Rousseau and Romanticism

One may report from observation another trait of truly ethical art, art which is at once imaginative and decorous. It is not merely intense, as art that is imaginative at the expense of decorum may very well be,131 it has a restrained and humanized intensity – intensity on a background of calm. The presence of the ethical imagination whether in art or life132 is always known as an element of calm.

In art that has the ethical quality, and I am again not setting up a metaphysical theory but reporting from observation, the calm that comes from imaginative insight into the universal is inextricably blended with an element of uniqueness – with a something that belongs to a particular time and place and individual. The truth to the universal, as Aristotle would say, gives the work verisimilitude and the truth to the particular satisfies man’s deep-seated craving for novelty; so that the best art unites the probable with the wonderful. But the probable, one cannot insist too often, is won no less than the wonderful with the aid of the imagination and so is of the very soul of art. The romanticist who is ready to sacrifice the probable to the wonderful and to look on the whole demand for verisimilitude as an academic superstition is prone to assume that he has a monopoly of soul and imagination. But the word soul is at least in as much need of Socratic definition as the word intuition. It is possible, for example, with the aid of the ethical imagination so to partake of the ultimate element of calm as to rise to the religious level. The man who has risen to this level has a soul, but it is a soul of peace. Both soul and imagination are also needed to achieve the fine adjustment and mediation of the humanist. It is not enough, however, to have a religious or a humanistic soul if one is to be a creator or even a fully equipped critic of art. For art rests primarily not on ethical but æsthetic perception. This perception itself varies widely according to the art involved. One may, for instance, be musically perceptive and at the same time lack poetic perception. To be a creator in any art one must possess furthermore the technique of this art – something that is more or less separable from its “soul” in any sense of the word. It is possible to put a wildly romantic soul into art, as has often been done in the Far East, and at the same time to be highly conventional or traditional in one’s technique. Writers like Mérimée, Renan, and Maupassant again are faithful in the main to the technique of French prose that was worked out during the classical period, but combine with this technique an utterly unclassical “soul.”

Rules, especially perhaps rules as to what to avoid, may be of aid in acquiring technique, but are out of place in dealing with the soul of art. There one passes from rules to principles. The only rule, if we are to achieve art that has an ethical soul, is to view life with some degree of imaginative wholeness. Art that has technique without soul in either the classical or romantic sense, and so fails either to inspire elevation or awaken wonder, is likely to be felt as a barren virtuosity. The pseudo-classicist was often unduly minute in the rules he laid down for technique or outer form, as one may say, and then ignored the ethical imagination or inner form entirely, or else set up as a substitute mere didacticism. Since pseudo-classic work of this type plainly lacked soul and imagination, and since the romanticist felt and felt rightly that he himself had a soul and imagination, he concluded wrongly that soul and imagination are romantic monopolies. Like the pseudo-classicist, he inclines to identify high seriousness in art, something that can only come from the exercise of the ethical imagination at its best, with mere preaching, only he differs from the pseudo-classicist in insisting that preaching should be left to divines. One should insist, on the contrary, that the mark of genuinely ethical art, art that is highly serious, is that it is free from preaching. Sophocles is more ethical than Euripides for the simple reason that he views life with more imaginative wholeness. At the same time he is much less given to preaching than Euripides. He does not, as FitzGerald says, interrupt the action and the exhibition of character through action in order to “jaw philosophy.”

It is not unusual for the modern artist to seek, like Euripides, to dissimulate the lack of true ethical purpose in his work by agitating various problems. But problems come and go, whereas human nature abides. One may agitate problems without number, and yet lack imaginative insight into the abiding element in human nature. Moreover, not being of the soul of art, the problem that one agitates is in danger of being a clogging intellectualism. Furthermore to seek in problems an equivalent for the definition and purpose that the ethical imagination alone can give is to renew, often in an aggravated form, the neo-classical error. The moralizing of the pseudo-classic dramatist, even though dull and misplaced, was usually sound enough in itself; whereas the moralizing of those who seek nowadays to use the stage as a pulpit, resting as it does on false humanitarian postulates, is in itself dubious. The problem play succeeds not infrequently in being at once dull and indecent.

The problem play is often very superior in technique or outer form to the earlier romantic drama, but it still suffers from the same lack of inner form, inasmuch as its social purpose cannot take the place of true human purpose based on imaginative insight into the universal. The lack of inner form in so much modern drama and art in general can be traced to the original unsoundness of the break with pseudo-classic formalism. To a pseudo-classic art that lacked every kind of perceptiveness the Rousseauist opposed æsthetic perceptiveness, and it is something, one must admit, thus to have discovered the senses. But to his æsthetic perceptiveness he failed, as I have already said, to add ethical perceptiveness because of his inability to distinguish between ethical perceptiveness and mere didacticism, and so when asked to put ethical purpose into art he replied that art should be pursued for its own sake (l’art pour l’art) and that “beauty is its own excuse for being.” One should note here the transformation that this pure æstheticism brought about in the meaning of the word beauty itself. For the Greek beauty resided in proportion,133 and proportion can be attained only with the aid of the ethical imagination. With the elimination of the ethical element from the soul of art the result is an imagination that is free to wander wild with the emancipated emotions. The result is likely to be art in which a lively æsthetic perceptiveness is not subordinated to any whole, art that is unstructural, however it may abound in vivid and picturesque details; and a one-sided art of this kind the romanticist does not hesitate to call beautiful. “If we let the reason sleep and are content to watch a succession of dissolving views,” says Mr. Elton of Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam,” “the poem is seen at once to overflow with beauty.”134 Mere reason is not strictly speaking a sufficient remedy for this unstructural type of “beauty.” Thus Chateaubriand’s reason is on the side of proportion and all the classical virtues but his imagination is not (and we cannot repeat too often that it is what a man is imaginatively and not what he preaches that really counts). Instead of siding with his reason and aiding it to ethical perception Chateaubriand’s imagination is the free playmate of his emotions. “What did I care for all these futilities” (i.e. his functions as cabinet minister), he exclaims, “I who never cared for anything except for my dreams, and even then on condition that they should last only for a night.” When a man has once spoken in that vein sensible people will pay little heed to what he preaches; for they will be certain that the driving power of his work and personality is elsewhere. The imagination holds the balance of power between the reason and the perceptions of sense, and Chateaubriand’s imagination is plainly on the side of sensuous adventure. This vagabondage of the imagination appears especially in his imagistic trend, in his pursuit of the descriptive detail for its own sake. To set out like Chateaubriand to restore the monarchy and the Christian religion and instead to become the founder of “l’école des images à tout prix” is an especially striking form of the contrast in romantic morality between the ideal and the real.

The attempt that we have been studying to divorce beauty from ethics led in the latter part of the eighteenth century to the rise of a nightmare subject, – æsthetics. Shaftesbury indeed, as we have seen already, anticipates the favorite romantic doctrine that beauty is truth and truth beauty, which means in practice to rest both truth and beauty upon a fluid emotionalism. Thus to deal æsthetically with truth is an error of the first magnitude, but it is also an error, though a less serious one, to see only the æsthetic element in beauty. For beauty to be complete must have not only æsthetic perceptiveness but order and proportion; and this brings us back again to the problem of the ethical imagination and the permanent model or pattern with reference to which it seeks to impose measure and proportion upon sensuous perception and expansive desire. We should not hesitate to say that beauty loses most of its meaning when divorced from ethics even though every æsthete in the world should arise and denounce us as philistines. To rest beauty upon feeling as the very name æsthetics implies, is to rest it upon what is ever shifting. Nor can we escape from this endless mobility with the aid of physical science, for physical science does not itself rise above the naturalistic flux. After eliminating from beauty the permanent pattern and the ethical imagination with the aid of which it is perceived, a man will be ready to term beautiful anything that reflects his ordinary or temperamental self. Diderot is a sentimentalist and so he sees as much beauty in the sentimentalist Richardson as in Homer. If a man is psychically restless he will see beauty only in motion. The Italian futurist Marinetti says that for him a rushing motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. A complete sacrifice of the principle of repose in beauty (which itself arises from the presence of the ethical imagination) to the suggesting of motion such as has been seen in certain recent schools, runs practically into a mixture of charlatanism and madness. “He that is giddy thinks the world goes round,” says Shakespeare, and the exponents of certain ultra-modern movements in painting are simply trying to paint their inner giddiness. As a matter of fact the pretension of the æsthete to have a purely personal vision of beauty and then treat as a philistine every one who does not accept it, is intolerable. Either beauty cannot be defined at all or we must say that only is beautiful which seems so to the right kind of man, and the right kind of man is plainly he whose total attitude towards life is correct, who views life with some degree of imaginative wholeness, which is only another way of saying that the problem of beauty is inseparable from the ethical problem. In an absolute sense nobody can see life steadily and see it whole; but we may at least move towards steadiness and wholeness. The æsthete is plainly moving in an opposite direction; he is becoming more and more openly a votary of the god Whirl. His lack of inner form is an error not of æsthetics but of general philosophy.

The romantic imagination, the imagination that is not drawn back to any ethical centre and so is free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras, has indeed a place in life. To understand what this place is one needs to emphasize the distinction between art that has high seriousness and art that is merely recreative. The serious moments of life are moments of tension, of concentration on either the natural or the human law. But Apollo cannot always be bending the bow. Man needs at times to relax, and one way of relaxing is to take refuge for a time in some land of chimeras, to follow the Arcadian gleam. He may then come back to the real world, the world of active effort, solaced and refreshed. But it is only with reference to some ethical centre that we may determine what art is soundly recreative, in what forms of adventure the imagination may innocently indulge. The romanticist should recollect that among other forms of adventure is what Ben Jonson terms “a bold adventure for hell”; and that a not uncommon nostalgia is what the French call la nostalgie de la boue– man’s nostalgia for his native mud. Because we are justified at times, as Lamb urges, in wandering imaginatively beyond “the diocese of strict conscience,” it does not follow that we may, like him, treat Restoration Comedy as a sort of fairyland; for Restoration Comedy is a world not of pure but of impure imagination.

Lamb’s paradox, however, is harmless compared with what we have just been seeing in Chateaubriand. With a dalliant imagination that entitles him at best to play a recreative rôle, he sets up as a religious teacher. Michelet again has been described as an “entertainer who believes himself a prophet,” and this description fits many other Rousseauists. The æsthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose is an especially flagrant instance of the huddling together of incompatible desires. He wishes to sport with Amaryllis in the shade and at the same time enjoy the honors that belong only to the man who scorns delights and lives laborious days. For the exercise of the ethical imagination, it is hardly necessary to say, involves effort. Perhaps no one has ever surpassed Rousseau himself in the art of which I have already spoken, – that of giving to moral indolence a semblance of profound philosophy.

One cannot indeed always affirm that the Rousseauist is by the quality of his imagination an entertainer pure and simple. His breaking down of barriers and running together of the planes of being results at times in ambiguous mixtures – gleams of insight that actually seem to minister to fleshliness. One may cite as an example the “voluptuous religiosity” that certain critics have discovered in Wagner.

The romanticist will at once protest against the application of ethical standards to Wagner or any other musician. Music, he holds, is the most soulful of the arts and so the least subject to ethics. For the same reason it is the chief of arts and also – in view of the fact that romanticists have a monopoly of soul – the most romantic. One should not allow to pass unchallenged this notion that because music is filled with soul it is therefore subject to no ethical centre, but should be treated as a pure enchantment. The Greeks were as a matter of fact much concerned with the ethical quality of music. Certain musical modes, the Doric for example, had as they believed a virile “soul,” other modes like the Lydian had the contrary (“Lap me in soft Lydian airs”). For the very reason that music is the most appealing of the arts (song, says Aristotle, is the sweetest of all things) they were especially anxious that this art should be guarded from perversion.135 Without attempting a full discussion of a difficult subject for which I have no competency, it will be enough to point out that the plain song that prevailed in Christian churches for over a thousand years evidently had a very different “soul,” a soul that inspired to prayer and peace, from much specifically romantic music that has a soul of restlessness, of infinite indeterminate desire. The result of the failure to recognize this distinction is very often a hybrid art. Berlioz showed a rather peculiar conception of religion when he took pride in the fact that his Requiem (!) Mass frightened one of the listeners into a fit.

The ethical confusion that arises from the romantic cult of “soul” and the closely allied tendency towards a hybrid art – art that lacks high seriousness without being frankly recreative – may also be illustrated from the field of poetry. Many volumes have been published and are still being published on Browning as a philosophic and religious teacher. But Browning can pass as a prophet only with the half-educated person, the person who has lost traditional standards and has at the same time failed to work out with the aid of the ethical imagination some fresh scale of values and in the meanwhile lives impulsively and glorifies impulse. Like the half-educated person, Browning is capable of almost any amount of intellectual and emotional subtlety, and like the half-educated person he is deficient in inner form: that is he deals with experience impressionistically without reference to any central pattern or purpose.136 It is enough that the separate moments of this experience should each stand forth like

The quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match.

One may take as an illustration of this drift towards the melodramatic the “Ring and the Book.” The method of this poem is peripheral, that is, the action is viewed not from any centre but as refracted through the temperaments of the actors. The twelve monologues of which the poem is composed illustrate the tendency of romantic writing to run into some “song of myself” or “tale of my heart.” The “Ring and the Book” is not only off the centre, but is designed to raise a positive prejudice against everything that is central. Guido, for example, had observed decorum, had done all the conventional things and is horrible. Pompilia, the beautiful soul, had the great advantage of having had an indecorous start. Being the daughter of a drab, she is not kept from heeding the voice of nature. Caponsacchi again shows the beauty of his soul by violating the decorum of the priesthood. This least representative of priests wins our sympathy, not by his Christianity, but by his lyrical intensity:

O lyric love, half angel and half bird,And all a wonder and a wild desire!

Browning here escapes for once from the clogging intellectualism that makes nearly all the “Ring and the Book” an indeterminate blend of verse and prose, and achieves true poetry though not of the highest type. The hybrid character of his art, due partly to a lack of outer form, to a defective poetical technique, arises even more from a lack of inner form – from an attempt to give a semblance of seriousness to what is at bottom unethical. The aged Pope may well meditate on the revolution that is implied in the substitution of the morality of the beautiful soul for that of St. Augustine.137 In seeming to accept this revolution Browning’s Pope comes near to breaking all records, even in the romantic movement, for paradox and indecorum.

At bottom the war between humanist and romanticist is so irreconcilable because the one is a mediator and the other an extremist. Browning would have us admire his Pompilia because her love knows no limit;138 but a secular love like hers must know a limit, must be decorous in short, if it is to be distinguished from mere emotional intensity. It is evident that the romantic ideal of art for art’s sake meant in the real world art for sensation’s sake. The glorification of a love knowing no limit, that a Browning or a Hugo sets up as a substitute for philosophy and even for religion, is therefore closely affiliated in practice with the libido sentiendi. “It is hard,” wrote Stendhal, in 1817, “not to see what the nineteenth century desires. A love of strong emotions is its true character.” The romantic tendency to push every emotion to an extreme, regardless of decorum, is not much affected by what the romanticist preaches or by the problems he agitates. Doudan remarks of a mother who loses her child in Hugo’s “Nôtre Dame de Paris,” that “her rage after this loss has nothing to equal it in the roarings of a lioness or tigress who has been robbed of her young. She becomes vulgar by excess of despair. It is the saturnalia of maternal grief. You see that this woman belongs to a world in which neither the instincts nor the passions have that divine aroma which imposes on them some kind of measure – the dignity or decorum that contains a moral principle; … When the passions no longer have this check, they should be relegated to the menagerie along with leopards and rhinoceroses, and, strange circumstance, when the passions do recognize this check they produce more effect on the spectators than unregulated outbursts; they give evidence of more depth.” This superlativeness, as one may say, that Hugo displays in his picture of maternal grief is not confined to the emotional romanticist. It appears, for example, among the intellectual romanticists of the seventeenth century and affected the very forms of language. Molière and others ridiculed the adjectives and adverbs with which the précieuses sought to express their special type of superlativeness and intensity (extrêmement, furieusement, terriblement, etc.). Alfred de Musset’s assertion that the chief difference between classicist and romanticist is found in the latter’s greater proneness to adjectives is not altogether a jest. It has been said that the pessimist uses few, the optimist many adjectives; but the use of adjectives and above all of superlatives would rather seem to grow with one’s expansiveness, and no movement was ever more expansive than that we are studying. Dante, according to Rivarol, is very sparing of adjectives. His sentence tends to maintain itself by the verb and substantive alone. In this as in other respects Dante is at the opposite pole from the expansionist.

The romantic violence of expression is at once a proof of “soul” and a protest against the tameness and smugness of the pseudo-classicist. The human volcano must overflow at times in a lava of molten words. “Damnation!” cries Berlioz, “I could crush a red-hot iron between my teeth.”139 The disproportion between the outer incident and the emotion that the Rousseauist expends on it is often ludicrous.140 The kind of force that the man attains who sees in emotional intensity a mark of spiritual distinction, and deems moderation identical with mediocrity, is likely to be the force of delirium or fever. What one sees in “Werther,” says Goethe himself, is weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength; and this remark goes far. There is in some of the romanticists a suggestion not merely of spiritual but of physical anæmia.141 Still the intensity is often that of a strong but unbridled spirit. Pleasure is pushed to the point where it runs over into pain, and pain to the point where it becomes an auxiliary of pleasure. The âcre baiser of the “Nouvelle Héloïse” that so scandalized Voltaire presaged even more than a literary revolution. The poems of A. de Musset in particular contain an extraordinary perversion of the Christian doctrine of purification through suffering. There is something repellent to the genuine Christian as well as to the worldling in what one is tempted to call Musset’s Epicurean cult of pain.142

Moments of superlative intensity whether of pleasure or pain must in the nature of the case be brief – mere spasms or paroxysms; and one might apply to the whole school the term paroxyst and spasmodist assumed by certain minor groups during the past century. The Rousseauist is in general loath to rein in his emotional vehemence, to impair the zest with which he responds to the solicitations of sense, by any reference to the “future and sum of time,” by any reference, that is, to an ethical purpose. He would enjoy his thrill pure and unalloyed, and this amounts in practice to the pursuit of the beautiful or sensation-crowded moment. Saint-Preux says of the days spent with Julie that a “sweet ecstasy” absorbed “their whole duration and gathered it together in a point like that of eternity. There was for me neither past nor future, and I enjoyed at one and the same time the delights of a thousand centuries.”143 The superlativist one might suppose could go no further. But in the deliberate sacrifice of all ethical values to the beautiful moment Browning has perhaps improved even on Rousseau:

Truth, that’s brighter than gem,Trust, that’s purer than pearl, —Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe – all were for meIn the kiss of one girl.

Browning entitles the poem from which I am quoting Summum Bonum. The supreme good it would appear is identical with the supreme thrill.

I have already said enough to make clear that the title of this chapter and the last is in a way a misnomer. There is no such thing as romantic morality. The innovations in ethics that are due to romanticism reduce themselves on close scrutiny to a vast system of naturalistic camouflage. To understand how this camouflage has been so successful one needs to connect Rousseauism with the Baconian movement. Scientific progress had inspired man with a new confidence in himself at the same time that the positive and critical method by which it had been achieved detached him from the past and its traditional standards of good and evil. To break with tradition on sound lines one needs to apply the utmost keenness of analysis not merely to the natural but to the human law. But man’s analytical powers were very much taken up with the new task of mastering the natural law, so much so that he seemed incapable of further analytical effort, but longed rather for relaxation from his sustained concentration of intellect and imagination on the physical order. At the same time he was so elated by the progress he was making in this order that he was inclined to assume a similar advance on the moral plane and to believe that this advance could also be achieved collectively. A collective salvation of this kind without any need of a concentration of the intellect and imagination is precisely what was opened up to him by the Rousseauistic “ideal” of brotherhood. This “ideal,” as I have tried to show, was only a projection of the Arcadian imagination on the void. But in the abdication of analysis and critical judgment, which would have reduced it to a purely recreative rôle, this Arcadian dreaming was enabled to set up as a serious philosophy, and to expand into innumerable Utopias. Many who might have taken alarm at the humanitarian revolution in ethics were reassured by the very fervor with which its promoters continued to utter the old words – conscience, virtue, etc. No one puts more stress than Rousseau himself on conscience, while in the very act of transforming conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion.