Rousseau and Romanticism

In youth we love the darksome lawn
Brushed by the owlet’s wing.
Then Twilight is preferred to Dawn
And autumn to the spring.
Sad fancies do we then affect
In luxury of disrespect
To our own prodigal excess
Of too familiar happiness.

    Ode to Lycoris.

254

Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 329-30.

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.

256

Première Promenade.

257

Ibid.

258

E.g., Hölderlin and Jean Polonius.

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.”)

260

“Be good and you will be lonely.”

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).

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.”

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.

264

Froude’s Carlyle, II, 377.

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 on

The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging 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.

266

Eth. Nic., 1109 b.

267

James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night says that he would have entered hell

gratified to gain

That positive eternity of pain

Instead of this insufferable inane.

268

R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.

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.”