Rousseau and Romanticism

Enough has been said to make plain that the infinite indeterminate desire of the romanticist and the Buddhist repression of desire are the most different things conceivable. Chateaubriand it has been said was an “invincibly restless soul,” a soul of desire (une âme de désir), but these phrases are scarcely more applicable to him than to many other great romanticists. They are fitly symbolized by the figures that pace to and fro in the Hall of Eblis and whose hearts are seen through their transparent bosoms to be lapped in the flames of unquenchable longing. The romanticist indeed bases, as I have said, on the very intensity of his longing his claims to be an idealist and even a mystic. William Blake, for example, has been proclaimed a true mystic. The same term has also been applied to Buddha. Without pretending to have fathomed completely so unfathomable a being as Buddha or even the far less unfathomable William Blake, one may nevertheless assert with confidence that Buddha and Blake stand for utterly incompatible views of life. If Blake is a mystic then Buddha must be something else. To be assured on this point one needs only to compare the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” with the “Dhammapada,” an anthology of some of the most authentic and authoritative material in early Buddhism. “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. … The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” says Blake. “Even in heavenly pleasures he finds no satisfaction; the disciple who is fully awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires. … Good is restraint in all things,” says Buddha. Buddha would evidently have dismissed Blake as a madman, whereas Blake would have looked on Buddhism as the ultimate abomination. My own conviction is that Buddha was a genuine sage well worthy of the homage rendered him by multitudes of men for more than twenty-four centuries, whereas Blake was only a romantic æsthete who was moving in his imaginative activity towards madness and seems at the end actually to have reached the goal.

I have been going thus far afield to ancient India and to Buddha, not that I might, like a recent student of Buddhism, enjoy “the strangeness of the intellectual landscape,” but on the contrary that I might suggest that there is a centre of normal human experience and that Buddhism, at least in its ethical aspects, is nearer to this centre than æsthetic romanticism. Buddha might perhaps marvel with more reason at our strangeness than we at his. Buddha’s assertion of man’s innate moral laziness in particular accords more closely with what most of us have experienced than Rousseau’s assertion of man’s natural goodness. This conception of the innate laziness of man seems to me indeed so central that I am going to put it at the basis of the point of view I am myself seeking to develop, though this point of view is not primarily Buddhistic. This conception has the advantage of being positive rather than dogmatic. It works out in practice very much like the original sin of the Christian theologian. The advantage of starting with indolence rather than sin is that many men will admit that they are morally indolent who will not admit that they are sinful. For theological implications still cluster thickly about the word sin, and these persons are still engaged more or less consciously in the great naturalistic revolt against theology.

The spiritual positivist then will start from a fact of immediate perception – from the presence namely in the breast of the individual of a principle of vital control (frein vital), and he will measure his spiritual strenuousness or spiritual sloth by the degree to which he exercises or fails to exercise this power. In accordance with the keenness of a man’s perception of a specially human order that is known practically as a curb upon his ordinary self, he may be said to possess insight. The important thing is that the insight should not be sophisticated, that a man should not fall away from it into some phantasmagoria of the intellect or emotions. A man sometimes builds up a whole system of metaphysics as a sort of screen between himself and his obligations either to himself or others. Mrs. Barbauld suspected that Coleridge’s philosophy was only a mask for indolence. Carlyle’s phrase for Coleridge was even harsher: “putrescent indolence,” a phrase that might be applied with more justice perhaps to Rousseau. One may learn from Rousseau the art of sinking to the region of instinct that is below the rational level instead of struggling forward to the region of insight that is above it, and at the same time passing for a sublime enthusiast; the art of looking backwards and downwards, and at the same time enjoying the honor that belongs only to those who look forwards and up. We need not wonder at the warm welcome that this new art received. I have said that that man has always been accounted a benefactor who has substituted for the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious art of going through the motions and that the decorum of the neo-classical period had largely sunk to this level. Even in the most decorous of modern ages, that of Louis XIV, it was very common, as every student of the period knows, for men to set up as personages in the grand manner and at the same time behind the façade of conventional dignity to let their appetites run riot. It would have been perfectly legitimate at the end of the eighteenth century to attack in the name of true decorum a decorum that had become the “varnish of vice” and “mask of hypocrisy.” What Rousseau actually opposed to pseudo-decorum was perhaps the most alluring form of sham spirituality that the world has ever seen – a method not merely of masking but of glorifying one’s spiritual indolence. “You wish to have the pleasures of vice and the honor of virtue,” wrote Julie to Saint-Preux in a moment of unusual candor. The Rousseauist may indulge in the extreme of psychic unrestraint and at the same time pose as a perfect idealist or even, if one is a Chateaubriand, as a champion of religion. Chateaubriand’s life according to Lemaître was a “magnificent series of attitudes.”

I do not mean to assert that the Rousseauist is always guilty of the pose and theatricality of which there is more than a suggestion in Chateaubriand. There is, however, much in the Rousseauistic view of life that militates against a complete moral honesty. “Of all the men I have known,” says Rousseau, “he whose character derives most completely from his temperament alone is Jean-Jacques.”[100 - Second Dialogue.] The ugly things that have a way of happening when impulse is thus left uncontrolled do not, as we have seen, disturb the beautiful soul in his complacency. He can always point an accusing finger at something or somebody else. The faith in one’s natural goodness is a constant encouragement to evade moral responsibility. To accept responsibility is to follow the line of maximum effort, whereas man’s secret desire is to follow, if not the line of least, at all events the line of lesser resistance. The endless twisting and dodging and proneness to look for scapegoats that results is surely the least reputable aspect of human nature. Rousseau writes to Madame de Francueil (20 April, 1751) that it was her class, the class of the rich, that was responsible for his having had to abandon his children. With responsibility thus shifted from one’s self to the rich, the next step is inevitable, namely to start a crusade against the members of a class which, without any warrant from “Nature,” oppresses its brothers, the members of other classes, and forces them into transgression. A man may thus dodge his duties as a father, and at the same time pose as a paladin of humanity. Rousseau is very close here to our most recent agitators. If a working girl falls from chastity, for example, do not blame her, blame her employer. She would have remained a model of purity if he had only added a dollar or two a week to her wage. With the progress of the new morality every one has become familiar with the type of the perfect idealist who is ready to pass laws for the regulation of everybody and everything except himself, and who knows how to envelop in a mist of radiant words schemes the true driving power of which is the desire to confiscate property.

The tendency to make of society the universal scapegoat is not, one scarcely needs add, to be ascribed entirely to the romantic moralist. It is only one aspect of the denial of the human law, of the assumption that because man is partly subject to the natural law he is entirely subject to it; and in this dehumanizing of man the rationalist has been at least as guilty as the emotionalist. If the Rousseauist hopes to find a substitute for all the restraining virtues in sympathy, the rationalistic naturalist, who is as a rule utilitarian with a greater or smaller dash of pseudo-science, hopes to find a substitute for these same virtues in some form of machinery. The legislative mill to which our “uplifters” are so ready to resort, is a familiar example. If our modern society continues to listen to those who are seeking to persuade it that it is possible to find mechanical or emotional equivalents for self-control, it is likely, as Rousseau said of himself, to show a “great tendency to degenerate.”

The fact on which the moral positivist would rest his effort to rehabilitate self-control is, as I have said, the presence in man of a restraining, informing and centralizing power that is anterior to both intellect and emotion. Such a power, it must be freely granted, is not present equally in all persons; in some it seems scarcely to exist at all. When released from outer control, they are simply unchained temperaments; whereas in others this superrational perception seems to be singularly vivid and distinct. This is the psychological fact that underlies what the theologian would term the mystery of grace.

Rousseau himself was not quite so temperamental as might be inferred from what has been said about his evasion of ethical effort. There were moments when the dualism of the spirit came home to him, moments when he perceived that the conscience is not itself an expansive emotion but rather a judgment and a check upon expansive emotion. Yet his general readiness to subordinate his ethical self to his sensibility is indubitable. Hence the absence in his personality and writing of the note of masculinity. There is indeed much in his make-up that reminds one less of a man than of a high-strung impressionable woman. Woman, most observers would agree, is more natural in Rousseau’s sense, that is, more temperamental, than man. One should indeed always temper these perilous comparisons of the sexes with the remark of La Fontaine that in this matter he knew a great many men who were women. Now to be temperamental is to be extreme, and it is in this sense perhaps that the female of the species may be said to be “fiercer than the male.” Rousseau’s failure to find “any intermediary term between everything and nothing” would seem to be a feminine rather than a masculine trait. Decorum in the case of women, even more perhaps than in the case of men, tends to be a mere conformity to what is established rather than the immediate perception of a law of measure and proportion that sets bounds to the expansive desires. “Women believe innocent everything that they dare,” says Joubert, whom no one will accuse of being a misogynist. Those who are thus temperamental have more need than others of outer guidance. “His feminine nature,” says C. E. Norton of Ruskin, “needed support such as it never got.”[101 - Letters, II, 298. For Ruskin and Rousseau see Ibid. I, 360: “[Ruskin] said that great parts of Les Confessions were so true to himself that he felt as if Rousseau must have transmigrated into his body.”]

If women are more temperamental than men it is only fair to add that they have a greater fineness of temperament. Women, says Joubert again, are richer in native virtues, men in acquired virtues. At times when men are slack in acquiring virtues in the truly ethical sense – and some might maintain that the present is such a time – the women may be not only men’s equals but their superiors. Rousseau had this feminine fineness of temperament. He speaks rightly of his “exquisite faculties.” He also had no inconsiderable amount of feminine charm. The numerous members of the French aristocracy whom he fascinated may be accepted as competent witnesses on this point. The mingling of sense and spirit that pervades Rousseau, his pseudo-Platonism as I have called it elsewhere, is also a feminine rather than a masculine trait.

There is likewise something feminine in Rousseau’s preference for illusion. Illusion is the element in which woman even more than man would seem to live and move and have her being. It is feminine and also romantic to prefer to a world of sharp definition a world of magic and suggestiveness. W. Bagehot (it will be observed that in discussing this delicate topic I am prone to take refuge behind authorities) attributes the triumph of an art of shifting illusion over an art of clear and firm outlines to the growing influence of women.[102 - “If a poet wishes an atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style. … Women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art.” Essay on Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry (1864).] Woman’s being is to that of man, we are told, as is moonlight unto sunlight – and the moon is the romantic orb. The whole of German romance in particular is bathed in moonshine.[103 - “Die Romanze auf einem Pferde” utters the following lines in the Prologue to Tieck’s Kaiser Octavianus:Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht,Die den Sinn gefangen hält,Wundervolle MärchenweltSteig’ auf in der alten Pracht.A special study might be made of the rôle of the moon in Chateaubriand and Coleridge – even if one is not prepared like Carlyle to dismiss Coleridge’s philosophy as “bottled moonshine.”]

The objection of the classicist to the so-called enlightenment of the eighteenth century is that it did not have in it sufficient light. The primitivists on the contrary felt that it had too much light – that the light needed to be tempered by darkness. Even the moon is too effulgent for the author of “Hymns to the Night.” No movement has ever avowed more openly its partiality for the dim and the crepuscular. The German romanticists have been termed “twilight men.” What many of them admire in woman as in children and plants, is her unconsciousness and freedom from analysis – an admiration that is also a tribute in its way to the “night side” of nature.[104 - O. Walzel points out that as soon as the women in H. von Kleist’s plays become conscious they fall into error (Deutsche Romantik, 3. Auflage, 147).]

Discussions of the kind in which I have been indulging regarding the unlikeness of woman and man are very dreary unless one puts at least equal emphasis on their fundamental likeness. Woman, before being woman, is a human being and so subject to the same law as man. So far as men and women both take on the yoke of this law, they move towards a common centre. So far as they throw it off and live temperamentally, there tends to arise the most odious of all forms of warfare – that between the sexes. The dictates of the human law are only too likely to yield in the case of both men and women to the rush of outer impressions and the tumult of the desires within. This is what La Rochefoucauld means when he says that “the head is always the dupe of the heart.” Nevertheless feeling is even more likely to prevail over judgment in woman than it is in man. To be judicial indeed to the point of hardness and sternness has always been held to be unfeminine. It is almost woman’s prerogative to err on the side of sympathy. But even woman cannot be allowed to substitute sympathy for true conscience – that is for the principle of control. In basing conduct on feeling Rousseau may be said to have founded a new sophistry. The ancient sophist at least made man the measure of all things. By subordinating judgment to sensibility Rousseau may be said to have made woman the measure of all things.

The affirmation of a human law must ultimately rest on the perception of a something that is set above the flux upon which the flux itself depends – on what Aristotle terms an unmoved mover. Otherwise conscience becomes a part of the very flux and element of change it is supposed to control. In proportion as he escapes from outer control man must be conscious of some such unmoved mover if he is to oppose a definite aim or purpose to the indefinite expansion of his desires. Having some such firm centre he may hope to carry through to a fortunate conclusion the “civil war in the cave.” He may, as the wise are wont to express it, build himself an island in the midst of the flood. The romantic moralist, on the other hand, instead of building himself an island is simply drifting with the stream. For feeling not only shifts from man to man, it is continually shifting in the same man; so that morality becomes a matter of mood, and romanticism here as elsewhere might be defined as the despotism of mood. At the time of doing anything, says Mrs. Shelley, Shelley deemed himself right; and Rousseau says that in the act of abandoning his own children he felt “like a member of Plato’s republic.”

The man who makes self-expression and not self-control his primary endeavor becomes subject to every influence, “the very slave of circumstance and impulse borne by every breath.”[105 - Byron, Sardanapalus, IV, 5. Cf. Rousseau, Neuvième Promenade: “Dominé par mes sens, quoi que je puisse faire, je n’ai jamais pu résister à leurs impressions, et, tant que l’objet agit sur eux, mon cœur ne cesse d’en être affecté.” Cf. also Musset, Rolla:Ce n’était pas Rolla qui gouvernait sa vie,C’étaient ses passions; il les laissait allerComme un pâtre assoupi regarde l’eau couler.] This is what it means in practice no longer to keep a firm hand on the rudder of one’s personality, but to turn one’s self over to “nature.” The partisan of expression becomes the thrall of his impressions so that the whole Rousseauistic conception may be termed indifferently impressionistic or expressionistic. For the beautiful soul in order to express himself has to indulge his emotions instead of hardening and bracing them against the shock of circumstance. The very refinement of sensibility which constitutes in his own eyes his superiority to the philistine makes him quiver responsive to every outer influence; he finally becomes subject to changes in the weather, or in Rousseau’s own phrase, the “vile plaything of the atmosphere and seasons.”

This rapid shifting of mood in the romanticist, in response to inner impulse or outer impression, is almost too familiar to need illustration. Here is an example that may serve for a thousand from that life-long devotee of the great god Whim – Hector Berlioz. When at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille’s marriage to another. “In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die.” Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady’s maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets “two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum.” While awaiting the departure of the diligence he “rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog.” Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a “‘Ha’! so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller.” But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there “the twenty happiest days” of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

In this exaltation of environmental influences one should note again the coöperation of Rousseauist and Baconian, of emotional and scientific naturalist. Both are prone to look upon man as being made by natural forces and not as making himself. To deal with the substitutes that Rousseauist and Baconian have proposed for traditional morality, is in fact to make a study of the varieties – and they are numerous – of naturalistic fatalism. The upshot of the whole movement is to discredit moral effort on the part of the individual. Why should a man believe in the efficacy of this effort, why should he struggle to acquire character if he is convinced that he is being moulded like putty by influences beyond his control – the influence of climate, for example? Both science and romanticism have vied with one another in making of man a mere stop on which Nature may play what tune she will. The Æolian harp enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a romantic symbol. The man of science for his part is ready to draw up statistical tables showing what season of the year is most productive of suicide and what type of weather impels bank-cashiers most irresistibly to embezzlement. A man on a mountain top, according to Rousseau, enjoys not only physical but spiritual elevation, and when he descends to the plain the altitude of his mind declines with that of his body. Ruskin’s soul, says C. E. Norton, “was like an Æolian harp, its strings quivering musically in serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might break the sounding board itself.” It is not surprising Ruskin makes other men as subject to “skyey influences” as himself. “The mountains of the earth are,” he says, “its natural cathedrals. True religion can scarcely be achieved away from them. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr’s passion.” The corruptions of Romanism “are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy.”[106 - Modern Painters, Part V, ch. XX.]

Is then the Rousseauist totally unable to regulate his impressions? It is plain that he cannot control them from within because the whole idea of a vital control of this kind is, as we have seen, foreign to the psychology of the beautiful soul. Yet it is, according to Rousseau, possible to base morality on the senses – on outer perception that is – and at the same time get the equivalent of a free-will based on inner perception. He was so much interested in this subject that he had planned to devote to it a whole treatise to be entitled “Sensitive morality or the materialism of the sage.” A man cannot resist an outer impression but he may at least get out of its way and put himself in the way of another impression that will impel him to the desired course of conduct. “The soul may then be put or maintained in the state most favorable to virtue.” “Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, rest, everything, acts on our physical frame.” By a proper adjustment of all these outer elements we may govern in their origins the feelings by which we allow ourselves to be dominated.[107 - Confessions, Pt. II, Livre IX (1756).]

Rousseau’s ideas about sensitive morality are at once highly chimerical and highly significant. Here as elsewhere one may say with Amiel that nothing of Rousseau has been lost. His point of view has an inner kinship with that of the man of science who asserts that man is necessarily the product of natural forces, but that one may at least modify the natural forces. For example, moral effort on the part of the individual cannot overcome heredity. It is possible, however, by schemes of eugenics to regulate heredity. The uneasy burden of moral responsibility is thus lifted from the individual, and the moralist in the old-fashioned sense is invited to abdicate in favor of the biologist. It would be easy enough to trace similar assumptions in the various forms of socialism and other “isms” almost innumerable of the present hour.

Perhaps the problem to which I have already alluded may as well be faced here. How does it happen that Rousseau who attacked both science and literature as the chief sources of human degeneracy should be an arch-æsthete, the authentic ancestor of the school of art for art’s sake and at the same time by his sensitive (or æsthetic) morality play into the hands of the scientific determinist? If one is to enter deeply into the modern movement one needs to consider both wherein scientific and emotional naturalists clash and wherein they agree. The two types of naturalists agree in their virtual denial of a superrational realm. They clash above all in their attitude towards what is on the rational level. The scientific naturalist is assiduously analytical. Rousseau, on the other hand, or rather one whole side of Rousseau, is hostile to analysis. The arts and sciences are attacked because they are the product of reflection. “The man who reflects is a depraved animal,” because he has fallen away from the primitive spontaneous unity of his being. Rousseau is the first of the great anti-intellectualists. By assailing both rationalism and pseudo-classic decorum in the name of instinct and emotion he appealed to men’s longing to get away from the secondary and the derivative to the immediate. True decorum satisfies the craving for immediacy because it contains within itself an element of superrational perception. The “reason” of a Plato or an Aristotle also satisfies the craving for immediacy because it likewise contains within itself an element of superrational perception. A reason or a decorum of this kind ministers to another deep need of human nature – the need to lose itself in a larger whole. Once eliminate the superrational perception and reason sinks to the level of rationalism, consciousness becomes mere self-consciousness. It is difficult, as St. Evremond said, for man to remain in the long run in this doubtful middle state. Having lost the unity of insight, he will long for the unity of instinct. Hence the paradox that this most self-conscious of all movements is filled with the praise of the unconscious. It abounds in persons who, like Walt Whitman, would turn and live with the animals, or who, like Novalis, would fain strike root into the earth with the plant. Animals[108 - With nature never do they wageA foolish strife; they seeA happy youth and their old ageIs beautiful and free.Wordsworth: The Fountain.] and plants are not engaged in any moral struggle, they are not inwardly divided against themselves.

Here is the source of the opposition between the abstract and analytical head, deadly to the sense of unity, and the warm immediate heart that unifies life with the aid of the imagination – an opposition that assumes so many forms from Rousseau to Bergson. The Rousseauist always betrays himself by arraigning in some form or other, “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” One should indeed remember that there were obscurantists before Rousseau. Pascal also arrays the heart against the head; but his heart is at the farthest remove from that of Rousseau; it stands for a superrational perception. Christians like Pascal may indulge with comparative impunity in a certain amount of obscurantism. For they have submitted to a tradition that supplies them with distinctions between good and evil and at the same time controls their imagination. But for the individualist who has broken with tradition to deny his head in the name of his heart is a deadly peril. He above all persons should insist that the power by which we multiply distinctions, though secondary, is not false – that the intellect, of however little avail in itself, is invaluable when working in coöperation with the imagination in the service of either inner or outer perception. It is only through the analytical head and its keen discriminations that the individualist can determine whether the unity and infinitude towards which his imagination is reaching (and it is only through the imagination that one can have the sense of unity and infinitude) is real or merely chimerical. Need I add that in making these distinctions between imagination, intellect, feeling, etc., I am not attempting to divide man up into more or less watertight compartments, into hard and fast “faculties,” but merely to express, however imperfectly, certain obscure and profound facts of experience?

The varieties of what one may term the rationalistic error, of the endeavor of the intellect to emancipate itself from perception and set up as an independent power, are numerous. The variety that was perhaps formerly most familiar was that of the theologian who sought to formulate intellectually what must ever transcend formulation. The forms of the rationalistic error that concern our present subject can be traced back for the most part to Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, and are indeed implicit in his famous identification of thought and being (Je pense, donc je suis). The dogmatic and arrogant rationalism that denies both what is above and what is below itself, both the realm of awe and the realm of wonder, which prevailed among the Cartesians of the Enlightenment, combined, as I have said, with pseudo-classic decorum to produce that sense of confinement and smugness against which the original genius protested. Man will always crave a view of life to which perception lends immediacy and the imagination infinitude. A view of life like that of the eighteenth century that reduces unduly the rôle of both imagination and perception will always seem to him unvital and mechanical. “The Bounded,” says Blake, “is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a Universe would soon become a Mill with complicated wheels.”

The mechanizing of life against which the romanticist protested may as I said be largely associated with the influence of Descartes. It is not however the whole truth about Descartes to say that he forgot the purely instrumental rôle of the intellect and encouraged it to set up as an independent power. As a matter of fact he also used the intellect as an instrument in the service of outer perception. Taking as his point of departure the precise observations that science was accumulating, he sought to formulate mathematically the natural law. Now the more one reduces nature to a problem of space and movement, the more one is enabled to measure nature; and the method of exact measurement may be justified, if not on metaphysical, at least on practical grounds. It helps one, if not to understand natural forces, at least to control them. It thereby increases man’s power and ministers to utility. In a word, the intellect when thus pressed into the service of outer perception makes for material efficiency. In a sense science becomes scientific only in proportion as it neglects the qualitative differences between phenomena, e.g. between light and sound, and treats them solely from the point of view of quantity. But the penalty that science pays for this quantitative method is a heavy one. The farther it gets away from the warm immediacy of perception the less real it becomes; for that only is real to a man that he immediately perceives. Perfectly pure science tends to become a series of abstract mathematical formulæ without any real content. By his resort to such a method, the man of science is in constant danger of becoming a mere rationalist. At bottom he is ignorant of the reality that lies behind natural phenomena; he must even be ignorant of it, for it lays hold upon the infinite, and so must elude a finite being like man. But the desire to conceal his own ignorance from himself and others, the secret push for power and prestige that lies deep down in the breast of the man of science as in that of every other man, impels him to attach an independent value to the operations of the intellect that have only an instrumental value in the service of outer perception and to conceive that he has locked up physical nature in his formulæ. The man of science thus falls victim to a special form of metaphysical illusion. The gravity of the error of the scientific intellectualist is multiplied tenfold when he conceives that his formulæ cover not merely the natural law but the human law as well, when he strives, like Taine, to convert man himself into a “walking theorem,” a “living geometry.” This denial of every form of spontaneity was rightly felt by the romanticists to be intolerable.

Goethe contrasts the smug satisfaction of Wagner in his dead formulæ that give only what is external and secondary, with Faust’s fierce craving for immediacy and therefore his impatience with an analysis that gives only the dry bones from which the vital breath has departed. Wagner is a philistine because he is not tormented by the thirst for the infinite. Faust, on the other hand, reaches out beyond the mere intellect towards the spirit that is behind the shows of nature, but this spirit appears to him and reduces him to despair by declaring that he is trying to grasp something that is not only infinite but alien to him. Instead of turning from this alien spirit to the spirit that is relevant to man, a spirit that sets bounds to every inordinate craving, including the inordinate craving for knowledge (libido sciendi), Faust gives himself to the devil in what was, in the time of the youthful Goethe, the newest fashion: he becomes a Rousseauist. Instead of striking into the ascending path of insight, he descends to the level of impulse. Seen from this level the power by which we multiply distinctions seems to him, as it was to seem later to Wordsworth, not merely secondary but false, and so definition yields to indiscriminate feeling (Gefühl ist alles). In general the Rousseauistic reply to the Cartesian attempt to identify thought and being is the identification of being with emotion (je sens donc je suis).

The Mephistopheles of Goethe has often been taken as a symbol of the iconoclastic and Voltairian side of the eighteenth century. The rationalists assailed the traditional forms that imply a superrational realm as mere “prejudice,” and, failing to find in insight a substitute for these discarded forms, they succumbed in turn to the emotionalists. A “reason” that is not grounded in insight will always seem to men intolerably cold and negative and will prove unable to withstand the assault of the primary passions. The reason of a Plato or an Aristotle is on a different footing altogether because, as I have said, it includes an element of inner perception. One may note here that the difficulties of the present subject arise in no small degree from the ambiguities that cluster about the word reason. It may not only mean the imaginative insight[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.] of a Plato and the abstract reasoning of a Descartes but is often employed by the classicist himself as a synonym of good sense. Good sense may be defined as a correct perception of the ordinary facts of life and of their relation to one another. It may be of very many grades, corresponding to the infinite diversity of the facts to be perceived. A man may evidently have good sense in dealing with one order of facts, and quite lack it in dealing with some different order of facts. As the result of long observation and experience of a multitude of minute relationships, of the facts that ordinarily follow one another or coexist in some particular field, a man’s knowledge of this field becomes at last, as it were, automatic and unconscious. A sea captain for example acquires at last an intuitive knowledge of the weather, the broker, an intuitive knowledge of stocks. The good sense or practical judgment of the sea captain in his particular calling and of the broker in his is likely to be greater than that of less experienced persons. One cannot, however, assert that a man’s good sense is always in strict ratio to his experience. Some persons seem to have an innate gift for seeing things as they are, others a gift equally innate for seeing things as they are not.

Again the field in which one displays one’s good sense or practical judgment may fall primarily under either the human law or the natural law, may belong in Aristotelian phrase to the domain either of the probable or of the necessary. To take a homely illustration, a man is free to choose the temperature of his bath, but only within the limits of natural necessity – in this case the temperature at which water freezes and that at which water boils. He will show his practical judgment by choosing water that is neither too hot nor too cold and this so far as he is concerned will be the golden mean. Here as elsewhere the golden mean is nothing mechanical, but may vary not only from individual to individual but in the same individual according to his age, the state of his health, etc. In determining what conforms to the golden mean or law of measure there must always be a mediation between the particular instance and the general principle, and it is here that intuition is indispensable. But even so there is a centre of normal human experience, and the person who is too far removed from it ceases to be probable. Aged persons may exist who find bathing in ice-water beneficial, but they are not representative. Now creative art, in distinct ratio to its dignity, deals not with what may happen in isolated cases but with what happens according to probability or necessity. It is this preoccupation with the universal that as Aristotle says makes poetry a more serious and philosophical thing than history. There enters indeed into true art an element of vital novelty and surprise. But the more cultivated the audience to which the creator addresses himself the more will it insist that the surprise be not won at the expense of motivation. It will demand that characters and incidents be not freakish, not too remote from the facts that normally follow one another or coexist, whether in nature or human nature. One needs, in short, to deal with both art and life from some ethical centre. The centre with reference to which one has good sense may be only the ethos of one’s time and country, but if one’s good sense has, as in the case of the great poets, the support of the imagination, it may pass beyond to something more abiding. “Of Pope’s intellectual character,” says Dr. Johnson, “the constituent and fundamental principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception of consonance and propriety. He saw immediately of his own conceptions what was to be chosen, and what to be rejected.” One may grant all this and at the same time feel the difference between the “reason” of a Pope and the reason of a Sophocles.

Good sense of the kind Dr. Johnson describes and decorum are not strictly speaking synonymous. To be decorous not only must one have a correct perception of what to do, but one must actually be able to do it; and this often requires a long and difficult training. We have seen that Rousseau’s spite against eighteenth-century Paris was largely due to the fact that he had not acquired young enough the habits that would have made it possible for him to conform to its convention. “I affected,” says Rousseau with singular candor, “to despise the politeness I did not know how to practice.” As a matter of fact he had never adjusted himself to the decorum and good sense of any community. His attitude towards life was fundamentally Bohemian. But a person who was sensible and decorous according to the standards of some other country might have emphasized the differences between his good sense and decorum and the good sense and decorum of eighteenth-century Paris. The opponents of the traditional order in the eighteenth century were fond of introducing some Persian or Chinese to whom this order seemed no true order at all but only “prejudice” or “abuse.” The conclusion would seem to be that because the good sense and decorum of one time and country do not coincide exactly with those of another time and country, therefore good sense and decorum themselves have in them no universal element, and are entirely implicated in the shifting circumstances of time and place. But behind the ethos of any particular country, that of Greece, for instance, there are, as Antigone perceived, the “unwritten laws of heaven,” and something of this permanent order is sure to shine through even the most imperfect convention. Though no convention is final, though man and all he establishes are subject to the law of change, it is therefore an infinitely delicate and perilous task to break with convention. One can make this break only in favor of insight; which is much as if one should say that the only thing that may safely be opposed to common sense is a commoner sense, or if one prefers, a common sense that is becoming more and more imaginative. Even so, the wiser the man, one may surmise, the less likely he will be to indulge in a violent and theatrical rupture with his age, after the fashion of Rousseau. He will like Socrates remember the counsel of the Delphian oracle to follow the “usage of the city,”[110 - See Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 16, 3.] and while striving to gain a firmer hold upon the human law and to impose a more strenuous discipline upon his ordinary self, he will so far as possible conform to what he finds established. A student of the past cannot help being struck by the fact that men are found scattered through different times and countries and living under very different conventions who are nevertheless in virtue of their insight plainly moving towards a common centre. So much so that the best books of the world seem to have been written, as Emerson puts it, by one all-wise, all-seeing gentleman. A curious circumstance is that the writers who are most universal in virtue of their imaginative reason or inspired good sense, are likewise as a rule the writers who realized most intensely the life of their own age. No other Spanish writer, for example, has so much human appeal as Cervantes, and at the same time no other brings us so close to the heart of sixteenth-century Spain. In the writings attributed to Confucius one encounters, mixed up with much that is almost inconceivably remote from us, maxims that have not lost their validity to-day; maxims that are sure to be reaffirmed wherever and whenever men attain to the level of humanistic insight. In the oldest Buddhist documents again one finds along with a great deal that is very expressive of ancient India, and thus quite foreign to our idiosyncrasy, a good sense which is even more imaginative and inspired, and therefore more universal, than that of Confucius, and which is manifested, moreover, on the religious rather than on the humanistic level. We are dealing here with indubitable facts, and should plant ourselves firmly upon them as against those who would exaggerate either the constant or the variable elements in human nature.

Enough has been said to show the ambiguities involved in the word reason. Reason may mean the abstract and geometrical reason of a Descartes, it may mean simply good sense, which may itself exist in very many grades ranging from an intuitive mastery of some particular field to the intuitive mastery of the ethos of a whole age, like the reason of a Pope. Finally reason may be imaginative and be thereby enabled to go beyond the convention of a particular time and country, and lay hold in varying degrees on “the unwritten laws of heaven.” I have already traced in some measure the process by which reason in the eighteenth century had come to mean abstract and geometrical (or as one may say Cartesian) reason or else unimaginative good sense. Cartesian reason was on the one hand being pressed into the service of science and its special order of perceptions; on the other hand it was being used frequently in coöperation with an unimaginative good sense to attack the traditional forms that imply a realm of insight which is above both abstract reason and ordinary good sense. Men were emboldened to use reason in this way because they were flushed not only by the increasing mastery of man over nature through science, but by the positive and anti-traditional method through which this mastery had been won. Both those who proclaimed and those who denied a superrational realm were at least agreed in holding that the faith in any such realm was inseparable from certain traditional forms. Pascal, for example, held not only that insight in religion is annexed to the acceptance of certain dogmas – and this offended the new critical spirit – but furthermore that insight could exist even in the orthodox only by a special divine gift or grace, and this offended man’s reviving confidence in himself. People were ready to applaud when a Voltaire declared it was time to “take the side of human nature against this sublime misanthropist.” The insight into the law of decorum on which classicism must ultimately rest was in much the same way held to be inseparable from the Græco-Roman tradition; and so the nature of classical insight as a thing apart from any tradition tended to be obscured in the endless bickerings of ancients and moderns. The classical traditionalists, however, were less prone than the Christian traditionalists (Jansenists, Jesuits and Protestants) to weaken their cause still further by wrangling among themselves.

Inasmuch as both Christians and humanists failed to plant themselves on the fact of insight, the insight came more and more to be rejected along with the special forms from which it was deemed to be inseparable. As a result of this rejection “reason” was left to cope unaided with man’s impulses and expansive desires. Now Pascal saw rightly that the balance of power in such a conflict between reason and impulse was held by the imagination, and that if reason lacked the support of insight the imagination would side with the expansive desires and reason would succumb. Moreover the superrational insight, or “heart” as Pascal calls it, that can alone keep man from being thus overwhelmed, comes, as he holds, not through reason but through grace and is at times actually opposed to reason. (“The heart,” he says, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.”) Instead of protesting against the asceticism of this view as the true positivist would do, instead of insisting that reason and imagination may pull together harmoniously in the service of insight, the romantic moralist opposed to the superrational “heart” of the austere Christian a subrational “heart,” and this involved an attempt to base morality on the very element in human nature it is designed to restrain. The positivist will plant himself first of all on the fact of insight and will define it as the immediate perception of a something anterior to both thought and feeling, that is known practically as a power of control over both. The beautiful soul, as we have seen, has no place for any such power in his scheme of things, but hopes to satisfy all ethical elements simply by letting himself go. Rousseau (following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) transforms conscience itself from an inner check into an expansive emotion. While thus corrupting conscience in its very essence he does not deny conscience. On the contrary he grows positively rhapsodic over conscience and other similar words. “Rousseau took wisdom from men’s souls,” says Joubert, “by talking to them of virtue.” In short, Rousseau displays the usual dexterity of the sophist in juggling with ill-defined general terms. If one calls for sharp definition one is at once dismissed as a mere rationalist who is retreating into a false secondary power from a warm immediacy. The traditional distinctions regarding good and bad were thus discarded at the same time that discredit was cast on the keen analysis with which it would have been possible to build up new distinctions – all in favor of an indiscriminate emotionalism. This discomfiture of both tradition and analysis in the field of the human law would not have been so easy if at the same time man’s active attention and effort had not been concentrated more and more on the field of the natural law. In that field imagination and the analytical intellect were actually pulling together in the service of perception with the result that man was constantly gaining in power and utility. Emotional romanticists and scientific utilitarians have thus, in spite of their surface clashes, cooperated during the past century in the dehumanizing of man.

It is not enough to say of the representatives of both sides of this great naturalistic movement that they eliminate the veto power from human nature while continuing to use the old words, like virtue and conscience, that imply a veto power. We have seen that they actually attack the veto power as synonymous with evil. The devil is conceived as the spirit that always says no. A purely affirmative morality is almost necessarily an emotional morality. If there is no region of insight above the reason which is felt by the natural man as an element of vital control, and if cold reason, reason unsupported by insight, never has done anything illustrious, as Rousseau truly says, it follows that the only way to put driving power behind reason is to turn virtue into a passion, – a passion that differs from other passions merely in its greater imperiousness. For the beautiful soul virtue, as we have seen in the case of Robespierre, is not only a tender, imperious and voluptuous passion but even an intoxication. “I was, if not virtuous,” says Rousseau, “at least intoxicated with virtue.” In its extreme manifestations romantic morality is indeed only one aspect, and surely the most singular aspect, of the romantic cult of intoxication. No student of romanticism can fail to be struck by its pursuit of delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake. It is important to see how all these things are closely related to one another and how they all derive from the attempt to put life on an emotional basis. To rest conscience, for example, on emotion is to rest it on what is always changing, not only from man to man but from moment to moment in the same man. “If,” as Shelley says, “nought is, but that it feels itself to be,” it will feel itself to be very different things at different times. No part of man is exempt from the region of flux and change. There is, as James himself points out, a kinship between such a philosophy of pure motion and vertigo. Faust after all is only consistent when having identified the spirit that says no, which is the true voice of conscience, with the devil, he proceeds to dedicate himself to vertigo (dem Taumel weih’ ich mich). Rousseau also, as readers of the “Confessions” will remember, deliberately courted giddiness by gazing down on a waterfall from the brink of a precipice (making sure first that the railing on which he leaned was good and strong). This naturalistic dizziness became epidemic among the Greeks at the critical moment of their break with traditional standards. “Whirl is King,” cried Aristophanes, “having driven out Zeus.” The modern sophist is even more a votary of the god Whirl than the Greek, for he has added to the mobility of an intellect that has no support in either tradition or insight the mobility of feeling. Many Rousseauists were, like Hazlitt, attracted to the French Revolution by its “grand whirling movements.”

Even more significant than the cult of vertigo is the closely allied cult of intoxication. “Man being reasonable,” says Byron, with true Rousseauistic logic, “must therefore get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.” The subrational and impulsive self of the man who has got drunk is not only released from the surveillance of reason in any sense of the word, but his imagination is at the same tune set free from the limitations of the real. If many Rousseauists have been rightly accused of being “lovers of delirium,” that is because in delirium the fancy is especially free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras. To compose a poem, as Coleridge is supposed to have composed “Kubla Khan,” in an opium dream without any participation of his rational self is a triumph of romantic art. “I should have taken more opium when I wrote it,” said Friedrich Schlegel in explanation of the failure of his play “Alarcos.” What more specially concerns our present topic is the carrying over of this subrational “enthusiasm” into the field of ethical values, and this calls for certain careful distinctions. Genuine religion – whether genuine Christianity or genuine Buddhism – is plainly unfriendly in the highest degree to every form of intoxication. Buddhism, for example, not only prohibits the actual use of intoxicants but it pursues implacably all the subtler intoxications of the spirit. The attitude of the humanist towards intoxication is somewhat more complex. He recognizes how deep in man’s nature is the craving for some blunting of the sharp edge of his consciousness and at least a partial escape from reason and reality; and so he often makes a place on the recreative side of life for such moments of escape even if attained with the aid of wine. Dulce est desipere in loco. Pindar, who displays so often in his verse the high seriousness of the ethical imagination, is simply observing the decorum of the occasion when he celebrates in a song for the end of a feast “the time when the wearisome cares of men have vanished from their reasons and on a wide sea of golden wealth we are all alike voyaging to some visionary shore. He that is penniless is then rich, and even they that are wealthy find their hearts expanding, when they are smitten by the arrows of the vine.” The true Greek, one scarcely needs add, put his final emphasis, as befitted a child of Apollo, not on intoxication but on the law of measure and sobriety – on preserving the integrity of his mind, to render literally the Greek word for the virtue that he perhaps prized the most.[111 - Σωφροσύνη.] One must indeed remember that alongside the Apollonian element in Greek life is the orgiastic or Dyonisiac element. But when Euripides sides imaginatively with the frenzy of Dionysus, as he does in his “Bacchae,” though ostensibly preaching moderation, we may affirm that he is falling away from what is best in the spirit of Hellas and revealing a kinship with the votaries of the god Whirl. The cult of intoxication has as a matter of fact appeared in all times and places where men have sought to get the equivalent of religious vision and the sense of oneness that it brings without rising above the naturalistic level. True religious vision is a process of concentration, the result of the imposition of the veto power upon the expansive desires of the ordinary self. The various naturalistic simulations of this vision are, on the contrary, expansive, the result of a more or less complete escape from the veto power, whether won with the aid of intoxicants or not. The emotional romanticists from Rousseau down have left no doubt as to the type of vision they represented. Rousseau dilates with a sort of fellow feeling on the deep potations that went on in the taverns of patriarchal Geneva.[112 - See his Lettre à d’Alembert.] Renan looks with disfavor on those who are trying to diminish drunkenness among the common people. He merely asks that this drunkenness “be gentle, amiable, accompanied by moral sentiments.” Perhaps this side of the movement is best summed up in the following passage of William James: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”[113 - Varieties of Religious Experience, 387.]

The American distiller who named one of his brands “Golden Dream Whiskey” was evidently too modest. If an adept in the new psychology he might have set up as a pure idealist, as the opener up of an especially radiant pathway to the “truth.”

The primitivist then attacks sober discrimination as an obstacle both to warm immediacy of feeling and to unity. He tends to associate the emotional unity that he gains through intoxication with the unity of instinct which he so admires in the world of the subrational. “The romantic character,” says Ricarda Huch, “is more exposed to waste itself in debaucheries than any other; for only in intoxication, whether of love or wine, when the one half of its being, consciousness, is lulled to sleep, can it enjoy the bliss for which it envies every beast – the bliss of feeling itself one.”[114 - Blütezeit der Romantik, 126.] The desires of the animal, however, work within certain definite limits. They are not, like those of the primitivist, inordinate, the explanation being that they are less stimulated than the desires of the primitivist by the imagination. Even if he gets rid of intellect and moral effort, the primitivist cannot attain the unity of instinct because he remains too imaginative; at the same time he proclaims and proclaims rightly that the imagination is the great unifying power – the power that can alone save us from viewing things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.” We should attend carefully at this point for we are coming to the heart of the great romantic sophism. The Rousseauist does not attain to the unity of the man whose impulses and desires are controlled and disciplined to some ethical centre. He does not, in spite of all his praise of the unconscious and of the “sublime animals,” attain to the unity of instinct. In what sense then may he be said to attain unity? The obvious reply is that he attains unity only in dreamland. For the nature to which he would return, one cannot repeat too often, is nothing real, but a mere nostalgic straining of the imagination away from the real. It is only in dreamland that one can rest unity on the expansive forces of personality that actually divide not only one individual from another but the same individual from himself. It is only in dreamland that, in the absence of both inner and outer control, “all things” will “flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” Such a unity will be no more than a dream unity, even though one term it the ideal and sophisticate in its favor all the traditional terms of religion and morality. A question that forces itself at every stage upon the student of this movement is: What is the value of unity without reality? For two things are equally indubitable: first, that romanticism on the philosophical side, is a protest in the name of unity against the disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist; second, that what the primitivist wants in exchange for analysis is not reality but illusion. Rousseau who inclines like other æsthetes to identify the true with the beautiful was, we are told, wont to exclaim: “There is nothing beautiful save that which is not”; a saying to be matched with that of “La Nouvelle Héloïse”: “The land of chimeras is alone worthy of habitation.” Similar utterances might be multiplied from French, English, and German romanticists.[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).] To be sure, the word “reality” is perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain recent votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have promised us that if we surrender to the flux we shall have a “vision” not only of unity but also of reality; and so they have transferred to the cult of their divinity all the traditional language of religion.

We do not, however, need for the present to enter into a discussion as to the nature of reality, but simply to stick to strict psychological observation. From this point of view it is not hard to see that the primitivist makes his primary appeal not to man’s need for unity and reality but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this need is in his tale (“The Island”) of a ship’s crew that overpowered its officers and then set sail for Otaheite; what impelled these Arcadian mutineers was not the desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life with its rigid conventions, but

The wish – which ages have not yet subdued
In man – to have no master save his mood.

Now to have no master save one’s mood is to be wholly temperamental. In Arcadia – the ideal of romantic morality – those who are wholly temperamental unite in sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to consider more fully what this triumph of temperament means in the real world.

CHAPTER V

ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE REAL

The fundamental thing in Rousseauistic morality is not, as we have seen, the assertion that man is naturally good, but the denial of the “civil war in the cave.” Though this denial is not complete in Rousseau himself, nothing is more certain than that his whole tendency is away from this form of dualism. The beautiful soul does the right thing not as a result of effort, but spontaneously, unconsciously and almost inevitably. In fact the beautiful soul can scarcely be said to be a voluntary agent at all. “Nature” acts in him and for him. This minimizing of moral struggle and deliberation and choice, this drift towards a naturalistic fatalism, as it may be termed, is a far more significant thing in Rousseau than his optimism. One may as a matter of fact eliminate dualism in favor of nature and at the same time look on nature as evil. This is precisely what one is likely to do if one sees no alternative to temperamental living, while judging those who live temperamentally not by their “ideal,” that is by their feeling of their own loveliness, but by what they actually do. One will become a realist in the sense that came to be attached to this word during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rousseau himself is often realistic in this sense when he interrupts his Arcadian visions to tell us what actually occurred. In the “Confessions,” as I have said, passages that recall Lamartine alternate with passages that recall Zola, and the transition from one type of passage to the other is often disconcertingly sudden. In reading these realistic passages of Rousseau we are led to reflect that his “nature” is not, in practice, so remote from Taine’s nature as might at first appear. “What we call nature,” says Taine, “is this brood of secret passions, often maleficent, generally vulgar, always blind, which tremble and fret within us, ill-covered by the cloak of decency and reason under which we try to disguise them; we think we lead them and they lead us; we think our actions our own, they are theirs.”[116 - Lit. Ang., IV, 130.]

The transition from an optimistic to a pessimistic naturalism can be followed with special clearness in the stages by which the sentimental drama of the eighteenth century passes over into the realistic drama of a later period. Petit de Julleville contrasts the beginning and the end of this development as follows: “[In the eighteenth century] to please the public you had to say to it: ‘You are all at least at bottom good, virtuous, full of feeling. Let yourselves go, follow your instincts; listen to nature and you will do the right thing spontaneously.’ How changed times are! Nowadays[117 - About 1885.] any one who wishes to please, to be read and petted and admired, to pass for great and become very rich, should address men as follows: ‘You are a vile pack of rogues, and profligates, you have neither faith nor law; you are impelled by your instincts alone and these instincts are ignoble. Do not try though to mend matters, that would be of no use at all.’”[118 - Le Théâtre en France, 304.]

The connecting link between these different forms of the drama is naturalistic fatalism, the suppression of moral responsibility for either man’s goodness or badness. Strictly speaking, the intrusion of the naturalistic element into the realm of ethical values and the subversion by it of deliberation and choice and of the normal sequence of moral cause and effect is felt from the human point of view not as fate at all, but as chance. Emotional romanticism joins at this point with other forms of romanticism, which all show a proclivity to prefer to strict motivation, to probability in the Aristotelian sense, what is fortuitous and therefore wonderful. This is only another way of saying that the romanticist is moving away from the genuinely dramatic towards melodrama. Nothing is easier than to establish the connection between emotional romanticism and the prodigious efflorescence of melodrama, the irresponsible quest for thrills, that has marked the past century. What perhaps distinguishes this movement from any previous one is the attempt to invest what is at bottom a melodramatic view of life with philosophic and even religious significance. By suppressing the “civil war in the cave” one strikes at the very root of true drama. It does not then much matter from the dramatic point of view whether the burden of responsibility for good or evil of which you have relieved the individual is shifted upon “nature” or society. Shelley, for example, puts the blame for evil on society. “Prometheus Unbound,” in which he has developed his conception, is, judged as a play, only an ethereal melodrama. The unaccountable collapse of Zeus, a monster of unalloyed and unmotivated badness, is followed by the gushing forth in man of an equally unalloyed and unmotivated goodness. The whole genius of Hugo, again, as I have said in speaking of his use of antithesis, is melodramatic. His plays may be described as parvenu melodramas. They abound in every variety of startling contrast and strange happening, the whole pressed into the service of “problems” manifold and even of a philosophy of history. At the same time the poverty of ethical insight and true dramatic motivation is dissimulated under profuse lyrical outpourings and purple patches of local color. His Hernani actually glories in not being a responsible agent, but an “unchained and fatal force,”[119 - Je suis une force qui va!Agent aveugle et sourd de mystères funèbres.] and so more capable of striking astonishment into himself and others. Yet the admirers of Hugo would not only promote him to the first rank of poets, but would have us share his own belief that he is a seer and a prophet.

It may be objected that the great dramatists of the past exalt this power of fate and thus diminish moral responsibility. But the very sharpest distinction must be drawn between the subrational fate of the emotional romanticist and the superrational fate of Greek tragedy. The fate of Æschylean tragedy, for instance, so far from undermining moral responsibility rather reinforces it. It is felt to be the revelation of a moral order of which man’s experience at any particular moment is only an infinitesimal fragment. It does not seem, like the subrational fate of the emotional romanticist, the intrusion into the human realm of an alien power whether friendly or unfriendly. This point might be established by a study of the so-called fate drama in Germany (Schicksaltragödie), which, though blackly pessimistic, is closely related to the optimistic sentimental drama of the eighteenth century.[120 - E.g., Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) had a marked influence on the rise of the German fate tragedy.] The German fate drama is in its essence ignoble because its characters are specimens of sensitive morality – incapable, that is, of opposing a firm human purpose to inner impulse or outer impression. The fate that thus wells up from the depths of nature and overwhelms their wills is not only malign and ironical, but as Grillparzer says, makes human deeds seem only “throws of the dice in the blind night of chance.”[121 - Wo ist der, der sagen dürfe,So will ich’s, so sei’s gemacht,Unser Taten sind nur WürfeIn des Zufalls blinde Nacht.Die Ahnfrau.] It would be easy to follow similar conceptions of fate down through later literature at least to the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Some of the earlier exponents of the sentimental drama, like Diderot, were not so certain as one might expect that the discarding of traditional decorum in favor of “nature” would result practically in a reign of pure loveliness. At one moment Diderot urges men to get rid of the civil war in the cave in order that they may be Arcadian, like the savages of the South Sea, but at other moments – as in “Rameau’s Nephew” – he shows a somewhat closer grip on the problem of what will actually come to pass when a man throws off the conventions of a highly organized civilization and sets out to live temperamentally. Diderot sees clearly that he will be that least primitive of all beings, the Bohemian. Rameau’s nephew, in his irresponsibility and emotional instability, in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of his mood, anticipates all the romantic Bohemians and persons of “artistic temperament” who were to afflict the nineteenth century. But he is more than a mere æsthete. At moments we can discern in him the first lineaments of the superman, who knows no law save the law of might. One should recollect that the actual influence of Diderot in France fell in the second rather than in the first half of the nineteenth century – was upon the realists rather than upon the romanticists. The same men that had a cult for Diderot admired the Vautrins and the Rastignacs of Balzac and the Julien Sorel of Stendhal. These characters are little Napoleons. They live temperamentally in the midst of a highly organized society, but they set aside its conventions of right and wrong in favor, not of æsthetic enjoyment, but of power.

The ideal of romantic morality, as was seen in the last chapter, is altruism. The real, it should be clear from the examples I have been citing, is always egoism. But egoism may assume very different forms. As to the main forms of egoism in men who have repudiated outer control without acquiring self-control we may perhaps revive profitably the old Christian classification of the three lusts – the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. Goethe indeed may be said to have treated these three main ways of being temperamental in three of his early characters – the lust of knowledge in “Faust,” the lust of sensation in “Werther,” and the lust of power in “Götz.” If we view life solely from the naturalistic level and concern ourselves solely with the world of action, we are justified in neglecting, like Hobbes, the other lusts and putting supreme emphasis on the lust for power.[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.] Professor F.J. Mather, Jr., has distinguished between “hard” and “soft” sentimentalists.[123 - See Unpopular Review, October, 1915.] His distinction might perhaps be brought more closely into line with my own distinctions if I ventured to coin a word and to speak of hard and soft temperamentalists. The soft temperamentalist will prove unable to cope in the actual world with the hard temperamentalist, and is very likely to become his tool. Balzac has very appropriately made Lucien de Rubempré, the romantic poet and a perfect type of a soft temperamentalism, the tool of Vautrin, the superman.

Here indeed is the supreme opposition between the ideal and the real in romantic morality. The ideal to which Rousseau invites us is either the primitivistic anarchy of the “Second Discourse,” in which egoism is tempered by “natural pity,” or else a state such as is depicted in the “Social Contract,” in which egoism is held in check by a disinterested “general will.” The preliminary to achieving either of these ideals is that the traditional checks on human nature should be removed. But in exact proportion as this programme of emancipation is carried out what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but the ego and its fundamental will to power. Give a bootblack half the universe, according to Carlyle, and he will soon be quarreling with the owner of the other half. He will if he is a very temperamental bootblack. Perhaps indeed all other evils in life may be reduced to the failure to check that something in man that is reaching out for more and ever for more. In a society in which the traditional inhibitions are constantly growing weaker, the conflict I have just sketched between the ideal and the real is becoming more and more acute. The soft temperamentalists are overflowing with beautiful professions of brotherly love, and at the same time the hard temperamentalists are reaching out for everything in sight; and inasmuch as the hard temperamentalists operate not in dreamland, but in the real world, they are only too plainly setting the tone. Very often, of course, the same temperamentalist has his hard and his soft side. The triumph of egoism over altruism in the relations between man and man is even more evident in the relations between nation and nation. The egoism that results from the inbreeding of temperament on a national scale runs in the case of the strong nations into imperialism.[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.] We have not reflected sufficiently on the fact that the soft temperamentalist Rousseau is more than any other one person the father of Kultur;[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.] and that the exponents of Kultur in our own day have been revealed as the hardest of hard temperamentalists.

To understand the particular craving that is met by Rousseauistic idealism one would need to go with some care into the psychology of the half-educated man. The half-educated man may be defined as the man who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not sufficient to acquire the new standards that come with a more thorough cultivation. It was pointed out long ago that the characteristic of the half-educated man is that he is incurably restless; that he is filled with every manner of desire. In contrast with him the uncultivated man, the peasant, let us say, and the man of high cultivation have few and simple desires. Thus Socrates had fewer and simpler desires than the average Athenian. But what is most noteworthy about the half-educated man is not simply that he harbors many desires and is therefore incurably restless, but that these desires are so often incompatible. He craves various good things, but is not willing to pay the price – not willing to make the necessary renunciations. He pushes to an extreme what is after all a universal human proclivity – the wish to have one’s cake and eat it too. Thus, while remaining on the naturalistic level, he wishes to have blessings that accrue only to those who rise to the humanistic or religious levels. He wishes to live in “a universe with the lid off,” to borrow a happy phrase from the pragmatist, and at the same time to enjoy the peace and brotherhood that are the fruits of restraint. The moral indolence of the Rousseauist is such that he is unwilling to adjust himself to the truth of the human law; and though living naturalistically, he is loath to recognize that what actually prevails on the naturalistic level is the law of cunning and the law of force. He thus misses the reality of both the human and the natural law and in the pursuit of a vague Arcadian longing falls into sheer unreality. I am indeed overstating the case so far as Rousseau is concerned. He makes plain in the “Emile” that the true law of nature is not the law of love but the law of force. Emile is to be released from the discipline of the human law and given over to the discipline of nature; and this means in practice that he will have “to bow his neck beneath the hard yoke of physical necessity.” In so far the “nature” of Emile is no Arcadian dream. Where the Arcadian dreaming begins is when Rousseau assumes that an Emile who has learned the lesson of force from Nature herself, will not pass along this lesson to others, whether citizens of his own or some other country, but will rather display in his dealings with them an ideal fraternity. In the early stages of the naturalistic movement, in Hobbes and Shaftesbury, for example, egoism and altruism, the idea of power and the idea of sympathy, are more sharply contrasted than they are in Rousseau and the later romanticists. Shaftesbury assumes in human nature an altruistic impulse or will to brotherhood that will be able to cope successfully with the will to power that Hobbes declares to be fundamental. Many of the romanticists, as we have seen, combine the cult of power with the cult of brotherhood. Hercules, as in Shelley’s poem, is to bow down before Prometheus, the lover of mankind. The extreme example, however, is probably William Blake. He proclaims himself of the devil’s party, he glorifies a free expansion of energy, he looks upon everything that restricts this expansion as synonymous with evil. At the same time he pushes his exaltation of sympathy to the verge of the grotesque.[126 - A robin redbreast in a cagePuts all Heaven in a rage.…He who shall hurt the little wrenShall never be belov’d by men.He who the ox to wrath has mov’dShall never be by woman lov’d.…Kill not the moth nor butterfly,For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.Auguries of Innocence.]

Such indeed is the jumble of incompatibles in Blake that he would rest an illimitable compassion on the psychology of the superman. For nothing is more certain than that the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is among other things a fairly complete anticipation of Nietzsche. The reasons are worth considering why the idea of power and the idea of sympathy which Blake and so many other romanticists hoped to unite have once more come to seem antipodal, why in the late stages of the movement one finds a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy, just as in its early stages one finds a Hobbes and a Shaftesbury. It is plain, first of all, that what brought the two cults together for a time was their common hatred of the past. With the triumph over the past fairly complete, the incompatibility of power and sympathy became increasingly manifest. Nietzsche’s attitude is that of a Prometheus whose sympathy for mankind has changed to disgust on seeing the use that they are actually making of their emancipation. Humanitarian sympathy seemed to him to be tending not merely to a subversion, but to an inversion of values, to a positive preference for the trivial and the ignoble. He looked with special loathing on that side of the movement that is symbolized in its homage to the ass. The inevitable flying apart of power and sympathy was further hastened in Nietzsche and others by the progress of evolution. Darwinism was dissipating the Arcadian mist through which nature had been viewed by Rousseau and his early followers. The gap is wide between Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and claw” and the tender and pitiful nature of Wordsworth.[127 - See Hart-Leap Well.] Nietzsche’s preaching of ruthlessness is therefore a protest against the sheer unreality of those who wish to be natural and at the same time sympathetic. But how are we to get a real scale of values to oppose to an indiscriminate sympathy? It is here that Nietzsche shows that he is caught in the same fatal coil of naturalism as the humanitarian. He accepts the naturalistic corruption of conscience which underlies all other naturalistic corruptions. “The will to overcome an emotion,” he says, “is ultimately only the will of another or of several other emotions.”[128 - Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.] All he can do with this conception of conscience is to set over against the humanitarian suppression of values a scale of values based on force and not a true scale of values based on the degree to which one imposes or fails to impose on one’s temperamental self a human law of vital control. The opposition between a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy is therefore not specially significant; it is only that between the hard and the soft temperamentalist. To be sure Nietzsche can on occasion speak very shrewdly about the evils that have resulted from temperamentalism – especially from the passion for an untrammeled self-expression. But the superman himself is a most authentic descendant of the original genius in whom we first saw this passion dominant. The imagination of the superman, spurning every centre of control, traditional or otherwise, so coöperates with his impulses and desires as to give them “infinitude,” that is so as to make them reach out for more and ever for more. The result is a frenzied romanticism.[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.)]

“Proportionateness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves,” says Nietzsche. “Our itching is really the itching for the infinite, the immeasurable.” How the humanitarian loses proportionateness is plain; it is by his readiness to sacrifice to sympathy the ninety per cent or so of the virtues that imply self-control. The superman would scarcely seem to redress the balance by getting rid of the same restraining virtues in favor of power. He simply oscillates wildly from the excess of which he is conscious in others or in himself into the opposite excess, at imminent peril in either case to the ethical basis of civilization. The patterns or models that the past had set up for imitation and with reference to which one might rein in his lusts and impose upon them proportionateness are rejected by every type of romantic expansionist, not only as Nietzsche says, because they do not satisfy the yearning for the infinite, but also, as we have seen, because they do not satisfy the yearning for unity and immediacy. Now so far as the forms of the eighteenth century were concerned the romantic expansionist had legitimate grounds for protest. But because the rationalism and artificial decorum of that period failed to satisfy, he goes on to attack the analytical intellect and decorum in general and this attack is entirely illegitimate. It may be affirmed on the contrary that the power by which we multiply distinctions is never so necessary as in an individualistic age, an age that has broken with tradition on the ground that it wishes to be more imaginative and immediate. There are various ways of being imaginative and immediate, and analysis is needed, not to build up some abstract system but to discriminate between the actual data of experience and so to determine which one of these ways it is expedient to follow if one wishes to become wise and happy. It is precisely at such moments of individualistic break with the past that the sophist stands ready to juggle with general terms, and the only protection against such juggling is to define these terms with the aid of the most unflinching analysis. Thus Bergson would have us believe that there are in France two main types of philosophy, a rationalistic type that goes back to Descartes and an intuitive type that goes back to Pascal,[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.] and gives us to understand that, inasmuch as he is an intuitionist, he is in the line of descent from Pascal. Monstrous sophistries lurk in this simple assertion, sophistries which if they go uncorrected are enough to wreck civilization. The only remedy is to define the word intuition, to discriminate practically and by their fruits between subrational and superrational intuition. When analyzed and defined in this way subrational intuition will be found to be associated with vital impulse (élan vital) and superrational intuition with a power of vital control (frein vital) over this impulse; and furthermore it will be clear that this control must be exercised if men are to be drawn towards a common centre, not in dreamland, but in the real world. So far then from its being true that the man who analyzes must needs see things in disconnection dead and spiritless, it is only by analysis that he is, in an individualistic age, put on the pathway of true unity, and also of the rôle of the imagination in achieving this unity. For there is need to discriminate between the different types of imagination no less than between the different types of intuition. One will find through such analysis that the centre of normal human experience that is to serve as a check on impulse (so far at least as it is something distinct from the mere convention of one’s age and time) can be apprehended only with the aid of the imagination. This is only another way of saying that the reality that is set above one’s ordinary self is not a fixed absolute but can be glimpsed, if at all, only through a veil of illusion and is indeed inseparable from the illusion. This realm of insight cannot be finally formulated for the simple reason that it is anterior to formulæ. It must therefore from the point of view of an intellect it transcends seem infinite though in a very different sense from the outer infinite of expansive desire.

This inner or human infinite, so far from being incompatible with decorum, is the source of true decorum. True decorum is only the pulling back and disciplining of impulse to the proportionateness that has been perceived with the aid of what one may term the ethical or generalizing imagination. To dismiss like the romantic expansionist everything that limits or restricts the lust of knowledge or of power or of sensation as arbitrary and artificial is to miss true decorum and at the same time to sink, as a Greek would say, from ethos to pathos. If one is to avoid this error one must, as Hamlet counsels, “in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion, acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” This is probably the best of all modern definitions of decorum simply because it is the most experimental. In general all that has been said about the ethical imagination is not to be taken as a fine-spun theory, but as an attempt however imperfect to give an account of actual experience.

One may report from observation another trait of truly ethical art, art which is at once imaginative and decorous. It is not merely intense, as art that is imaginative at the expense of decorum may very well be,[131 - Cf. Tennyson:Fantastic beauty, such as lurksIn some wild poet when he worksWithout a conscience or an aim —] it has a restrained and humanized intensity – intensity on a background of calm. The presence of the ethical imagination whether in art or life[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.] is always known as an element of calm.

In art that has the ethical quality, and I am again not setting up a metaphysical theory but reporting from observation, the calm that comes from imaginative insight into the universal is inextricably blended with an element of uniqueness – with a something that belongs to a particular time and place and individual. The truth to the universal, as Aristotle would say, gives the work verisimilitude and the truth to the particular satisfies man’s deep-seated craving for novelty; so that the best art unites the probable with the wonderful. But the probable, one cannot insist too often, is won no less than the wonderful with the aid of the imagination and so is of the very soul of art. The romanticist who is ready to sacrifice the probable to the wonderful and to look on the whole demand for verisimilitude as an academic superstition is prone to assume that he has a monopoly of soul and imagination. But the word soul is at least in as much need of Socratic definition as the word intuition. It is possible, for example, with the aid of the ethical imagination so to partake of the ultimate element of calm as to rise to the religious level. The man who has risen to this level has a soul, but it is a soul of peace. Both soul and imagination are also needed to achieve the fine adjustment and mediation of the humanist. It is not enough, however, to have a religious or a humanistic soul if one is to be a creator or even a fully equipped critic of art. For art rests primarily not on ethical but æsthetic perception. This perception itself varies widely according to the art involved. One may, for instance, be musically perceptive and at the same time lack poetic perception. To be a creator in any art one must possess furthermore the technique of this art – something that is more or less separable from its “soul” in any sense of the word. It is possible to put a wildly romantic soul into art, as has often been done in the Far East, and at the same time to be highly conventional or traditional in one’s technique. Writers like Mérimée, Renan, and Maupassant again are faithful in the main to the technique of French prose that was worked out during the classical period, but combine with this technique an utterly unclassical “soul.”