CHAPTER I

ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM

by

IRVING BABBITT

Professor of French Literature in Harvard University

[Illustration]

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Company

The Riverside Press Cambridge

_L’imagination dispose de tout._

PASCAL

_Le bon sens est le maître de la vie humaine._

BOSSUET

_L’homme est un être immense, en quelque sorte, qui peut

exister partiellement, mais dont l’existence est d’autant plus

délicieuse qu’elle est plus entière et plus pleine._

JOUBERT

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ix

I. THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 1

II. ROMANTIC GENIUS 32

III. ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 70

IV. ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL 114

V. ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE REAL 187

VI. ROMANTIC LOVE 220

VII. ROMANTIC IRONY 240

VIII. ROMANTICISM AND NATURE 268

IX. ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY 306

X. THE PRESENT OUTLOOK 353

APPENDIX--CHINESE PRIMITIVISM 395

BIBLIOGRAPHY 399

INDEX 421

INTRODUCTION

Many readers will no doubt be tempted to exclaim on seeing my title:

“Rousseau and no end!” The outpour of books on Rousseau had indeed in

the period immediately preceding the war become somewhat portentous.[1]

This preoccupation with Rousseau is after all easy to explain. It is

his somewhat formidable privilege to represent more fully than any

other one person a great international movement. To attack Rousseau or

to defend him is most often only a way of attacking or defending this

movement.

It is from this point of view at all events that the present work is

conceived. I have not undertaken a systematic study of Rousseau’s life

and doctrines. The appearance of his name in my title is justified,

if at all, simply because he comes at a fairly early stage in the

international movement the rise and growth of which I am tracing, and

has on the whole supplied me with the most significant illustrations of

it. I have already put forth certain views regarding this movement in

three previous volumes.[2] Though each one of these volumes attempts to

do justice to a particular topic, it is at the same time intended to be

a link in a continuous argument. I hope that I may be allowed to speak

here with some frankness of the main trend of this argument both on its

negative and on its positive, or constructive, side.

Perhaps the best key to both sides of my argument is found in the

lines of Emerson I have taken as epigraph for “Literature and the

American College”:

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled,--

Law for man, and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild,

And doth the man unking.

On its negative side my argument is directed against this undue

emphasis on the “law for thing,” against the attempt to erect on

naturalistic foundations a complete philosophy of life. I define two

main forms of naturalism--on the one hand, utilitarian and scientific

and, on the other, emotional naturalism. The type of romanticism I am

studying is inseparably bound up with emotional naturalism.

This type of romanticism encouraged by the naturalistic movement is

only one of three main types I distinguish and I am dealing for the

most part with only one aspect of it. But even when thus circumscribed

the subject can scarcely be said to lack importance; for if I am right

in my conviction as to the unsoundness of a Rousseauistic philosophy of

life, it follows that the total tendency of the Occident at present is

away from rather than towards civilization.

On the positive side, my argument aims to reassert the “law for man,”

and its special discipline against the various forms of naturalistic

excess. At the very mention of the word discipline I shall be set down

in certain quarters as reactionary. But does it necessarily follow

from a plea for the human law that one is a reactionary or in general

a traditionalist? An American writer of distinction was once heard to

remark that he saw in the world to-day but two classes of persons,--the

mossbacks and the mountebanks, and that for his part he preferred to

be a mossback. One should think twice before thus consenting to seem a

mere relic of the past. The ineffable smartness of our young radicals

is due to the conviction that, whatever else they may be, they are the

very pink of modernity. Before sharing their conviction it might be

well to do a little preliminary defining of such terms as modern and

the modern spirit. It may then turn out that the true difficulty with

our young radicals is not that they are too modern but that they are

not modern enough. For, though the word modern is often and no doubt

inevitably used to describe the more recent or the most recent thing,

this is not its sole use. It is not in this sense alone that the word

is used by writers like Goethe and Sainte-Beuve and Renan and Arnold.

What all these writers mean by the modern spirit is the positive and

critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things on authority.

This is what Renan means, for example, when he calls Petrarch the

“founder of the modern spirit in literature,” or Arnold when he

explains why the Greeks of the great period seem more modern to us than

the men of the Middle Ages.[3]

Now what I have myself tried to do is to be thoroughly modern in this

sense. I hold that one should not only welcome the efforts of the

man of science at his best to put the natural law on a positive and

critical basis, but that one should strive to emulate him in one’s

dealings with the human law; and so become a complete positivist. My

main objection to the movement I am studying is that it has failed to

produce complete positivists. Instead of facing honestly the emergency

created by its break with the past the leaders of this movement have

inclined to deny the duality of human nature, and then sought to

dissimulate this mutilation of man under a mass of intellectual and

emotional sophistry. The proper procedure in refuting these incomplete

positivists is not to appeal to some dogma or outer authority but

rather to turn against them their own principles. Thus Diderot, a

notable example of the incomplete positivist and a chief source of

naturalistic tendency, says that “everything is experimental in man.”

Now the word experimental has somewhat narrowed in meaning since the

time of Diderot. If one takes the saying to mean that everything in man

is a matter of experience one should accept it unreservedly and then

plant oneself firmly on the facts of experience that Diderot and other

incomplete positivists have refused to recognize.

The man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience,

is an individualist. To be modern in the sense I have defined is not

only to be positive and critical, but also--and this from the time of

Petrarch--to be individualistic. The establishment of a sound type

of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem. It is

right here that the failure of the incomplete positivist, the man who

is positive only according to the natural law, is most conspicuous.

What prevails in the region of the natural law is endless change and

relativity; therefore the naturalistic positivist attacks all the

traditional creeds and dogmas for the very reason that they aspire to

fixity. Now all the ethical values of civilization have been associated

with these fixed beliefs; and so it has come to pass that with their

undermining by naturalism the ethical values themselves are in danger

of being swept away in the everlasting flux. Because the individual

who views life positively must give up unvarying creeds and dogmas

“anterior, exterior, and superior” to himself, it has been assumed

that he must also give up standards. For standards imply an element of

oneness somewhere, with reference to which it is possible to measure

the mere manifoldness and change. The naturalistic individualist,

however, refuses to recognize any such element of oneness. His own

private and personal self is to be the measure of all things and this

measure itself, he adds, is constantly changing. But to stop at this

stage is to be satisfied with the most dangerous of half-truths.

Thus Bergson’s assertion that “life is a perpetual gushing forth of

novelties” is in itself only a dangerous half-truth of this kind. The

constant element in life is, no less than the element of novelty and

change, a matter of observation and experience. As the French have it,

the more life changes the more it is the same thing.

If, then, one is to be a sound individualist, an individualist with

human standards--and in an age like this that has cut loose from its

traditional moorings, the very survival of civilization would seem to

hinge on its power to produce such a type of individualist--one must

grapple with what Plato terms the problem of the One and the Many.

My own solution of this problem, it may be well to point out, is not

purely Platonic. Because one can perceive immediately an element

of unity in things, it does not follow that one is justified in

establishing a world of essences or entities or “ideas” above the flux.

To do this is to fall away from a positive and critical into a more

or less speculative attitude; it is to risk setting up a metaphysic

of the One. Those who put exclusive emphasis on the element of change

in things are in no less obvious danger of falling away from the

positive and critical attitude into a metaphysic of the Many.[4] This

for example is the error one finds in the contemporary thinkers who

seem to have the cry, thinkers like James and Bergson and Dewey and

Croce. They are very far from satisfying the requirements of a complete

positivism; they are seeking rather to build up their own intoxication

with the element of change into a complete view of life, and so are

turning their backs on one whole side of experience in a way that often

reminds one of the ancient Greek sophists. The history of philosophy

since the Greeks is to a great extent the history of the clashes of the

metaphysicians of the One and the metaphysicians of the Many. In the

eyes of the complete positivist this history therefore reduces itself

largely to a monstrous logomachy.

Life does not give here an element of oneness and there an element of

change. It gives a _oneness that is always changing_. The oneness and

the change are inseparable. Now if what is stable and permanent is felt

as real, the side of life that is always slipping over into something

else or vanishing away entirely is, as every student of psychology

knows, associated rather with the feeling of illusion. If a man

attends solely to this side of life he will finally come, like Leconte

de Lisle, to look upon it as a “torrent of mobile chimeras,” as an

“endless whirl of vain appearances.” To admit that the oneness of life

and the change are inseparable is therefore to admit that such reality

as man can know positively is inextricably mixed up with illusion.

Moreover man does not observe the oneness that is always changing from

the outside; he is a part of the process, he is himself a oneness that

is always changing. Though imperceptible at any particular moment, the

continuous change that is going on leads to differences--those, let us

say, between a human individual at the age of six weeks and the same

individual at the age of seventy--which are sufficiently striking: and

finally this human oneness that is always changing seems to vanish

away entirely. From all this it follows that an enormous element

of illusion--and this is a truth the East has always accepted more

readily than the West--enters into the idea of personality itself. If

the critical spirit is once allowed to have its way, it will not rest

content until it has dissolved life into a mist of illusion. Perhaps

the most positive and critical account of man in modern literature is

that of Shakespeare:

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

But, though strictly considered, life is but a web of illusion and a

dream within a dream, it is a dream that needs to be managed with the

utmost discretion, if it is not to turn into a nightmare. In other

words, however much life may mock the metaphysician, the problem of

conduct remains. There is always the unity at the heart of the change;

it is possible, however, to get at this real and abiding element and

so at the standards with reference to which the dream of life may be

rightly managed only through a veil of illusion. The problem of the

One and the Many, the ultimate problem of thought, can therefore be

solved only by a right use of illusion. In close relation to illusion

and the questions that arise in connection with it is all that we

have come to sum up in the word imagination. The use of this word, at

least in anything like its present extension, is, one should note,

comparatively recent. Whole nations and periods of the past can

scarcely be said to have had any word corresponding to imagination in

this extended sense. Yet the thinkers of the past have treated, at

times profoundly, under the head of fiction or illusion the questions

that we should treat under the head of imagination.[5] In the “Masters

of Modern French Criticism” I was above all preoccupied with the

problem of the One and the Many and the failure of the nineteenth

century to deal with it adequately. My effort in this present work is

to show that this failure can be retrieved only by a deeper insight

into the imagination and its all-important rôle in both literature

and life. Man is cut off from immediate contact with anything abiding

and therefore worthy to be called real, and condemned to live in an

element of fiction or illusion, but he may, I have tried to show, lay

hold with the aid of the imagination on the element of oneness that

is inextricably blended with the manifoldness and change and to just

that extent may build up a sound model for imitation. One tends to

be an individualist with true standards, to put the matter somewhat

differently, only in so far as one understands the relation between

appearance and reality--what the philosophers call the epistemological

problem. This problem, though it cannot be solved abstractly and

metaphysically, can be solved practically and in terms of actual

conduct. Inasmuch as modern philosophy has failed to work out any such

solution, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that modern philosophy is

bankrupt, not merely from Kant, but from Descartes.

The supreme maxim of the ethical positivist is: By their fruits shall

ye know them. If I object to a romantic philosophy it is because I do

not like its fruits. I infer from its fruits that this philosophy has

made a wrong use of illusion. “All those who took the romantic promises

at their face value,” says Bourget, “rolled in abysses of despair and

ennui.”[6] If any one still holds, as many of the older romanticists

held, that it is a distinguished thing to roll in abysses of despair

and ennui, he should read me no further. He will have no sympathy with

my point of view. If any one, on the other hand, accepts my criterion

but denies that Rousseauistic living has such fruits, it has been my

aim so to accumulate evidence that he will be confronted with the task

of refuting not a set of theories but a body of facts. My whole method,

let me repeat, is experimental, or it might be less ambiguous to say if

the word were a fortunate one, experiential. The illustrations I have

given of any particular aspect of the movement are usually only a small

fraction of those I have collected--themselves no doubt only a fraction

of the illustrations that might be collected from printed sources. M.

Maigron’s investigation[7] into the fruits of romantic living suggests

the large additions that might be made to these printed sources from

manuscript material.

My method indeed is open in one respect to grave misunderstanding.

From the fact that I am constantly citing passages from this or that

author and condemning the tendency for which these passages stand,

the reader will perhaps be led to infer a total condemnation of the

authors so quoted. But the inference may be very incorrect. I am

not trying to give rounded estimates of individuals--delightful and

legitimate as that type of criticism is--but to trace main currents as

a part of my search for a set of principles to oppose to naturalism.

I call attention for example to the Rousseauistic and primitivistic

elements in Wordsworth but do not assert that this is the whole

truth about Wordsworth. One’s views as to the philosophical value

of Rousseauism must, however, weigh heavily in a total judgment of

Wordsworth. Criticism is such a difficult art because one must not

only have principles but must apply them flexibly and intuitively. No

one would accuse criticism at present of lacking flexibility. It has

grown so flexible in fact as to become invertebrate. One of my reasons

for practicing the present type of criticism, is the conviction that

because of a lack of principles the type of criticism that aims at

rounded estimates of individuals is rapidly ceasing to have any meaning.

I should add that if I had attempted rounded estimates they would often

have been more favorable than might be gathered from my comments here

and elsewhere on the romantic leaders. One is justified in leaning

towards severity in the laying down of principles, but should nearly

always incline to indulgence in the application of them. In a sense one

may say with Goethe that the excellencies are of the individual, the

defects of the age. It is especially needful to recall distinctions

of this kind in the case of Rousseau himself and my treatment of him.

M. Lanson has dwelt on the strange duality of Rousseau’s nature.

“The writer,” he says, “is a poor dreamy creature who approaches

action only with alarm and with every manner of precaution, and who

understands the applications of his boldest doctrines in a way to

reassure conservatives and satisfy opportunists. But the work for its

part detaches itself from the author, lives its independent life,

and, heavily charged with revolutionary explosives which neutralize

the moderate and conciliatory elements Rousseau has put into it for

his own satisfaction, it exasperates and inspires revolt and fires

enthusiasms and irritates hatreds; it is the mother of violence, the

source of all that is uncompromising, it launches the simple souls

who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest

of the absolute, an absolute to be realized now by anarchy and now by

social despotism.”[8] I am inclined to discover in the Rousseau who,

according to M. Lanson, is merely timorous, a great deal of shrewdness

and at times something even better than shrewdness. The question is

not perhaps very important, for M. Lanson is surely right in affirming

that the Rousseau who has moved the world--and that for reasons I shall

try to make plain--is Rousseau the extremist and foe of compromise;

and so it is to this Rousseau that as a student of main tendencies I

devote almost exclusive attention. I am not, however, seeking to make

a scapegoat even of the radical and revolutionary Rousseau. One of

my chief objections, indeed, to Rousseauism, as will appear in the

following pages, is that it encourages the making of scapegoats.

If I am opposed to Rousseauism because of its fruits in experience, I

try to put what I have to offer as a substitute on the same positive

basis. Now experience is of many degrees: first of all one’s purely

personal experience, an infinitesimal fragment; and then the experience

of one’s immediate circle, of one’s time and country, of the near past

and so on in widening circles. The past which as dogma the ethical

positivist rejects, as experience he not only admits but welcomes. He

can no more dispense with it indeed than the naturalistic positivist

can dispense with his laboratory. He insists moreover on including

the remoter past in his survey. Perhaps the most pernicious of all

the conceits fostered by the type of progress we owe to science is

the conceit that we have outgrown this older experience. One should

endeavor, as Goethe says, to oppose to the aberrations of the hour, the

masses of universal history. There are special reasons just now why

this background to which one appeals should not be merely Occidental.

An increasing material contact between the Occident and the Far East

is certain. We should be enlightened by this time as to the perils

of material contact between men and bodies of men who have no deeper

understanding. Quite apart from this consideration the experience of

the Far East completes and confirms in a most interesting way that of

the Occident. We can scarcely afford to neglect it if we hope to work

out a truly ecumenical wisdom to oppose to the sinister one-sidedness

of our current naturalism. Now the ethical experience of the Far East

may be summed up for practical purposes in the teachings and influence

of two men, Confucius and Buddha.[9] To know the Buddhistic and

Confucian teachings in their true spirit is to know what is best and

most representative in the ethical experience of about half the human

race for over seventy generations.

A study of Buddha and Confucius suggests, as does a study of the great

teachers of the Occident, that under its bewildering surface variety

human experience falls after all into a few main categories. I myself

am fond of distinguishing three levels on which a man may experience

life--the naturalistic, the humanistic, and the religious. Tested by

its fruits Buddhism at its best confirms Christianity. Submitted to the

same test Confucianism falls in with the teaching of Aristotle and in

general with that of all those who from the Greeks down have proclaimed

decorum and the law of measure. This is so obviously true that

Confucius has been called the Aristotle of the East. Not only has the

Far East had in Buddhism a great religious movement and in Confucianism

a great humanistic movement, it has also had in early Taoism[10] a

movement that in its attempts to work out naturalistic equivalents of

humanistic or religious insight, offers almost startling analogies to

the movement I am here studying.

Thus both East and West have not only had great religious and

humanistic disciplines which when tested by their fruits confirm one

another, bearing witness to the element of oneness, the constant

element in human experience, but these disciplines have at times

been conceived in a very positive spirit. Confucius indeed, though a

moral realist, can scarcely be called a positivist; he aimed rather

to attach men to the past by links of steel. He reminds us in this as

in some other ways of the last of the great Tories in the Occident,

Dr. Johnson. Buddha on the other hand was an individualist. He wished

men to rest their belief neither on his authority[11] nor on that

of tradition.[12] No one has ever made a more serious effort to put

religion on a positive and critical basis. It is only proper that I

acknowledge my indebtedness to the great Hindu positivist: my treatment

of the problem of the One and the Many, for example, is nearer to

Buddha than to Plato. Yet even if the general thesis be granted that it

is desirable to put the “law for man” on a positive and critical basis,

the question remains whether the more crying need just now is for

positive and critical humanism or for positive and critical religion.

I have discussed this delicate and difficult question more fully in my

last chapter, but may give at least one reason here for inclining to

the humanistic solution. I have been struck in my study of the past

by the endless self-deception to which man is subject when he tries

to pass too abruptly from the naturalistic to the religious level.

The world, it is hard to avoid concluding, would have been a better

place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting

out to be superhuman; and this consideration would seem to apply with

special force to a generation like the present that is wallowing in

the trough of naturalism. After all to be a good humanist is merely to

be moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier for a man to

deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural lights than it is

regarding the degree to which he is moderate and sensible and decent.

The past is not without examples of a positive and critical humanism. I

have already mentioned Aristotle. If by his emphasis on the mediatory

virtues he reminds one of Confucius, by his positive method and

intensely analytical temper he reminds one rather of Buddha. When

Aristotle rises to the religious level and discourses of the “life of

vision” he is very Buddhistic. When Buddha for his part turns from the

religious life to the duties of the layman he is purely Aristotelian.

Aristotle also deals positively with the natural law. He is indeed a

complete positivist, and not, like the man of the nineteenth century,

positive according to the natural law alone. The Aristotle that

should specially concern us, however, is the positive and critical

humanist--the Aristotle, let us say, of the “Ethics” and “Politics” and

“Poetics.” Just as I have called the point of view of the scientific

and utilitarian naturalist Baconian,[13] and that of the emotional

naturalist Rousseauistic, so I would term the point of view that I

am myself seeking to develop Aristotelian. Aristotle has laid down

once for all the principle that should guide the ethical positivist.

“Truth,” he says, “in matters of moral action is judged from facts and

from actual life. … So what we should do is to examine the preceding

statements [of Solon and other wise men] by referring them to facts

and to actual life, and when they harmonize with facts we may accept

them, when they are at variance with them conceive of them as mere

theories.”[14]

It is in this sense alone that I aspire to be called an Aristotelian;

for one risks certain misunderstandings in using the name of

Aristotle.[15] The authority of this great positivist has been invoked

innumerable times throughout the ages as a substitute for direct

observation. Aristotle was not only the prop and mainstay of dogma

for centuries during the Middle Ages, but dogmatic Aristotelianism

survived to no small extent, especially in literature, throughout the

neo-classical period. It was no doubt natural enough that the champions

of the modern spirit should have rejected Aristotle along with the

traditional order of which he had been made a support. Yet if they had

been more modern they might have seen in him rather a chief precursor.

They might have learned from him how to have standards and at the same

time not be immured in dogma. As it is, those who call themselves

modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life.

“On desperate seas long wont to roam,” they have lost more and more

the sense of what is normal and central in human experience. But to

get away from what is normal and central is to get away from wisdom.

My whole argument on the negative side, if I may venture on a final

summing up, is that the naturalistic movement in the midst of which

we are still living had from the start this taint of eccentricity. I

have tried to show in detail the nature of the aberration. As for the

results, they are being written large in disastrous events. On its

constructive side, my argument, if it makes any appeal at all, will

be to those for whom the symbols through which the past has received

its wisdom have become incredible, and who, seeing at the same time

that the break with the past that took place in the eighteenth century

was on unsound lines, hold that the remedy for the partial positivism

that is the source of this unsoundness, is a more complete positivism.

Nothing is more perilous than to be only half critical. This is to

risk being the wrong type of individualist--the individualist who has

repudiated outer control without achieving inner control. “People mean

nowadays by a philosopher,” says Rivarol, “not the man who learns the

great art of mastering his passions or adding to his insight, but

the man who has cast off prejudices without acquiring virtues.” That

view of philosophy has not ceased to be popular. The whole modern

experiment is threatened with breakdown simply because it has not been

sufficiently modern. One should therefore not rest content until one

has, with the aid of the secular experience of both the East and the

West, worked out a point of view so modern that, compared with it, that

of our young radicals will seem antediluvian.

ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM

CHAPTER I

THE TERMS CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

The words classic and romantic, we are often told, cannot be defined

at all, and even if they could be defined, some would add, we should

not be much profited. But this inability or unwillingness to define may

itself turn out to be only one aspect of a movement that from Rousseau

to Bergson has sought to discredit the analytical intellect--what

Wordsworth calls “the false secondary power by which we multiply

distinctions.” However, those who are with Socrates rather than with

Rousseau or Wordsworth in this matter, will insist on the importance

of definition, especially in a chaotic era like the present; for

nothing is more characteristic of such an era than its irresponsible

use of general terms. Now to measure up to the Socratic standard, a

definition must not be abstract and metaphysical, but experimental;

it must not, that is, reflect our opinion of what a word should mean,

but what it actually has meant. Mathematicians may be free at times

to frame their own definitions, but in the case of words like classic

and romantic, that have been used innumerable times, and used not in

one but in many countries, such a method is inadmissible. One must

keep one’s eye on actual usage. One should indeed allow for a certain

amount of freakishness in this usage. Beaumarchais, for example, makes

classic synonymous with barbaric.[16] One may disregard an occasional

aberration of this kind, but if one can find only confusion and

inconsistency in all the main uses of words like classic and romantic,

the only procedure for those who speak or write in order to be

understood is to banish the words from their vocabulary.

Now to define in a Socratic way two things are necessary: one must

learn to see a common element in things that are apparently different

and also to discriminate between things that are apparently similar.

A Newton, to take the familiar instance of the former process, saw a

common element in the fall of an apple and the motion of a planet;

and one may perhaps without being a literary Newton discover a common

element in all the main uses of the word romantic as well as in all

the main uses of the word classic; though some of the things to which

the word romantic in particular has been applied seem, it must be

admitted, at least as far apart as the fall of an apple and the motion

of a planet. The first step is to perceive the something that connects

two or more of these things apparently so diverse, and then it may be

found necessary to refer this unifying trait itself back to something

still more general, and so on until we arrive, not indeed at anything

absolute--the absolute will always elude us--but at what Goethe calls

the original or underlying phenomenon (_Urphänomen_). A fruitful source

of false definition is to take as primary in a more or less closely

allied group of facts what is actually secondary--for example, to fix

upon the return to the Middle Ages as the central fact in romanticism,

whereas this return is only symptomatic; it is very far from being the

original phenomenon. Confused and incomplete definitions of romanticism

have indeed just that origin--they seek to put at the centre something

that though romantic is not central but peripheral, and so the whole

subject is thrown out of perspective.

My plan then is to determine to the best of my ability, in connection

with a brief historical survey, the common element in the various uses

of the words classic and romantic; and then, having thus disposed of

the similarities, to turn to the second part of the art of defining

and deal, also historically, with the differences. For my subject is

not romanticism in general, but only a particular type of romanticism,

and this type of romanticism needs to be seen as a recoil, not from

classicism in general, but from a particular type of classicism.

I

The word romantic when traced historically is found to go back to

the old French _roman_ of which still elder forms are _romans_ and

_romant_. These and similar formations derive ultimately from the

mediæval Latin adverb _romanice_. _Roman_ and like words meant

originally the various vernaculars derived from Latin, just as the

French still speak of these vernaculars as _les langues romanes_;

and then the word _roman_ came to be applied to tales written in the

various vernaculars, especially in old French. Now with what features

of these tales were people most struck? The reply to this question is

found in a passage of a fifteenth-century Latin manuscript:[17] “From

the reading of certain romantics, that is, books of poetry composed in

French on military deeds which are for the most part fictitious.”[18]

Here the term romantic is applied to books that we should still

call romantic and for the very same reason, namely, because of the

predominance in these books of the element of fiction over reality.

In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is

wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violates the

normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is

the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which

meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all the

uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it

is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique,[19]

etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique,

but representative of a class. In this sense medical men may speak

correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of

hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of

romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when

it belongs to a high class or to the best class.

The type of romanticism referred to in the fifteenth-century manuscript

was, it will be observed, the spontaneous product of the popular

imagination of the Middle Ages. We may go further and say that the

uncultivated human imagination in all times and places is romantic in

the same way. It hungers for the thrilling and the marvellous and is,

in short, incurably melodramatic. All students of the past know how,

when the popular imagination is left free to work on actual historical

characters and events, it quickly introduces into these characters

and events the themes of universal folk-lore, and makes a ruthless

sacrifice of reality to the love of melodramatic surprise. For example,

the original nucleus of historical fact has almost disappeared in the

lurid melodramatic tale “Les quatre fils Aymon,” which has continued,

as presented in the “Bibliothèque Bleue,” to appeal to the French

peasant down to our own times. Those who look with alarm on recent

attacks upon romanticism should therefore be comforted. All children,

nearly all women and the vast majority of men always have been, are

and probably always will be romantic. This is true even of a classical

period like the second half of the seventeenth century in France.

Boileau is supposed to have killed the vogue of the interminable

romances of the early seventeenth century which themselves continue

the spirit of the mediæval romances. But recent investigations have

shown that the vogue of these romances continued until well on into the

eighteenth century. They influenced the imagination of Rousseau, the

great modern romancer.

But to return to the history of the word romantic. The first printed

examples of the word in any modern tongue are, it would seem, to be

found in English. The Oxford Dictionary cites the following from F.

Greville’s “Life of Sidney” (written before 1628, published in 1652):

“Doe not his Arcadian romantics live after him?”--meaning apparently

ideas or features suggestive of romance. Of extreme interest is the

use of the word in Evelyn’s “Diary” (3 August, 1654): “Were Sir Guy’s

grot improved as it might be, it were capable of being made a most

romantic and pleasant place.” The word is not only used in a favorable

sense, but it is applied to nature; and it is this use of the word in

connection with outer nature that French and German literatures are

going to derive later from England. Among the early English uses of

the word romantic may be noted: “There happened this extraordinary

case--one of the most romantique that ever I heard in my life and could

not have believed,”[20] etc. “Most other authors that I ever read

either have wild romantic tales wherein they strain Love and Honor to

that ridiculous height that it becomes burlesque,”[21] etc. The word

becomes fairly common by the year 1700 and thousands of examples could

be collected from English writers in the eighteenth century. Here are

two early eighteenth-century instances:

“The gentleman I am married to made love to me in rapture but

it was the rapture of a Christian and a man of Honor, not a

romantic hero or a whining coxcomb.”[22]

Whether the charmer sinner it or saint it

If folly grow romantick I must paint it.[23]

The early French and German uses of the word romantic seem to derive

from England. One important point is to be noted as to France. Before

using the word _romantique_ the French used the word _romanesque_ in

the sense of wild, unusual, adventurous--especially in matters of

sentiment, and they have continued to employ _romanesque_ alongside

_romantique_, which is now practically used only of the romantic

school. A great deal of confusion is thus avoided into which we fall

in English from having only the one word romantic, which must do duty

for both _romantique_ and _romanesque_. An example of _romantique_

is found in French as early as 1675;[24] but the word owed its vogue

practically to the anglomania that set in about the middle of the

eighteenth century. The first very influential French example of the

word is appropriately found in Rousseau in the Fifth Promenade (1777):

“The shores of the Lake of Bienne are more wild and romantic than those

of the Lake of Geneva.” The word _romantique_ was fashionable in France

especially as applied to scenery from about the year 1785, but without

any thought as yet of applying it to a literary school.

In Germany the word _romantisch_ as an equivalent of the French

_romanesque_ and modern German _romanhaft_, appears at the end of

the seventeenth century and plainly as a borrowing from the French.

Heidigger, a Swiss, used it several times in his “Mythoscopia

romantica,”[25] an attack on romances and the wild and vain imaginings

they engender. According to Heidigger the only resource against

romanticism in this sense is religion. In Germany as in France the

association of romantic with natural scenery comes from England,

especially from the imitations and translations of Thomson’s “Seasons.”

In the second half of the eighteenth century the increasingly favorable

use of words like Gothic and enthusiastic as well as the emergence of

words like sentimental and picturesque are among the symptoms of a new

movement, and the fortunes of the word romantic were more or less bound

up with this movement. Still, apart from its application to natural

scenery, the word is as yet far from having acquired a favorable

connotation if we are to believe an essay by John Foster on the

“Application of the Epithet Romantic” (1805). Foster’s point of view is

not unlike that of Heidigger. Romantic, he says, had come to be used

as a term of vague abuse, whereas it can be used rightly only of the

ascendancy of imagination over judgment, and is therefore synonymous

with such words as wild, visionary, extravagant. “A man possessing

so strong a judgment and so subordinate a fancy as Dean Swift would

hardly have been made romantic … if he had studied all the books in Don

Quixote’s library.” It is not, Foster admits, a sign of high endowment

for a youth to be too coldly judicial, too deaf to the blandishments of

imaginative illusion. Yet in general a man should strive to bring his

imagination under the control of sound reason. But how is it possible

thus to prevail against the deceits of fancy? Right knowing, he asserts

very un-Socratically, is not enough to ensure right doing. At this

point Foster changes from the tone of a literary essay to that of a

sermon, and, maintaining a thesis somewhat similar to that of Pascal in

the seventeenth century and Heidigger in the eighteenth, he concludes

that a man’s imagination will run away with his judgment or reason

unless he have the aid of divine grace.

II

When Foster wrote his essay there was no question as yet in England

of a romantic school. Before considering how the word came to be

applied to a particular movement we need first to bring out more

fully certain broad conflicts of tendency during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, conflicts that are not sufficiently revealed

by the occasional uses during this period of the word romantic. In

the contrast Foster established between judgment and imagination he

is merely following a long series of neo-classical critics and this

contrast not only seemed to him and these critics, but still seems

to many, the essential contrast between classicism and romanticism.

We shall be helped in understanding how judgment (or reason) and

imagination came thus to be sharply contrasted if we consider briefly

the changes in the meaning of the word wit during the neo-classical

period, and also if we recollect that the contrast between judgment and

imagination is closely related to the contrast the French are so fond

of establishing between the general sense (_le sens commun_) and the

private sense or sense of the individual (_le sens propre_).

In the sixteenth century prime emphasis was put not upon common sense,

but upon wit or conceit or ingenuity (in the sense of quickness of

imagination). The typical Elizabethan strove to excel less by judgment

than by invention, by “high-flying liberty of conceit”; like Falstaff

he would have a brain “apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of

nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes.” Wit at this time, it should

be remembered, was synonymous not only with imagination but with

intellect (in opposition to will). The result of the worship of wit in

this twofold sense was a sort of intellectual romanticism. Though its

origins are no doubt mediæval, it differs from the ordinary romanticism

of the Middle Ages to which I have already referred in being thus

concerned with thought rather than with action. Towards the end of the

Renaissance and in the early seventeenth century especially, people

were ready to pursue the strange and surprising thought even at the

risk of getting too far away from the workings of the normal mind.

Hence the “points” and “conceits” that spread, as Lowell put it, like

a “cutaneous eruption” over the face of Europe; hence the Gongorists,

and Cultists, the Marinists and Euphuists, the _précieux_ and the

“metaphysical” poets. And then came the inevitable swing away from all

this fantasticality towards common sense. A demand arose for something

that was less rare and “precious” and more representative.

This struggle between the general sense and the sense of the individual

stands out with special clearness in France. A model was gradually

worked out by aid of the classics, especially the Latin classics, as

to what man should be. Those who were in the main movement of the time

elaborated a great convention, that is they _came together_ about

certain things. They condemned in the name of their convention those

who were too indulgent of their private sense, in other words, too

eccentric in their imaginings. A Théophile, for example, fell into

disesteem for refusing to restrain his imagination, for asserting the

type of “spontaneity” that would have won him favor in any romantic

period.[26]

The swing away from intellectual romanticism can also be traced in

the changes that took place in the meaning of the word wit in both

France and England. One of the main tasks of the French critics of the

seventeenth century and of English critics, largely under the lead of

the French, was to distinguish between true and false wit. The work

that would have been complimented a little earlier as “witty” and

“conceited” is now censured as fantastic and far-fetched, as lacking in

judicial control over the imagination, and therefore in general appeal.

The movement away from the sense of the individual towards common sense

goes on steadily from the time of Malherbe to that of Boileau. Balzac

attacks Ronsard for his individualistic excess, especially for his

audacity in inventing words without reference to usage. Balzac himself

is attacked by Boileau for his affectation, for his straining to say

things differently from other people. In so far his wit was not true

but false. La Bruyère, in substantial accord with Boileau, defines

false wit as wit which is lacking in good sense and judgment and “in

which the imagination has too large a share.”[27]

What the metaphysical poets in England understood by wit, according

to Dr. Johnson, was the pursuit of their thoughts to their last

ramifications, and in this pursuit of the singular and the novel they

lost the “grandeur of generality.” This imaginative quest of rarity

led to the same recoil as in France, to a demand for common sense and

judgment. The opposite extreme from the metaphysical excess is reached

when the element of invention is eliminated entirely from wit and it is

reduced, as it is by Pope, to rendering happily the general sense--

What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.

Dr. Johnson says that the decisive change in the meaning of the word

wit took place about the time of Cowley. Important evidences of this

change and also of the new tendency to depreciate the imagination

is also found in certain passages of Hobbes. Hobbes identifies the

imagination with the memory of outer images and so looks on it as

“decaying sense.”[28] “They who observe similitudes,” he remarks

elsewhere, making a distinction that was to be developed by Locke and

accepted by Addison, “in case they be such as are but rarely observed

by others are said to have a good wit; by which, in this occasion, is

meant a good fancy” (wit has here the older meaning). “But they who

distinguish and observe differences,” he continues, “are said to have

a good judgment. Fancy without the help of judgment is not worthy of

commendation, whereas judgment is commended for itself without the help

of fancy. Indeed without steadiness and direction to some end, a great

fancy is one kind of madness.” “Judgment without fancy,” he concludes,

“is wit” (this anticipates the extreme neo-classical use of the word

wit), “but fancy without judgment, not.”

Dryden betrays the influence of Hobbes when he says of the period of

incubation of his “Rival Ladies”: “Fancy was yet in its first work,

moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be

distinguished and either chosen or rejected by judgment.” Fancy or

imagination (the words were still synonymous), as conceived by the

English neo-classicists, often shows a strange vivacity for a faculty

that is after all only “decaying sense.” “Fancy without judgment,”

says Dryden, “is a hot-mouthed jade without a curb.” “Fancy,” writes

Rymer in a similar vein, “leaps and frisks, and away she’s gone; whilst

reason rattles the chain and follows after.” The following lines of

Mulgrave are typical of the neo-classical notion of the relation

between fancy and judgment:

As all is dullness when the Fancy’s bad,

So without Judgment, Fancy is but mad.

Reason is that substantial, useful part

Which gains the Head, while t’ other wins the Heart.[29]

The opposition established by the neo-classicist in passages of this

kind is too mechanical. Fancy and judgment do not seem to coöperate

but to war with one another. In case of doubt the neo-classicist is

always ready to sacrifice fancy to the “substantial, useful part,”

and so he seems too negative and cool and prosaic in his reason, and

this is because his reason is so largely a protest against a previous

romantic excess. What had been considered genius in the time of the

“metaphysicals” had too often turned out to be only oddity. With this

warning before them men kept their eyes fixed very closely on the

model of normal human nature that had been set up, and imitated it

very literally and timorously. A man was haunted by the fear that he

might be “monstrous,” and so, as Rymer put it, “satisfy nobody’s maggot

but his own.” Correctness thus became a sort of tyranny. We suffer to

the present day from this neo-classical failure to work out a sound

conception of the imagination in its relation to good sense. Because

the neo-classicist held the imagination lightly as compared with

good sense the romantic rebels, were led to hold good sense lightly

as compared with imagination. The romantic view in short is too much

the neo-classical view turned upside down; and, as Sainte-Beuve says,

nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling.

III

Because the classicism against which romanticism rebelled was

inadequate it does not follow that every type of classicism suffers

from a similar inadequacy. The great movement away from imaginative

unrestraint towards regularity and good sense took place in the main

under French auspices. In general the French have been the chief

exponents of the classic spirit in modern times. They themselves feel

this so strongly that a certain group in France has of late years

inclined to use interchangeably the words classicist and nationalist.

But this is a grave confusion, for if the classic spirit is anything

at all it is in its essence not local and national, but universal

and human. To be sure, any particular manifestation of classicism

will of necessity contain elements that are less universal, elements

that reflect merely a certain person or persons, or a certain age and

country. This is a truth that we scarcely need to have preached to us;

for with the growth of the historical method we have come to fix our

attention almost exclusively on these local and relative elements. The

complete critic will accept the historical method but be on his guard

against its excess. He will see an element in man that is set above the

local and the relative; he will learn to detect this abiding element

through all the flux of circumstance; in Platonic language, he will

perceive the One in the Many.

Formerly, it must be admitted, critics were not historical enough.

They took to be of the essence of classicism what was merely its local

coloring, especially the coloring it received from the French of the

seventeenth century. If we wish to distinguish between essence and

accident in the classic spirit we must get behind the French of the

seventeenth century, behind the Italians of the sixteenth century who

laid the foundations of neo-classical theory, behind the Romans who

were the immediate models of most neo-classicists, to the source of

classicism in Greece. Even in Greece the classic spirit is very much

implicated in the local and the relative, yet in the life of no other

people perhaps does what is universal in man shine forth more clearly

from what is only local and relative. We still need, therefore, to

return to Greece, not merely for the best practice, but for the best

theory of classicism; for this is still found in spite of all its

obscurities and incompleteness in the Poetics of Aristotle. If we have

recourse to this treatise, however, it must be on condition that we do

not, like the critics of the Renaissance, deal with it in an abstract

and dogmatic way (the form of the treatise it must be confessed gave

them no slight encouragement), but in a spirit akin to Aristotle’s own

as revealed in the total body of his writings--a spirit that is at its

best positive and experimental.

Aristotle not only deals positively and experimentally with the natural

order and with man so far as he is a part of this order, but he deals

in a similar fashion with a side of man that the modern positivist

often overlooks. Like all the great Greeks Aristotle recognizes that

man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary or natural self

of impulse and desire and a human self that is known practically as a

power of control over impulse and desire. If man is to become human he

must not let impulse and desire run wild, but must oppose to everything

excessive in his ordinary self, whether in thought or deed or emotion,

the law of measure. This insistence on restraint and proportion is

rightly taken to be of the essence not merely of the Greek spirit but

of the classical spirit in general. The norm or standard that is to set

bounds to the ordinary self is got at by different types of classicists

in different ways and described variously: for example, as the human

law, or the better self, or reason (a word to be discussed more fully

later), or nature. Thus when Boileau says, “Let nature be your only

study,” he does not mean outer nature, nor again the nature of this or

that individual, but representative human nature. Having decided what

is normal either for man or some particular class of men the classicist

takes this normal “nature” for his model and proceeds to imitate it.

Whatever accords with the model he has thus set up he pronounces

natural or probable, whatever on the other hand departs too far from

what he conceives to be the normal type or the normal sequence of cause

and effect he holds to be “improbable” and unnatural or even, if it

attains an extreme of abnormality, “monstrous.” Whatever in conduct

or character is duly restrained and proportionate with reference to

the model is said to observe decorum. Probability and decorum are

identical in some of their aspects and closely related in all.[30]

To recapitulate, a general nature, a core of normal experience, is

affirmed by all classicists. From this central affirmation derives the

doctrine of imitation, and from imitation in turn the doctrines of

probability and decorum.

But though all classicists are alike in insisting on nature, imitation,

probability and decorum, they differ widely, as I have already

intimated, in what they understand by these terms. Let us consider

first what Aristotle and the Greeks understand by them. The first point

to observe is that according to Aristotle one is to get his general

nature not on authority or second hand, but is to disengage it directly

for himself from the jumble of particulars that he has before his eyes.

He is not, says Aristotle, to imitate things as they are, but as they

ought to be. Thus conceived imitation is a creative act. Through all

the welter of the actual one penetrates to the real and so succeeds

without ceasing to be individual in suggesting the universal. Poetry

that is imitative in this sense is, according to Aristotle, more

“serious” and “philosophical” than history. History deals merely with

what has happened, whereas poetry deals with what may happen according

to probability or necessity. Poetry, that is, does not portray life

literally but extricates the deeper or ideal truth from the flux of

circumstance. One may add with Sydney that if poetry is thus superior

to history in being more serious and philosophical it resembles history

and is superior to philosophy in being concrete.

The One that the great poet or artist perceives in the Many and that

gives to his work its high seriousness is not a fixed absolute. In

general the model that the highly serious man (ὁ σπουδαῖος) imitates

and that keeps his ordinary self within the bounds of decorum is not

to be taken as anything finite, as anything that can be formulated

once for all. This point is important for on it hinges every right

distinction not merely between the classic and the romantic, but

between the classic and the pseudo-classic. Romanticism has claimed

for itself a monopoly of imagination and infinitude, but on closer

examination, as I hope to show later, this claim, at least so far as

genuine classicism is concerned, will be found to be quite unjustified.

For the present it is enough to say that true classicism does not

rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of models but on an

immediate insight into the universal. Aristotle is especially admirable

in the account he gives of this insight and of the way it may manifest

itself in art and literature. One may be rightly imitative, he says,

and so have access to a superior truth and give others access to it

only by being a master of illusion. Though the great poet “breathes

immortal air,” though he sees behind the shows of sense a world of

more abiding relationships, he can convey his vision not directly but

only imaginatively. Aristotle, one should observe, does not establish

any hard and fast opposition between judgment and imagination, an

opposition that pervades not only the neo-classical movement but also

the romantic revolt from it. He simply affirms a supersensuous order

which one can perceive only with the help of fiction. The best art,

says Goethe in the true spirit of Aristotle, gives us the “illusion

of a higher reality.” This has the advantage of being experimental.

It is merely a statement of what one feels in the presence of a great

painting, let us say, or in reading a great poem.

IV

After this attempt to define briefly with the help of the Greeks the

classical spirit in its essence we should be prepared to understand

more clearly the way in which this spirit was modified in neo-classical

times, especially in France. The first thing that strikes one about

the classicism of this period is that it does not rest on immediate

perception like that of the Greeks but on outer authority. The merely

dogmatic and traditional classicist gave a somewhat un-Greek meaning

to the doctrines of nature and imitation. Why imitate nature directly,

said Scaliger, when we have in Virgil a second nature? Imitation thus

came to mean the imitation of certain outer models and the following

of rules based on these models. Now it is well that one who aims at

excellence in any field should begin by a thorough assimilation of the

achievements of his great predecessors in this field. Unfortunately

the neo-classical theorist tended to impose a multitude of precepts

that were based on what was external rather than on what was vital

in the practice of his models. In so far the lesson of form that the

great ancients can always teach any one who approaches them in the

right spirit degenerated into formalism. This formalistic turn given

to the doctrine of imitation was felt from the outset to be a menace

to originality; to be incompatible, and everything hinges at last on

this point, with the spontaneity of the imagination. There was an

important reaction headed by men like Boileau, within the neo-classical

movement itself, against the oppression of the intuitive side of human

nature by mere dogma and authority, above all against the notion that

“regularity” is in itself any guarantee of literary excellence. A

school of rules was succeeded by a school of taste. Yet even to the

end the neo-classicist was too prone to reject as unnatural or even

monstrous everything that did not fit into one of the traditional

pigeon-holes. One must grant, indeed, that much noble work was achieved

under the neo-classical dispensation, work that shows a genuine insight

into the universal, but it is none the less evident that the view of

the imagination held during this period has a formalistic taint.

This taint in neo-classicism is due not merely to its dogmatic and

mechanical way of dealing with the doctrine of imitation but also to

the fact that it had to reconcile classical with Christian dogma; and

the two antiquities, classical and Christian, if interpreted vitally

and in the spirit, were in many respects divergent and in some respects

contradictory. The general outcome of the attempts at reconciliation

made by the literary casuists of Italy and France was that Christianity

should have a monopoly of truth and classicism a monopoly of fiction.

For the true classicist, it will be remembered, the two things are

inseparable--he gets at his truth through a veil of fiction. Many of

the neo-classicists came to conceive of art as many romanticists were

to conceive of it later as a sort of irresponsible game or play, but

they were, it must be confessed, very inferior to the romanticists

in the spontaneity of their fiction. They went for this fiction as

for everything else to the models, and this meant in practice that

they employed the pagan myths, not as imaginative symbols of a higher

reality--it is still possible to employ them in that way--but merely in

Boileau’s phrase as “traditional ornaments” (_ornements reçus_). The

neo-classicist to be sure might so employ his “fiction” as to inculcate

a moral; in that case he is only too likely to give us instead of

the living symbol, dead allegory; instead of high seriousness, its

caricature, didacticism. The traditional stock of fiction became at

last so intolerably trite as to be rejected even by some of the late

neo-classicists. “The rejection and contempt of fiction,” said Dr.

Johnson (who indulged in it himself on occasion) “is rational and

manly.” But to reject fiction in the larger sense is to miss the true

driving power in human nature--the imagination. Before concluding,

however, that Dr. Johnson had no notion of the rôle of the imagination

one should read his attack on the theory of the three unities[31] which

was later to be turned to account by the romanticists.

Now the three unities may be defended on an entirely legitimate

ground--on the ground namely that they make for concentration, a prime

virtue in the drama; but the grounds on which they were actually

imposed on the drama, especially in connection with the Quarrel of

the Cid, illustrate the corruption of another main classical doctrine,

that of probability or verisimilitude. In his dealings with probability

as in his dealings with imitation, the neo-classical formalist did

not allow sufficiently for the element of illusion. What he required

from the drama in the name of probability was not the “illusion of a

higher reality,” but strict logic or even literal deception. He was

not capable of a poetic faith, not willing to suspend his disbelief

on passing from the world of ordinary fact to the world of artistic

creation. Goethe was thinking especially of the neo-classical French

when he said: “As for the French, they will always be arrested by their

reason. They do not recognize that the imagination has its own laws

which are and always must be problematic for the reason.”

It was also largely under French influence that the doctrine of

decorum, which touches probability at many points, was turned aside

from its true meaning. Decorum is in a way the peculiar doctrine of the

classicist, is in Milton’s phrase “the grand masterpiece to observe.”

The doctrines of the universal and the imitation of the universal go

deeper indeed than decorum, so much deeper that they are shared by

classicism with religion. The man who aspires to live religiously must

no less than the humanist look to some model set above his ordinary

self and imitate it. But though the classicist at his best meditates,

he does not, like the seeker after religious perfection, see in

meditation an end in itself but rather a support for the mediatory

virtues, the virtues of the man who would live to the best advantage

in this world rather than renounce it; and these virtues may be said

to be summed up in decorum. For the best type of Greek humanist,

a Sophocles let us say, decorum was a vital and immediate thing.

But there enters into decorum even from the time of the Alexandrian

Greeks, and still more into French neo-classical decorum, a marked

element of artificiality. The all-roundness and fine symmetry, the

poise and dignity that come from working within the bounds of the

human law, were taken to be the privilege not of man in general but of

a special social class. Take for instance verbal decorum: the French

neo-classicists assumed that if the speech of poetry is to be noble and

highly serious it must coincide with the speech of the aristocracy. As

Nisard puts it, they confused nobility of language with the language of

the nobility. Decorum was thus more or less merged with etiquette, so

that the standards of the stage and of literature in general came to

coincide, as Rousseau complains, with those of the drawing-room. More

than anything else this narrowing of decorum marks the decline from the

classic to the pseudo-classic, from form to formalism.

While condemning pseudo-decorum one should remember that even a

Greek would have seen something paradoxical in a poem like Goethe’s

“Hermann und Dorothea” and its attempt to invest with epic grandeur the

affairs of villagers and peasants. After all, dignity and elevation

and especially the opportunity for important action, which is the

point on which the classicist puts prime emphasis, are normally

though not invariably associated with a high rather than with a mean

social estate. In general one should insist that the decorum worked

out under French auspices was far from being merely artificial. The

French gentleman (_honnête homme_) of the seventeenth century often

showed a moderation and freedom from over-emphasis, an exquisite tact

and urbanity that did not fall too far short of his immediate model,

Horace, and related him to the all-round man of the Greeks (καλὸς

κἀγαθός). To be sure an ascetic Christian like Pascal sees in decorum

a disguise of one’s ordinary self rather than a real curb upon it, and

feels that the gap is not sufficiently wide between even the best type

of the man of the world and the mere worldling. One needs, however, to

be very austere to disdain the art of living that has been fostered

by decorum from the Greeks down. Something of this art of living

survives even in a Chesterfield, who falls far short of the best type

of French gentleman and reminds one very remotely indeed of a Pericles.

Chesterfield’s half-jesting definition of decorum as the art of

combining the useful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions

of vice points the way to its ultimate corruption. Talleyrand, who

marks perhaps this last stage, was defined by Napoleon as “a silk

stocking filled with mud.” In some of its late exemplars decorum had

actually become, as Rousseau complains, the “mask of hypocrisy” and the

“varnish of vice.”

One should not however, like Rousseau and the romanticists, judge of

decorum by what it degenerated into. Every doctrine of genuine worth is

disciplinary and men in the mass do not desire discipline. “Most men,”

says Aristotle, “would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober

manner.” But most men do not admit any such preference--that would be

crude and inartistic. They incline rather to substitute for the reality

of discipline some art of going through the motions. Every great

doctrine is thus in constant peril of passing over into some hollow

semblance or even, it may be, into some mere caricature of itself. When

one wishes therefore to determine the nature of decorum one should

think of a Milton, let us say, and not of a Talleyrand or even of a

Chesterfield.

Milton imitated the models, like any other neo-classicist, but his

imitation was not, in Joubert’s phrase, that of one book by another

book, but of one soul by another soul. His decorum is therefore

imaginative; and it is the privilege of the imagination to give

the sense of spaciousness and infinitude. On the other hand, the

unimaginative way in which many of the neo-classicists held their

main tenets--nature, imitation, probability, decorum--narrowed unduly

the scope of the human spirit and appeared to close the gates of

the future. “Art and diligence have now done their best,” says Dr.

Johnson of the versification of Pope, “and what shall be added will be

the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity.” Nothing is more

perilous than thus to seem to confine man in some pinfold; there is

something in him that refuses to acquiesce in any position as final;

he is in Nietzsche’s phrase the being who must always surpass himself.

The attempt to oppose external and mechanical barriers to the freedom

of the spirit will create in the long run an atmosphere of stuffiness

and smugness, and nothing is more intolerable than smugness. Men were

guillotined in the French Revolution, as Bagehot suggests, simply

because either they or their ancestors had been smug. Inert acceptance

of tradition and routine will be met sooner or later by the cry of

Faust: _Hinaus ins Freie!_

Before considering the value of the method chosen by Rousseau and

the romanticists for breaking up the “tiresome old heavens” and

escaping from smugness and stuffiness, one should note that the lack

of originality and genius which they lamented in the eighteenth

century--especially in that part of it known as the Enlightenment--was

not due entirely to pseudo-classic formalism. At least two other main

currents entered into the Enlightenment: first the empirical and

utilitarian current that goes back to Francis Bacon, and some would

say to Roger Bacon; and secondly the rationalistic current that goes

back to Descartes. English empiricism gained international vogue in

the philosophy of Locke, and Locke denies any supersensuous element

in human nature to which one may have access with the aid of the

imagination or in any other way. Locke’s method of precise naturalistic

observation is in itself legitimate; for man is plainly subject to

the natural law. What is not truly empirical is to bring the whole

of human nature under this law. One can do this only by piecing out

precise observation and experiment with dogmatic rationalism. One side

of Locke may therefore be properly associated with the father of modern

rationalists, Descartes. The attempt of the rationalist to lock up

life in some set of formulæ produces in the imaginative man a feeling

of oppression. He gasps for light and air. The very tracing of cause

and effect and in general the use of the analytical faculties--and

this is to fly to the opposite extreme--came to be condemned by the

romanticists as inimical to the imagination. Not only do they make

endless attacks on Locke, but at times they assail even Newton for

having mechanized life, though Newton’s comparison of himself to a

child picking up pebbles on the seashore would seem to show that he had

experienced “the feeling infinite.”

The elaboration of science into a closed system with the aid of logic

and pure mathematics is as a matter of fact to be associated with

Descartes rather than with Newton. Neither Newton nor Descartes, one

scarcely needs add, wished to subject man entirely to the natural law

and the nexus of physical causes; they were not in short determinists.

Yet the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment was in the main

of Cartesian origin. This Cartesian influence ramifies in so many

directions and is related at so many points to the literary movement,

and there has been so much confusion about this relationship, that we

need to pause here to make a few distinctions.

Perhaps what most strikes one in the philosophy of Descartes is its

faith in logic and abstract reasoning and the closely allied processes

of mathematical demonstration. Anything that is not susceptible of

clear proof in this logical and almost mathematical sense is to

be rejected. Now this Cartesian notion of clearness is fatal to a

true classicism. The higher reality, the true classicist maintains,

cannot be thus demonstrated; it can only be grasped, and then never

completely, through a veil of imaginative illusion. Boileau is reported

to have said that Descartes had cut the throat of poetry; and this

charge is justified in so far as the Cartesian requires from poetry

a merely logical clearness. This conception of clearness was also

a menace to the classicism of the seventeenth century which rested

in the final analysis not on logic but on tradition. This appeared

very clearly in the early phases of the quarrel between ancients and

moderns when literary Cartesians like Perrault and Fontenelle attacked

classical dogma in the name of reason. In fact one may ask if any

doctrine has ever appeared so fatal to every form of tradition--not

merely literary but also religious and political--as Cartesianism.

The rationalist of the eighteenth century was for dismissing as

“prejudice” everything that could not give a clear account of itself

in the Cartesian sense. This riot of abstract reasoning (_la raison

raisonnante_) that prepared the way for the Revolution has been

identified by Taine and others with the classic spirit. A more vicious

confusion has seldom gained currency in criticism. It is true that

the French have mixed a great deal of logic with their conception of

the classic spirit, but that is because they have mixed a great deal

of logic with everything. I have already mentioned their tendency to

substitute a logical for an imaginative verisimilitude; and strenuously

logical classicists may be found in France from Chapelain to

Brunetière. Yet the distinction that should keep us from confusing mere

logic with the classic spirit was made by a Frenchman who was himself

violently logical and also a great geometrician--Pascal. One should

keep distinct, says Pascal, the _esprit de géométrie_ and the _esprit

de finesse_. The _esprit de finesse_ is not, like the _esprit de

géométrie_, abstract, but very concrete.[32] So far as a man possesses

the _esprit de finesse_ he is enabled to judge correctly of the

ordinary facts of life and of the relationships between man and man.

But these judgments rest upon such a multitude of delicate perceptions

that he is frequently unable to account for them logically. It is to

intuitive good sense and not to the _esprit de géométrie_ that the

gentleman (_honnête homme_) of the neo-classical period owed his fine

tact. Pascal himself finally took a stand against reason as understood

both by the Cartesian and by the man of the world. Unaided reason

he held is unable to prevail against the deceits of the imagination;

it needs the support of intuition--an intuition that he identifies

with grace, thus making it inseparable from the most austere form of

Christianity. The “heart,” he says, and this is the name he gives to

intuition, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.” A Plato or

an Aristotle would not have understood this divorce between reason and

intuition.[33]

Pascal seems to get his insight only by flouting ordinary good sense.

He identifies this insight with a type of theological dogma of which

good sense was determined to be rid; and so it tended to get rid of

the insight along with the dogma. Classical dogma also seemed at times

to be in opposition to the intuitive good sense of the man of the

world. The man of the world therefore often inclined to assail both

the classical and the Christian tradition in the name of good sense,

just as the Cartesian inclined to assail these traditions in the name

of abstract reason. Perhaps the best exponent of anti-traditional good

sense in the seventeenth century was Molière. He vindicated nature,

and by nature he still meant in the main normal human nature, from

arbitrary constraints of every kind whether imposed by an ascetic

Christianity or by a narrow and pedantic classicism. Unfortunately

Molière is too much on the side of the opposition. He does not seem

to put his good sense into the service of some positive insight of

his own. Good sense may be of many degrees according to the order of

facts of which it has a correct perception. The order of facts in human

nature that Molière’s good sense perceived is not the highest and so

this good sense appears at times too ready to justify the bourgeois

against the man who has less timid and conventional views. So at

least Rousseau thought when he made his famous attack on Molière.[34]

Rousseau assailed Molière in the name of instinct as Pascal would have

assailed him in the name of insight, and fought sense with sensibility.

The hostility of Rousseau to Molière, according to M. Faguet, is that

of a romantic Bohemian to a philistine of genius.[35] One hesitates to

call Molière a philistine, but one may at least grant M. Faguet that

Molière’s good sense is not always sufficiently inspired.

I have been trying to build up a background that will make clear

why the reason of the eighteenth century (whether we understand

by reason logic or good sense) had come to be superficial and

therefore oppressive to the imagination. It is only with reference

to this “reason” that one can understand the romantic revolt. But

neo-classical reason itself can be understood only with reference to

its background--as a recoil namely from a previous romantic excess.

This excess was manifested not only in the intellectual romanticism of

which I have already spoken, but in the cult of the romantic deed that

had flourished in the Middle Ages. This cult and the literature that

reflected it continued to appeal, even to the cultivated, well on into

the neo-classical period. It was therefore felt necessary to frame a

definition of reason that should be a rebuke to the extravagance and

improbability of the mediæval romances. When men became conscious

in the eighteenth century of the neo-classical meagerness on the

imaginative side they began to look back with a certain envy to the

free efflorescence of fiction in the Middle Ages. They began to ask

themselves with Hurd whether the reason and correctness they had won

were worth the sacrifice of a “world of fine fabling.”[36] We must not,

however, like Heine and many others, look on the romantic movement as

merely a return to the Middle Ages. We have seen that the men of the

Middle Ages themselves understood by romance not simply their own kind

of speech and writing in contrast with what was written in Latin, but

a kind of writing in which the pursuit of strangeness and adventure

predominated. This pursuit of strangeness and adventure will be found

to predominate in all types of romanticism. The type of romanticism,

however, which came in towards the end of the eighteenth century

did not, even when professedly mediæval, simply revert to the older

types. It was primarily not a romanticism of thought or of action,

the types we have encountered thus far, but a romanticism of feeling.

The beginnings of this emotional romanticism antedate considerably

the application of the word romantic to a particular literary school.

Before considering how the word came to be thus applied we shall need

to take a glance at eighteenth-century sentimentalism, especially at

the plea for genius and originality that, from about the middle of the

century on, were opposed to the tameness and servile imitation of the

neo-classicists.