Rousseau and Romanticism

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 waysOf custom, law and statute, took at onceThe 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 necessary and fatal opposition between poetry and prose the romanticist saw typified in “Don Quixote,” and of course he sided with the idealism of the knight against the philistine good sense of Sancho Panza; and so for the early romanticists as well as for those who were of their spiritual posterity, – Heine, for example, and Flaubert, – “Don Quixote” was a book to evoke not laughter but tears.

To the romantic conception of the ideal can be traced the increasing lack of understanding between the poet, or in general the creator, and the public during the past century. Many neo-classical writers may, like Boileau, have shown an undue reverence for what they conceived to be the general sense of their time, but to measure one’s inspiration by one’s remoteness from this general sense is surely a far more dangerous error; and yet one was encouraged to do this very thing by the views of original genius that were held in the eighteenth century. Certain late neo-classicists lacked imagination and were at the same time always harping on good sense. It was therefore assumed that to insist on good sense was necessarily proof of a lack of imagination. Because the attempt to achieve the universal had led to a stale and lifeless imitation it was assumed that a man’s genius consists in his uniqueness, in his unlikeness to other men. Now nothing is more private and distinctive in a man than his feelings, so that to be unique meant practically for Rousseau and his followers to be unique in feeling. Feeling alone they held was vital and immediate. As a matter of fact the element in a man’s nature that he possesses in common with other men is also something that he senses, something that is in short intuitive and immediate. But good sense the genius identifies with lifeless convention and so measures his originality by the distance of his emotional and imaginative recoil from it. Of this warfare between sense and sensibility that begins in the eighteenth century, the romantic war between the poet and the philistine is only the continuation. This war has been bad for both artist and public. If the artist has become more and more eccentric, it must be confessed that the good sense of the public against which he has protested has been too flatly utilitarian. The poet who reduces poetry to the imaginative quest of strange emotional adventure, and the plain citizen who does not aspire beyond a reality that is too literal and prosaic, both suffer; but the æsthete suffers the more severely – so much so that I shall need to revert to this conception of poetry in my treatment of romantic melancholy. It leads at last to a contrast between the ideal and the real such as is described by Anatole France in his account of Villiers de l’Isle Adam. “For thirty years,” says M. France, “Villiers wandered around in cafés at night, fading away like a shadow at the first glimmer of dawn. … His poverty, the frightful poverty of cities, had so put its stamp on him and fashioned him so thoroughly that he resembled those vagabonds, who, dressed in black, sleep on park benches. He had the livid complexion with red blotches, the glassy eye, the bowed back of the poor; and yet I am not sure we should call him unhappy, for he lived in a perpetual dream and that dream was radiantly golden. … His dull eyes contemplated within himself dazzling spectacles. He passed through the world like a somnambulist seeing nothing of what we see and seeing things that it is not given us to behold. Out of the commonplace spectacle of life he succeeded in creating an ever fresh ecstasy. On those ignoble café tables in the midst of the odor of beer and tobacco, he poured forth floods of purple and gold.”

This notion that literal failure is ideal success, and conversely, has been developed in a somewhat different form by Rostand in his “Cyrano de Bergerac.” By his refusal to compromise or adjust himself to things as they are, Cyrano’s real life has become a series of defeats. He is finally forced from life by a league of all the mediocrities whom his idealism affronts. His discomfiture is taken to show, not that he is a Quixotic extremist, but that he is the superior of the successful Guise, the man who has stooped to compromise, the French equivalent of the Antonio whom Goethe finally came to prefer to Tasso. Rostand’s “Chanticleer” is also an interesting study of romantic idealism and of the two main stages through which it passes – the first stage when one relates one’s ideal to the real; the second, when one discovers that the ideal and the real are more or less hopelessly dissevered. Chanticleer still maintains his idealistic pose even after he has discovered that the sun is not actually made to rise by his crowing. In this hugging of his illusion in defiance of reality Chanticleer is at the opposite pole from Johnson’s astronomer in “Rasselas” who thinks that he has control of the weather, but when disillusioned is humbly thankful at having escaped from this “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and entered once more into the domain of “sober probability.”

The problem, then, of the genius or the artist versus the philistine has persisted without essential modification from the eighteenth century to the present day – from the suicide of Chatterton, let us say, to the suicide of John Davidson. The man of imagination spurns in the name of his “ideal” the limits imposed upon it by a dull respectability, and then his ideal turns out only too often to lack positive content and to amount in practice to the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire. What the idealist opposes to the real is not only something that does not exist, but something that never can exist. The Arcadian revery which should be allowed at most as an occasional solace from the serious business of living is set up as a substitute for living. The imaginative and emotional dalliance of the Rousseauistic romanticist may assume a bewildering variety of forms. We have already seen in the case of Hölderlin how easily Rousseau’s dream of a state of nature passes over – and that in spite of Rousseau’s attacks on the arts – into the dream of a paradise of pure beauty. The momentous matter is not that a man’s imagination and emotions go out towards this or that particular haven of refuge in the future or in the past, in the East or in the West, but that his primary demand on life is for some haven of refuge; that he longs to be away from the here and now and their positive demands on his character and will. Poe may sing of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” but he is not therefore a classicist. With the same wistfulness innumerable romanticists have looked towards the Middle Ages. So C. E. Norton says that Ruskin was a white-winged anachronism,60 that he should have been born in the thirteenth century. But one may surmise that a man with Ruskin’s special quality of imagination would have failed to adjust himself to the actual life of the thirteenth or any other century. Those who put their Arcadia in the Middle Ages or some other period of the past have at least this advantage over those who put it in the present, they are better protected against disillusion. The man whose Arcadia is distant from him merely in space may decide to go and see for himself, and the results of this overtaking of one’s dream are somewhat uncertain. The Austrian poet Lenau, for example, actually took a trip to his primitive paradise that he had imagined somewhere in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Perhaps it is not surprising that he finally died mad. The disenchantment of Chateaubriand in his quest for a Rousseauistic Arcadia in America and for Arcadian savages I describe later. In his journey into the wilderness Chateaubriand reveals himself as a spiritual lotos-eater no less surely than the man who takes flight into what is superficially most remote from the virgin forest – into some palace of art. His attitude towards America does not differ psychically from that of many early romanticists towards Italy. Italy was their land of heart’s desire, the land that filled them with ineffable longing (Sehnsucht nach Italien), a palace of art that, like the Latin Quarter of later Bohemians, had some points of contact with Mohammed’s paradise. A man may even develop a romantic longing for the very period against which romanticism was originally a protest and be ready to “fling his cap for polish and for Pope.” One should add that the romantic Eldorado is not necessarily rural. Lamb’s attitude towards London is almost as romantic as that of Wordsworth towards the country. Dr. Johnson cherished urban life because of its centrality. Lamb’s imaginative dalliance, on the other hand, is stimulated by the sheer variety and wonder of the London streets as another’s might be by the mountains or the sea.61 Lamb could also find an Elysium of unmixed æsthetic solace in the literature of the past – especially in Restoration Comedy.

The essence of the mood is always the straining of the imagination away from the here and now, from an actuality that seems paltry and faded compared to the radiant hues of one’s dream. The classicist, according to A. W. Schlegel,62 is for making the most of the present, whereas the romanticist hovers between recollection and hope. In Shelleyan phrase he “looks before and after and pines for what is not.” He inclines like the Byronic dandy, Barbey d’Aurevilly, to take for his mottoes the words “Too late” and “Nevermore.”