousseau and many of his followers is simply a sign of an unduly dalliant imagination. Experience after all has other uses than to supply furnishings for the tower of ivory; it should control the judgment and guide the will; it is in short the necessary basis of conduct. The greater a man’s moral seriousness, the more he will be concerned with doing rather than dreaming (and I include right meditation among the forms of doing). He will also demand an art and literature that reflect this his main preoccupation. Between Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Aristotle’s definition of poetry as the imitation of human action according to probability or necessity, a wide gap plainly opens. One may prefer Aristotle’s definition to that of Wordsworth and yet do justice to the merits of Wordsworth’s actual poetical performance. Nevertheless the tendency to put prime emphasis on feeling instead of action shown in the definition is closely related to Wordsworth’s failure not only in dramatic but in epic poetry, in all poetry in short that depends for its success on an element of plot and sustained narrative.

A curious extension of the art of impassioned recollection should receive at least passing mention. It has been so extended as to lead to what one may term an unethical use of literature and history. What men have done in the past and the consequences of this doing should surely serve to throw some light on what men should do under similar circumstances in the present. But the man who turns his own personal experience into mere dalliance may very well assume a like dalliant attitude towards the larger experience of the race. This experience may merely provide him with pretexts for revery. This narcotic use of literature and history, this art of creating for one’s self an alibi as Taine calls it, is nearly as old as the romantic movement. The record of the past becomes a gorgeous pageant that lures one to endless imaginative exploration and lulls one to oblivion of everything except its variety and picturesqueness. It becomes everything in fact except a school of judgment. One may note in connection with this use of history the usual interplay between scientific and emotional naturalism. Both forms of naturalism tend to turn man into the mere product and plaything of physical forces – climate, heredity, and the like, over which his will has no control. Since literature and history have no meaning from the point of view of moral choice they may at least be made to yield the maximum of æsthetic satisfaction. Oscar Wilde argues in this wise for example in his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” and concludes that since man has no moral freedom or responsibility, and cannot therefore be guided in his conduct by the past experience of the race, he may at least turn this experience into an incomparable “bower of dreams.” “The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus blows on his pipe and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolf-skin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armor of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the queen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song,” etc.

The assumption that runs through this passage that the mere æsthetic contemplation of past experience gives the equivalent of actual experience is found in writers of far higher standing than Wilde – in Renan, for instance. The æsthete would look on his dream as a substitute for the actual, and at the same time convert the actual into a dream. (Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt.) It is not easy to take such a programme of universal dreaming seriously. In the long run the dreamer himself does not find it easy to take it seriously. For his attempts to live his chimera result, as we have seen in the case of romantic love, in more or less disastrous defeat and disillusion. The disillusioned romanticist continues to cling to his dream, but intellectually, at least, he often comes at the same time to stand aloof from it. This subject of disillusion may best be considered, along with certain other important aspects of the movement, in connection with the singular phenomenon known as romantic irony.

CHAPTER VII
ROMANTIC IRONY

The first romanticist who worked out a theory of irony was Friedrich Schlegel.¹⁷⁰ The attempt to put this theory into practice, after the fashion of Tieck’s plays, seemed and seemed rightly even to later representatives of the movement to be extravagant. Thus Hegel, who in his ideas on art continues in so many respects the Schlegels, repudiates irony. Formerly, says Heine, who is himself in any larger survey, the chief of German romantic ironists, when a man had said a stupid thing he had said it; now he can explain it away as “irony.” Nevertheless one cannot afford to neglect this early German theory. It derives in an interesting way from the views that the partisans of original genius had put forth regarding the rôle of the creative imagination. The imagination as we have seen is to be free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras. Rousseau showed the possibilities of an imagination that is at once extraordinarily rich and also perfectly free in this sense. I have said that Kant believed like the original genius that the nobility of art depends on the free “play” of the imagination; though he adds that art should at the same time submit to a purpose that is not a purpose – whatever that may mean. Schiller in his “Æsthetic Letters” relaxed the rationalistic rigor of Kant in favor of feeling and associated even more emphatically the ideality and creativeness of art with its free imaginative play, its emancipation from specific aim. The personal friction that arose between the Schlegels and Schiller has perhaps obscured somewhat their general indebtedness to him. The Schlegelian irony in particular merely pushes to an extreme the doctrine that nothing must interfere with the imagination in its creative play. “The caprice of the poet,” as Friedrich Schlegel says, “suffers no law above itself.” Why indeed should the poet allow any restriction to be placed upon his caprice in a universe that is after all only a projection of himself? The play theory of art is here supplemented by the philosophy of Fichte.¹⁷¹ In justice to him it should be said that though his philosophy may not rise above the level of temperament, he at least had a severe and stoical temperament, and if only for this reason his “transcendental ego” is far less obviously ego than that which appears in the irony of his romantic followers. When a man has taken possession of his transcendental ego, according to the Schlegels and Novalis, he looks down on his ordinary ego and stands aloof from it. His ordinary ego may achieve poetry but his transcendental ego must achieve the poetry of poetry. But there is in him something that may stand aloof even from this aloofness and so on indefinitely. Romantic irony joins here with what is perhaps the chief preoccupation of the German romanticists, the idea of the infinite or, as they term it, the striving for endlessness (Unendlichkeitstreben). Now, according to the romanticist, a man can show that he lays hold imaginatively upon the infinite only by expanding beyond what his age holds to be normal and central – its conventions in short; nay more, he must expand away from any centre he has himself achieved. For to hold fast to a centre of any kind implies the acceptance of limitations and to accept limitations is to be finite, and to be finite is, as Blake says, to become mechanical; and the whole of romanticism is a protest against the mechanizing of life. No man therefore deserves to rank as a transcendental egotist unless he has learned to mock not merely at the convictions of others but at his own, unless he has become capable of self-parody. “Objection,” says Nietzsche, “evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”¹⁷²

One cannot repeat too often that what the romanticist always sees at the centre is either the mere rationalist or else the philistine; and he therefore inclines to measure his own distinction by his remoteness from any possible centre. Now thus to be always moving away from centrality is to be paradoxical, and romantic irony is, as Friedrich Schlegel says, identical with paradox. Irony, paradox and the idea of the infinite have as a matter of fact so many points of contact in romanticism that they may profitably be treated together.

Friedrich Schlegel sought illustrious sponsors in the past for his theory of irony. Among others he invoked the Greeks and put himself in particular under the patronage of Socrates. But Greek irony always had a centre. The ironical contrast is between this centre and something that is less central. Take for example the so-called irony of Greek tragedy. The tragic character speaks and acts in darkness as to his impending doom, regarding which the spectator is comparatively enlightened. To take another example, the German romanticists were especially absurd in their attempts to set up Tieck as a new Aristophanes. For Aristophanes, however wild and irresponsible he may seem in the play of his imagination, never quite loses sight of his centre, a centre from which the comic spirit proceeds and to which it returns. Above all, however far he may push his mockery, he never mocks at his own convictions; he never, like Tieck, indulges in self-parody. A glance at the parabasis of almost any one of his plays will suffice to show that he was willing to lay himself open to the charge of being unduly didactic rather than to the charge of being aimless. The universe of Tieck, on the other hand, is a truly romantic universe: it has no centre, or what amounts to the same thing, it has at its centre that symbol of spiritual stagnation, the philistine, and his inability to rise above a dull didacticism. The romanticist cherishes the illusion that to be a spiritual vagrant is to be exalted on a pinnacle above the plain citizen. According to Professor Stuart P. Sherman, the Irish dramatist Synge indulges in gypsy laughter from the bushes,¹⁷³ a good description of romantic irony in general.

The irony of Socrates, to take the most important example of Greek irony, is not of the centrifugal character. Socrates professes ignorance, and this profession seems very ironical, for it turns out that his ignorance is more enlightened, that is, more central than other men’s swelling conceit of knowledge. It does not follow that Socrates is insincere in his profession of ignorance; for though his knowledge may be as light in comparison with that of the ordinary Athenian, he sees that in comparison with true and perfect knowledge it is only darkness. For Socrates was no mere rationalist; he was a man of insight, one would even be tempted to say a mystic were it not for the corruption of the term mystic by the romanticists. This being the case he saw that man is by his very nature precluded from true and perfect knowledge. A path, however, opens up before him towards this knowledge, and this path he should seek to follow even though it is in a sense endless, even though beyond any centre he can attain within the bounds of his finite experience there is destined always to be something still more central. Towards the mere dogmatist, the man who thinks he has achieved some fixed and final centre, the attitude of Socrates is that of scepticism. This attitude implies a certain degree of detachment from the received beliefs and conventions of his time, and it is all the more important to distinguish here between Socrates and the romanticists because of the superficial likeness; and also because there is between the Rousseauists and some of the Greeks who lived about the time of Socrates a real likeness. Promethean individualism was already rife at that time, and on the negative side it resulted then as since in a break with tradition, and on the positive side in an oscillation between the cult of force and the exaltation of sympathy, between admiration for the strong man and compassion for the weak. It is hardly possible to overlook these Promethean elements in the plays of Euripides. Antisthenes and the cynics, again, who professed to derive from Socrates, established an opposition between “nature” and convention even more radical in some respects than that established by Rousseau. Moreover Socrates himself was perhaps needlessly unconventional and also unduly inclined to paradox – as when he suggested to the jury who tried him that as an appropriate punishment he should be supported at the public expense in the prytaneum. Yet in his inner spirit and in spite of certain minor eccentricities, Socrates was neither a superman nor a Bohemian, but a humanist. Now that the critical spirit was abroad and the traditional basis for conduct was failing, he was chiefly concerned with putting conduct on a positive and critical basis. In establishing this basis his constant appeal is to actual experience and the more homely this experience the more it seems to please him. While working out the new basis for conduct he continues to observe the existing laws and customs; or if he gets away from the traditional discipline it is towards a stricter discipline; if he repudiates in aught the common sense of his day, it is in favor of a commoner sense. One may say indeed that Socrates and the Rousseauists (who are in this respect like some of the sophists) are both moving away from convention but in opposite directions. What the romanticist opposes to convention is his “genius,” that is his unique and private self. What Socrates opposes to convention is his universal and ethical self. According to Friedrich Schlegel, a man can never be a philosopher but only become one; if at any time he thinks that he is a philosopher he ceases to become one. The romanticist is right in thus thinking that to remain fixed at any particular point is to stagnate. Man is, as Nietzsche says, the being who must always surpass himself, but he has – and this is a point that Nietzsche did not sufficiently consider – a choice of direction in his everlasting pilgrimage. The man who is moving away from some particular centre will always seem paradoxical to the man who remains at it, but he may be moving away from it in either the romantic or the ethical direction. In the first case he is moving from a more normal to a less normal experience, in the second case he is moving towards an experience that is more profoundly representative. The New Testament abounds in examples of the ethical paradox – what one may term the paradox of humility. (A man must lose his life to find it, etc.) It is possible, however, to push even this type of paradox too far, to push it to a point where it affronts not merely some particular convention but the good sense of mankind itself, and this is a far graver matter. Pascal falls into this excess when he says that sickness is the natural state of the Christian. As a result of its supreme emphasis on humility Christianity from the start inclined unduly perhaps towards this type of paradox. It is hardly worth while, as Goethe said, to live seventy years in this world if all that one learn here below is only folly in the sight of God.

One of the most delicate of tasks is to determine whether a paradox occupies a position more or less central than the convention to which it is opposed. A somewhat similar problem is to determine which of two differing conventions has the greater degree of centrality. For one convention may as compared with another seem highly paradoxical. In 1870, it was announced at Peking that his Majesty the Emperor had had the good fortune to catch the small-pox. The auspiciousness of small-pox was part of the Chinese convention at this time, but to those of us who live under another convention it is a blessing we would willingly forego. But much in the Chinese convention, so far from being absurd, reflects the Confucian good sense, and if the Chinese decide to break with their convention, they should evidently consider long and carefully in which direction they are going to move – whether towards something more central, or something more eccentric.

As to the direction in which Rousseau is moving and therefore as to the quality of his paradoxes there can be little question. His paradoxes – and he is perhaps the most paradoxical of writers – reduce themselves on analysis to the notion that man has suffered a loss of goodness by being civilized, by having had imposed on his unconscious and instinctive self some humanistic or religious discipline – e.g., “The man who reflects is a depraved animal”; “True Christians are meant to be slaves”; decorum is only the “varnish of vice” or the “mask of hypocrisy.” Innumerable paradoxes of this kind will immediately occur to one as characteristic of Rousseau and his followers. These paradoxes may be termed in opposition to those of humility, the paradoxes of spontaneity. The man who holds them is plainly moving in an opposite direction not merely from the Christian but from the Socratic individualist. He is moving from the more representative to the less representative and not towards some deeper centre of experience, as would be the case if he were tending towards either humanism or religion. Wordsworth has been widely accepted not merely as a poet but as a religious teacher, and it is therefore important to note that his paradoxes are prevailingly of the Rousseauistic type. His verse is never more spontaneous or, as he would say, inevitable, than when it is celebrating the gospel of spontaneity. I have already pointed out some of the paradoxes that he opposes to pseudo-classic decorum: e.g., his attempt to bestow poetical dignity and importance upon the ass, and to make of it a model of moral excellence, also to find poetry in an idiot boy and to associate sublimity with a pedlar in defiance of the ordinary character of pedlars. In general Wordsworth indulges in Rousseauistic paradoxes when he urges us to look to peasants for the true language of poetry and would have us believe that man is taught by “woods and rills” and not by contact with his fellow men. He pushes this latter paradox to a point that would have made even Rousseau “stare and gasp” when he asserts that

 
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
 

Another form of this same paradox that what comes from nature spontaneously is better than what can be acquired by conscious effort is found in his poem “Lucy Gray”:

 
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!
 

True maidenhood is made up of a thousand decorums; but this Rousseauistic maiden would have seemed too artificial if she had been reared in a house instead of “growing” out of doors; she might in that case have been a human being and not a “thing” and this would plainly have detracted from her spontaneity. Wordsworth’s paradoxes about children have a similar origin. A child who at the age of six is a “mighty prophet, seer blest,” is a highly improbable not to say impossible child. The “Nature” again of “Heart-Leap Well” which both feels and inspires pity is more remote from normal experience than the Nature “red in tooth and claw” of Tennyson. Wordsworth indeed would seem to have a penchant for paradox even when he is less obviously inspired by his naturalistic thesis.

A study of Wordsworth’s life shows that he became progressively disillusioned regarding Rousseauistic spontaneity. He became less paradoxical as he grew older and in almost the same measure, one is tempted to say, less poetical. He returns gradually to the traditional forms until radicals come to look upon him as the “lost leader.” He finds it hard, however, to wean his imagination from its primitivistic Arcadias; so that what one finds, in writing like the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” is not imaginative fire but at best a sober intellectual conviction, an opposition between the head and the heart in short that suggests somewhat Chateaubriand and the “Genius of Christianity.”¹⁷⁴ If Wordsworth had lost faith in his revolutionary and naturalistic ideal, and had at the same time refused to return to the traditional forms, one might then have seen in his work something of the homeless hovering of the romantic ironist. If, on the other hand, he had worked away from the centre that the traditional forms give to life towards a more positive and critical centre, if, in other words, he had broken with the past not on Rousseauistic, but on Socratic lines, he would have needed an imagination of different quality, an imagination less idyllic and pastoral and more ethical than that he usually displays.¹⁷⁵ For the ethical imagination alone can guide one not indeed to any fixed centre but to an ever increasing centrality. We are here confronted once more with the question of the infinite which comes very close to the ultimate ground of difference between classicist and romanticist. The centre that one perceives with the aid of the classical imagination and that sets bounds to impulse and desire may, as I have already said, be defined in opposition to the outer infinite of expansion as the inner or human infinite. If we moderns, to repeat Nietzsche, are unable to attain proportionateness it is because “our itching is really the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable.” Thus to associate the infinite only with the immeasurable, to fail to perceive that the element of form and the curb it puts on the imagination are not external and artificial, but come from the very depths, is to betray the fact that one is a barbarian. Nietzsche and many other romanticists are capable on occasion of admiring the proportionateness that comes from allegiance to some centre. But after all the human spirit must be ever advancing, and its only motive powers, according to romantic logic, are wonder and curiosity; and so from the perfectly sound premise that man is the being who must always surpass himself, Nietzsche draws the perfectly unsound conclusion that the only way for man thus constantly to surpass himself and so show his infinitude is to spurn all limits and “live dangerously.” The Greeks themselves, according to Renan, will some day seem the “apostles of ennui,” for the very perfection of their form shows a lack of aspiration. To submit to form is to be static, whereas “romantic poetry,” says Friedrich Schlegel magnificently, is “universal progressive poetry.” Now the only effective counterpoise to the endless expansiveness that is implied in such a programme is the inner or human infinite of concentration. For it is perfectly true that there is something in man that is not satisfied with the finite and that, if he becomes stationary, he is at once haunted by the spectre of ennui. Man may indeed be defined as the insatiable animal; and the more imaginative he is the more insatiable he is likely to become, for it is the imagination that gives him access to the infinite in every sense of the word. In a way Baudelaire is right when he describes ennui as a “delicate monster” that selects as his prey the most highly gifted natures. Marguerite d’Angoulême already speaks of the “ennui proper to well-born spirits.” Now religion seeks no less than romance an escape from ennui. Bossuet is at one with Baudelaire when he dilates on that “inexorable ennui which is the very substance of human life.” But Bossuet and Baudelaire differ utterly in the remedies they propose for ennui. Baudelaire hopes to escape from ennui by dreaming of the superlative emotional adventure, by indulging in infinite, indeterminate desire, and becomes more and more restless in his quest for a something that at the end always eludes him. This infinite of nostalgia has nothing in common with the infinite of religion. No distinction is more important than that between the man who feels the divine discontent of religion, and the man who is suffering from mere romantic restlessness. According to religion man must seek the satisfaction that the finite fails to give by looking not without but within; and to look within he must in the literal sense of the word undergo conversion. A path will then be found to open up before him, a path of which he cannot see the end. He merely knows that to advance on this path is to increase in peace, poise, centrality; though beyond any calm he can attain is always a deeper centre of calm. The goal is at an infinite remove. This is the truth that St. Augustine puts theologically when he exclaims: “For thou hast made us for thyself and our heart is restless until it findeth peace in thee.”¹⁷⁶ One should insist that this question of the two infinites is not abstract and metaphysical but bears on what is most concrete and immediate in experience. If the inner and human infinite cannot be formulated intellectually, it can be known practically in its effect on life and conduct. Goethe says of Werther that he “treated his heart like a sick child; its every wish was granted it.” “My restless heart asked me for something else,” says Rousseau. “René,” says Chateaubriand, “was enchanted, tormented and, as it were, possessed by the demon of his heart.” Mr. Galsworthy speaks in a similar vein of “the aching for the wild, the passionate, the new, that never quite dies in a man’s heart.” But is there not deep down in the human breast another heart that is felt as a power of control over this romantic heart and can keep within due bounds “its aching for the wild, the passionate, the new.” This is the heart, it would seem, to which a man must hearken if he is not for a “little honey of romance” to abandon his “ancient wisdom and austere control.”

The romantic corruption of the infinite here joins with the romantic corruption of conscience, the transformation of conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion that I have already traced in Shaftesbury and Rousseau. But one should add that in some of its aspects this corruption of the idea of the infinite antedates the whole modern movement. At least the beginnings of it can be found in ancient Greece, – especially in that “delirious and diseased Greece” of which Joubert speaks – the Greece of the neo-Platonists. There is already in the neo-Platonic notion of the infinite a strong element of expansiveness. Aristotle and the older Greeks conceived of the infinite in this sense as bad. That something in human nature which is always reaching out for more – whether the more of sensation or of power or of knowledge – was, they held, to be strictly reined in and disciplined to the law of measure. All the furies lie in wait for the man who overextends himself. He is ripening for Nemesis. “Nothing too much.” “Think as a mortal.” “The half is better than the whole.” In his attitude towards man’s expansive self the Greek as a rule stands for mediation, and not like the more austere Christian, for renunciation. Yet Plato frequently and Aristotle at times mount from the humanistic to the religious level. One of the most impressive passages in philosophy is that in which Aristotle, perhaps the chief exponent of the law of measure, affirms that one who has really faced about and is moving towards the inner infinite needs no warning against excess: “We should not give heed,” he says, “to those who bid one think as a mortal, but so far as we can we should make ourselves immortal and do all with a view to a life in accord with the best Principle in us.”¹⁷⁷ (This Principle Aristotle goes on to say is a man’s true self.)

The earlier Greek distinction between an outer and evil infinite of expansive desire and an inner infinite that is raised above the flux and yet rules it, is, in the Aristotelian phrase, its “unmoved mover,” became blurred, as I have said, during the Alexandrian period. The Alexandrian influence entered to some extent into Christianity itself and filtered through various channels down to modern times. Some of the romanticists went directly to the neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus. Still more were affected by Jacob Boehme, who himself had no direct knowledge of the Alexandrian theosophy. This theosophy appears nevertheless in combination with other elements in his writings. He appealed to the new school by his insistence on the element of appetency or desire, by his universal symbolizing, above all by his tendency to make of the divine an affirmative instead of a restrictive force – a something that pushes forward instead of holding back. The expansive elements are moderated in Boehme himself and in disciples like Law by genuinely religious elements – e.g., humility and the idea of conversion. What happens when the expansiveness is divorced from these elements, one may see in another English follower of Boehme – William Blake. To be both beautiful and wise one needs, according to Blake, only to be exuberant. The influence of Boehme blends in Blake with the new æstheticism. Jesus himself, he says, so far from being restrained “was all virtue, and acted from impulse not from rules.” This purely æsthetic and impulsive Jesus has been cruelly maligned, as we learn from the poem entitled the “Everlasting Gospel,” by being represented as humble and chaste. Religion itself thus becomes in Blake the mere sport of a powerful and uncontrolled imagination, and this we are told is mysticism. I have already contrasted with this type of mysticism something that goes under the same name and is yet utterly different – the mysticism of ancient India. Instead of conceiving of the divine in terms of expansion the Oriental sage defines it experimentally as the “inner check.” No more fundamental distinction perhaps can be made than that between those who associate the good with the yes-principle and those who associate it rather with the no-principle. But I need not repeat what I have said elsewhere on the romantic attempt to discredit the veto power. Let no one think that this contrast is merely metaphysical. The whole problem of evil is involved in it and all the innumerable practical consequences that follow from one’s attitude towards this problem. The passage in which Faust defines the devil as the “spirit that always says no” would seem to derive directly or indirectly from Boehme. According to Boehme good can be known only through evil. God therefore divides his will into two, the “yes” and the “no,” and so founds an eternal contrast to himself in order to enter into a struggle with it, and finally to discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature is the transforming of the will which says “no” into the will which says “yes.”¹⁷⁸ The opposition between good and evil tends to lose its reality when it thus becomes a sort of sham battle that God gets up with himself (without contraries is no progression, says Blake), or when, to take the form that the doctrine assumes in “Faust,” the devil appears as the necessary though unwilling instrument of man’s betterment. The recoil from the doctrine of total depravity was perhaps inevitable. What is sinister is that advantage has been taken of this recoil to tamper with the problem of evil itself. Partial evil we are told is universal good; or else evil is only good in the making. For a Rousseau or a Shelley it is something mysteriously imposed from without on a spotless human nature; for a Wordsworth it is something one may escape by contemplating the speargrass on the wall.¹⁷⁹ For a Novalis sin is a mere illusion of which a man should rid his mind if he aspires to become a “magic idealist.”¹⁸⁰ In spite of his quaint Tory prejudices Dr. Johnson is one of the few persons in recent times that one may term wise without serious qualification because he never dodges or equivocates in dealing with the problem of evil; he never fades away from the fact of evil into some theosophic or sentimental dream.

The rise of a purely expansive view of life in the eighteenth century was marked by a great revival of enthusiasm. The chief grievance of the expansionist indeed against the no-principle is that it kills enthusiasm. But concentration no less than expansion may have its own type of enthusiasm. It is therefore imperative in an age that has repudiated the traditional sanctions and set out to walk by the inner light that all general terms and in particular the term enthusiasm should be protected by a powerful dialectic. Nothing is more perilous than an uncritical enthusiasm, since it is only by criticism that one may determine whether the enthusiast is a man who is moving towards wisdom or is a candidate for Bedlam. The Rousseauist, however, exalts enthusiasm at the same time that he depreciates discrimination. “Enthusiasm,” says Emerson, “is the height of man. It is the passage from the human to the divine.” It is only too characteristic of Emerson and of the whole school to which he belongs, to put forth statements of this kind without any dialectical protection. The type of enthusiasm to which Emerson’s praise might be properly applied, the type that has been defined as exalted peace, though extremely rare, actually exists. A commoner type of enthusiasm during the past century is that which has been defined as “the rapturous disintegration of civilized human nature.” When we have got our fingers well burned as a result of our failure to make the necessary discriminations, we may fly to the opposite extreme like the men of the early eighteenth century among whom, as is well known, enthusiasm had become a term of vituperation. This dislike of enthusiasm was the natural recoil from the uncritical following of the inner light by the fanatics of the seventeenth century. Shaftesbury attacks this older type of enthusiasm and at the same time prepares the way for the new emotional enthusiasm. One cannot say, however, that any such sharp separation of types appears in the revival of enthusiasm that begins about the middle of the eighteenth century, though some of those who were working for this revival felt the need of discriminating:

 
That which concerns us therefore is to see
What Species of Enthusiasts we be —
 

says John Byrom in his poem on Enthusiasm. The different species, however, – the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals and Wesleyans, the enthusiasm of those who like Law and his disciple Byrom hearken back to Boehme, the enthusiasm of Rousseau and the sentimentalists, tend to run together. To “let one’s feelings run in soft luxurious flow,”¹⁸¹ is, as Newman says, at the opposite pole from spirituality. Yet much of this mere emotional facility appears alongside of genuinely religious elements in the enthusiasm of the Methodist. One may get a notion of the jumble to which I refer by reading a book like Henry Brooke’s “Fool of Quality.” Brooke is at one and the same time a disciple of Boehme and Rousseau while being more or less affiliated with the Methodistic movement. The book indeed was revised and abridged by John Wesley himself and in this form had a wide circulation among his followers.¹⁸²

The enthusiasm that has marked the modern movement has plainly not been sufficiently critical. Perhaps the first discovery that any one will make who wishes to be at once critical and enthusiastic is that in a genuinely spiritual enthusiasm the inner light and the inner check are practically identical. He will find that if he is to rise above the naturalistic level he must curb constantly his expansive desires with reference to some centre that is set above the flux. Here let me repeat is the supreme rôle of the imagination. The man who has ceased to lean on outer standards can perceive his new standards or centre of control only through its aid. I have tried to show that to aim at such a centre is not to be stagnant and stationary but on the contrary to be at once purposeful and progressive. To assert that the creativeness of the imagination is incompatible with centrality or, what amounts to the same thing, with purpose, is to assert that the creativeness of the imagination is incompatible with reality or at least such reality as man may attain. Life is at best a series of illusions; the whole office of philosophy is to keep it from degenerating into a series of delusions. If we are to keep it from thus degenerating we need to grasp above all the difference between the eccentric and the concentric imagination. To look for serious guidance to an imagination that owes allegiance to nothing above itself, is to run the risk of taking some cloud bank for terra firma. The eccentric imagination may give access to the “infinite,” but it is an infinite empty of content and therefore an infinite not of peace but of restlessness. Can any one maintain seriously that there is aught in common between the “striving for endlessness” of the German romanticists and the supreme and perfect Centre that Dante glimpses at the end of the “Divine Comedy” and in the presence of which he becomes dumb?

We are told to follow the gleam, but the counsel is somewhat ambiguous. The gleam that one follows may be that which is associated with the concentric imagination and which gives steadiness and informing purpose, or it may be the romantic will o’ the wisp. One may, as I have said, in recreative moments allow one’s imagination to wander without control, but to take these wanderings seriously is to engage in a sort of endless pilgrimage in the void. The romanticist is constantly yielding to the “spell” of this or the “lure” of that, or the “call” of some other thing. But when the wonder and strangeness that he is chasing are overtaken, they at once cease to be wondrous and strange, while the gleam is already dancing over some other object on the distant horizon. For nothing is in itself romantic, it is only imagining that makes it so. Romanticism is the pursuit of the element of illusion in things for its own sake; it is in short the cherishing of glamour. The word glamour introduced into literary usage from popular Scotch usage by Walter Scott itself illustrates this tendency. Traced etymologically, it turns out to be the same word as grammar. In an illiterate age to know how to write at all was a weird and magical accomplishment,¹⁸³ but in an educated age, nothing is so drearily unromantic, so lacking in glamour as grammar.

The final question that arises in connection with this subject is whether one may quell the mere restlessness of one’s spirit and impose upon it an ethical purpose. “The man who has no definite end is lost,” says Montaigne. The upshot of the romantic supposition that purpose is incompatible with the freedom of the imagination is a philosophy like that of Nietzsche. He can conceive of nothing beyond whirling forever on the wheel of change (“the eternal recurrence”) without any goal or firm refuge that is set above the flux. He could not help doubting at times whether happiness was to be found after all in mere endless, purposeless mutation.

Have I still a goal? A haven towards which my sail is set? A good wind? Ah, he only who knoweth whither he saileth, knoweth what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.

What still remaineth to me? A heart weary and flippant; an unstable will; fluttering wings; a broken backbone.

…

Where is my home? For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal – in vain.¹⁸⁴

To allow one’s self to revolve passively on the wheel of change (samsāra) seemed to the Oriental sage the acme of evil. An old Hindu writer compares the man who does not impose a firm purpose upon the manifold solicitations of sense to a charioteer who fails to rein in his restless steeds¹⁸⁵– a comparison suggested independently to Ricarda Huch by the lives of the German romanticists. In the absence of central control, the parts of the self tend to pull each in a different way. It is not surprising that in so centrifugal a movement, at least on the human and spiritual level, one should find so many instances of disintegrated and multiple personality. The fascination that the phenomenon of the double (Doppelgängerei) had for Hoffmann and other German romanticists is well known.¹⁸⁶ It may well be that some such disintegration of the self takes place under extreme emotional stress.¹⁸⁷ We should not fail to note here the usual coöperation between the emotional and the scientific naturalist. Like the romanticist, the scientific psychologist is more interested in the abnormal than in the normal. According to the Freudians, the personality that has become incapable of any conscious aim is not left entirely rudderless. The guidance that it is unable to give itself is supplied to it by some “wish,” usually obscene, from the sub-conscious realm of dreams. The Freudian then proceeds to develop what may be true of the hysterical degenerate into a complete view of life.

Man is in danger of being deprived of every last scrap and vestige of his humanity by this working together of romanticism and science. For man becomes human only in so far as he exercises moral choice. He must also enter upon the pathway of ethical purpose if he is to achieve happiness. “Moods,” says Novalis, “undefined emotions, not defined emotions and feelings, give happiness.” The experience of life shows so plainly that this is not so that the romanticist is tempted to seek shelter once more from his mere vagrancy of spirit in the outer discipline he has abandoned. “To such unsettled ones as thou, seemeth at last even a prisoner blessed. Didst thou ever see how captured criminals sleep? They sleep quietly, they enjoy their new security. … Beware in the end lest a narrow faith capture thee, a hard rigorous delusion! For now everything that is narrow and fixed seduceth and tempteth thee.”¹⁸⁸

Various reasons have been given for romantic conversions to Catholicism – for example, the desire for confession (though the Catholic does not, like the Rousseauist, confess himself from the housetops), the æsthetic appeal of Catholic rites and ceremonies, etc. The sentence of Nietzsche puts us on the track of still another reason. The affinity of certain romantic converts for the Church is that of the jelly-fish for the rock. It is appropriate that Friedrich Schlegel, the great apostle of irony, should after a career as a heaven-storming Titan end by submitting to this most rigid of all forms of outer authority.

For it should now be possible to return after our digression on paradox and the idea of the infinite and the perils of aimlessness, to romantic irony with a truer understanding of its significance. Like so much else in this movement it is an attempt to give to a grave psychic weakness the prestige of strength – unless indeed one conceives the superior personality to be the one that lacks a centre and principle of control. Man it has usually been held should think lightly of himself but should have some conviction for which he is ready to die. The romantic ironist, on the other hand, is often morbidly sensitive about himself, but is ready to mock at his own convictions. Rousseau was no romantic ironist, but the root of self-parody is found nevertheless in his saying that his heart and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual. Everything of course is a matter of degree. What poor mortal can say that he is perfectly at one with himself? Friedrich Schlegel is not entirely wrong when he discovers elements of irony based on an opposition between the head and the heart in writers like Ariosto and Cervantes, who love the very mediæval tales that they are treating in a spirit of mockery. Yet the laughter of Cervantes is not gypsy laughter. He is one of those who next to Shakespeare deserve the praise of having dwelt close to the centre of human nature and so can in only a minor degree be ranked with the romantic ironists.

In the extreme type of romantic ironist not only are intellect and emotion at loggerheads but action often belies both: he thinks one thing and feels another and does still a third. The most ironical contrast of all is that between the romantic “ideal” and the actual event. The whole of romantic morality is from this point of view, as I have tried to show, a monstrous series of ironies. The pacifist, for example, has been disillusioned so often that he should by this time be able to qualify as a romantic ironist, to look, that is, with a certain aloofness on his own dream. The crumbling of the ideal is often so complete indeed when put to the test that irony is at times, we may suppose, a merciful alternative to madness. When disillusion overtakes the uncritical enthusiast, when he finds that he has taken some cloud bank for terra firma, he continues to cling to his dream, but at the same time wishes to show that he is no longer the dupe of it; and so “hot baths of sentiment,” as Jean Paul says of his novels, “are followed by cold douches of irony.” The true German master of the genre is, however, Heine. Every one knows with what coldness his head came to survey the enthusiasms of his heart, whether in love or politics. One may again measure the havoc that life had wrought with Renan’s ideals if one compares the tone of his youthful “Future of Science” with the irony of his later writings. He compliments Jesus by ascribing to him an ironical detachment similar to his own. Jesus, he says, has that mark of the superior nature – the power to rise above his own dream and to smile down upon it. Anatole France, who is even more completely detached from his own dreams than his master Renan, sums up the romantic emancipation of imagination and sensibility from any definite centre when he says that life should have as its supreme witnesses irony and pity.

Irony is on the negative side, it should be remembered, a way of affirming one’s escape from traditional and conventional control, of showing the supremacy of mood over decorum. “There are poems old and new which throughout breathe the divine breath of irony. … Within lives the poet’s mood that surveys all, rising infinitely above everything finite, even above his own art, virtue or genius.”¹⁸⁹ Decorum is for the classicist the grand masterpiece to observe because it is only thus he can show that he has a genuine centre set above his own ego; it is only by the allegiance of his imagination to this centre that he can give the illusion of a higher reality. The romantic ironist shatters the illusion wantonly. It is as though he would inflict upon the reader the disillusion from which he has himself suffered. By his swift passage from one mood to another (Stimmungsbrechung) he shows that he is subject to no centre. The effect is often that of a sudden breaking of the spell of poetry by an intrusion of the poet’s ego. Some of the best examples are found in that masterpiece of romantic irony, “Don Juan.”¹⁹⁰

Closely allied to the irony of emotional disillusion is a certain type of misanthropy. You form an ideal of man that is only an Arcadian dream and then shrink back from man when you find that he does not correspond to your ideal. I have said that the romantic lover does not love a real person but only a projection of his mood. This substitution of illusion for reality often appears in the relations of the romanticist with other persons. Shelley, for example, begins by seeing in Elizabeth Hitchener an angel of light and then discovers that she is instead a “brown demon.” He did not at any time see the real Elizabeth Hitchener. She merely reflects back to him two of his own moods. The tender misanthropy of the Rousseauist is at the opposite pole from that of a Swift, which is the misanthropy of naked intellect. Instead of seeing human nature through an Arcadian haze he saw it without any illusion at all. His irony is like that of Socrates, the irony of intellect. Its bitterness and cruelty arise from the fact that his intellect does not, like the intellect of Socrates, have the support of insight. Pascal would have said that Swift saw man’s misery without at the same time seeing his grandeur. For man’s grandeur is due to his infinitude and this infinitude cannot be perceived directly, but only through a veil of illusion; only, that is, through a right use of the imagination. Literary distinctions of this kind must of course be used cautiously. Byron’s irony is prevailingly sentimental, but along with this romantic element he has much irony and satire that Swift would have understood perfectly.

The misanthropist of the Rousseauistic or Byronic type has a resource that was denied to Swift. Having failed to find companionship among men he can flee to nature. Rousseau relates how when he had taken refuge on St. Peter’s Island he “exclaimed at times with deep emotion: Oh nature, oh my mother, here I am under your protection alone. Here is no adroit and rascally man to interpose between you and me.”¹⁹¹ Few aspects of romanticism are more important than this attempt to find companionship and consolation in nature.

CHAPTER VIII
ROMANTICISM AND NATURE

One of the most disquieting features of the modern movement is the vagueness and ambiguity of its use of the word nature and the innumerable sophistries that have resulted. One can sympathize at times with Sir Leslie Stephen’s wish that the word might be suppressed entirely. This looseness of definition may be said to begin with the very rise of naturalism in the Renaissance, and indeed to go back to the naturalists of Greek and Roman antiquity.¹⁹² Even writers like Rabelais and Molière are not free from the suspicion of juggling dangerously on occasion with the different meanings of the word nature. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not merely naturalistic, they were also humanistic, and what they usually meant by nature, as I have pointed out, was the conception of normal, representative human nature that they had worked out with the aid of the ancients. There is undeniably an element of narrowness and artificiality in this conception of nature, and a resulting unfriendliness, as appears in Pope’s definition of wit, towards originality and invention. In his “Art of Poetry” Boileau says, “Let nature be your sole study.” What he means by nature appears a few lines later: “Study the court and become familiar with the town.” To this somewhat conventionalized human nature the original genius opposed, as we have seen, the cult of primitive nature. A whole revolution is implied in Byron’s line:

I love not man the less, but nature more.

Any study of this topic must evidently turn on the question how far at different times and by different schools of thought the realm of man and the realm of nature (as Byron uses the word) have been separated and in what way, and also how far they have been run together and in what way. For there may be different ways of running together man and nature. Ruskin’s phrase the “pathetic fallacy” is unsatisfactory because it fails to recognize this fact. The man who is guilty of the pathetic fallacy sees in nature emotions that are not really there but only in himself. Extreme examples of this confusion abound in Ruskin’s own writings. Now the ancients also ran man and nature together, but in an entirely different way. The Greek we are told never saw the oak tree without at the same time seeing the dryad. There is in this and similar associations a sort of overflow of the human realm upon the forms of outer nature whereas the Rousseauist instead of bestowing imaginatively upon the oak tree a conscious life and an image akin to his own and so lifting it up to his level, would, if he could, become an oak tree and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity. The Greek, one may say, humanized nature; the Rousseauist naturalizes man. Rousseau’s great discovery was revery; and revery is just this imaginative melting of man into outer nature. If the ancients failed to develop in a marked degree this art of revery, it was not because they lacked naturalists. Both Stoics and Epicureans, the two main varieties of naturalists with which classical antiquity was familiar, inclined to affirm the ultimate identity of the human and the natural order. But both Stoics and Epicureans would have found it hard to understand the indifference to the intellect and its activities that Rousseauistic revery implies. The Stoics to be sure employed the intellect on an impossible and disheartening task – that of founding on the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. The Epicureans remind one rather in much of their intellectual activity of the modern man of science. But the Epicurean was less prone than the man of science to look on man as the mere passive creature of environment. The views of the man of science about the springs of conduct often seem to coincide rather closely with those of Rousseau about “sensitive morality.” Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire says that when reclining on the banks of the Nile he felt awakening within himself the instincts of the crocodile. The point of view is Rousseauistic perhaps rather than genuinely scientific. An Epicurus or a Lucretius would, we are probably safe in assuming, have been disquieted by any such surrender to the subrational, by any such encroachment of the powers of the unconscious upon conscious control.

It is hard as a matter of fact to find in the ancients anything resembling Rousseauistic revery, even when they yield to the pastoral mood. Nature interests them as a rule less for its own sake than as a background for human action; and when they are concerned primarily with nature, it is a nature that has been acted upon by man. They have a positive shrinking from wild and uncultivated nature. “The green pastures and golden slopes of England,” says Lowell, “are sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye that the hand of man has immemorially cared for and caressed them.” This is an attitude towards nature that an ancient would have understood perfectly. One may indeed call it the Virgilian attitude from the ancient who has perhaps expressed it most happily. The man who lives in the grand manner may indeed wish to impose on nature some of the fine proportion and symmetry of which he is conscious in himself and he may then from our modern point of view carry the humanizing of nature too far. “Let us sing of woods,” says Virgil, “but let the woods be worthy of a consul.” This line has sometimes been taken to be a prophecy of the Park of Versailles. We may sympathize up to a certain point with the desire to introduce a human symmetry into nature (such as appears, for instance, in the Italian garden), but the peril is even greater here than elsewhere of confounding the requirements of a real with those of an artificial decorum. I have already mentioned the neo-classicist who complained that the stars in heaven were not arranged in sufficiently symmetrical patterns.

What has been said should make clear that though both humanist and Rousseauist associate man with nature it is in very different ways, and that there is therefore an ambiguity in the expression “pathetic fallacy.” It remains to show that men may not only associate themselves with nature in different ways but that they may likewise differ in their ways of asserting man’s separateness from nature. The chief distinction to be made here is that between the humanist and the supernaturalist. Some sense of the gap between man and the “outworld” is almost inevitable and forces itself at times even upon those most naturalistically inclined:

 
Nor will I praise a cloud however bright,
Disparaging Man’s gifts and proper food —
Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
Though clad in colors beautiful and pure,
Find in the heart of man no natural home.¹⁹³
 

The Wordsworth who speaks here is scarcely the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey or the Wordsworth whose “daily teachers had been woods and rills.” He reminds us rather of Socrates who gave as his reason for going so rarely into the country, delightful as he found it when once there, that he did not learn from woods and rills but from the “men in the cities.” This sense of the separateness of the human and the natural realm may be carried much further – to a point where an ascetic distrust of nature begins to appear. Something of this ascetic distrust is seen for example in the following lines from Cardinal Newman:

 
There strayed awhile amid the woods of Dart
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart
To streamlet bright or soft secluded grove.¹⁹⁴
 

The origins of this latter attitude towards nature are to be sought in mediæval Christianity rather than in classical antiquity. No man who knows the facts would assert for a moment that the man of the Middle Ages was incapable of looking on nature with other feelings than those of ascetic distrust. It is none the less true that the man of the Middle Ages often saw in nature not merely something alien but a positive temptation and peril of the spirit. In his attitude towards nature as in other respects Petrarch is usually accounted the first modern. He did what no man of the mediæval period is supposed to have done before him, or indeed what scarcely any man of classical antiquity did: he ascended a mountain out of sheer curiosity and simply to enjoy the prospect. But those who tell of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux sometimes forget to add that the passage of Saint Augustine¹⁹⁵ that occurred to him at the top reflects the distrust of the more austere Christian towards the whole natural order. Petrarch is at once more ascetic and more romantic in his attitude towards nature than the Greek or Roman.

Traces of Petrarch’s taste for solitary and even for wild nature are to be found throughout the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. But the recoil from supernaturalism that took place at this time led rather, as I have remarked, to a revival of the Græco-Roman humanism with something more of artifice and convention, and to an even more marked preference¹⁹⁶ of the town to the country. An age that aims first of all at urbanity must necessarily be more urban than rural in its predilections. It was a sort of condescension for the neo-classical humanist to turn from the central model he was imitating to mere unadorned nature, and even then he felt that he must be careful not to condescend too far. Even when writing pastorals he was warned by Scaliger to avoid details that are too redolent of the real country; he should indulge at most in an “urbane rusticity.” Wild nature the neo-classicist finds simply repellent. Mountains he looks upon as “earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The Alps were regarded as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the plains of Lombardy. “At last,” says a German traveller of the seventeenth century, “we left the horrible and wearisome mountains and the beautiful flat landscape was joyfully welcomed.” The taste for mountain scenery is associated no doubt to some extent, as has been suggested, with the increasing ease and comfort of travel that has come with the progress of the utilitarian movement. It is scarcely necessary to point the contrast between the Switzerland of which Evelyn tells in his diary¹⁹⁷ and the Switzerland in which one may go by funicular to the top of the Jungfrau.

Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less trimness in nature and human nature were not it is true entirely without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting – as the very word picturesque testifies – for the encouragement they failed to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed like a picture¹⁹⁸ and it might be not merely irregular but savage if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. This association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the style of Le Nôtre.¹⁹⁹ As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry, nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle Héloïse.”²⁰⁰ Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path, and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so plentifully supplied by the Revolution.

Rousseau himself, it should hardly be necessary to say, stands for far more than an artificial wildness. Instead of imposing decorum on nature like the neo-classicist, he preached constantly the elimination of decorum from man. Man should flee from that “false taste for grandeur which is not made for him” and which “poisons his pleasures,”²⁰¹ to nature. Now “it is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent charms.”²⁰² The man of feeling finds the savage and deserted nook filled with beauties that seem horrible to the mere worldling.²⁰³ Rousseau indeed did not crave the ultimate degree of wildness even in the Alps. He did not get beyond what one may term the middle zone of Alpine scenery – scenery that may be found around the shores of Lake Leman. He was inclined to find the most appropriate setting for the earthly paradise in the neighborhood of Vevey. Moreover, others about the same time and more or less independently of his influence were opposing an even more primitive nature to the artificialities of civilization. The mountains of “Ossian” are, as has been said, mere blurs, yet the new delight in mountains is due in no small measure throughout Europe to the Ossianic influence.

The instinct for getting away from the beaten track, for exploration and discovery, has of course been highly developed at other epochs, notably at the Renaissance. Much of the romantic interest in the wild and waste places of the earth did not go much beyond what might have been felt in Elizabethan England. Many of the Rousseauists, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand for example, not only read eagerly the older books of travel but often the same books. The fascination of penetrating to regions “where foot of man hath ne’er or rarely been,” is perennial. It was my privilege a few years ago to listen to Sir Ernest Shackleton speak of his expedition across the Antarctic continent and of the thrill that he and the members of his party felt when they saw rising before them day after day mountain peaks that no human eye had ever gazed upon. The emotion was no doubt very similar to that of “stout Cortez” when he first “stared at the Pacific.” Chateaubriand must have looked forward to similar emotions when he planned his trip to North America in search of the North West Passage. But the passion for actual exploration which is a form of the romanticism of action is very subordinate in the case of Chateaubriand to emotional romanticism. He went into the wilderness first of all not to make actual discoveries but to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint, and at the same time to practice the new art of revery. His sentiments on getting into what was then the virgin forest to the west of Albany were very different we may assume from those of the early pioneers of America. “When,” he says, “after passing the Mohawk I entered woods which had never felt the axe, I was seized by a sort of intoxication of independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad.” The disillusion that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his first savages – a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat, drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”

The primitivistic fallacies of the German romanticists in their dealings with the symbol and metaphor appear in various forms in French romanticism and even more markedly in its continuation known as the symbolistic movement. What is exasperating in many of the poets of this school is that they combine the pretence to a vast illumination with the utmost degree of spiritual and intellectual emptiness and vagueness. Like the early German romanticists they mix up flesh and spirit in nympholeptic longing and break down and blur all the boundaries of being in the name of the infinite. Of this inner formlessness and anarchy the chaos of the vers libre (in which they were also anticipated by the Germans) is only an outer symptom.²²¹

If the Rousseauistic primitivist recognizes the futility of his symbolizing, and consents to become a passive register of outer perception, if for example he proclaims himself an imagist, he at least has the merit of frankness, but in that case he advertises by the very name he has assumed the bankruptcy of all that is most worth while in poetry.

But to return to romanticism and nature. It should be plain from what has already been said that the romanticist tends to make of nature the mere plaything of his mood. When Werther’s mood is cheerful, nature smiles at him benignly. When his mood darkens she becomes for him “a devouring monster.” When it grows evident to the romanticist that nature does not alter with his alteration, he chides her at times for her impassibility; or again he seeks to be impassible like her, even if he can be so only at the expense of his humanity. This latter attitude is closely connected with the dehumanizing of man by science that is reflected in a whole literature during the last half of the nineteenth century – for instance, in so-called “impassive” writers like Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle.

The causal sequences that had been observed in the physical realm were developed more and more during this period with the aid of pure mathematics and the mathematical reason (esprit de géométrie) into an all-embracing system. For the earlier romanticists nature had at least been a living presence whether benign or sinister. For the mathematical determinist she tends to become a soulless, pitiless mechanism against which man is helpless.²²² This conception of nature is so important that I shall need to revert to it in my treatment of melancholy.

The man who has accepted the universe of the mechanist or determinist is not always gloomy. But men in general felt the need of some relief from the deterministic obsession. Hence the success of the philosophy of Bergson and similar philosophies. The glorification of impulse (élan vital) that Bergson opposes to the mechanizing of life is in its main aspects, as I have already indicated, simply a return to the spontaneity of Rousseau. His plan of escape from deterministic science is at bottom very much like Rousseau’s plan of escape from the undue rationalism of the Enlightenment. As a result of these eighteenth-century influences, nature had, according to Carlyle, become a mere engine, a system of cogs and pulleys. He therefore hails Novalis as an “anti-mechanist,” a “deep man,” because of the way of deliverance that he teaches from this nightmare. “I owe him somewhat.” What Carlyle owed to Novalis many moderns have owed to Bergson, but it is not yet clear that either Novalis or Bergson are “deep men.”

The mechanistic view of nature, whether held pessimistically or optimistically, involving as it does factors that are infinite and therefore beyond calculation, cannot furnish proofs that will satisfy the true positivist: he is inclined to dismiss it as a mere phantasmagoria of the intellect. The Rousseauistic view of nature, on the other hand, whether held optimistically or pessimistically, is even less capable of satisfying the standards of the positivist and must be dismissed as a mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. The fact is that we do not know and can never know what nature is in herself. The mysterious mother has shrouded herself from us in an impenetrable veil of illusion. But though we cannot know nature absolutely we can pick up a practical and piecemeal knowledge of nature not by dreaming but by doing. The man of action can within certain limits have his way with nature. Now the men who have acted during the past century have been the men of science and the utilitarians who have been turning to account the discoveries of science. The utilitarians have indeed derived such potent aid from science that they have been able to stamp their efforts on the very face of the landscape. The romanticists have not ceased to protest against this scientific utilizing of nature as a profanation. But inasmuch as these protests have come from men who have stood not for work but for revery they have for the most part been futile. This is not the least of the ironic contrasts that abound in this movement between the ideal and the real. No age ever grew so ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century, at the same time no age ever did so much to deface nature. No age ever so exalted the country over the town, and no age ever witnessed such a crowding into urban centres.

A curious study might be made of this ironic contrast as it appears in the early romantic crusade against railways. One of the romantic grievances against the railway is that it does not encourage vagabondage: it has a definite goal and gets to it so far as possible in a straight line. Yet in spite of Wordsworth’s protesting sonnet the Windermere railway was built. Ruskin’s wrath at railways was equally vain. In general, sentiment is not of much avail when pitted against industrial advance. The papers announced recently that one of the loveliest cascades in the California Sierras had suddenly disappeared as a result of the diversion of its water to a neighboring power-plant. The same fate is overtaking Niagara itself. It is perhaps symbolic that a quarry has made a hideous gash in the hillside on the shores of Rydal Mere right opposite Wordsworth’s house.

If the man of science and the utilitarian do not learn what nature is in herself they learn at least to adjust themselves to forces outside themselves. The Rousseauist, on the other hand, does not in his “communion” with nature adjust himself to anything. He is simply communing with his own mood. Rousseau chose appropriately as title for the comedy that was his first literary effort “Narcissus or the Lover of Himself.” The nature over which the Rousseauist is bent in such rapt contemplation plays the part of the pool in the legend of Narcissus. It renders back to him his own image. He sees in nature what he himself has put there. The Rousseauist transfuses himself into nature in much the same way that Pygmalion transfuses himself into his statue. Nature is dead, as Rousseau says, unless animated by the fires of love. “Make no mistake,” says M. Masson, “the nature that Jean-Jacques worships is only a projection of Jean-Jacques. He has poured himself forth so complacently upon it that he can always find himself and cherish himself in it.” And M. Masson goes on and quotes from a curious and little-known fragment of Rousseau: “Beloved solitude,” Rousseau sighs, “beloved solitude, where I still pass with pleasure the remains of a life given over to suffering. Forest with stunted trees, marshes without water, broom, reeds, melancholy heather, inanimate objects, you who can neither speak to me nor hear me, what secret charm brings me back constantly into your midst? Unfeeling and dead things, this charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which wishes to refer back everything to itself.”²²³ Coleridge plainly only continues Rousseau when he writes:

 
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:²²⁴
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow’d
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth.
 

The fair luminous cloud is no other than the Arcadian imagination. “The light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream” of which Wordsworth speaks, is likewise as appears very plainly from the context,²²⁵ Arcadian. He should once, Wordsworth writes, have wished to see Peele Castle bathed in the Arcadian light, but now that he has escaped by sympathy for his fellow-men from the Arcadian aloofness, he is willing that it should be painted in storm. Mere storminess, one should recollect, is not in itself an assurance that one has turned from the romantic dream to reality. One finds in this movement, if nowhere else, as I remarked apropos of Chateaubriand, the stormy Arcadia.

It is not through the Arcadian imagination that one moves towards reality. This does not much matter if what one seeks in a “return to nature” is merely recreation. I cannot repeat too often that I have no quarrel with the nature cult when it remains recreative but only when it sets up as a substitute for philosophy and religion. This involves a confusion between the two main directions of the human spirit, a confusion as I have said in a previous chapter between the realm of awe and the region of wonder. Pascal exaggerates somewhat when he says the Bible never seeks to prove religion from the “wonders” of nature. But this remark is true to the total spirit of the Bible. A knowledge of the flowers of the Holy Land is less necessary for an understanding of the gospel narrative than one might suppose from Renan.²²⁶ Renan is simply seeking to envelop Jesus so far as possible in an Arcadian atmosphere. In so doing he is following in the footsteps of the great father of sentimentalists. According to M. Masson, Jesus, as depicted by Jean-Jacques, becomes “a sort of grand master of the Golden Age.”

Here as elsewhere the Rousseauist is seeking to identify the Arcadian view of life with wisdom. The result is a series of extraordinarily subtle disguises for egoism. We think we see the Rousseauist prostrate before the ideal woman or before nature or before God himself, but when we look more closely we see that he is only (as Sainte-Beuve said of Alfred de Vigny) “in perpetual adoration before the holy sacrament of himself.” The fact that he finds in nature only what he has put there seems to be for Rousseau himself a source of satisfaction. But the poem of Coleridge I have just quoted, in which he proclaims that so far as nature is concerned “we receive but what we give,” is entitled “Ode to Dejection.” One of man’s deepest needs would seem to be for genuine communion, for a genuine escape, that is, from his ordinary self. The hollowness of the Rousseauistic communion with nature as well as other Rousseauistic substitutes for genuine communion is indissolubly bound up with the subject of romantic melancholy.

CHAPTER IX
ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY

Rousseau and his early followers – especially perhaps his early French followers – were very much preoccupied with the problem of happiness. Now in a sense all men – even those who renounce the world and mortify the flesh – aim at happiness. The important point to determine is what any particular person means by happiness and how he hopes to attain it. It should be plain from all that has been said that the Rousseauist seeks happiness in the free play of the emotions. The “Influence of the Passions on Happiness” is the significant title of one of Madame de Staël’s early treatises. The happiness that the Rousseauist seeks involves not merely a free play of feeling but – what is even more important – a free play of the imagination. Feeling acquires a sort of infinitude as a result of this coöperation of the imagination, and so the romanticist goes, as we have seen, in quest of the thrill superlative, as appears so clearly in his nympholepsy, his pursuit of the “impossible she.” But the more imaginative this quest for emotional happiness grows the more it tends to become a mere nostalgia. Happiness is achieved so far as it is achieved at all in dreamland. Rousseau says of himself: Mon plus constant bonheur fut en songe. Every finite satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves him unsatisfied. René says that he had exhausted solitude as he had exhausted society: they had both failed to satisfy his insatiable desires. René plainly takes his insatiableness to be the badge of his spiritual distinction. To submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the philistine.

But does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperæsthetic, by burning with infinite indeterminate desire? We have here perhaps the chief irony and contradiction in the whole movement. The Rousseauist seeks happiness and yet on his own showing, his mode of seeking it results, not in happiness but in wretchedness. One finds indeed figures in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom.²²⁷

 
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair.
 

According to a somewhat doubtful authority, Ninon de Lenclos, “the joy of the spirit measures its force.” When the romanticist on the other hand discovers that his ideal of happiness works put into actual unhappiness he does not blame his ideal. He simply assumes that the world is unworthy of a being so exquisitely organized as himself, and so shrinks back from it and enfolds himself in his sorrow as he would in a mantle. Since the superlative bliss that he craves eludes him he will at least be superlative in woe. So far from being a mark of failure this woe measures his spiritual grandeur. “A great soul,” as René says, “must contain more grief than a small one.” The romantic poets enter into a veritable competition with one another as to who shall be accounted the most forlorn. The victor in this competition is awarded the palm not merely for poetry but wisdom. In the words of Arnold:

Amongst us one

 
Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days.
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
 
 
This for our wisest! and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;
With close-lipped patience for our only friend,
Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair.
 

Though Arnold may in this poem, as some one has complained, reduce the muse to the rôle of hospital nurse, he is, like his master Senancour, free from the taint of theatricality. He does not as he said of Byron make “a pageant of his bleeding heart”; and the Byronic pose has a close parallel in the pose of Chateaubriand. An Irish girl at London once told Chateaubriand that “he carried his heart in a sling.” He himself said that he had a soul of the kind “the ancients called a sacred malady.”

Chateaubriand, to be sure, had his cheerful moments and many of them. His sorrows he bestowed upon the public. Herein he was a true child of Jean-Jacques. We are told by eye-witnesses how heartily Rousseau enjoyed many aspects of his life at Motiers-Travers. On his own showing, he was plunged during this period in almost unalloyed misery. Froude writes of Carlyle: “It was his peculiarity that if matters were well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.” We can follow clear down to Gissing the assumption in some form or other that “art must be the mouthpiece of misery.” This whole question as to the proper function of art goes to the root of the debate between the classicist and the Rousseauist. “All these poets,” Goethe complains to Eckermann of the romanticists of 1830, “write as though they were ill, and as though the whole world were a hospital. … Every one of them in writing tries to be more desolate than all the others. This is really an abuse of poetry which has been given to make man satisfied with the world and with his lot. But the present generation is afraid of all solid energy; its mind is at ease and sees poetry only in weakness. I have found a good expression to vex these gentlemen. I am going to call their poetry hospital poetry.”²²⁸

Now Goethe is here, like Chateaubriand, mocking to some degree his own followers. When he suffered from a spiritual ailment of any kind he got rid of it by inoculating others with it; and it was in this way, as we learn from his Autobiography, that he got relief from the Weltschmerz of “Werther.” But later in life Goethe was classical not merely in precept like Chateaubriand, but to some extent in practice. The best of the poetry of his maturity tends like that of the ancients to elevate and console.

The contrast between classic and romantic poetry in this matter of melancholy is closely bound up with the larger contrast between imitation and spontaneity. Homer is the greatest of poets, according to Aristotle, because he does not entertain us with his own person but is more than any other poet an imitator. The romantic poet writes, on the other hand, as Lamartine says he wrote, solely for the “relief of his heart.” He pours forth himself – his most intimate and private self; above all, his anguish and his tears. In his relation to his reader, as Musset tells us in a celebrated image,²²⁹ he is like the pelican who rends and lacerates his own flesh to provide nourishment for his young (Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur):

 
Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots. ²³⁰
 

To make of poetry a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, usually of sorrowful emotion, is what the French understand by lyricism (le lyrisme); and it may be objected that it is not fair to compare an epic poet like Homer with a lyricist like Musset. Let us then take for our comparison the poet whom the ancients themselves looked upon as the supreme type of the lyricist – Pindar. He is superbly imaginative, “sailing,” as Gray tells us, “with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air,” but his imagination is not like that of Musset in the service of sensibility. He does not bestow his own emotions upon us but is rather in the Aristotelian sense an imitator. He is indeed at the very opposite pole from Rousseau and the “apostles of affliction.” “Let a man,” he says, “not darken delight in his life.” “Disclose not to strangers our burden of care; this at least shall I advise thee. Therefore is it fitting to show openly to all the folk the fair and pleasant things allotted us; but if any baneful misfortune sent of heaven befalleth man, it is seemly to shroud this in darkness.”²³¹ And one should also note Pindar’s hostility towards that other great source of romantic lyricism – nostalgia (“The desire of the moth for the star”), and the closely allied pursuit of the strange and the exotic. He tells of the condign punishment visited by Apollo upon the girl Coronis who became enamoured of “a strange man from Arcadia,” and adds: “She was in love with things remote – that passion which many ere now have felt. For among men, there is a foolish company of those who, putting shame on what they have at home, cast their glances afar, and pursue idle dreams in hopes that shall not be fulfilled.”²³²

We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and superficial of all types – the professional optimist who insists on inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.”²³³ In general the Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller – the Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the everlasting wondersong of youth”²³⁴– is a romantic myth. We read in the Iliad:²³⁵ “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry:

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.²³⁶

One should indeed not fail to distinguish between the note of melancholy in a Homer or a Virgil and the melancholy of the ancients, whether Stoic or Epicurean, who had experienced the hopelessness and helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ultimate problems. The melancholy of the Stoic is the melancholy of the man who associates with the natural order a “virtue” that the natural order does not give, and so is tempted to exclaim at last with Brutus, that he had thought virtue a thing and had found that it was only a word. The melancholy of the Epicurean is that of the man who has tasted the bitter sediment (amari aliquid) in the cup of pleasure. It is not difficult to discover modern equivalents of both Stoic and Epicurean melancholy. “One should seek,” says Sainte-Beuve, “in the pleasures of René the secret of his ennuis,” and so far as this is true Chateaubriand is on much the same level as some Roman voluptuary who suffered from the tædium vitæ in the time of Tiberius or Nero.²³⁷ But though the Roman decadent gave himself up to the pursuit of sensation and often of violent and abnormal sensation he was less prone than a Chateaubriand to associate this pursuit with the “infinite”; and so he was less nostalgic and hyperæsthetic. His Epicureanism was therefore less poetical no doubt, but on the other hand he did not set up mere romantic restlessness as a sort of substitute for religion. It was probably easier therefore for him to feel the divine discontent and so turn to real religion than it would have been if he had, like the Rousseauist, complicated his Epicureanism with sham spirituality.

To say that the melancholy even of the decadent ancient is less nostalgic is perhaps only another way of saying what I have said about the melancholy of the ancients in general – that it is not so purely personal. It derives less from his very private and personal illusions and still less from his very private and personal disillusions. In its purely personal quality romantic melancholy is indeed inseparable from the whole conception of original genius. The genius sets out not merely to be unique but unique in feeling, and the sense uniqueness in feeling speedily passes over into that of uniqueness in suffering – on the principle no doubt laid down by Horace Walpole that life, which is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. To be a beautiful soul, to preserve one’s native goodness of feeling among men who have been perverted by society, is to be the elect of nature and yet this election turns out as Rousseau tells us to be a “fatal gift of heaven.” It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however, who assumes this elegiac tone. We need to consider what he means by happiness while he still seeks for it in the actual world and not in the pays des chimères. Rousseau tells us that he based the sense of his own worth on the fineness of his powers of perception. Why should nature have endowed him with such exquisite faculties²³⁸ if he was not to have a satisfaction commensurate with them, if he was “to die without having lived”? We have here the psychological origins of the right to happiness that the romanticists were to proclaim. “We spend on the passions,” says Joubert, “the stuff that has been given us for happiness.” The Rousseauist hopes to find his happiness in the passions themselves. Romantic happiness does not involve any moral effort and has been defined in its extreme forms as a “monstrous dream of passive enjoyment.” Flaubert has made a study of the right to happiness thus understood in his “Madame Bovary.” Madame Bovary, who is very commonplace in other respects, feels exquisitely; and inasmuch as her husband had no such fineness the right to happiness meant for her, as it did for so many other “misunderstood” women, the right to extra-marital adventure. One should note the germs of melancholy that lurk in the quest of the superlative moment even if the quest is relatively successful. Suppose Saint-Preux had succeeded in compressing into a single instant “the delights of a thousand centuries”; and so far as outer circumstances are concerned had had to pay no penalty. The nearer the approach to a superhuman intensity of feeling the greater is likely to be the ensuing languor. The ordinary round of life seems pale and insipid compared with the exquisite and fugitive moment. One seems to one’s self to have drained the cup of life at a draught and save perhaps for impassioned recollection of the perfect moment to have no reason for continuing to live. One’s heart is “empty and swollen”²³⁹ and one is haunted by thoughts of suicide.

This sense of having exhausted life²⁴⁰ and the accompanying temptation to suicide that are such striking features of the malady of the age are not necessarily associated with any outer enjoyment at all. One may devour life in revery and then the melancholy arises from the disproportion between the dream and the fact. The revery that thus consumes life in advance is not necessarily erotic. What may be termed the cosmic revery of a Senancour or an Amiel²⁴¹ has very much the same effect.

The atony and aridity of which the sufferer from romantic melancholy complains may have other sources besides the depression that follows upon the achieving of emotional intensity whether in revery or in fact; it may also be an incident in the warfare between head and heart that assumes so many forms among the spiritual posterity of Jean-Jacques. The Rousseauist seeks happiness in emotional spontaneity and this spontaneity seems to be killed by the head which stands aloof and dissects and analyzes. Perhaps the best picture of the emotionalist who is thus incapacitated for a frank surrender to his own emotions is the “Adolphe” of Benjamin Constant (a book largely reminiscent of Constant’s actual affair with Madame de Staël).

Whether the victim of romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded action and at the same time become highly sensitive and highly self-conscious. The man who thrills more exquisitely to pleasure than another will also thrill more exquisitely to pain; nay, pleasure itself in its extreme is allied to pain;²⁴² so that to be hyperæsthetic is not an unmixed advantage especially if it be true, as Pindar says, that the Gods bestow two trials on a man for every boon. Perhaps the deepest bitterness is found, not in those who make a pageant of their bleeding hearts, but in those who, like Leconte de Lisle²⁴³ and others (les impassibles), disdain to make a show of themselves to the mob, and so dissimulate their quivering sensibility under an appearance of impassibility; or, like Stendhal, under a mask of irony that “is imperceptible to the vulgar.”

Stendhal aims not at emotional intensity only, but also glorifies the lust for power. He did as much as any one in his time to promote the ideal of the superman. Yet even if the superman has nerves of steel, as seems to have been the case with Stendhal’s favorite, Napoleon, and acts on the outer world with a force of which the man in search of a sensation is quite incapable, he does not act upon himself, he remains ethically passive. This ethical passivity is the trait common to all those who incline to live purely on the naturalistic level – whether they sacrifice the human law and its demands for measure to the lust of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power. The man who neglects his ethical self and withdraws into his temperamental or private self, must almost necessarily have the sense of isolation, of remoteness from other men. We return here to the psychology of the original genius to whom it was a tame and uninteresting thing to be simply human and who, disdaining to seem to others a being of the same clay as themselves, wished to be in their eyes either an angel or a demon – above all a demon.²⁴⁴ René does not, as I have said,²⁴⁵ want even the woman who loves him to feel at one with him, but rather to be at once astonished and appalled. He exercises upon those who approach him a malign fascination; for he not only lives in misery himself as in his natural element, but communicates this misery to those who approach him. He is like one of those fair trees under which one cannot sit without perishing. Moreover René disavows all responsibility for thus being a human Upas-tree. Moral effort is unavailing, for it was all written in the book of fate. The victim of romantic melancholy is at times tender and elegiac, at other times he sets up as a heaven-defying Titan. This latter pose became especially common in France around 1830 when the influence of Byron had been added to that of Chateaubriand. Under the influence of these two writers a whole generation of youth became “things of dark imaginings,”²⁴⁶ predestined to a blight that was at the same time the badge of their superiority. One wished like René to have an “immense, solitary and stormy soul,” and also, like a Byronic hero, to have a diabolical glint in the eye and a corpse-like complexion,²⁴⁷ and so seem the “blind and deaf agent of funereal mysteries.”²⁴⁸ “It was possible to believe everything about René except the truth.” The person who delights in being as mysterious as this easily falls into mystification. Byron himself we are told was rather flattered by the rumor that he had committed at least one murder. Baudelaire, it has been said, displayed his moral gangrene as a warrior might display honorable wounds. This flaunting of his own perversity was part of the literary attitude he had inherited from the “Satanic School.”