Rousseau and Romanticism

A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth and their old age
Is beautiful and free.

    Wordsworth: The Fountain.

109

The phrase imaginative insight is, I believe, true to the spirit of Plato at his best, but it is certainly not true to his terminology. Plato puts the imagination (φαντασία) not only below intuitive reason (νοῦς) and discursive reason or understanding (διάνοια), but even below outer perception (πίστις). He recognizes indeed that it may reflect the operations of the understanding and even the higher reason as well as the impressions of sense. This notion of a superior intellectual imagination was carried much further by Plotinus and the neo-Platonists. Even the intellectual imagination is, however, conceived of as passive. Perhaps no Greek thinker, not even Plato, makes as clear as he might that reason gets its intuition of reality and the One with the aid of the imagination and, as it were, through a veil of illusion, that, in Joubert’s phrase, “l’illusion est une partie inté, grante de la réalité” (Pensées, Titre XI, XXXIX). Joubert again distinguishes (ibid., Titre III, XLVII, LI) between “l’imaginative” which is passive and “l’imagination” which is active and creative (“l’œil de l’âme”). In its failure to bring out with sufficient explicitness this creative rôle of the imagination and in the stubborn intellectualism that this failure implies is to be found, if anywhere, the weak point in the cuirass of Greek philosophy.

110

See Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 16, 3.

111

Σωφροσύνη.

112

See his Lettre à d’Alembert.

113

Varieties of Religious Experience, 387.

114

Blütezeit der Romantik, 126.

115

“Parfaite illusion, réalité parfaite” (Alfred de Vigny). “Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt” (Novalis). “This sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated disappointments and vain regrets” (Hazlitt).

116

Lit. Ang., IV, 130.

117

About 1885.

118

Le Théâtre en France, 304.

119

Je suis une force qui va!

Agent aveugle et sourd de mystères funèbres.

120

E.g., Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) had a marked influence on the rise of the German fate tragedy.

121

Wo ist der, der sagen dürfe,
So will ich’s, so sei’s gemacht,
Unser Taten sind nur Würfe
In des Zufalls blinde Nacht.

    Die Ahnfrau.

122

“So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.” Leviathan, Part I, ch. XI.

123

See Unpopular Review, October, 1915.

124

E. Seillière has been tracing, in Le Mal romantique and other volumes, the relation between Rousseauism and what he terms an “irrational imperialism.” His point of view is on the constructive side very different from mine.

125

The best account of Rousseau’s German influence is still that of H. Hettner in his Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Compared with Rousseau’s German influence, says Professor Paul Hensel in his Rousseau (1907), “his influence in France seems almost trifling.” In Germany “Rousseau became the basis not of a guillotine but of a new culture (Kultur). … We have drawn his spirit over to us, we have made it our own.” (121.) See also Professor Eugen Kühnemann, Vom Weltreich des deutschen Geistes (1914), 54-62, and passim. German idealism is, according to Kühnemann, the monument that does the greatest honor to Rousseau.

126

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage.

…

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.

…

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.

    Auguries of Innocence.