Rousseau and Romanticism

127

See Hart-Leap Well.

128

Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.

129

“Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived. … Let this love be your new nobility, – the undiscovered in the remotest seas,” etc. (Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, 240, 248.)

130

“On trouverait, en rétablissant les anneaux intermédiaires de la chaîne, qu’à Pascal se rattachent les doctrines modernes qui font passer en première ligne la connaissance immédiate, l’intuition, la vie intérieure, comme à Descartes … se rattachent plus particulièrement les philosophies de la raison pure.” La Science française (1915), I, 17.

131

Cf. Tennyson:

Fantastic beauty, such as lurks
In some wild poet when he works
Without a conscience or an aim —

132

Addison writes:

’Twas then great Marlbro’s mighty soul was proved,
That, in the shock of changing hosts unmoved,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,
Examin’d all the dreadful scenes of war;
In peaceful thought the field of death survey’d.

So far as Marlborough deserved this praise he was a general in the grand manner.

133

“Beauty resides in due proportion and order,” says Aristotle (Poetics, ch. VII).

134

A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (1912), II, 191.

135

Confucius and the Chinese sages were if anything even more concerned than Plato or Aristotle with the ethical quality of music.

136

Like Bishop Blougram’s his “interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.”

137

Does he take inspiration from the church,
Directly make her rule his law of life?
Not he: his own mere impulse guides the man.

…

Such is, for the Augustine that was once,
This Canon Caponsacchi we see now.

    X, 1911-28.

138

See X, 1367-68.

139

Letter to Joseph d’Ortigue, January 19, 1833.

140

Here is an extreme example from Maigron’s manuscript collection (Le Romantisme et les mœurs, 153). A youth forced to be absent three weeks from the woman he loves writes to her as follows: “Trois semaines, mon amour, trois semaines loin de toi! … Oh! Dieu m’a maudit! … Hier j’ai erré toute l’après-midi comme une bête fauve, une bête traquée. … Dans la forêt, j’ai hurlé, hurlé comme un démon … je me suis roulé par terre … j’ai broyé sous mes dents des branches que mes mains avaient arrachées. … Alors, de rage, j’ai pris ma main entre mes dents; j’ai serré, serré convulsivement; le sang a jailli et j’ai craché au ciel le morceau de chair vive … j’aurais voulu lui cracher mon cœur.”

141

Maxime Du Camp asserts in his Souvenirs littéraires (I, 118) that this anæmia was due in part to the copious blood-letting to which the physicians of the time, disciples of Broussais, were addicted.

142

This perversion was not unknown to classical antiquity. Cf. Seneca, To Lucilius, XCIX: “Quid turpius quam captare in ipso luctu voluptatem; et inter lacrymas quoque, quod juvet, quærere?”

143

Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. III, Lettre VI.

144

Confessions, Livre IV.

145

The New Laokoon, ch. V.

146

Franciscae meæ laudes, in Les Fleurs du mal.