Rousseau and Romanticism

Any study of this topic must evidently turn on the question how far at different times and by different schools of thought the realm of man and the realm of nature (as Byron uses the word) have been separated and in what way, and also how far they have been run together and in what way. For there may be different ways of running together man and nature. Ruskin’s phrase the “pathetic fallacy” is unsatisfactory because it fails to recognize this fact. The man who is guilty of the pathetic fallacy sees in nature emotions that are not really there but only in himself. Extreme examples of this confusion abound in Ruskin’s own writings. Now the ancients also ran man and nature together, but in an entirely different way. The Greek we are told never saw the oak tree without at the same time seeing the dryad. There is in this and similar associations a sort of overflow of the human realm upon the forms of outer nature whereas the Rousseauist instead of bestowing imaginatively upon the oak tree a conscious life and an image akin to his own and so lifting it up to his level, would, if he could, become an oak tree and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity. The Greek, one may say, humanized nature; the Rousseauist naturalizes man. Rousseau’s great discovery was revery; and revery is just this imaginative melting of man into outer nature. If the ancients failed to develop in a marked degree this art of revery, it was not because they lacked naturalists. Both Stoics and Epicureans, the two main varieties of naturalists with which classical antiquity was familiar, inclined to affirm the ultimate identity of the human and the natural order. But both Stoics and Epicureans would have found it hard to understand the indifference to the intellect and its activities that Rousseauistic revery implies. The Stoics to be sure employed the intellect on an impossible and disheartening task – that of founding on the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. The Epicureans remind one rather in much of their intellectual activity of the modern man of science. But the Epicurean was less prone than the man of science to look on man as the mere passive creature of environment. The views of the man of science about the springs of conduct often seem to coincide rather closely with those of Rousseau about “sensitive morality.” Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire says that when reclining on the banks of the Nile he felt awakening within himself the instincts of the crocodile. The point of view is Rousseauistic perhaps rather than genuinely scientific. An Epicurus or a Lucretius would, we are probably safe in assuming, have been disquieted by any such surrender to the subrational, by any such encroachment of the powers of the unconscious upon conscious control.

It is hard as a matter of fact to find in the ancients anything resembling Rousseauistic revery, even when they yield to the pastoral mood. Nature interests them as a rule less for its own sake than as a background for human action; and when they are concerned primarily with nature, it is a nature that has been acted upon by man. They have a positive shrinking from wild and uncultivated nature. “The green pastures and golden slopes of England,” says Lowell, “are sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye that the hand of man has immemorially cared for and caressed them.” This is an attitude towards nature that an ancient would have understood perfectly. One may indeed call it the Virgilian attitude from the ancient who has perhaps expressed it most happily. The man who lives in the grand manner may indeed wish to impose on nature some of the fine proportion and symmetry of which he is conscious in himself and he may then from our modern point of view carry the humanizing of nature too far. “Let us sing of woods,” says Virgil, “but let the woods be worthy of a consul.” This line has sometimes been taken to be a prophecy of the Park of Versailles. We may sympathize up to a certain point with the desire to introduce a human symmetry into nature (such as appears, for instance, in the Italian garden), but the peril is even greater here than elsewhere of confounding the requirements of a real with those of an artificial decorum. I have already mentioned the neo-classicist who complained that the stars in heaven were not arranged in sufficiently symmetrical patterns.

What has been said should make clear that though both humanist and Rousseauist associate man with nature it is in very different ways, and that there is therefore an ambiguity in the expression “pathetic fallacy.” It remains to show that men may not only associate themselves with nature in different ways but that they may likewise differ in their ways of asserting man’s separateness from nature. The chief distinction to be made here is that between the humanist and the supernaturalist. Some sense of the gap between man and the “outworld” is almost inevitable and forces itself at times even upon those most naturalistically inclined:

Nor will I praise a cloud however bright,
Disparaging Man’s gifts and proper food —
Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
Though clad in colors beautiful and pure,
Find in the heart of man no natural home.[193 - Wordsworth: Miscellaneous Sonnets, XII.]

The Wordsworth who speaks here is scarcely the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey or the Wordsworth whose “daily teachers had been woods and rills.” He reminds us rather of Socrates who gave as his reason for going so rarely into the country, delightful as he found it when once there, that he did not learn from woods and rills but from the “men in the cities.” This sense of the separateness of the human and the natural realm may be carried much further – to a point where an ascetic distrust of nature begins to appear. Something of this ascetic distrust is seen for example in the following lines from Cardinal Newman:

There strayed awhile amid the woods of Dart
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart
To streamlet bright or soft secluded grove.[194 - In much the same spirit the Japanese hermit, Kamo Chōmei (thirteenth century), expresses the fear that he may forget Buddha because of his fondness for the mountains and the moon. – See article on nature in Japan by M. Revon in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.]

The origins of this latter attitude towards nature are to be sought in mediæval Christianity rather than in classical antiquity. No man who knows the facts would assert for a moment that the man of the Middle Ages was incapable of looking on nature with other feelings than those of ascetic distrust. It is none the less true that the man of the Middle Ages often saw in nature not merely something alien but a positive temptation and peril of the spirit. In his attitude towards nature as in other respects Petrarch is usually accounted the first modern. He did what no man of the mediæval period is supposed to have done before him, or indeed what scarcely any man of classical antiquity did: he ascended a mountain out of sheer curiosity and simply to enjoy the prospect. But those who tell of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux sometimes forget to add that the passage of Saint Augustine[195 - Confessions, Bk. X, ch. IX.] that occurred to him at the top reflects the distrust of the more austere Christian towards the whole natural order. Petrarch is at once more ascetic and more romantic in his attitude towards nature than the Greek or Roman.

Traces of Petrarch’s taste for solitary and even for wild nature are to be found throughout the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. But the recoil from supernaturalism that took place at this time led rather, as I have remarked, to a revival of the Græco-Roman humanism with something more of artifice and convention, and to an even more marked preference[196 - Cf. Cicero: “Urbem, urbem, mi Rufe, cole et in ista luce vive.” (Ad Fam., II, 22.)] of the town to the country. An age that aims first of all at urbanity must necessarily be more urban than rural in its predilections. It was a sort of condescension for the neo-classical humanist to turn from the central model he was imitating to mere unadorned nature, and even then he felt that he must be careful not to condescend too far. Even when writing pastorals he was warned by Scaliger to avoid details that are too redolent of the real country; he should indulge at most in an “urbane rusticity.” Wild nature the neo-classicist finds simply repellent. Mountains he looks upon as “earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The Alps were regarded as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the plains of Lombardy. “At last,” says a German traveller of the seventeenth century, “we left the horrible and wearisome mountains and the beautiful flat landscape was joyfully welcomed.” The taste for mountain scenery is associated no doubt to some extent, as has been suggested, with the increasing ease and comfort of travel that has come with the progress of the utilitarian movement. It is scarcely necessary to point the contrast between the Switzerland of which Evelyn tells in his diary[197 - March 23, 1646.] and the Switzerland in which one may go by funicular to the top of the Jungfrau.

Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less trimness in nature and human nature were not it is true entirely without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting – as the very word picturesque testifies – for the encouragement they failed to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed like a picture[198 - It was especially easy for the poets to go for their landscapes to the painters because according to the current theory poetry was itself a form of painting (ut pictura poesis). Thus Thomson writes in The Castle of Indolence:Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls,Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise,Or autumn’s varied shades embrown the walls:Now the black tempest strikes the astonish’d eyes;Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;The trembling sun now plays o’er ocean blue,And now rude mountains frown amid the skies;Whate’er Lorrain light touch’d with softening hue,Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.(C. I, st. 38.)] and it might be not merely irregular but savage if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. This association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the style of Le Nôtre.[199 - Disparaissez, monuments du génie,Pares, jardins immortels, que Le Nôtre a plantés;De vos dehors pompeux l’exacte symmétrie,Etonne vainement mes regards attristés.J’aime bien mieux ce désordre bizarre,Et la variété de ces riches tableauxQue disperse l’Anglais d’une main moins avare.Bertin, 19e Elégie of Les Amours.] As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry, nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle Héloïse.”[200 - Pt. IV, Lettre XI.] Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path, and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so plentifully supplied by the Revolution.

Rousseau himself, it should hardly be necessary to say, stands for far more than an artificial wildness. Instead of imposing decorum on nature like the neo-classicist, he preached constantly the elimination of decorum from man. Man should flee from that “false taste for grandeur which is not made for him” and which “poisons his pleasures,”[201 - Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. IV, Lettre XI.] to nature. Now “it is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent charms.”[202 - Ibid.] The man of feeling finds the savage and deserted nook filled with beauties that seem horrible to the mere worldling.[203 - Ibid., Pt. IV, Lettre XVII.] Rousseau indeed did not crave the ultimate degree of wildness even in the Alps. He did not get beyond what one may term the middle zone of Alpine scenery – scenery that may be found around the shores of Lake Leman. He was inclined to find the most appropriate setting for the earthly paradise in the neighborhood of Vevey. Moreover, others about the same time and more or less independently of his influence were opposing an even more primitive nature to the artificialities of civilization. The mountains of “Ossian” are, as has been said, mere blurs, yet the new delight in mountains is due in no small measure throughout Europe to the Ossianic influence.

The instinct for getting away from the beaten track, for exploration and discovery, has of course been highly developed at other epochs, notably at the Renaissance. Much of the romantic interest in the wild and waste places of the earth did not go much beyond what might have been felt in Elizabethan England. Many of the Rousseauists, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand for example, not only read eagerly the older books of travel but often the same books. The fascination of penetrating to regions “where foot of man hath ne’er or rarely been,” is perennial. It was my privilege a few years ago to listen to Sir Ernest Shackleton speak of his expedition across the Antarctic continent and of the thrill that he and the members of his party felt when they saw rising before them day after day mountain peaks that no human eye had ever gazed upon. The emotion was no doubt very similar to that of “stout Cortez” when he first “stared at the Pacific.” Chateaubriand must have looked forward to similar emotions when he planned his trip to North America in search of the North West Passage. But the passion for actual exploration which is a form of the romanticism of action is very subordinate in the case of Chateaubriand to emotional romanticism. He went into the wilderness first of all not to make actual discoveries but to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint, and at the same time to practice the new art of revery. His sentiments on getting into what was then the virgin forest to the west of Albany were very different we may assume from those of the early pioneers of America. “When,” he says, “after passing the Mohawk I entered woods which had never felt the axe, I was seized by a sort of intoxication of independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad.” The disillusion that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his first savages – a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat, drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”

In America, as elsewhere, Chateaubriand’s chief concern is not with any outer fact or activity, but with his own emotions and the enhancement of these emotions by his imagination. In him as in many other romanticists the different elements of Rousseauism – Arcadian longing, the pursuit of the dream woman, the aspiration towards the “infinite” (often identified with God) – appear at times more or less separately and then again almost inextricably blended with one another and with the cult of nature. It may be well to consider more in detail these various elements of Rousseauism and their relation to nature in about the order I have mentioned. The association of Arcadian longing with nature is in part an outcome of the conflict between the ideal and the real. The romantic idealist finds that men do not understand him: his “vision” is mocked and his “genius” is unrecognized. The result is the type of sentimental misanthropy of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter. He feels, as Lamartine says, that there is nothing in common between the world and him. Lamartine adds, however, “But nature is there who invites you and loves you.” You will find in her the comprehension and companionship that you have failed to find in society. And nature will seem a perfect companion to the Rousseauist in direct proportion as she is uncontaminated by the presence of man. Wordsworth has described the misanthropy that supervened in many people on the collapse of the revolutionary idealism. He himself overcame it, though there is more than a suggestion in the manner of his own retirement into the hills of a man who retreats into an Arcadian dream from actual defeat. The suggestion of defeat is much stronger in Ruskin’s similar retirement. Ruskin doubtless felt in later life, like Rousseau, that if he had failed to get on with men “it was less his fault than theirs.”[204 - Confessions, Livre V (1732).] Perhaps emotional misanthropy and the worship of wild nature are nowhere more fully combined than in Byron. He gives magnificent expression to the most untenable of paradoxes – that one escapes from solitude by eschewing human haunts in favor of some wilderness.[205 - See especially Childe Harold, canto II, XXV ff.] In these haunts, he says, he became like a “falcon with clipped wing,” but found in nature the kindest of mothers.

Oh! she is fairest in her features wild,
Where nothing polished dare pollute her path:
To me by day or night she ever smiled
Though I have marked her when none other hath
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.[206 - Ibid., canto II, XXXVII.]

He not only finds companionship in nature but at the same time partakes of her infinitude – an infinitude, one should note, of feeling:

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.[207 - Ibid., canto III, LXXII.]

In his less misanthropic moods the Rousseauist sees in wild nature not only a refuge from society, but also a suitable setting for his companionship with the ideal mate, for what the French term la solitude à deux.

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race
And, hating no one, love but only her![208 - Ibid., canto IV, CLXXVII.]

The almost innumerable passages in the romantic movement that celebrate this Arcadian companionship in the wilderness merely continue in a sense the pastoral mood that must be as old as human nature itself. But in the past the pastoral mood has been comparatively placid. It has not been associated in any such degree with misanthropy and wildness, with nympholeptic longing and the thirst for the infinite. The scene that Chateaubriand has imagined between Chactas and Atala in the primeval forest, is surely the stormiest of Arcadias; so stormy indeed that it would have been unintelligible to Theocritus. It is not certain that it would have been intelligible to Shakespeare, who like the other Elizabethans felt at times that he too had been born in Arcadia. The Arcadian of the past was much less inclined to sink down to the subrational and to merge his personality in the landscape. Rousseau describes with a charm that has scarcely been surpassed by any of his disciples, the reveries in which he thus descends below the level of his rational self. Time, no longer broken up by the importunate intellect and its analysis, is then felt by him in its unbroken flow; the result is a sort of “eternal present that leaves no sense of emptiness.” Of such a moment of revery Rousseau says, anticipating Faust, that he “would like it to last forever.” Bergson in his conception of the summum bonum as a state in which time is no longer cut up into artificial segments but is perceived in its continuous stream as a “present that endures,”[209 - See La Perception du changement, 30.] has done little more than repeat Rousseau. The sight and sound of water seem to have been a special aid to revery in Rousseau’s case. His accounts of the semi-dissolution of his conscious self that he enjoyed while drifting idly on the Lake of Bienne are justly celebrated. Lamartine’s soul was, like that of Rousseau, lulled by “the murmur of waters.” Nothing again is more Rousseauistic than the desire Arnold attributes to Maurice de Guérin – the desire “to be borne on forever down an enchanted stream.” That too is why certain passages of Shelley are so near in spirit to Rousseau – for example, the boat revery in “Prometheus Unbound” in which an Arcadian nature and the dream companion mingle to the strains of music in a way that is supremely romantic.[210 - ASIAMy soul is an enchanted boat,Which like a sleeping swan, doth floatUpon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;And thine doth like an angel sitBeside a helm conducting it,Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.It seems to float ever, for everUpon that many-winding river,Between mountains, woods, abysses,A paradise of wildernesses!…Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinionsIn music’s most serene dominions;Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.And we sail on away, afar,Without a course, without a star,But by the instinct of sweet music driven;Till through Elysian garden isletsBy thee, most beautiful of pilots,Where never mortal pinnace glidedThe boat of my desire is guided;Realms where the air we breathe is love —Prometheus Unbound, Act II, Sc. V.]

The association of nature with Arcadian longing and the pursuit of the dream woman is even less significant than its association with the idea of the infinite. For as a result of this latter association the nature cult often assumes the aspect of a religion. The various associations may indeed as I have said be very much blended or else may run into one another almost insensibly. No better illustration of this blending can be found perhaps than in Chateaubriand – especially in that compendium of Rousseauistic psychology, his “René.” The soul of René, one learns, was too great to adjust itself to the society of men. He found that he would have to contract his life if he put himself on their level. Men, for their part, treated him as a dreamer, and so he is forced more and more by his increasing disgust for them into solitude. Now René rests the sense of his superiority over other men on two things: first, on his superlative capacity to feel grief;[211 - “Si tu souffres plus qu’un autre des choses de la vie, il ne faut pas t’en étonner; une grande âme doit contenir plus de douleurs qu’une petite.”] secondly, on his thirst for the infinite. “What is finite,” he says, “has no value for me.” What is thus pushing him beyond all bounds is “an unknown good of which the instinct pursues me.” “I began to ask myself what I desired. I did not know but I thought all of a sudden that the woods would be delicious to me!” What he found in this quest for the mystical something that was to fill the abyss of his existence was the dream woman. “I went down into the valley, I strode upon the mountain, summoning with all the force of my desire the ideal object of a future flame; I embraced this object in the winds; I thought that I heard it in the moanings of the river. All was this phantom of the imagination – both the stars in heaven and the very principle of life in the universe.” I have already quoted a very similar passage and pointed out the equivalent in Shelley. No such close equivalent could be found in Byron, and Wordsworth, it is scarcely necessary to say, offers no equivalent at all. If one reads on, however, one finds passages that are Byronic and others that are Wordsworthian. Paganism, Chateaubriand complains, by seeing in nature only certain definite forms – fauns and satyrs and nymphs – had banished from it both God and the infinite. But Christianity expelled these thronging figures in turn and restored to the grottoes their silence and to the woods their revery. The true God thus became visible in his works and bestowed upon them his own immensity. What Chateaubriand understands by God and the infinite appears in the following description of the region near Niagara seen by moonlight. The passage is Byronic as a whole with a Wordsworthian touch at the end. “The grandeur, the amazing melancholy of this picture cannot be expressed in human language; the fairest night of Europe can give no conception of it. In vain in our cultivated fields does the imagination seek to extend itself. It encounters on every hand the habitations of men; but in these savage regions the soul takes delight in plunging into an ocean of forests, in hovering over the gulf of cataracts, in meditating on the shores of lakes and rivers and, so to speak, in finding itself alone in the presence of God.” The relation between wild and solitary nature and the romantic idea of the infinite is here obvious. It is an aid to the spirit in throwing off its limitations and so in feeling itself “free.”[212 - Cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo:I love all wasteAnd solitary places; where we tasteThe pleasure of believing what we seeIs boundless, as we wish our souls to be.]

A greater spiritual elevation it is sometimes asserted is found in Wordsworth’s communings with nature than in those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. The difference perhaps is less one of spirit than of temperament. In its abdication of the intellectual and critical faculties, in its semi-dissolution of the conscious self, the revery of Wordsworth does not differ from that of Rousseau[213 - Cf. for example, the passage of Rousseau in the seventh Promenade (“Je sens des extases, des ravissements inexprimables à me fondre pour ainsi dire dans le système des êtres,” etc.) with the revery described by Wordsworth in The Excursion, I, 200-218.] and Chateaubriand, but the erotic element is absent. In the “Genius of Christianity” Chateaubriand gives a magnificent description of sunset at sea and turns the whole picture into a proof of God. Elsewhere he tells us that it was “not God alone that I contemplated on the waters in the splendor of his works. I saw an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. … I should have sold eternity for one of her caresses. I imagined that she was palpitating behind that veil of the universe that hid her from my eyes,” etc. Wordsworth was at least consistently religious in his attitude towards the landscape: he did not see in it at one moment God, and at another an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. At the same time his idea of spirituality is very remote from the traditional conception. Formerly spirituality was held to be a process of recollection, of gathering one’s self in, that is, towards the centre and not of diffusive emotion; so that when a man wished to pray he retired into his closet, and did not, like a Wordsworth or a Rousseau, fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders of nature. As for the poets of the past, they inclined as a rule to look on nature as an incentive not to religion but to love. Keble, following Wordsworth, protests on this ground against Aristophanes, and Catullus and Horace and Theocritus. He might have lengthened the list almost indefinitely. Chateaubriand bids us in our devotional moods to betake ourselves “to the religious forest.” La Fontaine is at least as near to normal human experience and also at least as poetical when he warns “fair ones” to “fear the depths of the woods and their vast silence.”[214 - O belles, craignez le fond des bois, et leur vaste silence.]

No one would question that Wordsworth has passages of great ethical elevation. But in some of these passages he simply renews the error of the Stoics who also display at times great ethical elevation; he ascribes to the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. This error persists to some extent even when he is turning away, as in the “Ode to Duty,” from the moral spontaneity of the Rousseauist. It is not quite clear that the law of duty in the breast of man is the same law that preserves “the stars from wrong.” His earlier assertion that the light of setting suns and the mind of man are identical in their essence is at best highly speculative, at least as speculative as the counter assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “there is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.” Furthermore this latter sense of the gap between man and nature seems to be more fully justified by its fruits in life and conduct, and this is after all the only test that counts in the long run.

One of the reasons why pantheistic revery has been so popular is that it seems to offer a painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort. In its extreme exponents, a Rousseau or a Walt Whitman, it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination. Even in its milder forms it encourages one to assume a tone of consecration in speaking of experiences that are æsthetic rather than truly religious. “’Tis only heaven that’s given away,” sings Lowell; “’Tis only God may be had for the asking.” God and heaven are accorded by Lowell with such strange facility because he identifies them with the luxurious enjoyment of a “day in June.” When pushed to a certain point the nature cult always tends towards sham spirituality.

Oh World as God has made it
– All is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and
Love is duty.

It seems to follow from these verses of Browning, perhaps the most flaccid spiritually in the English language, that to go out and mix one’s self up with the landscape is the same as doing one’s duty. As a method of salvation this is even easier and more æsthetic than that of the Ancient Mariner, who, it will be remembered, is relieved of the burden of his transgression by admiring the color of water-snakes!

The nature cult arose at a time when the traditional religious symbols were becoming incredible. Instead of working out new and firm distinctions between good and evil, the Rousseauist seeks to discredit all precise distinctions whether new or old, in favor of mere emotional intoxication. The passage to which I have already alluded, in which Faust breaks down the scruples of Marguerite by proclaiming the supremacy of feeling, surpasses even the lines I have cited from Browning as an example of sham spirituality:

Marguerite:

Dost thou believe in God?

Faust:

My darling, who dares say,
Yes, I in God believe?
Question or priest or sage, and they
Seem, in the answer you receive,
To mock the questioner.

Marguerite:

Then thou dost not believe?

Faust:

Sweet one! my meaning do not misconceive!
Him who dare name
And who proclaim,
Him I believe?
Who that can feel,
His heart can steel
To say: I believe him not?
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Holds and sustains he not
Thee, me, himself?