Rousseau and Romanticism

And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.

This for our wisest! and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;
With close-lipped patience for our only friend,
Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair.

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

Chateaubriand, to be sure, had his cheerful moments and many of them. His sorrows he bestowed upon the public. Herein he was a true child of Jean-Jacques. We are told by eye-witnesses how heartily Rousseau enjoyed many aspects of his life at Motiers-Travers. On his own showing, he was plunged during this period in almost unalloyed misery. Froude writes of Carlyle: “It was his peculiarity that if matters were well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.” We can follow clear down to Gissing the assumption in some form or other that “art must be the mouthpiece of misery.” This whole question as to the proper function of art goes to the root of the debate between the classicist and the Rousseauist. “All these poets,” Goethe complains to Eckermann of the romanticists of 1830, “write as though they were ill, and as though the whole world were a hospital. … Every one of them in writing tries to be more desolate than all the others. This is really an abuse of poetry which has been given to make man satisfied with the world and with his lot. But the present generation is afraid of all solid energy; its mind is at ease and sees poetry only in weakness. I have found a good expression to vex these gentlemen. I am going to call their poetry hospital poetry.”[228 - Eckermann, September 24, 1827.]

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

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

Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.[230 - These lines are inscribed on the statue of Musset in front of the Théâtre Français. Cf. Shelley:Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.]

To make of poetry a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, usually of sorrowful emotion, is what the French understand by lyricism (le lyrisme); and it may be objected that it is not fair to compare an epic poet like Homer with a lyricist like Musset. Let us then take for our comparison the poet whom the ancients themselves looked upon as the supreme type of the lyricist – Pindar. He is superbly imaginative, “sailing,” as Gray tells us, “with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air,” but his imagination is not like that of Musset in the service of sensibility. He does not bestow his own emotions upon us but is rather in the Aristotelian sense an imitator. He is indeed at the very opposite pole from Rousseau and the “apostles of affliction.” “Let a man,” he says, “not darken delight in his life.” “Disclose not to strangers our burden of care; this at least shall I advise thee. Therefore is it fitting to show openly to all the folk the fair and pleasant things allotted us; but if any baneful misfortune sent of heaven befalleth man, it is seemly to shroud this in darkness.”[231 - Translation by J. E. Sandys of fragment cited in Stobæus, Flor. CIX, I.] And one should also note Pindar’s hostility towards that other great source of romantic lyricism – nostalgia (“The desire of the moth for the star”), and the closely allied pursuit of the strange and the exotic. He tells of the condign punishment visited by Apollo upon the girl Coronis who became enamoured of “a strange man from Arcadia,” and adds: “She was in love with things remote – that passion which many ere now have felt. For among men, there is a foolish company of those who, putting shame on what they have at home, cast their glances afar, and pursue idle dreams in hopes that shall not be fulfilled.”[232 - Pythian Odes, III, 20 ff.]

We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and superficial of all types – the professional optimist who insists on inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.”[233 - Pythian Odes, III, 81-82.] In general the Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller – the Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the everlasting wondersong of youth”[234 - Song of the Banjo, in the Seven Seas.]– is a romantic myth. We read in the Iliad:[235 - XVII, 446-47.] “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry:

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.[236 - A brief survey of melancholy among the Greeks will be found in Professor S. H. Butcher’s Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.]

One should indeed not fail to distinguish between the note of melancholy in a Homer or a Virgil and the melancholy of the ancients, whether Stoic or Epicurean, who had experienced the hopelessness and helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ultimate problems. The melancholy of the Stoic is the melancholy of the man who associates with the natural order a “virtue” that the natural order does not give, and so is tempted to exclaim at last with Brutus, that he had thought virtue a thing and had found that it was only a word. The melancholy of the Epicurean is that of the man who has tasted the bitter sediment (amari aliquid) in the cup of pleasure. It is not difficult to discover modern equivalents of both Stoic and Epicurean melancholy. “One should seek,” says Sainte-Beuve, “in the pleasures of René the secret of his ennuis,” and so far as this is true Chateaubriand is on much the same level as some Roman voluptuary who suffered from the tædium vitæ in the time of Tiberius or Nero.[237 - The exasperated quest of novelty is one of the main traits both of the ancient and the modern victim of ennui. See Seneca, De Tranquillitate animi: “Fastidio illis esse cœpit vita, et ipse mundus; et subit illud rabidorum deliciarum: quousque eadem?” (Cf. La Fontaine: Il me faut du nouveau, n’en fût-il plus au monde.)] But though the Roman decadent gave himself up to the pursuit of sensation and often of violent and abnormal sensation he was less prone than a Chateaubriand to associate this pursuit with the “infinite”; and so he was less nostalgic and hyperæsthetic. His Epicureanism was therefore less poetical no doubt, but on the other hand he did not set up mere romantic restlessness as a sort of substitute for religion. It was probably easier therefore for him to feel the divine discontent and so turn to real religion than it would have been if he had, like the Rousseauist, complicated his Epicureanism with sham spirituality.

To say that the melancholy even of the decadent ancient is less nostalgic is perhaps only another way of saying what I have said about the melancholy of the ancients in general – that it is not so purely personal. It derives less from his very private and personal illusions and still less from his very private and personal disillusions. In its purely personal quality romantic melancholy is indeed inseparable from the whole conception of original genius. The genius sets out not merely to be unique but unique in feeling, and the sense uniqueness in feeling speedily passes over into that of uniqueness in suffering – on the principle no doubt laid down by Horace Walpole that life, which is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. To be a beautiful soul, to preserve one’s native goodness of feeling among men who have been perverted by society, is to be the elect of nature and yet this election turns out as Rousseau tells us to be a “fatal gift of heaven.” It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however, who assumes this elegiac tone. We need to consider what he means by happiness while he still seeks for it in the actual world and not in the pays des chimères. Rousseau tells us that he based the sense of his own worth on the fineness of his powers of perception. Why should nature have endowed him with such exquisite faculties[238 - “A quoi bon m’avoir fait naître avec des facultés exquises pour les laisser jusqu’à la fin sans emploi? Le sentiment de mon prix interne en me donnant celui de cette injustice m’en dédommageait en quelque sorte, et me faisait verser des larmes que j’aimais a laisser couler.” Confessions. Livre IX (1756).] if he was not to have a satisfaction commensurate with them, if he was “to die without having lived”? We have here the psychological origins of the right to happiness that the romanticists were to proclaim. “We spend on the passions,” says Joubert, “the stuff that has been given us for happiness.” The Rousseauist hopes to find his happiness in the passions themselves. Romantic happiness does not involve any moral effort and has been defined in its extreme forms as a “monstrous dream of passive enjoyment.” Flaubert has made a study of the right to happiness thus understood in his “Madame Bovary.” Madame Bovary, who is very commonplace in other respects, feels exquisitely; and inasmuch as her husband had no such fineness the right to happiness meant for her, as it did for so many other “misunderstood” women, the right to extra-marital adventure. One should note the germs of melancholy that lurk in the quest of the superlative moment even if the quest is relatively successful. Suppose Saint-Preux had succeeded in compressing into a single instant “the delights of a thousand centuries”; and so far as outer circumstances are concerned had had to pay no penalty. The nearer the approach to a superhuman intensity of feeling the greater is likely to be the ensuing languor. The ordinary round of life seems pale and insipid compared with the exquisite and fugitive moment. One seems to one’s self to have drained the cup of life at a draught and save perhaps for impassioned recollection of the perfect moment to have no reason for continuing to live. One’s heart is “empty and swollen”[239 - Nouvelle Héloise, Pt. VI, Lettre VIII.] and one is haunted by thoughts of suicide.

This sense of having exhausted life[240 - “Encore enfant par la tête, vous êtes déjà vieux par le cœur.” Ibid.] and the accompanying temptation to suicide that are such striking features of the malady of the age are not necessarily associated with any outer enjoyment at all. One may devour life in revery and then the melancholy arises from the disproportion between the dream and the fact. The revery that thus consumes life in advance is not necessarily erotic. What may be termed the cosmic revery of a Senancour or an Amiel[241 - See the examples quoted in Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 305-06.] has very much the same effect.

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

Whether the victim of romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded action and at the same time become highly sensitive and highly self-conscious. The man who thrills more exquisitely to pleasure than another will also thrill more exquisitely to pain; nay, pleasure itself in its extreme is allied to pain;[242 - This is the thought of Keats’s Ode to Melancholy:Ay, in the very temple of DelightVeil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.Cf. Chateaubriand: Essai sur les Révolutions, Pt. II, ch. LVIII: “Ces jouissances sont trop poignantes: telle est notre faiblesse, que les plaisirs exquis deviennent des douleurs,” etc.] so that to be hyperæsthetic is not an unmixed advantage especially if it be true, as Pindar says, that the Gods bestow two trials on a man for every boon. Perhaps the deepest bitterness is found, not in those who make a pageant of their bleeding hearts, but in those who, like Leconte de Lisle[243 - See his sonnet Les Montreurs. This type of Rousseauist is anticipated by “Milord” Bomston in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau directed the engraver to depict him with “un maintien grave et stoïque sous lequel il cache avec peine une extrême sensibilité.”] and others (les impassibles), disdain to make a show of themselves to the mob, and so dissimulate their quivering sensibility under an appearance of impassibility; or, like Stendhal, under a mask of irony that “is imperceptible to the vulgar.”

Stendhal aims not at emotional intensity only, but also glorifies the lust for power. He did as much as any one in his time to promote the ideal of the superman. Yet even if the superman has nerves of steel, as seems to have been the case with Stendhal’s favorite, Napoleon, and acts on the outer world with a force of which the man in search of a sensation is quite incapable, he does not act upon himself, he remains ethically passive. This ethical passivity is the trait common to all those who incline to live purely on the naturalistic level – whether they sacrifice the human law and its demands for measure to the lust of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power. The man who neglects his ethical self and withdraws into his temperamental or private self, must almost necessarily have the sense of isolation, of remoteness from other men. We return here to the psychology of the original genius to whom it was a tame and uninteresting thing to be simply human and who, disdaining to seem to others a being of the same clay as themselves, wished to be in their eyes either an angel or a demon – above all a demon.[244 - “Qui es-tu? À coup sûr tu n’es pas un être pétri du même limon et animé de la même vie que nous! Tu es un ange ou un démon mais tu n’es pas une créature humaine. … Pourquoi habiter parmi nous, qui ne pouvons te suffire ni te comprendre?” G. Sand, Lélia, I, 11.] René does not, as I have said,[245 - See p. 51.] want even the woman who loves him to feel at one with him, but rather to be at once astonished and appalled. He exercises upon those who approach him a malign fascination; for he not only lives in misery himself as in his natural element, but communicates this misery to those who approach him. He is like one of those fair trees under which one cannot sit without perishing. Moreover René disavows all responsibility for thus being a human Upas-tree. Moral effort is unavailing, for it was all written in the book of fate. The victim of romantic melancholy is at times tender and elegiac, at other times he sets up as a heaven-defying Titan. This latter pose became especially common in France around 1830 when the influence of Byron had been added to that of Chateaubriand. Under the influence of these two writers a whole generation of youth became “things of dark imaginings,”[246 - See Lara, XVIII, XIX, perhaps the best passage that can be quoted for the Byronic hero.] predestined to a blight that was at the same time the badge of their superiority. One wished like René to have an “immense, solitary and stormy soul,” and also, like a Byronic hero, to have a diabolical glint in the eye and a corpse-like complexion,[247 - Cf. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme: “Il était de mode alors dans l’école romantique d’être pâle, livide, verdâtre, un peu cadavéreux, s’il était possible. Cela donnait l’air fatal, byronien, giaour, dévoré par les passions et les remords.”] and so seem the “blind and deaf agent of funereal mysteries.”[248 - Hugo, Hernani.] “It was possible to believe everything about René except the truth.” The person who delights in being as mysterious as this easily falls into mystification. Byron himself we are told was rather flattered by the rumor that he had committed at least one murder. Baudelaire, it has been said, displayed his moral gangrene as a warrior might display honorable wounds. This flaunting of his own perversity was part of the literary attitude he had inherited from the “Satanic School.”

When the romanticist is not posing as the victim of fate he poses as the victim of society. Both ways of dodging moral responsibility enter into the romantic legend of the poète maudit. Nobody loves a poet. His own mother according to Baudelaire utters a malediction upon him.[249 - Lorsque, par un décret des puissances suprêmes,Le Poète apparaît dans ce monde ennuyé,Sa mère épouvantée et pleine de blasphèmesCrispe ses poings vers Dieu, qui la prend en pitié.Fleurs du mal: Bénédiction.Cf. Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. III, Lettre XXVI:“Ciel inexorable! … O ma mère, pourquoi vous donna-t-il un fils dans sa colère?”] That is because the poet feels so exquisitely that he is at once odious and unintelligible to the ordinary human pachyderm. Inasmuch as the philistine is not too sensitive to act he has a great advantage over the poet in the real world and often succeeds in driving him from it and indeed from life itself. This inferiority in action is a proof of the poet’s ideality. “His gigantic wings,” as Baudelaire says, “keep him from walking.” He has, in Coleridgean phrase, fed on “honey dew and drunk the milk of paradise,”[250 - Coleridge has a side that relates him to the author of Les Fleurs du mal. In his Pains of Sleep he describes a dream in which he feltDesire with loathing strangely mix’d,On wild or hateful objects fix’d.] and so can scarcely be expected to submit to a diet of plain prose. It is hardly necessary to say that great poets of the past have not been at war with their public in this way. The reason is that they were less taken up with the uttering of their own uniqueness; they were, without ceasing to be themselves, servants of the general sense.

Chatterton became for the romanticists a favorite type of the poète maudit, and his suicide a symbol of the inevitable defeat of the “ideal” by the “real.” The first performance of Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) with its picture of the implacable hatred of the philistine for the artist was received by the romantic youth of Paris with something akin to delirium. As Gautier says in his well-known account of this performance one could almost hear in the night the crack of the solitary pistols. The ordinary man of letters, says Vigny in his preface to this play, is sure of success, even the great writer may get a hearing, but the poet, a being who is on a far higher level than either, can look forward only to “perpetual martyrdom and immolation.” He comes into the world to be a burden to others; his native sensibility is so intimate and profound that it “has plunged him from childhood into involuntary ecstasies, interminable reveries, infinite inventions. Imagination possesses him above all … it sweeps his faculties heavenward as irresistibly as the balloon carries up its car.” From that time forth he is more or less cut off from normal contact with his fellow-men. “His sensibility has become too keen; what only grazes other men wounds him until he bleeds.” He is thrown back more and more upon himself and becomes a sort of living volcano, “consumed by secret ardors and inexplicable languors,” and incapable of self-guidance. Such is the poet. From his first appearance he is an outlaw. Let all your tears and all your pity be for him. If he is finally forced to suicide not he but society is to blame. He is like the scorpion that cruel boys surround with live coals and that is finally forced to turn his sting upon himself. Society therefore owes it to itself to see that this exquisite being is properly pensioned and protected by government, to the end that idealism may not perish from the earth. M. Thiers who was prime minister at that time is said to have received a number of letters from young poets, the general tenor of which was: “A position or I’ll kill myself.”[251 - Keats according to Shelley was an example of the poète maudit. “The poor fellow” he says “was literally hooted from the stage of life.” Keats was as a matter of fact too sturdy to be snuffed out by an article and had less of the quivering Rousseauistic sensibility than Shelley himself. Cf. letter of Shelley to Mrs. Shelley (Aug. 7, 1820): “Imagine my despair of good, imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men.”]

A circumstance that should interest Americans is that Poe as interpreted by Baudelaire came to hold for a later generation of romanticists the place that Chatterton had held for the romanticists of 1830. Poe was actually murdered, says Baudelaire – and there is an element of truth in the assertion along with much exaggeration – by this great gas-lighted barbarity (i.e., America). All his inner and spiritual life whether drunkard’s or poet’s, was one constant effort to escape from this antipathetic atmosphere “in which,” Baudelaire goes on to say, “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny, the tyranny of the beasts, a zoöcracy”; and in this human zoo a being with such a superhuman fineness of sensibility as Poe was of course at a hopeless disadvantage. In general our elation at Poe’s recognition in Europe should be tempered by the reflection that this recognition is usually taken as a point of departure for insulting America. Poe is about the only hyperæsthetic romanticist we have had, and he therefore fell in with the main European tendency that comes down from the eighteenth century. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom I have already cited as an extreme example of romantic idealism, was one of Poe’s avowed followers; but Villiers is also related by his æsthetic and “diabolic” Catholicism to Chateaubriand; and the religiosity of Chateaubriand itself derives from the religiosity of Rousseau.

Hitherto I have been studying for the most part only one main type of modern melancholy. This type even in a Chateaubriand or a Byron and still more in their innumerable followers may seem at once superficial and theatrical. It often does not get beyond that Epicurean toying with sorrow, that luxury of grief, which was not unknown even to classical antiquity.[252 - Euripides speaks of the Χάρις γόων in his Ἱκέτιδες (Latin, “dolendi voluptas”; German, “die Wonne der Wehmut”).] The despair of Chateaubriand is frequently only a disguise of his love of literary glory, and Chesterton is inclined to see in the Byronic gloom an incident of youth and high spirits.[253 - Chesterton is anticipated in this paradox by Wordsworth:In youth we love the darksome lawnBrushed by the owlet’s wing.Then Twilight is preferred to DawnAnd autumn to the spring.Sad fancies do we then affectIn luxury of disrespectTo our own prodigal excessOf too familiar happiness.Ode to Lycoris.] But this is not the whole story even in Byron and Chateaubriand. To find what is both genuine and distinctive in romantic melancholy we need to enlarge a little further on the underlying difference between the classicist and the Rousseauist. The Rousseauist, as indeed the modern man in general, is more preoccupied with his separate and private self than the classicist. Modern melancholy has practically always this touch of isolation not merely because of the proneness of the “genius” to dwell on his own uniqueness, but also because of the undermining of the traditional communions by critical analysis. The noblest form of the “malady of the age” is surely that which supervened upon the loss of religious faith. This is what distinguishes the sadness of an Arnold or a Senancour from that of a Gray. The “Elegy” belongs to the modern movement by the humanitarian note, the sympathetic interest in the lowly, but in its melancholy it does not go much beyond the milder forms of classical meditation on the inevitable sadness of life – what one may term pensiveness. Like the other productions of the so-called graveyard school, it bears a direct relation to Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” It is well to retain Gray’s own distinction. “Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part,” he wrote to Richard West in 1742, “but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt.” Gray did not experience the more poignant sadness, one may suspect, without some loss of the “trembling hope” that is the final note of the “Elegy.” No forlornness is greater than that of the man who has known faith and then lost it. Renan writes of his own break with the Church:

The fish of Lake Baikal, we are told, have spent thousands of years in becoming fresh-water fish after being salt-water fish. I had to go through my transition in a few weeks. Like an enchanted circle Catholicism embraces the whole of life with so much strength that when one is deprived of it everything seems insipid. I was terribly lost. The universe produced upon me the impression of a cold and arid desert. For the moment that Christianity was not the truth, all the rest appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, barely worthy of interest. The collapse of my life upon itself left in me a feeling of emptiness like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love-affair.[254 - Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 329-30.]

The forlornness at the loss of faith is curiously combined in many of the romanticists with the mood of revolt. This type of romanticist heaps reproaches on a God in whose existence he no longer believes (as in Leconte de Lisle’s “Quaïn,” itself related to Byron’s “Cain”). He shakes his fist at an empty heaven, or like Alfred de Vigny (in his Jardin des Oliviers) assumes towards this emptiness an attitude of proud disdain. He is loath to give up this grandiose defiance of divinity if only because it helps to save him from subsiding into platitude. A somewhat similar mood appears in the “Satanic” Catholics who continue to cling to religion simply because it adds to the gusto of sinning.[255 - “[Villiers] était de cette famille des néo-catholiques littéraires dont Chateaubriand est le père commun, et qui a produit Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire et plus récemment M. Joséphin Peladan. Ceux-là ont goûté par-dessus tout dans la religion les charmes du péché, la grandeur du sacrilège, et leur sensualisme a caressé les dogmes qui ajoutaient aux voluptés la suprême volupté de se perdre.” A. France, Vie Littéraire, III, 121.] A Barbey succeeded in combining the rôle of Byronic Titan with that of champion of the Church. But in general the romantic Prometheus spurns the traditional forms of communion whether classical or Christian. He is so far as everything established is concerned enormously centrifugal, but he hopes to erect on the ruins of the past the new religion of human brotherhood. Everything in this movement from Shaftesbury down hinges on the rôle that is thus assigned to sympathy: if it can really unite men who are at the same time indulging each to the utmost his own “genius” or idiosyncrasy there is no reason why one should not accept romanticism as a philosophy of life.

But nowhere else perhaps is the clash more violent between the theory and the fact. No movement is so profuse in professions of brotherhood and none is so filled with the aching sense of solitude. “Behold me then alone upon the earth,” is the sentence with which Rousseau begins his last book;[256 - Première Promenade.] and he goes on to marvel that he, the “most loving of men,” had been forced more and more into solitude. “I am in the world as though in a strange planet upon which I have fallen from the one that I inhabited.”[257 - Ibid.] When no longer subordinated to something higher than themselves both the head and the heart (in the romantic sense) not only tend to be opposed to one another, but also, each in its own way, to isolate. Empedocles was used not only by Arnold but by other victims[258 - E.g., Hölderlin and Jean Polonius.] of romantic melancholy, as a symbol of intellectual isolation: by his indulgence in the “imperious lonely thinking power” Empedocles has broken the warm bonds of sympathy with his fellows:

thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought, —
But a naked eternally restless mind!

His leaping into Ætna typifies his attempt to escape from his loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself.

According to religion one should seek to unite with a something that is set above both man and nature, whether this something is called God as in Christianity or simply the Law as in various philosophies of the Far East.[259 - A striking passage on solitude will be found in the Laws of Manu, IV, 240-42. (“Alone a being is born: alone he goes down to death.” His kin forsake him at the grave; his only hope then is in the companionship of the Law of righteousness [Dharma]. “With the Law as his companion he crosses the darkness difficult to cross.”)] The most severe penalty visited on the man who transgresses is that he tends to fall away from this union. This is the element of truth in the sentence of Diderot that Rousseau took as a personal affront: “Only the wicked man is alone.” Rousseau asserted in reply, anticipating Mark Twain,[260 - “Be good and you will be lonely.”] that “on the contrary only the good man is alone.” Now in a sense Rousseau is right. “Most men are bad,” as one of the seven sages of Greece remarked, and any one who sets out to follow a very strenuous virtue is likely to have few companions on the way. Rousseau is also right in a sense when he says that the wicked man needs to live in society so that he may have opportunity to practice his wickedness. Yet Rousseau fails to face the main issue: solitude is above all a psychic thing. A man may frequent his fellows and suffer none the less acutely, like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” from a ghastly isolation. And conversely one may be like the ancient who said that he was never less alone than when he was alone.

Hawthorne, who was himself a victim of solitude, brooded a great deal on this whole problem, especially, as may be seen in the “Scarlet Letter” and elsewhere, on the isolating effects of sin. He perceived the relation of the problem to the whole trend of religious life in New England. The older Puritans had a sense of intimacy with God and craved no other companionship. With the weakening of their faith the later Puritans lost the sense of a divine companionship, but retained their aloofness from men. Hawthorne’s own solution of the problem of solitude, so far as he offers any, is humanitarian. Quicken your sympathies. Let the man who has taken as his motto Excelsior[261 - In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow’s poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron!Et Byron … disparaît aux yeux du pâtre épouvanté.(See E. Estève, Byron en France, 147).] be warned. Nothing will console him on the bleak heights either of knowledge or of power for the warm contact with the dwellers in the valley. Faust, who is a symbol of the solitude of knowledge, seeks to escape from his forlornness by recovering this warm contact. That the inordinate quest of power also leads to solitude is beyond question. Napoleon, the very type of the superman, must in the nature of the case have been very solitary.[262 - In the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. “Mon cœur se refuse aux joies communes comme à la douleur ordinaire.” He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait à rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au désert de sa vie.”] His admirer Nietzsche wrote one day: “I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child.” Carlyle, whose “hero” derives like the superman from the original genius[263 - The solitude of the “genius” is already marked in Blake:O! why was I born with a different face?Why was I not born like the rest of my race?When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.] of the eighteenth century, makes the following entry in his diary: “My isolation, my feeling of loneliness, unlimitedness (much meant by this) what tongue shall say? Alone, alone!”[264 - Froude’s Carlyle, II, 377.]

It cannot be granted, however, that one may escape by love, as the Rousseauist understands the word, from the loneliness that arises from the unlimited quest either of knowledge or power. For Rousseauistic love is also unlimited whether one understands by love either passion or a diffusive sympathy for mankind at large. “What solitudes are these human bodies,” Musset exclaimed when fresh from his affair with George Sand. Wordsworth cultivated a love for the lowly that quite overflowed the bounds of neo-classic selection. It is a well-known fact that the lowly did not altogether reciprocate. “A desolate-minded man, ye kna,” said an old inn-keeper of the Lakes to Canon Rawnsley, “’Twas potry as did it.” If Wordsworth writes so poignantly of solitude one may infer that it is because he himself had experienced it.[265 - No finer lines on solitude are found in English than those in which Wordsworth relates how from his room at Cambridge he could look out onThe antechapel where the statue stoodOf Newton with his prism and silent face,The marble index of a mind for everVoyaging through strange seas of thought alone.(Prelude III, 61-63.)Cf. also the line in the Sonnet on Milton:His soul was like a star and dwelt apart.] Nor would it be difficult to show that the very philanthropic Ruskin was at least as solitary as Carlyle with his tirades against philanthropy.

I have spoken of the isolating effects of sin, but sin is scarcely the right word to apply to most of the romanticists. The solitude of which so many of them complain does, however, imply a good deal of spiritual inertia. Now to be spiritually inert, as I have said elsewhere, is to be temperamental, to indulge unduly the lust for knowledge or sensation or power without imposing on these lusts some centre or principle of control set above the ordinary self. The man who wishes to fly off on the tangent of his own temperament and at the same time enjoy communion on any except the purely material level is harboring incompatible desires. For temperament is what separates. A sense of unlimitedness (“much meant by this” as Carlyle says) and of solitude are simply the penalties visited upon the eccentric individualist. If we are to unite on the higher levels with other men we must look in another direction than the expansive outward striving of temperament: we must in either the humanistic or religious sense undergo conversion. We must pull back our temperaments with reference to the model that we are imitating, just as, in Aristotle’s phrase, one might pull back and straighten out a crooked stick.[266 - Eth. Nic., 1109 b.] Usually the brake on temperament is supplied by the ethos, the convention of one’s age and country. I have tried to show elsewhere that the whole programme of the eccentric individualist is to get rid of this convention, whatever it may be, without developing some new principle of control. The eccentric individualist argues that to accept control, to defer to some centre as the classicist demands, is to cease to be himself. But are restrictions upon temperament so fatal to a man’s being himself? The reply hinges upon the definition of the word self, inasmuch as man is a dual being. If a man is to escape from his isolation he must, I have said, aim at some goal set above his ordinary self which is at the same time his unique and separate self. But because this goal is set above his ordinary self, it is not therefore necessarily set above his total personality. The limitations that he imposes on his ordinary self may be the necessary condition of his entering into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men. Aristotle says that if a man wishes to achieve happiness he must be a true lover of himself. It goes without saying that he means the ethical self. The author of a recent book on Ibsen says that Ibsen’s message to the world is summed up in the line:

This above all, – to thine own self be true.

It is abundantly plain from the context, however, that Polonius is a decayed Aristotelian and not a precursor of Ibsen. The self to which Aristotle would have a man be true is at the opposite pole from the self that Ibsen and the original geniuses are so eager to get uttered.

To impose the yoke of one’s human self upon one’s temperamental self is, in the Aristotelian sense, to work. Aristotle conceives of happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists, on the other hand, are from the human point of view, passive. The happiness that they crave is a passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the energy of a Napoleon and yet remain ethically passive. He may absorb whole encyclopædias and remain ethically passive. He may expand his sympathies until, like Schiller, he is ready to “bestow a kiss upon the whole world” and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to be ethically passive only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian sense, that is when he begins to put the brake on temperament and impulse, and in the same degree he tends to become ethically efficient. By his denial of the dualism of the spirit, Rousseau discredited this inner working, so that inwardness has come to seem synonymous with mere subjectivity; and to be subjective in the Rousseauistic sense is to be diffusive, to lack purpose and concentration, to lose one’s self in a shoreless sea of revery.

The utilitarian intervenes at this point and urges the romanticist, since he has failed to work inwardly, at least to work outwardly. Having missed the happiness of ethical efficiency he may in this way find the happiness of material efficiency, and at the same time serve the world. This is the solution of the problem of happiness that Goethe offers at the end of the Second Faust, and we may affirm without hesitation that it is a sham solution. To work outwardly and in the utilitarian sense, without the inner working that can alone save from ethical anarchy is to stimulate rather than repress the most urgent of all the lusts – the lust of power. It is only too plain that the unselective sympathy or joy in service with which Goethe would complete Faust’s utilitarian activity is not in itself a sufficient counterpoise to the will to power, unless indeed we assume with Rousseau that one may control expansive impulses by opposing them to one another.

A terrible danger thus lurks in the whole modern programme: it is a programme that makes for a formidable mechanical efficiency and so tends to bring into an ever closer material contact men who remain ethically centrifugal. The reason why the humanitarian and other schemes of communion that have been set up during the last century have failed is that they do not, like the traditional schemes, set any bounds to mere expansiveness, or, if one prefers, they do not involve any conversion. And so it is not surprising that the feeling of emptiness[267 - James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night says that he would have entered hellgratified to gainThat positive eternity of painInstead of this insufferable inane.] or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral solitude”;[268 - R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.] but strictly speaking his solitude is the reverse of moral. Only by cultivating his human self and by the unceasing effort that this cultivation involves does a man escape from his nightmare of separateness and so move in some measure towards happiness. But the happiness of which René dreams is unethical – something very private and personal and egoistic. Nothing is easier than to draw the line from René to Baudelaire and later decadents – for instance to Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s novel “A Rebours,”[269 - Decadent Rome had the equivalent of Des Esseintes. Seneca (To Lucilius, CXXII) speaks of those who seek to affirm their originality and attract attention to themselves by doing everything differently from other people and, “ut ita dicam, retro vivunt.”] who is typical of the last exaggerations of the movement. Des Esseintes cuts himself off as completely as possible from other men and in the artificial paradise he has devised gives himself up to the quest of strange and violent sensation; but his dream of happiness along egoistic lines turns into a nightmare,[270 - Tennyson has traced this change of the æsthetic dream into a nightmare in his Palace of Art.] his palace of art becomes a hell. Lemaître is quite justified in saying of Des Esseintes that he is only René or Werther brought up to date – “a played-out and broken-down Werther who has a malady of the nerves, a deranged stomach and eighty years more of literature to the bad.”[271 - Contemporains, I, 332.]

Emotional romanticism was headed from the start towards this bankruptcy because of its substitution for ethical effort of a mere lazy floating on the stream of mood and temperament. I have said that Buddhism saw in this ethical indolence the root of all evil. Christianity in its great days was preoccupied with the same problem. To make this point clear it will be necessary to add to what I have said about classical and romantic melancholy a few words about melancholy in the Middle Ages. In a celebrated chapter of his “Genius of Christianity” (Le Vague des passions) Chateaubriand seeks to give to the malady of the age Christian and mediæval origins. This was his pretext, indeed, for introducing René into an apology for Christianity and so, as Sainte-Beuve complained, administering poison in a sacred wafer. Chateaubriand begins by saying that the modern man is melancholy because, without having had experience himself, he is at the same time overwhelmed by the second-hand experience that has been heaped up in the books and other records of an advanced civilization; and so he suffers from a precocious disillusion; he has the sense of having exhausted life before he has enjoyed it. There is nothing specifically Christian in this disillusion and above all nothing mediæval. But Chateaubriand goes on to say that from the decay of the pagan world and the barbarian invasions the human spirit received an impression of sadness and possibly a tinge of misanthropy which has never been completely effaced. Those that were thus wounded and estranged from their fellow-men took refuge formerly in monasteries, but now that this resource has failed them, they are left in the world without being of it and so they “become the prey of a thousand chimeras.” Then is seen the rise of that guilty melancholy which the passions engender when, left without definite object, they prey upon themselves in a solitary heart.[272 - Génie du Christianisme, Pt. II, Livre III, ch. IX.]

The vague des passions, the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire, that Chateaubriand here describes may very well be related to certain sides of Christianity – especially to what may be termed its neo-Platonic side. Yet Christianity at its best has shown itself a genuine religion, in other words, it has dealt sternly and veraciously with the facts of human nature. It has perceived clearly how a man may move towards happiness and how on the other hand he tends to sink into despair; or what amounts to the same thing, it has seen the supreme importance of spiritual effort and the supreme danger of spiritual sloth. The man who looked on himself as cut off from God and so ceased to strive was according to the mediæval Christian the victim of acedia. This sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting and abdication of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime against the Holy Ghost itself. It would in fact not be hard to show that what was taken by the Rousseauist to be the badge of spiritual distinction was held by the mediæval Christian to be the chief of all the deadly sins.

The victim of acedia often looked upon himself, like the victim of the malady of the age, as foredoomed. But though the idea of fate enters at times into mediæval melancholy, the man of the Middle Ages could scarcely so detach himself from the community as to suffer from that sense of loneliness which is the main symptom of romantic melancholy. This forlornness was due not merely to the abrupt disappearance of the older forms of communion, but to the failure of the new attempts at communion. When one gets beneath the surface of the nineteenth century one finds that it was above all a period of violent disillusions, and it is especially after violent disillusion that a man feels himself solitary and forlorn. I have said that the special mark of the half-educated man is his harboring of incompatible desires. The new religions or unifications of life that appeared during the nineteenth century made an especially strong appeal to the half-educated man because it seemed to him that by accepting some one of these he could enjoy the benefits of communion and at the same time not have to take on the yoke of any serious discipline; that he could, in the language of religion, achieve salvation without conversion. When a communion on these lines turns out to be not a reality, but a sham, and its disillusioned votary feels solitary and forlorn, he is ready to blame everybody and everything except himself.

A few specific illustrations will help us to understand how romantic solitude, which was created by the weakening of the traditional communions, was enhanced by the collapse of various sham communions. Let us return for a moment to that eminent example of romantic melancholy and disillusion, Alfred de Vigny. His “Chatterton” deals with the fatal misunderstanding of the original genius by other men. “Moïse” deals more specifically with the problem of his solitude. The genius is so eminent and unique, says Vigny, speaking for himself from behind the mask of the Hebrew prophet, that he is quite cut off from ordinary folk who feel that they have nothing in common with him.[273 - L’orage est dans ma voix, l’éclair est sur ma bouche;Aussi, loin de m’aimer, voilà qu’ils tremblent tous,Et quand j’ouvre les bras, on tombe à mes genoux.] This forlornness of the genius is not the sign of some capital error in his philosophy. On the contrary it is the sign of his divine election, and so Moses blames God for his failure to find happiness.[274 - Que vous ai-je donc fait pour être votre élu?…Hélas! je suis, Seigneur, puissant et solitaire,Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre!] If the genius is cut off from communion with men he cannot hope for companionship with God because he has grown too sceptical. Heaven is empty and in any case dumb; and so in the poem to which I have already referred (Le Mont des Oliviers) Vigny assumes the mask of Jesus himself to express this desolateness, and concludes that the just man will oppose a haughty and Stoic disdain to the divine silence.[275 - Le juste opposera le dédain à l’absenceEt ne répondra plus que par un froid silenceAu silence éternel de la Divinité.]

All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower – a phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny.[276 - See Sainte-Beuve’s poetical epistle A. M. Villemain (Pensées d’Août 1837).] In the ivory tower he can at least commune with nature and the ideal woman. But Vigny came at a time when the Arcadian glamour was being dissipated from nature. Partly under scientific influence she was coming to seem not a benign but a cold and impassive power, a collection of cruel and inexorable laws. I have already mentioned this mood that might be further illustrated from Taine and so many others towards the middle of the nineteenth century.[277 - See Masters of Modern French Criticism, 233, 238.] “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.”[278 - Wordsworth writesA piteous lot it were to flee from manYet not rejoice in Nature.(Excursion, IV, 514.)This lot was Vigny’s:Ne me laisse jamais seul avec la NatureCar je la connais trop pour n’en avoir pas peur.] (“La Maison du Berger”); and so in the Maison roulante, or sort of Arcadia on wheels that he has imagined, he must seek his chief solace with the ideal feminine companion. But woman herself turns out to be treacherous; and, assuming the mask of Samson (“La Colère de Samson”), Vigny utters a solemn malediction upon the eternal Delilah (Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila). Such is the disillusion that comes from having sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress.[279 - Madame Dorval.]

Now that every form of communion has failed, all that is left it would seem is to die in silence and solitude like the wolf (“La Mort du Loup”). Vigny continues to hold, however, like the author of the “City of Dreadful Night,” that though men may not meet in their joys, they may commune after a fashion in their woe. He opposes to heartless nature and her “vain splendors” the religion of pity, “the majesty of human sufferings.”[280 - La Maison du Berger. Note that in Wordsworth the “still sad music of humanity” is very closely associated with nature.] Towards the end when Vigny feels the growing prestige of science, he holds out the hope that a man may to a certain extent escape from the solitude of his own ego into some larger whole by contributing his mite to “progress.” But the symbol of this communion[281 - La Bouteille à la Mer.] that he has chosen – that of the shipwrecked and sinking mariner who consigns his geographical discoveries to a bottle in the hope that it may be washed up on some civilized shore – is itself of a singular forlornness.

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.