Rousseau and Romanticism

These two tendencies in Occidental thought go back respectively at least as far as Parmenides and Heraclitus.

5

In his World as Imagination (1916) E. D. Fawcett, though ultra-romantic and unoriental in his point of view, deals with a problem that has always been the special preoccupation of the Hindu. A Hindu, however, would have entitled a similar volume The World as Illusion (māyā). Aristotle has much to say of fiction in his Poetics but does not even use the word imagination (φαντασία). In the Psychology, where he discusses the imagination, he assigns not to it, but to mind or reason the active and creative rôle (νοῦς ποιητικός). It is especially the notion of the creative imagination that is recent. The earliest example of the phrase that I have noted in French is in Rousseau’s description of his erotic reveries at the Hermitage (Confessions, Livre IX).

6

Essay on Flaubert in Essais de Psychologie contemporaine.

7

Le Romantisme et les mœurs (1910).

8

Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, VIII, 30-31.

9

I should perhaps say that in the case of Buddha I have been able to consult the original Pāli documents. In the case of Confucius and the Chinese I have had to depend on translations.

10

See appendix on Chinese primitivism.

11

See, for example, Majjhima (Pāli Text Society), I, 265. Later Buddhism, especially Mahāyāna Buddhism, fell away from the positive and critical spirit of the founder into mythology and metaphysics.

12

Buddha expressed on many occasions his disdain for the Vedas, the great traditional authority of the Hindus.

13

I have explained the reasons for giving this place to Bacon in chapter II of Literature and the American College.

14

Eth. Nic., 1179 a.

15

I scarcely need remind the reader that the extant Aristotelian writings which have repelled so many by their form were almost certainly not meant for publication. For the problems raised by these writings as well as for the mystery in the method of their early transmission see R. Shute, History of the Aristotelian Writings (1888). The writings which Aristotle prepared for publication and which Cicero describes as a “golden stream of speech” (Acad. II, 38, 119) have, with the possible exception of the recently recovered Constitution of Athens, been lost.

16

See his Essai sur le genre dramatique sérieux.

17

Quoted in Grimm’s Dictionary.

18

Ex lectione quorundam romanticorum, i.e. librorum compositorum in gallico poeticorum de gestis militaribus, in quibus maxima pars fabulosa est.

19

Perhaps the most romantic lines in English are found in one of Camillo’s speeches in The Winter’s Tale (IV, 4):

a wild dedication of yourselves

To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores.

This “wild dedication” is, it should be noted, looked upon by Camillo with disfavor.

20

Pepys’s Diary, 13 June, 1666.

21

Thomas Shadwell, Preface to the Sullen Lovers, 1668.

22

Spectator, 142, by Steele.

23

Pope, 2d Epistle, Of the Character of Women.

24

Cf. Revue d’hist. litt., XVIII, 440. For the Early French history of the word, see also the article Romantique by A. François in Annales de la Soc. J. – J. Rousseau, V, 199-236.

25

First edition, 1698; second edition, 1732.

26

Cf. his Elégie à une dame.

Mon âme, imaginant, n’a point la patience
De bien polir les vers et ranger la science.
La règle me déplaît, j’écris confusément: