Rousseau and Romanticism

Vigny has a concentration and power of philosophical reflection that is rare among the romanticists. George Sand is inferior to him in this respect but she had a richer and more generous nature, and is perhaps even more instructive in her life and writings for the student of romantic melancholy. After the loss of the religious faith of her childhood she became an avowed Rousseauist. She attacks a society that seems to her to stand in the way of the happiness of which she dreams – the supreme emotional intensity to be achieved in an ideal love. In celebrating passion and the rights of passion she is lyrical in the two main modes of the Rousseauist – she is either tender and elegiac, or else stormy and Titanic. But when she attempts to practice with Musset this religion of love, the result is violent disillusion. In the forlornness that follows upon the collapse of her sham communion she meditates suicide. “Ten years ago,” she wrote in 1845 to Mazzini, “I was in Switzerland; I was still in the age of tempests; I made up my mind even then to meet you, if I should resist the temptation to suicide which pursued me upon the glaciers.” And then gradually a new faith dawned upon her; she substituted for the religion of love the religion of human brotherhood. She set up as an object of worship humanity in its future progress; and then, like so many other dreamers, she suffered a violent disillusion in the Revolution of 1848. The radiant abstraction she had been worshipping had been put to the test and she discovered that there entered into the actual make-up of the humanity she had so idealized “a large number of knaves, a very large number of lunatics, and an immense number of fools.” What is noteworthy in George Sand is that she not only saved the precious principle of faith from these repeated shipwrecks but towards the end of her life began to put it on a firmer footing. Like Goethe she worked out to some extent, in opposition to romanticism, a genuinely ethical point of view.

This latter development can best be studied in her correspondence with Flaubert. She urges him to exercise his will, and he replies that he is as “fatalistic as a Turk.” His fatalism, however, was not oriental but scientific or pseudo-scientific. I have already cited his demand that man be studied “objectively” just as one would study “a mastodon or a crocodile.” Flaubert refused to see any connection between this determinism and his own gloom or between George Sand’s assertion of will and her cheerfulness. It was simply, he held, a matter of temperament, and there is no doubt some truth in this contention. “You at the first leap mount to heaven,” he says, “while I, poor devil, am glued to the earth as though by leaden soles.” And again: “In spite of your great sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist,” whereas “I am constantly dissecting; and when I have finally discovered the corruption in anything that is supposed to be pure, the gangrene in its fairest parts, then I raise my head and laugh.” Yet George Sand’s cheerfulness is also related to her perception of a power in man to work upon himself – a power that sets him apart from other animals. To enter into this region of ethical effort is to escape from the whole fatal circle of naturalism, and at the same time to show some capacity to mature – a rare achievement among the romanticists. The contrast is striking here between George Sand and Hugo, who, as the ripe fruit of his meditations, yields nothing better than the apotheosis of Robespierre and Marat. “I wish to see man as he is,” she writes to Flaubert. “He is not good or bad: he is good and bad. But he is something else besides: being good and bad he has an inner force which leads him to be very bad and a little good, or very good and a little bad. I have often wondered,” she adds, “why your ‘Education Sentimentale’ was so ill received by the public, and the reason, as it seems to me, is that its characters are passive – that they do not act upon themselves.” But the Titaness of the period of “Lélia” can scarcely be said to have acted upon herself, so that she is justified in writing: “I cannot forget that my personal victory over despair is the work of my will, and of a new way of understanding life which is the exact opposite of the one I held formerly.” How different is the weary cry of Flaubert: “I am like a piece of clock work, what I am doing to-day I shall be doing to-morrow; I did exactly the same thing yesterday; I was exactly the same man ten years ago.”

The correspondence of Flaubert and George Sand bears interestingly on another of the sham religions of the nineteenth century – the religion of art. Art is for Flaubert not merely a religion but a fanaticism. He preaches abstinence, renunciation and mortification of the flesh in the name of art. He excommunicates those who depart from artistic orthodoxy and speaks of heretics and disbelievers in art with a ferocity worthy of a Spanish inquisitor. Ethical beauty such as one finds in the Greeks at their best resides in order and proportion; it is not a thing apart but the outcome of some harmonious whole. Beauty in the purely æsthetic and unethical sense that Flaubert gives to the word is little more than the pursuit of illusion. The man who thus treats beauty as a thing apart, who does not refer back his quest of the exquisite to some ethical centre will spend his life Ixion-like embracing phantoms. “O Art, Art,” exclaims Flaubert, “bitter deception, nameless phantom, which gleams and lures us to our ruin!” He speaks elsewhere of “the chimera of style which is wearing him out soul and body.” Attaching as he did an almost religious importance to his quest of the exquisite he became like so many other Rousseauists not merely æsthetic but hyperæsthetic. He complains in his old age: “My sensibility is sharper than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois, an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.” Hardly anywhere else, indeed, will one find such accents of bitterness, such melancholy welling up unbidden from the very depths of the heart, as in the devotees of art for art’s sake – Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier.

George Sand takes Flaubert to task with admirable tact for his failure to subordinate art to something higher than itself. “Talent imposes duties; and art for art’s sake is an empty word.” As she grew older she says she came more and more to put truth above beauty, and goodness before strength. “I have reflected a great deal on what is true, and in this search for truth, the sentiment of my ego has gradually disappeared.” The truth on which she had reflected was what she herself calls total truth (le vrai total), not merely truth according to the natural law, which received such exclusive emphasis towards the middle of the nineteenth century as to lead to the rise of another sham religion – the religion of science. “You have a better sense for total truth,” she tells one of her correspondents “than Sainte-Beuve, Renan and Littré. They have fallen into the German rut: therein lies their weakness.” And Flaubert writes to George Sand: “What amazes and delights me is the strength of your whole personality, not that of the brain alone.”

Furthermore the holding of the human law that made possible this rounded development, this growth towards total truth, was a matter not of tradition but of immediate perception. George Sand had succeeded, as Taine says, in making the difficult transition from an hereditary faith to a personal conviction. Now this perception of the human law is something very different from the pantheistic revery in which George Sand was also an adept. To look on revery as the equivalent of vision in the Aristotelian sense, as Rousseau and so many of his followers have done, is to fall into sham spirituality. Maurice de Guérin falls into sham spirituality when he exclaims “Oh! this contact of nature and the soul would engender an ineffable voluptuousness, a prodigious love of heaven and of God.” I am not asserting that George Sand herself discriminated sharply between ethical and æsthetic perception or that she is to be rated as a very great sage at any time. Yet she owes her recovery of serenity after suffering shock upon shock of disillusion to her having exercised in some degree what she terms “the contemplative sense wherein resides invincible faith” (le sens contemplatif où réside la foi invincible), and the passages that bear witness to her use of this well-nigh obsolete sense are found in her correspondence.

Wordsworth lauds in true Rousseauistic fashion a “wise passiveness.” But to be truly contemplative is not to be passive at all, but to be “energetic” in Aristotle’s sense, or strenuous in Buddha’s sense. It is a matter of no small import that the master analyst of the East and the master analyst of the West are at one in their solution of the supreme problem of ethics – the problem of happiness. For there can be no doubt that the energy282 in which the doctrine of Aristotle culminates is the same as the “strenuousness”283 on which Buddha puts his final emphasis. The highest good they both agree is a contemplative working. It is by thus working according to the human law that one rises above the naturalistic level. The scientific rationalists of the nineteenth century left no place for this true human spontaneity when they sought to subject man entirely to the “law for thing.” This scientific determinism was responsible for a great deal of spiritual depression and acedia, especially in France during the second half of the nineteenth century.284 But even if science is less dogmatic and absolute one needs to consider why it does not deserve to be given the supreme and central place in life, why it cannot in short take the place of humanism and religion, and the working according to the human law that they both enjoin.

A man may indeed effect through science a certain escape from himself, and this is very salutary so far as it goes; he has to discipline himself to an order that is quite independent of his own fancies and emotions. He becomes objective in short, but objective according to the natural and not according to the human law. Objectivity of this kind gives control over natural forces but it does not supply the purpose for which these forces are to be used. It gives the airship, for instance, but does not determine whether the airship is to go on some beneficent errand or is to scatter bombs on women and children. Science does not even set right limits to the faculty that it chiefly exercises – the intellect. In itself it stimulates rather than curbs one of the three main lusts to which human nature is subject – the lust of knowledge. Renan, who makes a religion of science, speaks of “sacred curiosity.” But this is even more dangerous than the opposite excess of the ascetic Christian who denounces all curiosity as vain. The man of science avers indeed that he does subordinate his knowledge to an adequate aim, namely the progress of humanity. But the humanity of the Baconian is only an intellectual abstraction just as the humanity of the Rousseauist is only an emotional dream. George Sand found, as we have seen, that the passage from one’s dream of humanity to humanity in the concrete involved a certain disillusion. The scientific or rationalistic humanitarian is subject to similar disillusions.285 Science not only fails to set proper limits to the activity of the intellect, but one must also note a curious paradox in its relation to the second of the main lusts to which man is subject, the lust for emotion (libido sentiendi). The prime virtue of science is to be unemotional and at the same time keenly analytical. Now protracted and unemotional analysis finally creates a desire, as Renan says, for the opposite pole, “the kisses of the naïve being,” and in general for a frank surrender to the emotions. Science thus actually prepares clients for the Rousseauist.286 The man of science is also flattered by the Rousseauistic notion that conscience and virtue are themselves only forms of emotion. He is thus saved from anything so distasteful as having to subordinate his own scientific discipline to some superior religious or humanistic discipline. He often oscillates between the rationalistic and the emotional pole not only in other things but also in his cult of humanity. But if conscience is merely an emotion there is a cult that makes a more potent appeal to conscience than the cult of humanity itself and that is the cult of country. One is here at the root of the most dangerous of all the sham religions of the modern age – the religion of country, the frenzied nationalism that is now threatening to make an end of civilization itself.

Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist;287 and that is because he saw that patriotic “virtue” is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration came in the French Revolution which began as a great international movement on emotional lines and ended in imperialism and Napoleon Bonaparte. It is here that the terrible peril of a science that is pursued as an end in itself becomes manifest. It disciplines man and makes him efficient on the naturalistic level, but leaves him ethically undisciplined. Now in the absence of ethical discipline the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature – the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac. The final use of a science that has thus become a tool of the lust for power is in Burke’s phrase to “improve the mystery of murder.”

This union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint, though in a way the upshot of the whole movement we have been studying, is especially marked in the modern German. Goethe as I have pointed out is ready to pardon Faust for grave violations of the moral law because of work which, so far from being ethical, is, in view of the ruin in which it involves the rustic pair, Baucis and Philemon, under suspicion of being positively unethical. Yet Goethe was far from being a pure utilitarian and he had reacted more than most Germans of his time from Rousseauism. Rousseau is glorified by Germans as a chief source of their Kultur, as I have already pointed out. Now Kultur when analyzed breaks up into two very different things – scientific efficiency and emotionalism or what the Germans (and unfortunately not the Germans alone) term “idealism.” There is no question about the relation of this idealism to the stream of tendency of which Rousseau is the chief representative. By his corruption of conscience Rousseau made it possible to identify character with temperament. It was easy for Fichte and others to take the next step and identify national character with national temperament. The Germans according to Fichte are all beautiful souls, the elect of nature. If they have no special word for character it is because to be a German and have character are synonymous. Character is something that gushes up from the primordial depths of the German’s being without any conscious effort on his part.288 The members of a whole national group may thus flatter one another and inbreed their national “genius” in the romantic sense, and feel all the while that they are ecstatic “idealists”; yet as a result of the failure to refer their genius back to some ethical centre, to work, in other words, according to the human law, they may, so far as the members of other national groups are concerned, remain in a state of moral solitude.

Everything thus hinges on the meaning of the word work. In the abstract and metaphysical sense man can know nothing of unity. He may, however, by working in the human sense, by imposing, that is, due limits on his expansive desires, close up in some measure the gap in his own nature (the “civil war in the cave”) and so tend to become inwardly one. He may hope in the same way to escape from the solitude of his own ego, for the inner unity that he achieves through work is only an entering into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men. Thus to work ethically is not only to become more unified and happy but also to move away from what is less permanent towards what is more permanent and therefore more peaceful in his total nature; so that the problem of happiness and the problem of peace turn out at last to be inseparable.

Souls, says Emerson, never meet; and it is true that a man never quite escapes from his solitude. That does not make the choice of direction any the less important. An infinite beckons to him on either hand. The one inspires the divine discontent, the other romantic restlessness. If instead of following the romantic lure he heeds the call from the opposite direction, he will not indeed attain to any perfect communion but he will be less solitary. Strictly speaking a man is never happy in the sense of being completely satisfied with the passing moment,289 or never, Dr. Johnson would add, except when he is drunk. The happiness of the sober and waking man resides, it may be, not in his content with the present moment but in the very effort that marks his passage from a lower to a higher ethical level.

The happiness of which Rousseau dreamed, it has been made plain, was not this active and ethical happiness, but rather the passive enjoyment of the beautiful moment – the moment that he would like to have last forever. After seeking for the beautiful moment in the intoxication of love, he turned as we have seen to pantheistic revery. “As long as it lasts,” he says of a moment of this kind, “one is self-sufficing like God.” Yes, but it does not last, and when he wakes from his dream of communion with nature, he is still solitary, still the prisoner of his ego. The pantheistic dreamer is passive in every sense. He is not working either according to the human or according to the natural law, and so is not gaining either in material or in ethical efficiency. In a world such as that in which we live this seems too much like picnicking on a battlefield. Rousseau could on occasion speak shrewdly on this point. He wrote to a youthful enthusiast who wished to come and live with him at Montmorency: “The first bit of advice I should like to give you is not to indulge in the taste you say you have for the contemplative life and which is only an indolence of the spirit reprehensible at every age and especially at yours. Man is not made to meditate but to act.”

The contemplative life is then, according to Rousseau, the opposite of action. But to contemplate is according to an Aristotle or a Buddha to engage in the most important form of action, the form that leads to happiness. To identify leisure and the contemplative life with pantheistic revery, as Rousseau does, is to fall into one of the most vicious of confusions. Perhaps indeed the most important contrast one can reach in a subject of this kind is that between a wise strenuousness and a more or less wise passiveness, between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer, between a Saint Paul, let us say, and a Walt Whitman.

The spiritual idling and drifting of the Rousseauist would be less sinister if it did not coexist in the world of to-day with an intense material activity. The man who seeks happiness by work according to the natural law is to be rated higher than the man who seeks happiness in some form of emotional intoxication (including pantheistic revery). He is not left unarmed, a helpless dreamer in the battle of life. The type of efficiency he is acquiring also helps him to keep at bay man’s great enemy, ennui. An Edison, we may suppose, who is drawn ever onward by the lure of wonder and curiosity and power, has little time to be bored. It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire.290

I have already pointed out, however, the peril in a one-sided working of this kind. It makes man efficient without making him ethical. It stimulates rather than corrects a fearless, formless expansion on the human level. This inordinate reaching out beyond bounds is, as the great Greek poets saw with such clearness, an invitation to Nemesis. The misery that results from unrestraint, from failure to work according to the human law, is something different from mere pain and far more to be dreaded; just as the happiness that results from a right working according to the human law is something different from mere pleasure and far more worthy of pursuit.

The present alliance between emotional romanticists and utilitarians291 is a veritable menace to civilization itself. It does not follow, as I said in a previous chapter, because revery or “intuition of the creative flux” cannot take the place of leisure or meditation, that one must therefore condemn it utterly. It may like other forms of romanticism have a place on the recreative side of life. What finally counts is work according to either the human or the natural law, but man cannot always be working. He needs moments of relief from tension and concentration and even, it should seem, of semi-oblivion of his conscious self. As one of the ways of winning such moments of relaxation and partial forgetfulness much may be said for revery. In general one must grant the solace and rich source of poetry that is found in communion with nature even though the final emphasis be put on communion with man. It is no small thing to be, as Arnold says Wordsworth was, a “priest of the wonder and bloom of the world.” One cannot however grant the Wordsworthian that to be a priest of wonder is necessarily to be also a priest of wisdom. Thus to promote to the supreme and central place something that is legitimate in its own degree, but secondary, is to risk starting a sham religion.

Those who have sought to set up a cult of love or beauty or science or humanity or country are open to the same objections as the votaries of nature. However important each of these things may be in its own place, it cannot properly be put in the supreme and central place for the simple reason that it does not involve any adequate conversion or discipline of man’s ordinary self to some ethical centre. I have tried to show that the sense of solitude or forlornness that is so striking a feature of romantic melancholy arises not only from a loss of hold on the traditional centres, but also from the failure of these new attempts at communion to keep their promises. The number of discomfitures of this kind in the period that has elapsed since the late eighteenth century, suggests that this period was even more than most periods an age of sophistry. Every age has had its false teachers, but possibly no age ever had so many dubious moralists as this, an incomparable series of false prophets from Rousseau himself down to Nietzsche and Tolstoy. It remains to sum up in a closing chapter the results of my whole inquiry and at the same time to discuss somewhat more specifically the bearing of my whole point of view, especially the idea of work according to the human law, upon the present situation.

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT OUTLOOK

It has been my endeavor throughout this book to show that classic and romantic art, though both at their best highly imaginative, differ in the quality of the imagination. I pointed out in my first chapter that in his recoil from the intellectual romanticism of the Renaissance and the mediæval romanticism of actual adventure the neo-classicist came to rest his literary faith on “reason” (by which he meant either ordinary good sense or abstract reasoning), and then opposed this reason or judgment to imagination. This supposed opposition between reason and imagination was accepted by the romantic rebels against neo-classicism and has been an endless source of confusion to the present day. Though both neo-classicists and romanticists achieved much admirable work, work which is likely to have a permanent appeal, it is surely no small matter that they both failed on the whole to deal adequately with the imagination and its rôle whether in literature or life. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Æneid to its being “a well-weighed judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polished, the more lustre they receive.”292 Read on and you will find that Dryden thus stresses judgment by way of protest against the Cavalier Marini and the imaginative unrestraint that he and other intellectual romanticists display. Dryden thus obscures the fact that what gives the immortalizing touch to the Æneid is not mere judgment but imagination – a certain quality of imagination. Even the reader who is to enter properly into the spirit of Virgil needs more than judgment – he needs to possess in some measure the same quality of imagination. The romantic answer to the neo-classic distrust of the imagination was the apotheosis of the imagination, but without sufficient discrimination as to its quality, and this led only too often to an anarchy of the imagination – an anarchy associated, as we have seen, in the case of the Rousseauist, with emotion rather than with thought or action.