Rousseau and Romanticism

Et moi, je suis semblable à la feuille flétrie;
Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons.

    L’Isolement.

218

Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156.

219

See appendix on Chinese primitivism.

220

G. Duval has written a Dictionnaire des métaphores de Victor Hugo, and G. Lucchetti a work on Les Images dans les œuvres de Victor Hugo. So far as the ethical values are concerned, the latter title is alone justified. Hugo is, next to Chateaubriand, the great imagist.

221

The French like to think of the symbolists as having rendered certain services to their versification. Let us hope that they did, though few things are more perilous than this transfer of the idea of progress to the literary and artistic domain. Decadent Rome, as we learn from the younger Pliny and others, simply swarmed with poets who also no doubt indulged in many strange experiments. All this poetical activity, as we can see only too plainly at this distance, led nowhere.

222

Grant Allen writes of the laws of nature in Magdalen Tower:

They care not any whit for pain or pleasure,
That seems to us the sum and end of all,
Dumb force and barren number are their measure,
What shall be shall be, tho’ the great earth fall,
They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,
Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,
Work out their fatal will unswerv’d, unswerving,
And know not that they are!

223

Fragment de l’Art de jouir, quoted by P. – M. Masson in La Religion de J. – J. Rousseau, II, 228.

224

If nature merely reflects back to a man his own image, it follows that Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between fancy and imagination has little value, inasmuch as he rests his proof of the unifying power of the imagination, in itself a sound idea, on the union the imagination effects between man and outer nature – and this union is on his own showing fanciful.

225

If I had had this consecration Wordsworth says, addressing Peele Castle,

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;
On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

…

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife, etc.

    Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm.

226

Cf. Doudan, Lettres, IV, 216: “J’ai parcouru le Saint-Paul de Renan. Je n’ai jamais vu dans un théologien une si grande connaissance de la flore orientale. C’est un paysagiste bien supérieur à Saint-Augustin et à Bossuet. Il sème des résédas, des anémones, des pâquerettes pour recueillir l’incrédulité.”

227

In his Mal romantique (1908) E. Seillière labels the generations that have elapsed since the rise of Rousseauism as follows:

1. Sensibility (Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761).

2. Weltschmerz (Schiller’s Æsthetic Letters, 1795).

3. Mal du siècle (Hugo’s Hernani, 1830).

4. Pessimism (vogue of Schopenhauer and Stendhal, 1865).

5. Neurasthenia (culmination of fin de siècle movement, 1900).

228

Eckermann, September 24, 1827.

229

See La Nuit de Mai.

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.

231

Translation by J. E. Sandys of fragment cited in Stobæus, Flor. CIX, I.

232

Pythian Odes, III, 20 ff.

233