Rousseau and Romanticism

Lifts not the Heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us lie?
And beaming tenderly with looks of love
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?
Do I not gaze into thine eyes?
Nature’s impenetrable agencies,
Are they not thronging on thy heart and brain,
Viewless, or visible to mortal ken,
Around thee weaving their mysterious chain?
Fill thence thy heart, how large soe’er it be;
And in the feeling when thou utterly art blest,
Then call it what thou wilt —
Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is all;
Name is but sound and smoke
Shrouding the glow of heaven.[215 - Faust (Miss Swanwick’s translation).]

The upshot of this enthusiasm that overflows all boundaries and spurns definition as mere smoke that veils its heavenly glow is the seduction of a poor peasant girl. Such is the romantic contrast between the “ideal” and the “real.”

Those to whom I may seem to be treating the nature cult with undue severity should remember that I am treating it only in its pseudo-religious aspect. In its proper place all this refining on man’s relation to the “outworld” may be legitimate and delightful; but that place is secondary. My quarrel is only with the æsthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose and gives forth as a profound philosophy what is at best only a holiday or week-end view of existence. No distinction is more important for any one who wishes to maintain a correct scale of values than that between what is merely recreative and what ministers to leisure. There are times when we may properly seek solace and renewal in nature, when we may invite both our souls and our bodies to loaf. The error is to look on these moments of recreation and relief from concentration on some definite end as in themselves the consummation of wisdom. Rousseau indeed assumes that his art of mixing himself up with the landscape is identical with leisure; like innumerable disciples he confuses revery with meditation – a confusion so grave that I shall need to revert to it later. He parodies subtly what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of what is below it. He thus brings under suspicion the most necessary of all truths – that the kingdom of heaven is within us.

The first place always belongs to action and purpose and not to mere idling, even if it be like that of the Rousseauist transcendental idling. The man who makes a deliberate choice and then plans his life with reference to it is less likely than the aimless man to be swayed by every impulse and impression. The figures of Raphael according to Hazlitt have always “a set, determined, voluntary character,” they “want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements.” And Hazlitt therefore concludes rightly that Raphael has “nothing romantic about him.” The distinction is so important that it might be made the basis for a comparison between the painting of the Renaissance and some of the important schools of the nineteenth century. Here again no sensible person would maintain that the advantage is all on one side. Romanticism gave a great impulse to landscape painting and to the painting of man in the landscape. Few romantic gains are more indubitable. One may prefer the best work of the Barbizon school for example to the contemporary product in French literature. But even here it must be insisted that painting from which man is absent or in which he is more or less subordinated to the landscape is not the highest type of painting. Turner, one of the greatest masters of landscape, was almost incapable of painting the human figure. Ruskin is therefore indulging in romantic paradox when he puts Turner in the same class as Shakespeare. Turner’s vision of life as compared with that of Shakespeare is not central but peripheral.

The revolution that has resulted from the triumph of naturalistic over humanistic tendencies in painting extends down to the minutest details of technique; it has meant the subordination of design – the imposition, that is, on one’s material of a firm central purpose – to light and color; and this in painting corresponds to the literary pursuit of glamour and illusion for their own sake. It has meant in general a tendency to sacrifice all the other elements of painting to the capture of the vivid and immediate impression. And this corresponds to the readiness of the writer to forego decorum in favor of intensity. The choice that is involved, including a choice of technique, according as one is a naturalist or a humanist, is brought out by Mr. Kenyon Cox in his comparison of two paintings of hermits,[216 - Artist and Public, 134 ff.] one by Titian and one by John Sargent: the impressionistic and pantheistic hermit of Sargent is almost entirely merged in the landscape; he is little more than a pretext for a study of the accidents of light. The conception of Titian’s St. Jerome in the Desert is perhaps even more humanistic than religious. The figure of the saint on which everything converges is not merely robust, it is even a bit robustious. The picture affirms in its every detail the superior importance of man and his purposes to his natural environment. So far as their inner life is concerned the two hermits are plainly moving in opposite directions. An appropriate motto for Sargent’s hermit would be the following lines that I take from a French symbolist, but the equivalent of which can be found in innumerable other Rousseauists:

Je voudrais me confondre avec les chases, tordre
Mes bras centre la pierre et les fraîches écorces,
Etre l’arbre, le mur, le pollen et le sel,
Et me dissoudre au fond de l’être universel.

This is to push the reciprocity between man and nature to a point where the landscape is not only a state of the soul but the soul is a state of the landscape; just as in Shelley’s Ode, Shelley becomes the West Wind and the West Wind becomes Shelley.[217 - Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:What if my leaves are falling like its own!The tumult of thy mighty harmoniesWill take from both a deep, autumnal tone,Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!Drive my dead thoughts over the universeLike withered leaves, etc.Cf. Lamartine:Quand la feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie,Le vent du soir s’élève et l’arrache aux vallons;Et moi, je suis semblable à la feuille flétrie;Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons.L’Isolement.] The changes in the romantic soul are appropriately mirrored in the changes of the seasons. In Tieck’s “Genoveva,” for example, Golo’s love blossoms in the springtime, the sultry summer impels him to sinful passion, the autumn brings grief and repentance, and in winter avenging judgment overtakes the offender and casts him into the grave.[218 - Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156.] Autumn is perhaps even more than springtime the favorite season of the Rousseauist. The movement is filled with souls who like the hero of Poe’s “Ulalume” have reached the October of their sensations. Some traces of this sympathetic relation between man and nature may indeed be found in the literature of the past. The appropriateness of the setting in the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus would scarcely seem to be an accident. The storm in “Lear” may also be instanced. But as I have already said occidental man did not before Rousseau show much inclination to mingle with the landscape. The parallelism that Pater establishes in “Marius the Epicurean” between the moods of the hero and the shifting aspects of nature is felt as a distinct anachronism. If we wish to find any early approximations to the subtleties and refinements of the Rousseauist in his dealings with nature we need to turn to the Far East – especially to the Taoist movement in China.[219 - See appendix on Chinese primitivism.] As a result of the Taoist influence China had from a very early period poets and painters for whom the landscape is very plainly a state of the soul.

Pantheistic revery of the kind I have been describing leads inevitably to a special type of symbolism. The Rousseauist reads into nature unutterable love. He sees shining through its finite forms the light of the infinite. The Germans especially set out to express symbolically the relationship between the love and infinitude that they saw in nature and the kindred elements in themselves. Any one who has attempted to thread his way through the German theories of the symbol will feel that he has, like Wordsworth’s shepherd, “been in the heart of many thousand mists.” But in view of the importance of the subject it is necessary to venture for a moment into this metaphysical murk. Schelling’s “Nature Philosophy” is perhaps the most ambitious of all the German attempts to run together symbolically the human spirit and phenomenal nature. “What we call nature,” says Schelling, “is a poem that lies hidden in a secret wondrous writing”; if the riddle could be revealed we should recognize in nature “the Odyssey of the Spirit.” “There looks out through sensuous objects as through a half-transparent mist the world of phantasy for which we long.” “All things are only a garment of the world of spirit.” “To be romantic,” says Uhland, “is to have an inkling of the infinite in appearances.” “Beauty,” says Schelling in similar vein, “is a finite rendering of the infinite.” Now the infinite and the finite can only be thus brought together through the medium of the symbol. Therefore, as A. W. Schlegel says, “beauty is a symbolical representation of the infinite. All poetry is an everlasting symbolizing.”

This assertion is in an important sense true. Unfortunately there remains the ambiguity that I have already pointed out in the word “infinite.” No one would give a high rating to a certain type of allegory that flourished in neo-classical times as also in a somewhat different form during the Middle Ages. It is a cold intellectual contrivance in which the imagination has little part and which therefore fails to suggest the infinite in any sense. But to universalize the particular in the classical sense is to give access imaginatively to the human infinite that is set above nature. Every successful humanistic creation is more or less symbolical. Othello is not merely a jealous man; he is also a symbol of jealousy. Some of the myths of Plato again are imaginative renderings of a supersensuous realm to which man has no direct access. They are symbolical representations of an infinite that the romanticist leaves out of his reckoning. The humanistic and spiritual symbols that abound in the religion and poetry of the past, are then, it would seem, very different from the merely æsthetic symbolizing of a Schelling. For Schelling is one of the chief of those who from Shaftesbury down have tended to identify beauty and truth and to make both purely æsthetic. But a symbol that is purely æsthetic, that is in other words purely a matter of feeling, rests on what is constantly changing not only from man to man but in the same man. Romantic symbolism, therefore, though it claims at one moment to be scientific (especially in Germany) and at another moment to have a religious value, is at bottom the symbolizing of mood. Both the imagination and the emotion that enter into the romantic symbol are undisciplined. The results of such a symbolism do not meet the demand of the genuine man of science for experimental proof, they do not again satisfy the test of universality imposed by those who believe in a distinctively human realm that is set above nature. The nature philosophy of a Schelling leads therefore on the one hand to sham science and on the other to sham philosophy and religion.

The genuine man of science has as a matter of fact repudiated the speculations of Schelling and other romantic physicists as fantastic. He may also be counted on to look with suspicion on the speculations of a Bergson who, more perhaps than any living Rousseauist, reminds one of the German romantic philosophers. One idea has however lingered in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this romantic theorizing – namely that man has access to the infinite only through nature. Thus Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn said in a recent address to the students of Columbia University:

I would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career give me nature. The ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality. Nature, studied since Aristotle’s time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebulæ to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing and invigorating. Of the two most creative literary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the “blue bird,” with a delicious renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard.

The romanticists acted from the start, following here in the wake of the pseudo-classicists, on Professor Osborn’s assumption that normal human nature is something that may be bottled up once for all and put by on a shelf, though they would have been pained to learn from him that even abnormal human nature may also be bottled up and put by in the same fashion. Sophistries of this kind should perhaps be pardoned in the man of science when so many men who are supposed to stand for letters have shown him the way. Great literature is an imaginative and symbolical interpretation of an infinite that is accessible only to those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. A writer like Maeterlinck, whom Professor Osborn takes to be representative of literature in general, is merely a late exponent of a movement that from the start turned away from this human infinite towards pantheistic revery.

The imagination is, as Coleridge says, the great unifying power; it draws together things that are apparently remote. But its analogies to be of value should surely have validity apart from the mere shifting mood of the man who perceives them. Otherwise he simply wrests some outer object from the chain of cause and effect of which it is actually a part, and incorporates it arbitrarily into his own private dream. Wordsworth is not sparing of homely detail in his account of his leech-gatherer; but at a given moment in this poem the leech-gatherer undergoes a strange transformation; he loses all verisimilitude as a leech-gatherer and becomes a romantic symbol, a mere projection, that is, of the poet’s own broodings. To push this symbolizing of mood beyond a certain point is incipient hallucination. We are told that when the asylum at Charenton was shelled in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the lunatics saw reflected in the bursting bombs, each in a different way, his own madness. One took the bombs to be a link in the plot of his enemies against him, etc. It is hard to consider the symbolizing and visions of the extreme romanticist, such as those of William Blake, without thinking at times of Charenton.

What I have said of the romantic symbol is true in some degree of the romantic metaphor, for the symbol and even the myth are often only a developed metaphor. The first part of the romantic metaphor, the image or impression that has been received from the outer world, is often admirably fresh and vivid.[220 - G. Duval has written a Dictionnaire des métaphores de Victor Hugo, and G. Lucchetti a work on Les Images dans les œuvres de Victor Hugo. So far as the ethical values are concerned, the latter title is alone justified. Hugo is, next to Chateaubriand, the great imagist.] But the second part of the metaphor when the analogy involved is that between some fact of outer perception and the inner life of man is often vague and misty; for the inner life in which the romanticist takes interest is not the life he possesses in common with other men but what is most unique in his own emotions – his mood in short. That is why the metaphor and still more the symbol in so far as they are romantic are always in danger of becoming unintelligible, since it is not easy for one man to enter into another’s mood. Men accord a ready welcome to metaphors and symbols that instead of expressing something more or less individual have a real relevancy to their common nature. Tribulation, for example, means literally the beating out of grain on the threshing floor. The man who first saw the analogy between this process and certain spiritual experiences established a legitimate link between nature and human nature, between sense and the supersensuous. Language is filled with words and expressions of this kind which have become so current that their metaphorical and symbolical character has been forgotten and which have at the same time ceased to be vivid and concrete and become abstract.

The primitivistic fallacies of the German romanticists in their dealings with the symbol and metaphor appear in various forms in French romanticism and even more markedly in its continuation known as the symbolistic movement. What is exasperating in many of the poets of this school is that they combine the pretence to a vast illumination with the utmost degree of spiritual and intellectual emptiness and vagueness. Like the early German romanticists they mix up flesh and spirit in nympholeptic longing and break down and blur all the boundaries of being in the name of the infinite. Of this inner formlessness and anarchy the chaos of the vers libre (in which they were also anticipated by the Germans) is only an outer symptom.[221 - The French like to think of the symbolists as having rendered certain services to their versification. Let us hope that they did, though few things are more perilous than this transfer of the idea of progress to the literary and artistic domain. Decadent Rome, as we learn from the younger Pliny and others, simply swarmed with poets who also no doubt indulged in many strange experiments. All this poetical activity, as we can see only too plainly at this distance, led nowhere.]

If the Rousseauistic primitivist recognizes the futility of his symbolizing, and consents to become a passive register of outer perception, if for example he proclaims himself an imagist, he at least has the merit of frankness, but in that case he advertises by the very name he has assumed the bankruptcy of all that is most worth while in poetry.

But to return to romanticism and nature. It should be plain from what has already been said that the romanticist tends to make of nature the mere plaything of his mood. When Werther’s mood is cheerful, nature smiles at him benignly. When his mood darkens she becomes for him “a devouring monster.” When it grows evident to the romanticist that nature does not alter with his alteration, he chides her at times for her impassibility; or again he seeks to be impassible like her, even if he can be so only at the expense of his humanity. This latter attitude is closely connected with the dehumanizing of man by science that is reflected in a whole literature during the last half of the nineteenth century – for instance, in so-called “impassive” writers like Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle.

The causal sequences that had been observed in the physical realm were developed more and more during this period with the aid of pure mathematics and the mathematical reason (esprit de géométrie) into an all-embracing system. For the earlier romanticists nature had at least been a living presence whether benign or sinister. For the mathematical determinist she tends to become a soulless, pitiless mechanism against which man is helpless.[222 - Grant Allen writes of the laws of nature in Magdalen Tower:They care not any whit for pain or pleasure,That seems to us the sum and end of all,Dumb force and barren number are their measure,What shall be shall be, tho’ the great earth fall,They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,Work out their fatal will unswerv’d, unswerving,And know not that they are!] This conception of nature is so important that I shall need to revert to it in my treatment of melancholy.

The man who has accepted the universe of the mechanist or determinist is not always gloomy. But men in general felt the need of some relief from the deterministic obsession. Hence the success of the philosophy of Bergson and similar philosophies. The glorification of impulse (élan vital) that Bergson opposes to the mechanizing of life is in its main aspects, as I have already indicated, simply a return to the spontaneity of Rousseau. His plan of escape from deterministic science is at bottom very much like Rousseau’s plan of escape from the undue rationalism of the Enlightenment. As a result of these eighteenth-century influences, nature had, according to Carlyle, become a mere engine, a system of cogs and pulleys. He therefore hails Novalis as an “anti-mechanist,” a “deep man,” because of the way of deliverance that he teaches from this nightmare. “I owe him somewhat.” What Carlyle owed to Novalis many moderns have owed to Bergson, but it is not yet clear that either Novalis or Bergson are “deep men.”

The mechanistic view of nature, whether held pessimistically or optimistically, involving as it does factors that are infinite and therefore beyond calculation, cannot furnish proofs that will satisfy the true positivist: he is inclined to dismiss it as a mere phantasmagoria of the intellect. The Rousseauistic view of nature, on the other hand, whether held optimistically or pessimistically, is even less capable of satisfying the standards of the positivist and must be dismissed as a mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. The fact is that we do not know and can never know what nature is in herself. The mysterious mother has shrouded herself from us in an impenetrable veil of illusion. But though we cannot know nature absolutely we can pick up a practical and piecemeal knowledge of nature not by dreaming but by doing. The man of action can within certain limits have his way with nature. Now the men who have acted during the past century have been the men of science and the utilitarians who have been turning to account the discoveries of science. The utilitarians have indeed derived such potent aid from science that they have been able to stamp their efforts on the very face of the landscape. The romanticists have not ceased to protest against this scientific utilizing of nature as a profanation. But inasmuch as these protests have come from men who have stood not for work but for revery they have for the most part been futile. This is not the least of the ironic contrasts that abound in this movement between the ideal and the real. No age ever grew so ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century, at the same time no age ever did so much to deface nature. No age ever so exalted the country over the town, and no age ever witnessed such a crowding into urban centres.

A curious study might be made of this ironic contrast as it appears in the early romantic crusade against railways. One of the romantic grievances against the railway is that it does not encourage vagabondage: it has a definite goal and gets to it so far as possible in a straight line. Yet in spite of Wordsworth’s protesting sonnet the Windermere railway was built. Ruskin’s wrath at railways was equally vain. In general, sentiment is not of much avail when pitted against industrial advance. The papers announced recently that one of the loveliest cascades in the California Sierras had suddenly disappeared as a result of the diversion of its water to a neighboring power-plant. The same fate is overtaking Niagara itself. It is perhaps symbolic that a quarry has made a hideous gash in the hillside on the shores of Rydal Mere right opposite Wordsworth’s house.

If the man of science and the utilitarian do not learn what nature is in herself they learn at least to adjust themselves to forces outside themselves. The Rousseauist, on the other hand, does not in his “communion” with nature adjust himself to anything. He is simply communing with his own mood. Rousseau chose appropriately as title for the comedy that was his first literary effort “Narcissus or the Lover of Himself.” The nature over which the Rousseauist is bent in such rapt contemplation plays the part of the pool in the legend of Narcissus. It renders back to him his own image. He sees in nature what he himself has put there. The Rousseauist transfuses himself into nature in much the same way that Pygmalion transfuses himself into his statue. Nature is dead, as Rousseau says, unless animated by the fires of love. “Make no mistake,” says M. Masson, “the nature that Jean-Jacques worships is only a projection of Jean-Jacques. He has poured himself forth so complacently upon it that he can always find himself and cherish himself in it.” And M. Masson goes on and quotes from a curious and little-known fragment of Rousseau: “Beloved solitude,” Rousseau sighs, “beloved solitude, where I still pass with pleasure the remains of a life given over to suffering. Forest with stunted trees, marshes without water, broom, reeds, melancholy heather, inanimate objects, you who can neither speak to me nor hear me, what secret charm brings me back constantly into your midst? Unfeeling and dead things, this charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which wishes to refer back everything to itself.”[223 - Fragment de l’Art de jouir, quoted by P. – M. Masson in La Religion de J. – J. Rousseau, II, 228.] Coleridge plainly only continues Rousseau when he writes:

O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:[224 - If nature merely reflects back to a man his own image, it follows that Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between fancy and imagination has little value, inasmuch as he rests his proof of the unifying power of the imagination, in itself a sound idea, on the union the imagination effects between man and outer nature – and this union is on his own showing fanciful.]
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow’d
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth.

The fair luminous cloud is no other than the Arcadian imagination. “The light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream” of which Wordsworth speaks, is likewise as appears very plainly from the context,[225 - If I had had this consecration Wordsworth says, addressing Peele Castle,I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,Amid a world how different from this!Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.…A Picture had it been of lasting ease,Elysian quiet, without toil or strife, etc.Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm.] Arcadian. He should once, Wordsworth writes, have wished to see Peele Castle bathed in the Arcadian light, but now that he has escaped by sympathy for his fellow-men from the Arcadian aloofness, he is willing that it should be painted in storm. Mere storminess, one should recollect, is not in itself an assurance that one has turned from the romantic dream to reality. One finds in this movement, if nowhere else, as I remarked apropos of Chateaubriand, the stormy Arcadia.

It is not through the Arcadian imagination that one moves towards reality. This does not much matter if what one seeks in a “return to nature” is merely recreation. I cannot repeat too often that I have no quarrel with the nature cult when it remains recreative but only when it sets up as a substitute for philosophy and religion. This involves a confusion between the two main directions of the human spirit, a confusion as I have said in a previous chapter between the realm of awe and the region of wonder. Pascal exaggerates somewhat when he says the Bible never seeks to prove religion from the “wonders” of nature. But this remark is true to the total spirit of the Bible. A knowledge of the flowers of the Holy Land is less necessary for an understanding of the gospel narrative than one might suppose from Renan.[226 - Cf. Doudan, Lettres, IV, 216: “J’ai parcouru le Saint-Paul de Renan. Je n’ai jamais vu dans un théologien une si grande connaissance de la flore orientale. C’est un paysagiste bien supérieur à Saint-Augustin et à Bossuet. Il sème des résédas, des anémones, des pâquerettes pour recueillir l’incrédulité.”] Renan is simply seeking to envelop Jesus so far as possible in an Arcadian atmosphere. In so doing he is following in the footsteps of the great father of sentimentalists. According to M. Masson, Jesus, as depicted by Jean-Jacques, becomes “a sort of grand master of the Golden Age.”

Here as elsewhere the Rousseauist is seeking to identify the Arcadian view of life with wisdom. The result is a series of extraordinarily subtle disguises for egoism. We think we see the Rousseauist prostrate before the ideal woman or before nature or before God himself, but when we look more closely we see that he is only (as Sainte-Beuve said of Alfred de Vigny) “in perpetual adoration before the holy sacrament of himself.” The fact that he finds in nature only what he has put there seems to be for Rousseau himself a source of satisfaction. But the poem of Coleridge I have just quoted, in which he proclaims that so far as nature is concerned “we receive but what we give,” is entitled “Ode to Dejection.” One of man’s deepest needs would seem to be for genuine communion, for a genuine escape, that is, from his ordinary self. The hollowness of the Rousseauistic communion with nature as well as other Rousseauistic substitutes for genuine communion is indissolubly bound up with the subject of romantic melancholy.

CHAPTER IX

ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY

Rousseau and his early followers – especially perhaps his early French followers – were very much preoccupied with the problem of happiness. Now in a sense all men – even those who renounce the world and mortify the flesh – aim at happiness. The important point to determine is what any particular person means by happiness and how he hopes to attain it. It should be plain from all that has been said that the Rousseauist seeks happiness in the free play of the emotions. The “Influence of the Passions on Happiness” is the significant title of one of Madame de Staël’s early treatises. The happiness that the Rousseauist seeks involves not merely a free play of feeling but – what is even more important – a free play of the imagination. Feeling acquires a sort of infinitude as a result of this coöperation of the imagination, and so the romanticist goes, as we have seen, in quest of the thrill superlative, as appears so clearly in his nympholepsy, his pursuit of the “impossible she.” But the more imaginative this quest for emotional happiness grows the more it tends to become a mere nostalgia. Happiness is achieved so far as it is achieved at all in dreamland. Rousseau says of himself: Mon plus constant bonheur fut en songe. Every finite satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves him unsatisfied. René says that he had exhausted solitude as he had exhausted society: they had both failed to satisfy his insatiable desires. René plainly takes his insatiableness to be the badge of his spiritual distinction. To submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the philistine.

But does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperæsthetic, by burning with infinite indeterminate desire? We have here perhaps the chief irony and contradiction in the whole movement. The Rousseauist seeks happiness and yet on his own showing, his mode of seeking it results, not in happiness but in wretchedness. One finds indeed figures in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom.[227 - In his Mal romantique (1908) E. Seillière labels the generations that have elapsed since the rise of Rousseauism as follows:1. Sensibility (Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761).2. Weltschmerz (Schiller’s Æsthetic Letters, 1795).3. Mal du siècle (Hugo’s Hernani, 1830).4. Pessimism (vogue of Schopenhauer and Stendhal, 1865).5. Neurasthenia (culmination of fin de siècle movement, 1900).]

Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair.

According to a somewhat doubtful authority, Ninon de Lenclos, “the joy of the spirit measures its force.” When the romanticist on the other hand discovers that his ideal of happiness works put into actual unhappiness he does not blame his ideal. He simply assumes that the world is unworthy of a being so exquisitely organized as himself, and so shrinks back from it and enfolds himself in his sorrow as he would in a mantle. Since the superlative bliss that he craves eludes him he will at least be superlative in woe. So far from being a mark of failure this woe measures his spiritual grandeur. “A great soul,” as René says, “must contain more grief than a small one.” The romantic poets enter into a veritable competition with one another as to who shall be accounted the most forlorn. The victor in this competition is awarded the palm not merely for poetry but wisdom. In the words of Arnold:

Amongst us one

Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days.
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,