Rousseau and Romanticism

One can imagine the Rousseauist interrupting at this point to remark that one of his chief protests has always been against the mechanical and utilitarian and in general the scientific attitude towards life. This is true. Something has already been said about this protest and it will be necessary to say more about it later. Yet Rousseauist and Baconian agree, as I have said, in turning away from the “civil war in the cave” to humanity in the lump. They agree in being more or less rebellious towards the traditional forms that put prime emphasis on the “civil war in the cave” – whether the Christian tradition with its humility or the classical with its decorum. No wonder Prometheus was the great romantic hero. Prometheus was at once a rebel, a lover of man and a promoter of man’s material progress. We have been living for over a century in what may be termed an age of Promethean individualism.

The Rousseauist especially feels an inner kinship with Prometheus and other Titans. He is fascinated by every form of insurgency. Cain and Satan are both romantic heroes. To meet the full romantic requirement, however, the insurgent must also be tender-hearted. He must show an elemental energy in his explosion against the established order and at the same time a boundless sympathy for the victims of it. One of Hugo’s poems tells of a Mexican volcano, that in sheer disgust at the cruelty of the members of the Inquisition, spits lava upon them. This compassionate volcano symbolizes in both of its main aspects the romantic ideal. Hence the enormous international popularity of Schiller’s “Robbers.” One may find innumerable variants of the brigand Karl Moor who uses his plunder “to support meritorious young men at college.” The world into which we enter from the very dawn of romanticism is one of “glorious rascals,” and “beloved vagabonds.”

“Sublime convicts,” says M. Lasserre, “idlers of genius, angelic female poisoners, monsters inspired by God, sincere comedians, virtuous courtesans, metaphysical mountebanks, faithful adulterers, form only one half – the sympathetic half of humanity according to romanticism. The other half, the wicked half, is manufactured by the same intellectual process under the suggestion of the same revolutionary instinct. It comprises all those who hold or stand for a portion of any discipline whatsoever, political, religious, moral or intellectual – kings, ministers, priests, judges, soldiers, policemen, husbands and critics.”86

The Rousseauist is ever ready to discover beauty of soul in any one who is under the reprobation of society. The figure of the courtesan rehabilitated through love that has enjoyed such popularity during the past hundred years goes back to Rousseau himself.87 The underlying assumption of romantic morality is that the personal virtues, the virtues that imply self-control, count as naught compared with the fraternal spirit and the readiness to sacrifice one’s self for others. This is the ordinary theme of the Russian novel in which one finds, as Lemaître remarks, “the Kalmuck exaggerations of our French romantic ideas.” For example Sonia in “Crime and Punishment” is glorified because she prostitutes herself to procure a livelihood for her family. One does not however need to go to Russia for what is scarcely less the assumption of contemporary America. If it can only be shown that a person is sympathetic we are inclined to pardon him his sins of unrestraint, his lack, for example, of common honesty. As an offset to the damaging facts brought out at the investigation of the sugar trust, the defense sought to establish that the late H. O. Havemeyer was a beautiful soul. It was testified that he could never hear little children sing without tears coming into his eyes. His favorite song, some one was unkind enough to suggest, was “little drops of water, little grains of sand.” The newspapers again reported not long ago that a notorious Pittsburg grafter had petitioned for his release from the penitentiary on the grounds that he wished to continue his philanthropic activities among the poor. Another paragraph that appeared recently in the daily press related that a burglar while engaged professionally in a house at Los Angeles discovered that the lady of the house had a child suffering from croup, and at once came to her aid, explaining that he had six children of his own. No one could really think amiss of this authentic descendant of Schiller’s Karl Moor. For love, according to the Rousseauist, is not the fulfillment of the law but a substitute for it. In “Les Misérables” Hugo contrasts Javert who stands for the old order based on obedience to the law with the convict Jean Valjean who stands for the new regeneration of man through love and self-sacrifice. When Javert awakens to the full ignominy of his rôle he does the only decent thing – he commits suicide. Hugo indeed has perhaps carried the new evangel of sympathy as a substitute for all the other virtues further than any one else and with fewer weak concessions to common sense. Sultan Murad, Hugo narrates, was “sublime.” He had his eight brothers strangled, caused his uncle to be sawn in two between two planks, opened one after the other twelve children to find a stolen apple, shed an ocean of blood and “sabred the world.” One day while passing in front of a butcher-shop he saw a pig bleeding to death, tormented by flies and with the sun beating upon its wound. Touched by pity, the Sultan pushes the pig into the shade with his foot and with an “enormous and superhuman gesture” drives away the flies. When Murad dies the pig appears before the Almighty and, pleading for him against the accusing host of his victims, wins his pardon. Moral: “A succored pig outweighs a world oppressed”88 (Un pourceau secouru vaut un monde égorgé).

This subordination of all the other values of life to sympathy is achieved only at the expense of the great humanistic virtue – decorum or a sense of proportion. Now not to possess a sense of proportion is, however this lack may be manifested, to be a pedant; and, if there is ever a humanistic reaction, Hugo, one of the chief products of the age of original genius, will scarcely escape the charge of pedantry. But true religion also insists on a hierarchy of the virtues. Burke speaks at least as much from a religious as from a humanistic point of view when he writes:

“The greatest crimes do not arise so much from a want of feeling for others as from an over-sensibility for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires. … They [the ‘philosophes’] explode or render odious or contemptible that class of virtues which restrain the appetite. These are at least nine out of ten of the virtues. In the place of all this they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence. By these means their morality has no idea in it of restraint or indeed of a distinct and settled principle of any kind. When their disciples are thus left free and guided only by present feeling, they are no longer to be depended on for good and evil. The men who to-day snatch the worst criminals from justice will murder the most innocent persons to-morrow.”89

The person who seeks to get rid of ninety per cent of the virtues in favor of an indiscriminate sympathy does not simply lose his scale of values. He arrives at an inverted scale of values. For the higher the object for which one feels sympathy the more the idea of obligation is likely to intrude – the very thing the Rousseauist is seeking to escape. One is more irresponsible and therefore more spontaneous in the Rousseauistic sense in lavishing one’s pity on a dying pig. Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this “psychosis.” He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had we are told an unspeakable affection for his dog.90

Rousseau’s contemporary, Sterne, is supposed to have lavished a somewhat disproportionate emotion upon an ass. But the ass does not really come into his own until a later stage of the movement. Nietzsche has depicted the leaders of the nineteenth century as engaged in a veritable onolatry or ass-worship. The opposition between neo-classicist and Rousseauist is indeed symbolized in a fashion by their respective attitude towards the ass. Neo-classical decorum was, it should be remembered, an all-pervading principle. It imposed a severe hierarchy, not only upon objects, but upon the words that express these objects. The first concern of the decorous person was to avoid lowness, and the ass he looked upon as hopelessly low – so low as to be incapable of ennoblement even by a resort to periphrasis. Homer therefore was deemed by Vida to have been guilty of outrageous indecorum in comparing Ajax to an ass. The partisans of Homer sought indeed to prove that the ass was in the time of Homer a “noble” animal or at least that the word ass was “noble.” But the stigma put upon Homer by Vida – reinforced as it was by the similar attacks of Scaliger and others – remained.

The rehabilitation of the ass by the Rousseauist is at once a protest against an unduly squeamish decorum, and a way of proclaiming the new principle of unbounded expansive sympathy. In dealing with both words and what they express, one should show a democratic inclusiveness. Something has already been said of the war the romanticist waged in the name of local color against the impoverishment of vocabulary by the neo-classicists. But the romantic warfare against the aristocratic squeamishness of the neo-classic vocabulary goes perhaps even deeper. Take, for instance, Wordsworth’s view as to the proper language of poetry. Poetical decorum had become by the end of the eighteenth century a mere varnish of conventional elegance. Why should mere polite prejudice, so Wordsworth reasoned, and the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” in which it resulted be allowed to interfere with the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion”? And so he proceeds to set up a view of poetry that is only the neo-classical view turned upside down. For the proper subjects and speech of poetry he would turn from the highest class of society to the lowest, from the aristocrat to the peasant. The peasant is more poetical than the aristocrat because he is closer to nature, for Wordsworth as he himself avows, is less interested in the peasant for his own sake than because he sees in him a sort of emanation of the landscape.91

One needs to keep all this background in mind if one wishes to understand the full significance of a poem like “Peter Bell.” Scaliger blames Homer because he stoops to mention in his description of Zeus something so trivial as the eyebrows. Wordsworth seeks to bestow poetical dignity and seriousness on the “long left ear” of an ass.92 The ass is thus exalted one scarcely need add, because of his compassionateness. The hard heart of Peter Bell is at last melted by the sight of so much goodness. He aspires to be like the ass and finally achieves his wish.

The French romanticists, Hugo, for instance, make an attack on decorum somewhat similar to that of Wordsworth. Words formerly lived, says Hugo, divided up into castes. Some had the privilege of mounting into the king’s coaches at Versailles, whereas others were relegated to the rabble. I came along and clapped a red liberty cap on the old dictionary. I brought about a literary ’93,93 etc. Hugo’s attack on decorum is also combined with an even more violent assertion than Wordsworth’s of the ideal of romantic morality – the supremacy of pity. He declares in the “Legend of the Ages” that an ass that takes a step aside to avoid crushing a toad is “holier than Socrates and greater than Plato.”94 For this and similar utterances Hugo deserves to be placed very nearly if not quite at the head of romantic onolaters.

We have said that the tremendous burden put upon sympathy in romantic morality is a result of the assumption that the “civil war in the cave” is artificial and that therefore the restraining virtues (according to Burke ninety per cent of the virtues) which imply this warfare are likewise artificial. If the civil war in the cave should turn out to be not artificial but a fact of the gravest import, the whole spiritual landscape would change immediately. Romantic morality would in that case be not a reality but a mirage. We need at all events to grasp the central issue firmly. Humanism and religion have always asserted in some form or other the dualism of the human spirit. A man’s spirituality is in inverse ratio to his immersion in temperament. The whole movement from Rousseau to Bergson is, on the other hand, filled with the glorification of instinct. To become spiritual the beautiful soul needs only to expand along the lines of temperament and with this process the cult of pity or sympathy does not interfere. The romantic moralist tends to favor expansion on the ground that it is vital, creative, infinite, and to dismiss whatever seems to set bounds to expansion as something inert, mechanical, finite. In its onslaughts on the veto power whether within or without the breast of the individual it is plain that no age has ever approached the age of original genius in the midst of which we are still living. Goethe defines the devil as the spirit that always says no, and Carlyle celebrates his passage from darkness to light as an escape from the Everlasting Nay to the Everlasting Yea. We rarely pause to consider what a reversal of traditional wisdom is implied in such conceptions. In the past, the spirit that says no has been associated rather with the divine. Socrates tells us that the counsels of his “voice” were always negative, never positive.95 According to the ancient Hindu again the divine is the “inner check.” God, according to Aristotle, is pure Form. In opposition to all this emphasis on the restricting and limiting power, the naturalist, whether scientific or emotional, sets up a program of formless, fearless expansion; which means in practice that he recognizes no bounds either to intellectual or emotional curiosity.

I have said that it is a part of the psychology of the original genius to offer the element of wonder and surprise awakened by the perpetual novelty, the infinite otherwiseness of things, as a substitute for the awe that is associated with their infinite oneness; or rather to refuse to discriminate between these two infinitudes and so to confound the two main directions of the human spirit, its religious East, as one may say, with its West of wonder and romance. This confusion may be illustrated by the romantic attitude towards what is perhaps the most Eastern of all Eastern lands, – India. The materials for the study of India in the Occident were accumulated by Englishmen towards the end of the eighteenth century, but the actual interpretation of this material is due largely to German romanticists, notably to Friedrich Schlegel.96 Alongside the romantic Hellenist and the romantic mediævalist we find the romantic Indianist. It is to India even more than to Spain that one needs to turn, says Friedrich Schlegel, for the supremely romantic97– that is, the wildest and most unrestrained luxuriance of imagination. Now in a country so vast and so ancient as India you can find in some place or at some period or other almost anything you like. If, for example, W. B. Yeats waxes enthusiastic over Tagore we may be sure that there is in the work of Tagore something akin to æsthetic romanticism. But if we take India at the top of her achievement in the early Buddhistic movement, let us say, we shall find something very different. The early Buddhistic movement in its essential aspects is at the extreme opposite pole from romanticism. The point is worth making because certain misinterpretations that still persist both of Buddhism and other movements in India can be traced ultimately to the bad twist that was given to the whole subject by romanticists like the Schlegels. The educated Frenchman, for instance, gets his ideas of India largely from certain poems of Leconte de Lisle who reflects the German influence. But the sense of universal and meaningless flux that pervades these poems without any countervailing sense of a reality behind the shows of nature is a product of romanticism, working in coöperation with science, and is therefore antipodal to the absorption of the true Hindu in the oneness of things. We are told, again, that Schopenhauer was a Buddhist. Did he not have an image of Buddha in his bedroom? But no doctrine perhaps is more remote from the genuine doctrine of Buddha than that of this soured and disillusioned romanticist. The nature of true Buddhism and its opposition to all forms of romanticism is worth dwelling on for a moment. Buddha not only asserted the human law with unusual power but he also did what, in the estimation of some, needs doing in our own day – he put this law, not on a traditional, but on a positive and critical basis. This spiritual positivism of Buddha is, reduced to its simplest terms, a psychology of desire. Not only is the world outside of man in a constant state of flux and change, but there is an element within man that is in constant flux and change also and makes itself felt practically as an element of expansive desire. What is unstable in him longs for what is unstable in the outer world. But he may escape from the element of flux and change, nay he must aspire to do so, if he wishes to be released from sorrow. This is to substitute the noble for the ignoble craving. The permanent or ethical element in himself towards which he should strive to move is known to him practically as a power of inhibition or inner check upon expansive desire. Vital impulse (élan vital) may be subjected to vital control (frein vital). Here is the Buddhist equivalent of the “civil war in the cave” that the romanticist denies. Buddha does not admit a soul in man in the sense that is often given to the word, but on this opposition between vital impulse and vital control as a psychological fact he puts his supreme emphasis. The man who drifts supinely with the current of desire is guilty according to Buddha of the gravest of all vices – spiritual or moral indolence (pamāda). He on the contrary who curbs or reins in his expansive desires is displaying the chief of all the virtues, spiritual vigilance or strenuousness (appamāda). The man who is spiritually strenuous has entered upon the “path.” The end of this path and the goal of being cannot be formulated in terms of the finite intellect, any more than the ocean can be put into a cup. But progress on the path may be known by its fruits – negatively by the extinction of the expansive desires (the literal meaning of Nirvâna), positively by an increase in peace, poise, centrality.

A man’s rank in the scale of being is, then, according to the Buddhist determined by the quality of his desires; and it is within his power to determine whether he shall let them run wild or else control them to some worthy end. We hear of the fatalistic East, but no doctrine was ever less fatalistic than that of Buddha. No one ever put so squarely upon the individual what the individual is ever seeking to evade – the burden of moral responsibility. “Self is the lord of self. Who else can be the lord? … You yourself must make the effort. The Buddhas are only teachers.”98 But does not all this emphasis on self, one may ask, tend to hardness and indifference towards others, towards the undermining of that compassion to which the romantic moralist is ready to sacrifice all the other virtues? Buddha may be allowed to speak for himself: “Even as a mother cherishes her child, her only child, so let a man cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.”99 Buddha thus seems to fulfil Pascal’s requirement for a great man: he unites in himself opposite virtues and occupies all the space between them.

Enough has been said to make plain that the infinite indeterminate desire of the romanticist and the Buddhist repression of desire are the most different things conceivable. Chateaubriand it has been said was an “invincibly restless soul,” a soul of desire (une âme de désir), but these phrases are scarcely more applicable to him than to many other great romanticists. They are fitly symbolized by the figures that pace to and fro in the Hall of Eblis and whose hearts are seen through their transparent bosoms to be lapped in the flames of unquenchable longing. The romanticist indeed bases, as I have said, on the very intensity of his longing his claims to be an idealist and even a mystic. William Blake, for example, has been proclaimed a true mystic. The same term has also been applied to Buddha. Without pretending to have fathomed completely so unfathomable a being as Buddha or even the far less unfathomable William Blake, one may nevertheless assert with confidence that Buddha and Blake stand for utterly incompatible views of life. If Blake is a mystic then Buddha must be something else. To be assured on this point one needs only to compare the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” with the “Dhammapada,” an anthology of some of the most authentic and authoritative material in early Buddhism. “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. … The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” says Blake. “Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction; the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires. … Good is restraint in all things,” says Buddha. Buddha would evidently have dismissed Blake as a madman, whereas Blake would have looked on Buddhism as the ultimate abomination. My own conviction is that Buddha was a genuine sage well worthy of the homage rendered him by multitudes of men for more than twenty-four centuries, whereas Blake was only a romantic æsthete who was moving in his imaginative activity towards madness and seems at the end actually to have reached the goal.

I have been going thus far afield to ancient India and to Buddha, not that I might, like a recent student of Buddhism, enjoy “the strangeness of the intellectual landscape,” but on the contrary that I might suggest that there is a centre of normal human experience and that Buddhism, at least in its ethical aspects, is nearer to this centre than æsthetic romanticism. Buddha might perhaps marvel with more reason at our strangeness than we at his. Buddha’s assertion of man’s innate moral laziness in particular accords more closely with what most of us have experienced than Rousseau’s assertion of man’s natural goodness. This conception of the innate laziness of man seems to me indeed so central that I am going to put it at the basis of the point of view I am myself seeking to develop, though this point of view is not primarily Buddhistic. This conception has the advantage of being positive rather than dogmatic. It works out in practice very much like the original sin of the Christian theologian. The advantage of starting with indolence rather than sin is that many men will admit that they are morally indolent who will not admit that they are sinful. For theological implications still cluster thickly about the word sin, and these persons are still engaged more or less consciously in the great naturalistic revolt against theology.

The spiritual positivist then will start from a fact of immediate perception – from the presence namely in the breast of the individual of a principle of vital control (frein vital), and he will measure his spiritual strenuousness or spiritual sloth by the degree to which he exercises or fails to exercise this power. In accordance with the keenness of a man’s perception of a specially human order that is known practically as a curb upon his ordinary self, he may be said to possess insight. The important thing is that the insight should not be sophisticated, that a man should not fall away from it into some phantasmagoria of the intellect or emotions. A man sometimes builds up a whole system of metaphysics as a sort of screen between himself and his obligations either to himself or others. Mrs. Barbauld suspected that Coleridge’s philosophy was only a mask for indolence. Carlyle’s phrase for Coleridge was even harsher: “putrescent indolence,” a phrase that might be applied with more justice perhaps to Rousseau. One may learn from Rousseau the art of sinking to the region of instinct that is below the rational level instead of struggling forward to the region of insight that is above it, and at the same time passing for a sublime enthusiast; the art of looking backwards and downwards, and at the same time enjoying the honor that belongs only to those who look forwards and up. We need not wonder at the warm welcome that this new art received. I have said that that man has always been accounted a benefactor who has substituted for the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious art of going through the motions and that the decorum of the neo-classical period had largely sunk to this level. Even in the most decorous of modern ages, that of Louis XIV, it was very common, as every student of the period knows, for men to set up as personages in the grand manner and at the same time behind the façade of conventional dignity to let their appetites run riot. It would have been perfectly legitimate at the end of the eighteenth century to attack in the name of true decorum a decorum that had become the “varnish of vice” and “mask of hypocrisy.” What Rousseau actually opposed to pseudo-decorum was perhaps the most alluring form of sham spirituality that the world has ever seen – a method not merely of masking but of glorifying one’s spiritual indolence. “You wish to have the pleasures of vice and the honor of virtue,” wrote Julie to Saint-Preux in a moment of unusual candor. The Rousseauist may indulge in the extreme of psychic unrestraint and at the same time pose as a perfect idealist or even, if one is a Chateaubriand, as a champion of religion. Chateaubriand’s life according to Lemaître was a “magnificent series of attitudes.”