ASPECTS OF
LITERATURE
J. MIDDLETON MURRY
NEW YORK:
ALFRED A. KNOPF
MCMXX
Copyright, 1920
_Printed in Great Britain_
TO
BRUCE RICHMOND
TO WHOSE GENEROUS ENCOURAGEMENT
I OWE SO MUCH
_Preface_
Two of these essays, 'The Function of Criticism' and 'The Religion of
Rousseau,' were contributed to the _Times Literary Supplement_; that on
'The Poetry of Edward Thomas' in the _Nation_; all the rest save one
have appeared in the _Athenæum_.
The essays are arranged in the order in which they were written, with
two exceptions. The second part of the essay on Tchehov has been placed
with the first for convenience, although in order of thought it should
follow the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness.' More important, I have
placed 'The Function of Criticism' first although it was written last,
because it treats of the broad problem of literary criticism, suggests a
standard of values implicit elsewhere in the book, and thus to some
degree affords an introduction to the remaining essays.
But the degree is not great, as the critical reader will quickly
discover for himself. I ask him not to indulge the temptation of
convicting me out of my own mouth. I am aware that my practice is often
inconsistent with my professions; and I ask the reader to remember that
the professions were made after the practice and to a considerable
extent as the result of it. The practice came first, and if I could
reasonably expect so much of the reader I would ask him to read 'The
Function of Criticism' once more when he has reached the end of the
book.
I make no apology for not having rewritten the essays. As a critic I
enjoy nothing more than to trace the development of a writer's attitude
through its various phases; I could do no less than afford my readers
the opportunity of a similar enjoyment in my own case. They may be
assured that none of the essays have suffered any substantial
alteration, even where, for instance in the case of the incidental and
(I am now persuaded) quite inadequate estimate of Chaucer in 'The
Nostalgia of Mr Masefield,' my view has since completely changed. Here
and there I have recast expressions which, though not sufficiently
conveying my meaning, had been passed in the haste of journalistic
production. But I have nowhere tried to adjust earlier to later points
of view. I am aware that these points of view are often difficult to
reconcile; that, for instance, 'æsthetic' in the essay on Tchehov has a
much narrower meaning than it bears in 'The Function of Criticism'; that
the essay on 'The Religion of Rousseau' is criticism of a kind which I
deprecate as insufficient in the essay, 'The Cry in the Wilderness,'
because it lacks that reference to life as a whole which I have come to
regard as essential to criticism; and that in this latter essay I use
the word 'moral' (for instance in the phrase 'The values of literature
are in the last resort moral') in a sense which is never exactly
defined. The key to most of these discrepancies will, I hope, be found
in the introductory essay on 'The Function of Criticism.'
_May_, 1920.
_Contents_
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1
THE RELIGION OF ROUSSEAU 15
THE POETRY OF EDWARD THOMAS 29
MR YEATS'S SWAN SONG 39
THE WISDOM OF ANATOLE FRANCE 46
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS 52
THE PROBLEM OF KEATS 62
THOUGHTS ON TCHEHOV 76
AMERICAN POETRY 91
RONSARD 99
SAMUEL BUTLER 107
THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 121
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ENGLISH POETRY 139
THE NOSTALGIA OF MR MASEFIELD 150
THE LOST LEGIONS 157
THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS 167
POETRY AND CRITICISM 176
COLERIDGE'S CRITICISM 184
SHAKESPEARE CRITICISM 194
_The Function of Criticism_
It is curious and interesting to find our younger men of letters
actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism.
This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe,
symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world of
letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and
uncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of
outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a
dozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star,
if the new star was to appear, would burst upon our vision in the shape
of a novel. To-day we feel it might be anything. The cloud no bigger
than a man's hand might even be, like Trigorin's in 'The Sea-gull,' like
a piano; it has no predetermined form.
This sense of incalculability, which has been aroused by the prodigious
literary efflorescence of late years, reacts upon its cause; and the
reaction tends by many different paths to express itself finally in the
ventilation of problems that hinge about criticism. There is a general
feeling that the growth of the young plant has been too luxuriant; a
desire to have it vigorously pruned by a capable gardener, in order that
its strength may be gathered together to produce a more perfect fruit.
There is also a sense that if the _lusus naturæ_, the writer of genius,
were to appear, there ought to be a person or an organisation capable of
recognising him, however unexpected his scent or the shape of his
leaves. Both these tasks fall upon criticism. The younger generation
looks round a little apprehensively to see if there is a gardener whom
it can trust, and decides, perhaps a little prematurely, that there is
none.
There is reviewing but no criticism, says one icy voice that we have
learned to respect. There are pontiffs and potential pontiffs, but no
critics, says another disrespectful young man. Oh, for some more Scotch
Reviewers to settle the hash of our English bards, sighs a third. And
the _London Mercury_, after whetting our appetite by announcing that it
proposed to restore the standards of authoritative criticism, still
leaves us a little in the dark as to what these standards are. Mr T.S.
Eliot deals more kindly, if more frigidly, with us in the _Monthly
Chapbook_. There are, he says, three kinds of criticism--the historical,
the philosophic, and the purely literary.
'Every form of genuine criticism is directed towards creation. The
historical or philosophic critic of poetry is criticising poetry in
order to create a history or a philosophy; the poetic critic is
criticising poetry in order to create poetry.'
These separate and distinct kinds, he considers, are but rarely found
to-day, even in a fragmentary form; where they do exist, they are almost
invariably mingled in an inextricable confusion.
Whether we agree or not with the general condemnation of reviewing
implicit in this survey of the situation, or with the division of
criticism itself, we have every reason to be grateful to Mr Eliot for
disentangling the problem for us. The question of criticism has become
rather like Glaucus the sea-god, encrusted with shells and hung with
weed till his lineaments are hardly discernible. We have at least clear
sight of him now, and we are able to decide whether we will accept Mr
Eliot's description of him. Let us see.
We have no difficulty in agreeing that historical criticism of
literature is a kind apart. The historical critic approaches literature
as the manifestation of an evolutionary process in which all the phases
are of equal value. Essentially, he has no concern with the greater or
less literary excellence of the objects whose history he traces--their
existence is alone sufficient for him; a bad book is as important as a
good one, and much more important than a good one if it exercised, as
bad books have a way of doing, a real influence on the course of
literature. In practice, it is true, the historical critic generally
fails of this ideal of unimpassioned objectivity. He either begins by
making judgments of value for himself, or accepts those judgments which
have been endorsed by tradition. He fastens upon a number of outstanding
figures and more or less deliberately represents the process as from
culmination to culmination; but in spite of this arbitrary
foreshortening he is primarily concerned, in each one of the phases
which he distinguishes, with that which is common to every member of the
group of writers which it includes. The individuality, the quintessence,
of a writer lies completely outside his view.
We may accept the isolation of the historical critic then, at least in
theory, and conceive of him as a fragment of a social historian, as the
author of a chapter in the history of the human spirit. But can we
isolate the philosophic critic in the same way? And what exactly _is_ a
philosophic critic? Is he a critic with a philosophical scheme in which
art and literature have their places, a critic who therefore approaches
literature with a definite conception of it as one among many parallel
manifestations of the human spirit, and with a system of values derived
from his metaphysical scheme? Hegel and Croce are philosophical critics
in this sense, and Aristotle is not, as far as we can judge from the
Poetics, wherein he considers the literary work of Greece as an isolated
phenomenon, and examines it in and for itself. But for the moment, and
with the uneasy sense that we have not thoroughly laid the ghost of
philosophic criticism, we will assume that we have isolated him, and
pass to the consideration of the pure literary critic, if indeed we can
find him.
What does he do? How shall we recognise him? Mr Eliot puts before us
Coleridge and Aristotle and Dryden as literary critics _par excellence_
arranged in an ascending scale of purity. The concatenation is curious,
for these were men possessed of very different interests and faculties
of mind; and it would occur to few to place Dryden, as a critic, at
their head. The living centre of Aristotle's criticism is a conception
of art as a means to a good life. As an activity, poetry 'is more
philosophic than history,' a nearer approach to the universal truth in
appearances; and as a more active influence, drama refines our spiritual
being by a purgation of pity and terror. Indeed, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that the very pith and marrow of Aristotle's
literary criticism is a system of moral values derived from his
contemplation of life. It was necessary that this relation should exist,
because for Aristotle literature was, essentially, an imitation of life
though we must remember to understand imitation according to our final
sense of the theme which is the golden, persistent thread throughout the
Poetics. The imitation of life in literature was for Aristotle, the
creative revelation of the ideal actively at work in human life. The
tragic hero failed because his composition was less than ideal; but he
could only be a tragic hero if the ideal was implicit in him and he
visibly approximated to it. It is this constant reference to the ideal
which makes of 'imitation' a truly creative principle and the one which,
properly understood, is the most permanently valid and pregnant of all;
it is also one which has been constantly misunderstood. Its importance
is, nevertheless, so central that adequate recognition of it might
conceivably be taken as the distinguishing mark of all fruitful
criticism.
To his sympathetic understanding of this principle Coleridge owed a
great debt. It is true that his efforts to refine upon it were not only
unsuccessful, but a trifle ludicrous; his effort to graft the vague
transcendentalism of Germany on to the rigour and clarity of Aristotle
was, from the outset, unfortunately conceived. But the root of the
matter was there, and in Coleridge's fertile mind the Aristotelian
theory of imitation flowered into a magnificent conception of the
validity and process of the poetic imagination. And partly because the
foundation was truly Aristotelian, partly because Coleridge had known
what it was to be a great poet, the reference to life pervades the
whole of what is permanently valuable in Coleridge's criticism. In him,
too, there is a strict and mutually fertilising relation between the
moral and the æsthetic values. This is the firm ground beneath his feet
when he--too seldom--proceeds to the free exercise of his exquisite
æsthetic discrimination.
In Dryden, however, there was no such organic interpenetration. Dryden,
too, had a fine sensibility, though less exquisite, by far, than that of
Coleridge; but his theoretical system was not merely alien to him--it
was in itself false and mistaken. _Corruptio optimi pessima_. He took
over from France the sterilised and lifeless Aristotelianism which has
been the plague of criticism for centuries; he used it no worse than his
French exemplars, but he used it very little better than they. It was in
his hands, as in theirs, a dead mechanical framework of rules about the
unities. Dryden, we can see in his critical writing, was constantly
chafed by it. He behaves like a fine horse with a bearing rein: he is
continually tossing his head after a minute or two of 'good manners and
action,' and saying, 'Shakespeare was the best of them, anyhow';
'Chaucer beats Ovid to a standstill.' It is a gesture with which all
decent people sympathise and when it is made in language so supple as
Dryden's prose it has a lasting charm. Dryden's heart was in the right
place, and he was not afraid of showing it; but that does not make him a
critic, much less a critic to be set as a superior in the company of
Aristotle and Coleridge.
Our search for the pure literary critic is likely to be arduous. We have
seen that there is a sense in which Dryden is a purer literary critic
than either Coleridge or Aristotle; but we have also seen that it is
precisely by reason of the 'pureness' in him that he is to be relegated
into a rank inferior to theirs. It looks as though we might have to
pronounce that the true literary critic is the philosophic critic. Yet
the pronouncement must not be prematurely made; for there is a real and
vital difference between those for whom we have accepted the designation
of philosophic critics, Hegel or Croce, and Aristotle or Coleridge. Yet
three of these (and it might be wise to include Coleridge as a fourth)
were professional philosophers. It is evidently not the philosophy as
such that makes the difference.
The difference depends, we believe, upon the nature of the philosophy.
The secret lies in Aristotle. The true literary critic must have a
humanistic philosophy. His inquiries must be modulated, subject to an
intimate, organic governance, by an ideal of the good life. He is not
the mere investigator of facts; existence is never for him synonymous
with value, and it is of the utmost importance that he should never be
deluded into believing that it is. He will not accept from Hegel the
thesis that all the events of human history, all man's spiritual
activities, are equally authentic manifestations of Spirit; he will not
even recognise the existence of Spirit. He may accept from Croce the
thesis that art is the expression of intuitions, but he will not be
extravagantly grateful, because his duty as a critic is to distinguish
between intuitions and to decide that one is more significant than
another. A philosophy of art that lends him no aid in this and affords
no indication why the expression of one intuition should be preferred to
the expression of another is of little value to him. He will incline to
say that Hegel and Croce are the scientists of art rather than its
philosophers.
Here, then, is the opposition: between the philosophy that borrows its
values from science and the philosophy which shares its values with art.
We may put it with more cogency and truth: the opposition lies between a
philosophy without values and a philosophy based upon them. For values
are human, anthropocentric. Shut them out once and you shut them out for
ever. You do not get them back, as some believe, by declaring that such
and such a thing is true. Nothing is precious because it is true save to
a mind which has, consciously or unconsciously, decided that it is good
to know the truth. And the making of that single decision is a most
momentous judgment of value. If the scientist appeals to it, as indeed
he invariably does, he too is at bottom, though he may deny it, a
humanist. He would do better to confess it, and to confess that he too
is in search of the good life. Then he might become aware that to search
for the good life is in fact impossible, unless he has an ideal of it
before his mind's eye.
An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and
the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. There
is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, for
instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of
the diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we know
instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good with
reference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good life
because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives
the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently
human of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. In
the _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are
identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal
city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined
by the æsthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and
through, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the most
permanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent on
the examination of the identity which Plato established between the good
and the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic,
absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in
their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_,
the beautiful-good.
This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art
and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe
themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to
criticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic critics
but--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to art
are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. The
interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are
judged the same. If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the
consciousness of life. Poetry is more philosophic and more highly
serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than
his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the
actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history
significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place
of sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do
this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of
'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of
Plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude
from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not
fundamentally æsthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of the
greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art
ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the
way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, but
false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic
system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an
everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.
Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of
the word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man
appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the
work of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at which
human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely
expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he works
on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.
Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
the imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is the
consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. The
essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by
art. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot,
who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces
that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the
anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true
critic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present state
of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist
will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly
divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present
day. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his æsthetic
philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious.
This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no
means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for
quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists
about art as by the profane about either. Moreover, it is important to
remember that in proportion as society approaches the ideal--there is no
continual progress towards the ideal; at present society is as far
removed from it as it has ever been--the chance of the philosopher, of
the scientist even, becoming a true critic of art grows greater. When
the æsthetic basis of all humane activity is familiarly recognised, the
values of the philosopher, the scientist, and the artist become
consciously the same, and therefore interchangeable.
Still, the ideal society is sufficiently remote for us to disregard it,
and we shall say that the principle of art for art's sake contains an
element of truth when it is opposed to those who would inflict upon art
the values of science, of metaphysics, or of a morality of mere
convention. We shall also say that the principle of art for art's sake
needs to be understood and interpreted very differently. Its
implications are tremendous. Art is autonomous, and to be pursued for
its own sake, precisely because it comprehends the whole of human life;
because it has reference to a more perfectly human morality than other
activity of man; because, in so far as it is truly art, it is indicative
of a more comprehensive and unchallengeable harmony in the spirit of
man. It does not demand impossibilities, that man should be at one with
the universe or in tune with the infinite; but it does envisage the
highest of all attainable ideals, that man should be at one with
himself, obedient to his own most musical law.
Thus art reveals to us the principle of its own governance. The function
of criticism is to apply it. Obviously it can be applied only by him who
has achieved, if not the actual æsthetic ideal in life, at least a
vision and a sense of it. He alone will know that the principle he has
to elucidate and apply is living, organic. It is indeed the very
principle of artistic creation itself. Therefore he will approach what
claims to be a work of art first as a thing in itself, and seek with it
the most intimate and immediate contact in order that he may decide
whether it too is organic and living. He will be untiring in his effort
to refine his power of discrimination by the frequentation of the finest
work of the past, so that he may be sure of himself when he decides, as
he must, whether the object before him is the expression of an æsthetic
intuition at all. At the best he is likely to find that it is mixed and
various; that fragments of æsthetic vision jostle with unsubordinated
intellectual judgments.
But, in regarding the work of art as a thing in itself, he will never
forget the hierarchy of comprehension, that the active ideal of art is
indeed to see life steadily and see it whole, and that only he has a
claim to the title of a great artist whose work manifests an incessant
growth from a merely personal immediacy to a coherent and
all-comprehending attitude to life. The great artist's work is in all
its parts a revelation of the ideal as a principle of activity in human
life. As the apprehension of the ideal is more or less perfect, the
artist's comprehension will be greater or less. The critic has not
merely the right, but the duty, to judge between Homer and Shakespeare,
between Dante and Milton, between Cezanne and Michelangelo, Beethoven
and Mozart. If the foundations of his criticism are truly æsthetic, he
is compelled to believe and to show that among would-be artists some are
true artists and some are not, and that among true artists some are
greater than others. That what has generally passed under the name of
æsthetic criticism assumes as an axiom that every true work of art is
unique and incomparable is merely the paradox which betrays the
unworthiness of such criticism to bear the name it has arrogated to
itself. The function of true criticism is to establish a definite
hierarchy among the great artists of the past, as well as to test the
production of the present; by the combination of these activities it
asserts the organic unity of all art. It cannot honestly be said that
our present criticism is adequate to either task.
[APRIL, 1920.
_The Religion of Rousseau_
These are times when men have need of the great solitaries; for each man
now in his moment is a prey to the conviction that the world and his
deepest aspirations are incommensurable. He is shaken by a presentiment
that the lovely bodies of men are being spent and flaming human minds
put out in a conflict for something which never can be won in the clash
of material arms, and he is distraught by a vision of humanity as a
child pitifully wandering in a dark wood where the wind faintly echoes
the strange word 'Peace.' Therefore he too wanders pitifully like that
child, seeking peace, and men are become the symbols of mankind. The
tragic paradox of human life which slumbers in the soul in years of
peace is awakened again. When we would be solitary and cannot, we are
made sensible of the depth and validity of the impulse which moved the
solitaries of the past.
The paradox is apparent now on every hand. It appears in the death of
the author of _La Formation Réligieuse de J.J. Rousseau_.[1] One of the
most distinguished of the younger generation of French scholar-critics,
M. Masson met a soldier's death before the book to which he had devoted
ten years of his life was published. He had prepared it for the press in
the leisure hours of the trenches. There he had communed with the
unquiet spirit of the man who once thrilled the heart of Europe by
stammering forgotten secrets, and whispered to an age flushed and
confident with material triumphs that the battle had been won in vain.
Rousseau, rightly understood is no consoling companion for a soldier.
What if after all, the true end of man be those hours of plenary
beatitude he spent lying at the bottom of the boat on the Lake of
Bienne? What if the old truth is valid still, that man is born free but
is everywhere in chains? Let us hope that the dead author was not too
keenly conscious of the paradox which claimed him for sacrifice. His
death would have been bitter.
[Footnote 1: _La Formation Réligieuse de Jean-Jacques Rousseau_. Par
Pierre Maurice Masson. (Paris: Hachette. Three volumes.)]
From his book we can hardly hazard a judgment. His method would speak
against it. Jean-Jacques, as he himself knew only too well, is one of
the last great men to be catechised historically, for he was inadequate
to the life which is composed of the facts of which histories are made.
He had no historical sense; and of a man who has no historical sense no
real history can be written. Chronology was meaningless to him because
he could recognise no sovereignty of time over himself. With him ends
were beginnings. In the third _Dialogue_ he tell us--and it is nothing
less than the sober truth told by a man who knew himself well--that his
works must be read backwards, beginning with the last, by those who
would understand him. Indeed, his function was, in a deeper sense than
is imagined by those who take the parable called the _Contrat Social_
for a solemn treatise of political philosophy, to give the lie to
history. In himself he pitted the eternal against the temporal and grew
younger with years. He might be known as the man of the second childhood
_par excellence_. To the eye of history the effort of his soul was an
effort backwards, because the vision of history is focused only for a
perspective of progress. On his after-dinner journey to Diderot at
Vincennes, Jean-Jacques saw, with the suddenness of intuition, that that
progress, amongst whose convinced and cogent prophets he had lived so
long was for him an unsubstantial word. He beheld the soul of man _sub
specie æternitatis_. In his vision history and institutions dissolved
away. His second childhood had begun.
On such a man the historical method can have no grip. There is, as the
French say, no _engrenage_. It points to a certain lack of the subtler
kind of understanding to attempt to apply the method; more truly,
perhaps, to an unessential interest, which has of late years been
imported into French criticism from Germany. The Sorbonne has not, we
know, gone unscathed by the disease of documentation for documentation's
sake. M. Masson's three volumes leave us with the sense that their
author had learnt a method and in his zeal to apply it had lost sight of
the momentous question whether Jean-Jacques was a person to whom it
might be applied with a prospect of discovery. No one who read Rousseau
with a mind free of ulterior motives could have any doubt on the matter.
Jean-Jacques is categorical on the point. The Savoyard Vicar was
speaking for Jean-Jacques to posterity when he began his profession of
faith with the words:--
'Je ne veux argumenter avec vous, ni même de tenter vous convaincre;
il me suffit de vous exposer ce que je pense dans la simplicité de
mon coeur. Consultez le vôtre pendant mon discours; c'est tout ce
que je vous demande.'
To the extent, therefore, that M. Masson did not respond to this appeal
and filled his volumes with information concerning the books
Jean-Jacques might have read and a hundred other interesting but only
partly relevant things, he did the citizen of Geneva a wrong. The
ulterior motive is there, and the faint taste of a thesis in the most
modern manner. But the method is saved by the perception which, though
it sometimes lacks the perfect keenness of complete understanding, is
exquisite enough to suggest the answer to the questions it does not
satisfy. Though the environment is lavish the man is not lost.
It is but common piety to seek to understand Jean-Jacques in the way in
which he pleaded so hard to be understood. Yet it is now over forty
years since a voice of authority told England how it was to regard him.
Lord Morley was magisterial and severe, and England obeyed. One feels
almost that Jean-Jacques himself would have obeyed if he had been alive.
He would have trembled at the stern sentence that his deism was 'a rag
of metaphysics floating in a sunshine of sentimentalism,' and he would
have whispered that he would try to be good; but, when he heard his
_Dialogues_ described as the outpourings of a man with persecution
mania, he might have rebelled and muttered silently an _Eppur si muove_.
We see now that it was a mistake to stand him in the social dock, and
that precisely those _Dialogues_ which the then Mr Morley so powerfully
dismissed contain his plea that the tribunal has no jurisdiction. To
his contention that he wrote his books to ease his own soul it might be
replied that their publication was a social act which had vast social
consequences. But Jean-Jacques might well retort that the fact that his
contemporaries and the generation which followed read and judged him in
the letter and not in the spirit is no reason why we, at nearly two
centuries remove, should do the same.
A great man may justly claim our deference, if Jean-Jacques asks that
his last work shall be read first we are bound, even if we consider it
only a quixotic humour, to indulge it. But to those who read the
neglected _Dialogues_ it will appear a humour no longer. Here is a man
who at the end of his days is filled to overflowing with bitterness at
the thought that he has been misread and misunderstood. He says to
himself: Either he is at bottom of the same nature as other men or he is
different. If he is of the same nature, then there must be a malignant
plot at work. He has revealed his heart with labour and good faith; not
to hear him his fellow-men must have stopped their ears. If he is of
another kind than his fellows, then--but he cannot bear the thought.
Indeed it is a thought that no man can bear. They are blind because they
will not see. He has not asked them to believe that what he says is
true; he asks only that they shall believe that he is sincere, sincere
in what he says, sincere, above all, when he implores that they should
listen to the undertone. He has been 'the painter of nature and the
historian of the human heart.'
His critics might have paused to consider why Jean-Jacques, certainly
not niggard of self-praise in the _Dialogues_, should have claimed no
more for himself than this. He might have claimed, with what in their
eyes at least must be good right, to have been pre-eminent in his
century as a political philosopher, a novelist, and a theorist of
education. Yet to himself he is no more than 'the painter of nature and
the historian of the human heart.' Those who would make him more make
him less, because they make him other than he declares himself to be.
His whole life has been an attempt to be himself and nothing else
besides; and all his works have been nothing more and nothing less than
his attempt to make his own nature plain to men. Now at the end of his
life he has to swallow the bitterness of failure. He has been acclaimed
the genius of his age; kings have delighted to honour him, but they have
honoured another man. They have not known the true Jean-Jacques. They
have taken his parables for literal truth, and he knows why.
'Des êtres si singulièrement constitués doivent nécessairement
s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible
qu'avec des âmes si différemment modifiés ils ne portent pas dans
l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idées l'empreinte de
ces modifications. Si cette empreinte échappe à ceux qui n'ont
aucune notion de cette manière d'être, elle ne peut échapper à ceux
qui la connoissent, et qui en sont affectés eux-mêmes. C'est une
signe caracteristique auquel les initiés se reconnoissent entre eux;
et ce qui donne un grand prix à ce signe, c'est qu'il ne peut se
contrefaire, que jamais il n'agit qu'au niveau de sa source, et que,
quand il ne part pas du coeur de ceux qui l'imitent, il n'arrive
pas non plus aux coeurs faits pour le distinguer; mais sitôt qu'il y
parvient, on ne sauroit s'y méprendre; il est vrai dès qu'il est
senti.'
At the end of his days he felt that the great labour of his life which
had been to express an intuitive certainty in words which would carry
intellectual conviction, had been in vain, and his last words are: 'It
is true so soon as it is felt.'
Three pages would tell as much of the essential truth of his 'religious
formation' as three volumes. At Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens, as a
boy and as a young man, he had known peace of soul. In Paris, amid the
intellectual exaltation and enthusiasms of the Encyclopædists, the
memory of his lost peace haunted him like an uneasy conscience. His
boyish unquestioning faith disappeared beneath the destructive criticism
of the great pioneers of enlightenment and progress. Yet when all had
been destroyed the hunger in his heart was still unsatisfied. Underneath
his passionate admiration for Diderot smouldered a spark of resentment
that he was not understood. They had torn down the fabric of expression
into which he had poured the emotion of his immediate certainty as a
boy; sometimes with an uplifted, sometimes with a sinking heart he
surveyed the ruins. But the certainty that he had once been certain, the
memory and the desire of the past peace--this they could not destroy.
They could hardly even weaken this element within him, for they did not
know that it existed, they were unable to conceive that it could exist.
Jean-Jacques himself could give them no clue to its existence; he had
no words, and he was still under the spell of the intellectual dogma of
his age that words must express definite things. In common with his age
he had lost the secret of the infinite persuasion of poetry. So the
consciousness that he was different from those who surrounded him, and
from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of
his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of
their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The
pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is
apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the
note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to
this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable
without and within, he might be delivered from that disquieting sense of
tongue-tied queerness in a normal world.
If he cheated himself at all, the deception was brief. The poignant
memory of Les Charmettes whispered to him that there was a state of
grace in which the hard things were made clear. But he had not yet the
courage of his destiny. His consciousness of his separation from his
fellows had still to harden into a consciousness of superiority before
that courage would come. On the road to Vincennes on an October evening
in 1749--M. Masson has fixed the date for us--he read in a news-sheet
the question of the Dijon Academy: 'Si le rétablissement des arts et des
sciences a contribué à épurer les moeurs?' The scales dropped from his
eyes and the weight was removed from his tongue. There is no mystery
about this 'revelation.' For the first time the question had been put
in terms which struck him squarely in the heart. Jean-Jacques made his
reply with the stammering honesty of a man of genius wandering in age of
talent.
The First Discourse seems to many rhetorical and extravagant. In after
days it appeared so to Rousseau himself, and he claimed no more for it
than that he had tried to tell the truth. Before he learned that he had
won the Dijon prize and that his work had taken Paris by storm, he was
surely a prey to terrors lest his Vincennes vision of the non-existence
of progress should have been mere madness. The success reassured him.
'Cette faveur du public, nullement brigué, et pour un auteur inconnu, me
donna la première assurance véritable de mon talent.' He was, in fact,
not 'queer,' but right; and he had seemed to be queer precisely because
he was right. Now he had the courage. 'Je suis grossier,' he wrote in
the preface to _Narcisse_, 'maussade, impoli par principes; je me fous
de tous vous autres gens de cour; je suis un barbare.' There is a touch
of exaggeration and bravado in it all. He was still something of the
child hallooing in the dark to give himself heart. He clutched hold of
material symbols of the freedom he had won, round wig, black stockings,
and a living gained by copying music at so much a line. But he did not
break with his friends; the 'bear' suffered himself to be made a lion.
He had still a foot in either camp, for though he had the conviction
that he was right, he was still fumbling for his words. The memoirs of
Madame d'Epinay tell us how in 1754, at dinner at Mlle Quinault's,
impotent to reply to the polite atheistical persiflage of the company,
he broke out: 'Et moi, messieurs, je crois en Dieu. Je sors si vous
dites un mot de plus.' That was not what he meant; neither was the First
Discourse what he meant. He had still to find his language, and to find
his language he had to find his peace. He was like a twig whirled about
in an eddy of a stream. Suddenly the stream bore him to Geneva, where he
returned to the church which he had left at Confignon. That, too, was
not what he meant. When he returned from Geneva, Madame d'Epinay had
built him the Ermitage.
In the _Rêveries_, which are mellow with the golden calm of his
discovered peace, he tells how, having reached the climacteric which he
had set at forty years, he went apart into the solitude of the Ermitage
to inquire into the configuration of his own soul, and to fix once for
all his opinions and his principles. In the exquisite third _Rêverie_
two phrases occur continually. His purpose was 'to find firm
ground'--'prendre une assiette,'--and his means to this discovery was
'spiritual honesty'--'bonne foi.' Rousseau's deep concern was to
elucidate the anatomy of his own soul, but, since he was sincere, he
regarded it as a type of the soul of man. Looking into himself, he saw
that, in spite of all his follies, his weaknesses, his faintings by the
way, his blasphemies against the spirit, he was good. Therefore he
declared: Man is born good. Looking into himself he saw that he was free
to work out his own salvation, and to find that solid foundation of
peace which he so fervently desired. Therefore he declared: Man is born
free. To the whisper of les Charmettes that there was a condition of
grace had been added the sterner voice of remorse for his abandoned
children, telling him that he had fallen from his high estate.
'J'ai fui en vain; partout j'ai retrouvé la Loi.
Il faut céder enfin! ô porte, il faut admettre
L'hôte; coeur frémissant, il faut subir le maître,
Quelqu'un qui soit en moi plus moi-même que moi.'
The noble verse of M. Claudel contains the final secret of Jean-Jacques.
He found in himself something more him than himself. Therefore he
declared: There is a God. But he sought to work out a logical foundation
for these pinnacles of truth. He must translate these luminous
convictions of his soul into arguments and conclusions. He could not,
even to himself, admit that they were only intuitions; and in the
_Contrat Social_ he turned the reason to the service of a certainty not
her own.
This unremitting endeavour to express an intuitive certainty in
intellectual terms lies at the root of the many superficial
contradictions in his work, and of the deeper contradiction which forms,
as it were, the inward rhythm of his three great books. He seems to
surge upwards on a passionate wave of revolutionary ideas, only to sink
back into the calm of conservative or quietist conclusions. M. Masson
has certainly observed it well.
'Le premier _Discours_ anathématise les sciences et les arts, et ne
voit le salut que dans les académies; le _Discours sur l'Inégalité_
paraît détruire tout autorité, et recommande pourtant "l'obéissance
scrupuleuse aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs": la
_Nouvelle Héloïse_ prêche d'abord l'émancipation sentimentale, et
proclame la suprématie des droits de la passion, mais elle aboutit à
exalter la fidelité conjugale, à consolider les grands devoirs
familiaux et sociaux. Le Vicaire Savoyard nous reserve la même
surprise.'
To the revolutionaries of his age he was a renegade and a reactionary;
to the Conservatives, a subversive charlatan. Yet he was in truth only a
man stricken by the demon of 'la bonne foi,' and, like many men devoured
by the passion of spiritual honesty, in his secret heart he believed in
his similitude to Christ. 'Je ne puis pas souffrir les tièdes,' he wrote
to Madame Latour in 1762, 'quiconque ne se passionne pas pour moi n'est
pas digne de moi.' There is no mistaking the accent, and it sounds more
plainly still in the _Dialogues_. He, too, was persecuted for
righteousness' sake, because he, too, proclaimed that the kingdom of
heaven was within men.
And what, indeed, have material things to do with the purification and
the peace of the soul? World-shattering arguments and world-preserving
conclusions--this is the inevitable paradox which attends the attempt to
record truth seen by the eye of the soul in the language of the
market-place. The eloquence and the inspiration may descend upon the man
so that he writes believing that all men will understand. He wakes in
the morning and he is afraid, not of his own words whose deeper truth he
does not doubt, but of the incapacity of mankind to understand him. They
will read in the letter what was written in the spirit; their eyes will
see the words, but their ears will be stopped to the music. The
_mystique_ as Péguy would have said, will be degraded into _politique_.
To guard himself against this unhallowed destiny, at the last Rousseau
turns with decision and in the language of his day rewrites the hard
saying, that the things which are Cæsar's shall be rendered unto Cæsar.