ROMANTIC GENIUS
Romanticism, it has been remarked, is all that is not Voltaire. The
clash between Rousseau and Voltaire is indeed not merely the clash
between two men, it is the clash between two incompatible views of
life. Voltaire is the end of the old world, as Goethe has put it,
Rousseau the beginning of the new.
One is not to suppose, however, that Voltaire was a consistent champion
of the past. He is indeed with all his superficial clearness one of the
most incoherent of writers. At the same time that he defended classical
tradition he attacked Christian tradition, spreading abroad a spirit of
mockery and irreverence that tended to make every traditional belief
impossible. The “reason” to which he appeals has all the shallowness
that I have noticed in the “reason” of the eighteenth century. Though
he does not fall into the Cartesian excess of abstract reasoning, and
though the good sense that he most often understands by reason is
admirably shrewd within certain bounds, he nevertheless falls very
far short of the standards of a true classicism. He delights in the
philosophy of Locke and has little sense for Greek philosophy or for
the higher aspects of Greek literature. He is quite lacking in the
quality of imagination that is needful if one is to communicate with
what is above the ordinary rational level. So far from being capable of
high seriousness, he is scarcely capable of ordinary seriousness. And
so the nobility, elegance, imitation, and decorum that he is constantly
preaching have about them a taint of formalism. Perhaps this taint
appears most conspicuously in his conception of decorum. A man may be
willing to impose restrictions on his ordinary self--and every type of
decorum is restrictive--if he is asked to do so for some adequate end.
The end of the decorum that an Aristotle, for example, would impose is
that one may become more human and therefore, as he endeavors to show
in a highly positive fashion, happier. The only art and literature that
will please a man who has thus become human through the observance of
true decorum is an art and literature that are themselves human and
decorous. Voltaire for his part wishes to subject art and literature
to an elaborate set of restrictions in the name of decorum, but these
restrictions are not joined to any adequate end. The only reward he
holds out to those who observe all these restrictions is “the merit
of difficulty overcome.” At bottom, like so many of the Jesuits from
whom he received his education, he looks upon art as a game--a very
ingenious and complicated game. The French muse he compares to a
person executing a difficult clog dance on a tight rope, and he argues
from this comparison, not that the French muse should assume a less
constrained posture, but that she should on the contrary be exemplary
to the nations. No wonder the romanticists and even Dr. Johnson
demurred at Voltaire’s condemnation of Shakespeare in the name of this
type of decorum.
Voltaire is therefore, in spite of all his dazzling gifts, one of
the most compromising advocates of classicism. Pope also had eminent
merits, but from the truly classical point of view he is about as
inadequate as Voltaire; and this is important to remember because
English romanticism tends to be all that is not Pope. The English
romanticists revolted especially from the poetic diction of which Pope
was one of the chief sources, and poetic diction, with its failure
to distinguish between nobility of language and the language of the
nobility, is only an aspect of artificial decorum. However, the revolt
from poetic diction and decorum in general is not the central aspect of
the great movement that resulted in the eclipse of the wit and man of
the world and in the emergence of the original genius. What the genius
wanted was spontaneity, and spontaneity, as he understood it, involves
a denial, not merely of decorum, but of something that, as I have said,
goes deeper than decorum--namely the doctrine of imitation. According
to Voltaire genius is only judicious imitation. According to Rousseau
the prime mark of genius is refusal to imitate. The movement away from
imitation, however, had already got well started before it thus came
to a picturesque head in the clash between Rousseau and Voltaire, and
if we wish to understand this movement we need to take a glance at its
beginnings--especially in England.
There are reasons why this supposed opposition between imitation and
genius should have been felt in England more keenly than elsewhere. The
doctrine of imitation in its neo-classical form did not get established
there until about the time of Dryden. In the meanwhile England had had
a great creative literature in which the freedom and spontaneity of the
imagination had not been cramped by a too strict imitation of models.
Dryden himself, though he was doing more than any one else to promote
the new correctness that was coming in from France, felt that this
correctness was no equivalent for the Elizabethan inspiration. The
structure that he and his contemporaries were erecting might be more
regular, but lacked the boldness and originality of that reared by the
“giant race before the flood”:
Our age was cultivated thus at length;
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength.
Our builders were with want of genius cursed;
The second temple was not like the first.[37]
This contrast between the imitator and the inspired original was
developed by Addison in a paper (“Spectator,” 160) that was destined
to be used against the very school to which he himself belonged.
For Addison was in his general outlook a somewhat tame Augustan.
Nevertheless he exalts the “natural geniuses” who have something
“nobly wild and extravagant” in them above the geniuses who have been
“refined by conversation, reflection and the reading of the most polite
authors”; who have “formed themselves by rules and submitted the
greatness of their natural talents to the corrections and restraints of
art.” “The great danger in these latter kind of geniuses, is lest they
cramp their own abilities too much by imitation, and form themselves
altogether upon models, without giving full play to their own natural
parts. An imitation of the best authors is not to compare with a good
original; and I believe we may observe that very few writers make an
extraordinary figure in the world, who have not something in their way
of thinking or expressing themselves that is peculiar to them, and
entirely their own.”
Another main influence that was making against the doctrine of
imitation was also largely of English origin. This was the idea of
progress through scientific observation and experiment. As a result
of this type of positivism, discovery was being added to discovery.
Science was kindling man’s imagination and opening up before him what
he really craves, the vista of an endless advance. Why should not
literature likewise do something new and original instead of sticking
forever in the same rut of imitation? In its Greek form the doctrine
of imitation was, as I have tried to show, not only flexible and
progressive, but in its own way, positive and experimental. But in
modern times the two main forms of imitation, the classical and the
Christian, have worked within the limits imposed by tradition and
traditional models. The imitation of models, the Christian imitation
of Christ, let us say, or the classical imitation of Horace, may
indeed be a very vital thing, the imitation of one soul by another
soul; but when carried out in this vital way, the two main forms of
imitation tend to clash, and the compromise between them, as I have
already said, resulted in a good deal of formalism. By its positive
and critical method science was undermining every traditional belief.
Both the Christian and the classical formalists would have been the
first to deny that the truths of imitation for which they stood could
be divorced from tradition and likewise put on a positive and critical
basis. The fact is indubitable in any case that the discrediting of
tradition has resulted in a progressive lapse from the religious and
the humanistic to the naturalistic level. An equally indubitable fact
is that scientific or rationalistic naturalism tended from the early
eighteenth century to produce emotional naturalism, and that both forms
of naturalism were hostile to the doctrine of imitation.
The trend away from the doctrine of imitation towards emotional
naturalism finds revolutionary expression in the literary field in such
a work as Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759). Addison
had asserted, as we have seen, the superiority of what is original in
a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by
conscious effort and culture. Young, a personal friend of Addison’s,
develops this contrast between the “natural” and the “artificial” to
its extreme consequences. “Modern writers,” he says, “have a choice
to make. … They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the
soft fetters of easy imitation.” “An original may be said to be of a
vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius;
it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture,
wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of preëxistent
materials not their own.” “We may as well grow good by another’s
virtue, or fat by another’s food, as famous by another’s thought.”
One evidence that we are still living in the movement of which Young
is one of the initiators is that his treatise will not only seem to
most of us a very spirited piece of writing--that it certainly is--but
doctrinally sound. And yet it is only one of those documents very
frequent in literary history which lack intrinsic soundness, but which
can be explained if not justified as a recoil from an opposite extreme.
The unsoundness of Young’s work comes out clearly if one compares
it with the treatise on the “Sublime” attributed to Longinus which
is not a mere protest against a previous excess, but a permanently
acceptable treatment of the same problem of genius and inspiration.
Longinus exalts genius, but is at the same time regardful of culture
and tradition, and even emphasizes the relation between inspiration and
the imitation of models. Young insinuates, on the contrary, that one
is aided in becoming a genius by being brainless and ignorant. “Some
are pupils of nature only, nor go further to school.” “Many a genius
probably there has been which could neither write nor read.” It follows
almost inevitably from these premises that genius flourishes most in
the primitive ages of society before originality has been crushed
beneath the superincumbent weight of culture and critics have begun
their pernicious activities. Young did not take this step himself, but
it was promptly taken by others on the publication of the Ossianic
poems (1762). Ossian is at once added to the list of great originals
already enumerated by Addison--Homer, Pindar, the patriarchs of the
Old Testament and Shakespeare (whom Young like the later romanticists
opposes to Pope). “Poetry,” says Diderot, summing up a whole movement,
“calls for something enormous, barbaric and savage.”
This exaltation of the virtues of the primitive ages is simply
the projection into a mythical past of a need that the man of the
eighteenth century feels in the present--the need to let himself
go. This is what he understands by his “return to nature.” A whole
revolution is implied in this reinterpretation of the word nature.
To follow nature in the classical sense is to imitate what is normal
and representative in man and so to become decorous. To be natural in
the new sense one must begin by getting rid of imitation and decorum.
Moreover, for the classicist, nature and reason are synonymous. The
primitivist, on the other hand, means by nature the spontaneous play
of impulse and temperament, and inasmuch as this liberty is hindered
rather than helped by reason, he inclines to look on reason, not as the
equivalent but as the opposite of nature.
If one is to understand this development, one should note carefully
how certain uses of the word reason, not merely by the neo-classicists
but by the anti-traditionalists, especially in religion, tended to
produce this denial of reason. It is a curious fact that some of those
who were attacking the Christian religion in the name of reason, were
themselves aware that mere reason, whether one understood by the word
abstract reasoning or uninspired good sense, does not satisfy, that
in the long run man is driven either to rise higher or to sink lower
than reason. St. Evremond, for example, prays nature to deliver man
from the doubtful middle state in which she has placed him--either
to “lift him up to angelic radiance,” or else to “sink him to the
instinct of simple animals.”[38] Since the ascending path, the path
that led to angelic radiance, seemed to involve the acceptance of
a mass of obsolete dogma, man gradually inclined to sink below the
rational level and to seek to recover the “instinct of simple animals.”
Another and still more fundamental fact that some of the rationalists
perceived and that militated against their own position, is that the
dominant element in man is not reason, but imagination, or if one
prefers, the element of illusion. “Illusion,” said Voltaire himself,
“is the queen of the human heart.” The great achievement of tradition
at its best was to be at once a limit and a support to both reason
and imagination and so to unite them in a common allegiance. In the
new movement, at the same time that reason was being encouraged by
scientific method to rise up in revolt against tradition, imagination
was being fascinated and drawn to the naturalistic level by scientific
discovery and the vista of an endless advance that it opened up. A main
problem, therefore, for the student of this movement is to determine
what forms of imaginative activity are possible on the naturalistic
level. A sort of understanding was reached on this point by different
types of naturalists in the course of the eighteenth century. One
form of imagination, it was agreed, should be displayed in science,
another form in art and literature.[39] The scientific imagination
should be controlled by judgment and work in strict subordination to
the facts. In art and literature, on the other hand, the imagination
should be free. Genius and originality are indeed in strict ratio to
this freedom. “In the fairy land of fancy,” says Young, “genius may
wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily
over its own empire of chimeras.” (The empire of chimeras was later to
become the tower of ivory.) This sheer indiscipline of the literary
imagination might seem in contrast with the discipline of the
scientific imagination an inferiority; but such was not the view of the
partisans of original genius. Kant, indeed, who was strongly influenced
in his “Critique of Æsthetic Judgment” by these English theorists,[40]
inclined to deny genius to the man of science for the very reason that
his imagination is so strictly controlled. The fact would seem to be
that a great scientist, a Newton let us say, has as much right to be
accounted a genius as Shakespeare. The inferiority of the genius of a
Newton compared with that of a Shakespeare lies in a certain coldness.
Scientific genius is thus cold because it operates in a region less
relevant to man than poetic genius; it is, in Bagehot’s phrase, more
remote from the “hearth of the soul.”
The scientific and the literary imagination are indeed not quite so
sharply contrasted by most of the theorists as might be inferred
from what I have said; most of them do not admit that the literary
imagination should be entirely free to wander in its own “empire of
chimeras.” Even literary imagination, they maintain, should in some
measure be under the surveillance of judgment or taste. One should
observe, however, that the judgment or taste that is supposed to
control or restrict genius is not associated with the imagination.
On the contrary, imagination is associated entirely with the element
of novelty in things, which means, in the literary domain, with the
expansive eagerness of a man to get his own uniqueness uttered. The
genius for the Greek, let us remind ourselves, was not the man who was
in this sense unique, but the man who perceived the universal; and as
the universal can be perceived only with the aid of the imagination,
it follows that genius may be defined as imaginative perception of the
universal. The universal thus conceived not only gives a centre and
purpose to the activity of the imagination, but sets bounds to the free
expansion of temperament and impulse, to what came to be known in the
eighteenth century as nature.
Kant, who denies genius to the man of science on grounds I have already
mentioned, is unable to associate genius in art or literature with this
strict discipline of the imagination to a purpose. The imagination
must be free and must, he holds, show this freedom not by working
but by playing. At the same time Kant had the cool temper of a man
of the Enlightenment, and looked with the utmost disapproval on the
aberrations that had marked in Germany the age of original genius (_die
Geniezeit_). He was not in the new sense of the word nor indeed in any
sense, an enthusiast. And so he wished the reason, or judgment, to
keep control over the imagination without disturbing its free play;
art is to have a purpose which is at the same time not a purpose. The
distinctions by which he works out the supposed relationship between
judgment and imagination are at once difficult and unreal. One can
indeed put one’s finger here more readily perhaps than elsewhere on the
central impotence of the whole Kantian system. Once discredit tradition
and outer authority and then set up as a substitute a reason that is
divorced from the imagination and so lacks the support of supersensuous
insight, and reason will prove unable to maintain its hegemony. When
the imagination has ceased to pull in accord with the reason in the
service of a reality that is set above them both, it is sure to become
the accomplice of expansive impulse, and mere reason is not strong
enough to prevail over this union of imagination and desire. Reason
needs some driving power behind it, a driving power that, when working
in alliance with the imagination, it gets from insight. To suppose
that man will long rest content with mere naked reason as his guide
is to forget that “illusion is the queen of the human heart”; it is
to revive the stoical error. Schiller, himself a Kantian, felt this
rationalistic rigor and coldness of his master, and so sought, while
retaining the play theory of art, to put behind the cold reason of
Kant the driving power it lacked; for this driving power he looked not
to a supersensuous reality, not to insight in short, but to emotion.
He takes appropriately the motto for his “Æsthetic Letters” from
Rousseau: _Si c’est la raison qui fait l’homme, c’est le sentiment qui
le conduit_. He retains Kant’s play theory of art without even so much
offset to this play as is implied in Kant’s “purposiveness without
purpose.” The nobility of Schiller’s intentions is beyond question.
At the same time, by encouraging the notion that it is possible to
escape from neo-classical didacticism only by eliminating masculine
purpose from art, he opens the way for the worst perversions of the
æsthete, above all for the divorce of art from ethical reality. In art,
according to Schiller, both imagination and feeling should be free and
spontaneous, and the result of all this freedom, as he sees it, will be
perfectly “ideal.” His suspicion of a purpose is invincible. As soon as
anything has a purpose it ceases to be æsthetic and in the same measure
suffers a loss of dignity. Thus the æsthetic moment of the lion, he
says, is when he roars not with any definite design, but out of sheer
lustiness, and for the pure pleasure of roaring.
One may assume safely the æsthetic attitude, or what amounts to the
same thing, allow one’s self to be guided by feeling, only on the
assumption that feeling is worthy of trust. As appears in the very
motto he took for his “Æsthetic Letters” Schiller was helped to this
faith in man’s native goodness by Rousseau. We need to pause for a
moment at this point and consider the background of this belief which
finds not only in Schiller but in Rousseau himself, with whom it is
usually associated, a rather late expression. The movement that took
its rise in the eighteenth century involves, we should recollect, a
break not with one but with two traditions--the classical and the
Christian. If the plea for genius and originality is to be largely
explained as a protest against the mechanical imitation and artificial
decorum of a certain type of classicist, the assertion of man’s natural
goodness is to be understood rather as a rebound from the doctrine of
total depravity that was held by the more austere type of Christian.
This doctrine had even in the early centuries of the faith awakened
certain protests like that of Pelagius, but for an understanding of
the Rousseauistic protest one does not need to go behind the great
deistic movement of the early eighteenth century. God, instead of
being opposed to nature, is conceived by the deist as a power that
expresses his goodness and loveliness through nature. The oppressive
weight of fear that the older theology had laid upon the human spirit
is thus gradually lifted. Man begins to discover harmonies instead
of discords in himself and outer nature. He not only sees virtue
in instinct but inclines to turn virtue itself into a “sense,” or
instinct. And this means in practice to put emotional expansion in the
place of spiritual concentration at the basis of life and morals. In
studying this drift towards an æsthetic or sentimental morality one
may most conveniently take one’s point of departure in certain English
writers of deistic tendency, especially in Shaftesbury and his disciple
Hutcheson. Considered purely as an initiator, Shaftesbury is probably
more important than Rousseau. His influence ramifies out in every
direction, notably into Germany.
The central achievement of Shaftesbury from a purely psychological
point of view may be said to be his transformation of conscience from
an inner check into an expansive emotion. He is thus enabled to set
up an æsthetic substitute not merely for traditional religion but for
traditional humanism. He undermines insidiously decorum, the central
doctrine of the classicist, at the very time that he seems to be
defending it. For decorum also implies a control upon the expansive
instincts of human nature, and Shaftesbury is actually engaged in
rehabilitating “nature,” and insinuating that it does not need any
control. He attains this expansiveness by putting æsthetic in the
place of spiritual perception, and so merging more or less completely
the good and the true with the beautiful. He thus points the way very
directly to Rousseau’s rejection of both inner and outer control
in the name of man’s natural goodness. Once accept Shaftesbury’s
transformation of conscience and one is led almost inevitably to look
on everything that is expansive as natural or vital and on everything
that restricts expansion as conventional or artificial. Villers wrote
to Madame de Staël (4 May, 1803): “The fundamental and creative idea
of all your work has been to show primitive, incorruptible, naïve,
passionate nature in conflict with the barriers and shackles of
conventional life. … Note that this is also the guiding idea of the
author of ‘Werther.’” This contrast between nature and convention is
indeed almost the whole of Rousseauism. In permitting his expansive
impulses to be disciplined by either humanism or religion man has
fallen away from nature much as in the old theology he has fallen
away from God, and the famous “return to nature” means in practice
the emancipation of the ordinary or temperamental self that had been
thus artificially controlled. This throwing off of the yoke of both
Christian and classical discipline in the name of temperament is the
essential aspect of the movement in favor of original genius. The
genius does not look to any pattern that is set above his ordinary
spontaneous ego and imitate it. On the contrary, he attains to the
self-expression that other men, intimidated by convention, weakly
forego.
In thus taking a stand for self-expression, the original genius is in
a sense on firm ground--at least so far as the mere rationalist or
the late and degenerate classicist is concerned. No conventions are
final, no rules can set arbitrary limits to creation. Reality cannot be
locked up in any set of formulæ. The element of change and novelty in
things, as the romanticists are never tired of repeating, is at once
vital and inexhaustible. Wherever we turn, we encounter, as a romantic
authority, Jacob Boehme, declares, “abysmal, unsearchable and infinite
multiplicity.” Perhaps not since the beginning of the world have two
men or indeed two leaves or two blades of grass been exactly alike.
Out of a thousand men shaving, as Dr. Johnson himself remarked, no
two will shave in just the same way. A person carries his uniqueness
even into his thumbprint--as a certain class in the community has
learned to its cost. But though all things are ineffably different
they are at the same time ineffably alike. And this oneness in things
is, no less than the otherwiseness, a matter of immediate perception.
This universal implication of the one in the many is found even more
marked than elsewhere in the heart of the individual. Each man has
his idiosyncrasy (literally his “private mixture”). But in addition
to his complexion, his temperamental or private self, every man has
a self that he possesses in common with other men. Even the man who
is most filled with his own uniqueness, or “genius,” a Rousseau, for
example, assumes this universal self in every word he utters. “Jove
nods to Jove behind us as we talk.” The word character, one may note,
is ambiguous, inasmuch as it may refer either to the idiosyncratic or
to the universal human element in a man’s dual nature. For example, an
original genius like William Blake not only uses the word character
in a different sense from Aristotle--he cannot even understand the
Aristotelian usage. “Aristotle,” he complains, “says characters are
either good or bad; now Goodness or Badness has nothing to do with
Character. An apple tree, a pear tree, a horse, a lion are Characters;
but a good apple tree or a bad is an apple tree still, etc.” But
character as Aristotle uses the word implies something that man
possesses and that a horse or tree does not possess--the power namely
to deliberate and choose. A man has a good or bad character, he is
ethical or unethical, as one may say from the Greek word for character
in this sense (ἦθος), according to the quality of his choice as it
appears in what he actually does. This distinction between a man’s
private, peculiar character (χαρακτήρ) and the character he possesses
when judged with reference to something more general than his own
complexion is very similar to the French distinction between the _sens
propre_ and the _sens commun_.
The general sense or norm that is opposed to mere temperament and
impulse may rest upon the ethos of a particular time and country--the
traditional habits and customs that the Rousseauist is wont to dismiss
as “artificial”--or it may rest in varying degrees upon immediate
perception. For example, the Ismene and Antigone of Sophocles are
both ethical; but Ismene would abide by the law of the state, whereas
Antigone opposes to this law something still more universal--the
“unwritten laws of heaven.” This insight of Antigone into a moral order
that is set not only above her ordinary self but above the convention
of her time and country is something very immediate, something
achieved, as I shall try to show more fully later, with the aid of the
imagination.
It is scarcely necessary to add that such a perfect example of the
ethical imagination as one finds in Antigone--the imagination that
works concentric with the human law--is rare. In actual life for
one Antigone who obeys the “unwritten laws of heaven” there will
be a thousand Ismenes who will be guided in their moral choices by
the law of the community. This law, the convention of a particular
place and time, is always but a very imperfect image, a mere shadow
indeed of the unwritten law which being above the ordinary rational
level is, in a sense to be explained later, infinite and incapable
of final formulation. And yet men are forced if only on practical
grounds to work out some approximation to this law as a barrier to the
unchained appetites of the individual. The elements that enter into
any particular attempt to circumscribe the individual in the interests
of the community are very mixed and in no small measure relative. Yet
the things that any group of men have come together about--their
conventions in the literal meaning of the word--even the tabus of a
savage tribe, are sure to reflect, however inadequately, the element
of oneness in man, the element which is opposed to expansive impulse,
and which is no less real, no less a matter of immediate experience,
than the element of irreducible difference. The general sense therefore
should never be sacrificed lightly to the sense of the individual.
Tabu, however inferior it may be to insight, deserves to rank higher
after all than mere temperament.[41]
The original genius proceeds upon the opposite assumption. Everything
that limits temperamental expansion is dismissed as either artificial
or mechanical; everything on the contrary that makes for the
emancipation of temperament, and so for variety and difference, he
welcomes as vital, dynamic, creative. Now, speaking not metaphysically
but practically and experimentally, man may, as I have said, follow two
main paths: he may develop his ethical self--the self that lays hold
of unity--or he may put his main emphasis on the element within him
and without him that is associated with novelty and change. In direct
proportion as he turns his attention to the infinite manifoldness of
things he experiences wonder; if on the other hand he attends to the
unity that underlies the manifoldness and that likewise transcends him,
he experiences awe. As a man grows religious, awe comes more and more
to take the place in him of wonder. The humanist is less averse from
the natural order and its perpetual gushing forth of novelties than the
man who is religious, yet even the humanist refuses to put his final
emphasis on wonder (his motto is rather _nil admirari_). To illustrate
concretely, Dr. Johnson can scarcely conceal his disdain for the
wonderful, but being a genuinely religious spirit, is very capable of
awe. Commenting on Yalden’s line
Awhile th’ Almighty wondering stood,
Dr. Johnson remarks: “He ought to have remembered that Infinite
Knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon
Ignorance.” Granted the justness of the remark, Johnson seems inclined
at times to forget how wide is the gap in this respect between us
and the Almighty and therefore to be unduly hostile to the element
of wonder. To take the opposite case, it is not easy to discover in
either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence.
On the other hand he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art
to be a pure wondersmith. It is especially important to determine a
man’s attitude towards himself in this matter of awe and wonder, in
other words to determine whether he is taken up first of all with that
element in his own nature which makes him incomprehensibly like other
men or with that element which makes him incomprehensibly different
from them. A man, the wise have always insisted, should look with
reverence but not with wonder on himself. Rousseau boasts that if not
better than other men, he is at least different. By this gloating
sense of his own otherwiseness he may be said to have set the tone for
a whole epoch. Chateaubriand, for instance, is quite overcome by his
own uniqueness and wonderfulness. At the most ordinary happenings he
exclaims, as Sainte-Beuve points out, that such things happen only to
him. Hugo again is positively stupefied at the immensity of his own
genius. The theatricality that one feels in so much of the art of this
period arises from the eagerness of the genius to communicate to others
something of the amazement that he feels at himself. René’s first
concern is to inspire wonder even in the women who love him. “Céluta
felt that she was going to fall upon the bosom of this man as one falls
into an abyss.”
In thus putting such an exclusive emphasis on wonder the Rousseauistic
movement takes on a regressive character. For if life begins in
wonder it culminates in awe. To put “the budding rose above the rose
full-blown” may do very well for a mood, but as an habitual attitude
it implies that one is more interested in origins than in ends; and
this means in practice to look backward and downward instead of forward
and up. The conscious analysis that is needed if one is to establish
orderly sequences and relationships and so work out a kingdom of ends
is repudiated by the Rousseauist because it diminishes wonder, because
it interferes with the creative impulse of genius as it gushes up
spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious. The whole movement is
filled with the praise of ignorance and of those who still enjoy its
inappreciable advantages--the savage, the peasant and above all the
child. The Rousseauist may indeed be said to have discovered the poetry
of childhood of which only traces can be found in the past, but at what
would seem at times a rather heavy sacrifice of rationality. Rather
than consent to have the bloom taken off things by analysis one should,
as Coleridge tells us, _sink back_ to the devout state of childlike
wonder. However, to grow ethically is not to sink back but to struggle
painfully forward. To affirm the contrary is to set up the things that
are below the ordinary rational level as a substitute for the things
that are above it, and at the same time to proclaim one’s inability to
mature. The romanticist, it is true, is wont to oppose to the demand
for maturity Christ’s praise of the child. But Christ evidently praises
the child not because of his capacity for wonder but because of his
freedom from sin, and it is of the essence of Rousseauism to deny the
very existence of sin--at least in the Christian sense of the word.
One may also read in the New Testament that when one has ceased to be
a child one should give up childish things, and this is a saying that
no primitivist, so far as I am aware, has ever quoted. On the contrary,
he is ready to assert that what comes to the child spontaneously is
superior to the deliberate moral effort of the mature man. The speeches
of all the sages are, according to Maeterlinck, outweighed by the
unconscious wisdom of the passing child. Wordsworth hails a child of
six as “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” (It is only fair to Coleridge
to say that he refused to follow Wordsworth into this final abyss of
absurdity.[42]) In much the same way Hugo pushes his adoration of
the child to the verge of what has been termed “solemn silliness”
(_niaiserie solennelle_).
To set up the spontaneity of the child as a substitute for insight,
to identify wonder with awe, romance with religion, is to confuse the
very planes of being. There would appear to be a confusion of this kind
in what Carlyle takes to be his own chief discovery, in his “natural
supernaturalism.”[43] The natural order we must grant Carlyle is
unfathomable, but it is not therefore awful, only wonderful. A movement
of charity belongs as Pascal says to an entirely different order.[44]
The spiritual order to which Pascal refers lifts a man so far as he
perceives it out of his ordinary self and draws him to an ethical
centre. But the Rousseauist tends, as I have said, to repudiate
the very idea of an ethical centre along with the special forms in
which it had got itself embedded. Every attempt, whether humanistic
or religious, to set up some such centre, to oppose a unifying and
centralizing principle to expansive impulse, seems to him arbitrary
and artificial. He does not discriminate between the ethical norm or
centre that a Sophocles grasps intuitively and the centrality that the
pseudo-classicist hopes to achieve by mechanical imitation. He argues
from his underlying assumption that the principle of variation is alone
vital, that one’s genius and originality are in pretty direct ratio
to one’s eccentricity in the literal meaning of the word; and he is
therefore ready to affirm his singularity or difference in the face of
whatever happens to be established. This attitude, it is worth noting,
is quite unlike that of the humorist in the old English sense of the
word, who indulges his bent and is at the same time quite unconcerned
with any central model that he should imitate and with reference to
which he should discipline his oddities. The idiosyncrasy of the
Rousseauist is not, like that of the humorist, genial, but defiant.
He is strangely self-conscious in his return to the unconscious. In
everything, from his vocabulary to the details of his dress, he is
eager to emphasize his departure from the norm. Hence the persistent
pose and theatricality in so many of the leaders of this movement, in
Rousseau himself, for instance, or in Chateaubriand and Byron. As for
the lesser figures in the movement their “genius” is often chiefly
displayed in their devices for calling attention to themselves as the
latest and most marvellous births of time; it is only one aspect in
short of an art in which the past century, whatever its achievement in
the other arts, has easily surpassed all its predecessors--the art of
advertising.
One needs always to return, however, if one is to understand the
romantic notion of genius, to a consideration of the pseudo-classic
decorum against which it is a protest. The gentleman or man of the
world (_honnête homme_) was not, like the original genius, anxious
to advertise himself, to call attention to his own special note
of originality, since his primary concern was with an entirely
different problem, with the problem, namely, not of expressing but
of humanizing himself; and he could humanize himself, he felt, only
by constant reference to the accepted standard of what the normal
man should be. He refused to “pride himself on anything”; he was
fearful of over-emphasis, because the first of virtues in his eyes
was a sense of proportion. The total symmetry of life to which the
best type of classicist refers back his every impulse, he apprehends
intuitively with the aid of his imagination. The symmetry to which the
pseudo-classicist refers back his impulses has ceased to be imaginative
and has become a mere conformity to an outer code or even to the rules
of etiquette; and so, instead of a deep imaginative insight, he gets
mere elegance or polish. The unity that a purely external decorum of
this kind imposes on life degenerates into a tiresome sameness. It
seems an unwarranted denial of the element of wonder and surprise.
“Boredom was born one day of uniformity,” said La Motte Houdard, who
was himself a pseudo-classicist; whereas variety as everybody knows
is the spice of life. The romanticist would break up the smooth and
tiresome surface of artificial decorum by the pursuit of strangeness.
If he can only get his thrill he cares little whether it is probable,
whether it bears any relation, that is, to normal human experience.
This sacrifice of the probable to the surprising appears, as I said
at the outset, in all types of romanticism--whether of action or
thought or feeling. The genuine classicist always puts his main
stress on design or structure; whereas the main quest of every type
of romanticist is rather for the intense and vivid and arresting
detail. Take, for instance, the intellectual romanticism that prevailed
especially in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In
the “witty and conceited” poets of this period the intellect is engaged
in a more or less irresponsible vagabondage with the imagination as its
free accomplice. The conceits by which a poet of this type displays his
“ingenuity” (genius) are not structural, are not, that is, referred
back to any centre. They stand forth each separately and sharply from
the surface of the style (hence known to the French as “points”), and
so arrest the reader by their novelty. Their rareness and preciousness,
however, are intended to startle the intellect alone. They do not
have and are not intended to have any power of sensuous suggestion.
The Rousseauistic romanticist, on the other hand, so far from being
“metaphysical,” strives to be concrete even at the risk of a certain
materialism of style, of turning his metaphors into mere images. Like
the intellectual romanticist, though in a different way, he wishes to
break up the smooth and monotonous surface of life and style, and so he
sets up the cult of the picturesque. To understand this cult one needs
to remember the opposite extreme of artificial symmetry. One needs to
recall, for example, the neo-classicist who complained of the stars
in heaven because they were not arranged in symmetrical patterns, or
various other neo-classicists who attacked mountains because of their
rough and irregular shapes, because of their refusal to submit to the
rule and compass. When beauty is conceived in so mechanical a fashion
some one is almost certain to wish to “add strangeness” to it.
The cult of the picturesque is closely associated with the cult of
local color. Here as elsewhere romantic genius is, in contradistinction
to classical genius which aims at the “grandeur of generality,” the
genius of wonder and surprise. According to Buffon, who offers the
rare spectacle of a man of science who is at the same time a theorist
of the grand manner, genius is shown in the architectonic gift--in
the power so to unify a subject as to keep its every detail in proper
subordination to the whole. Any mere wantoning of the imagination
in the pursuit of either the precious or the picturesque is to be
severely repressed if one is to attain to the grandeur of generality.
Buffon is truly classic in relating genius to design. Unfortunately
he verges towards the pseudo-classic in his distrust of color, of the
precise word and the vivid descriptive epithet. The growing verbal
squeamishness that so strikes one towards the end of the neo-classic
period is one outcome of artificial decorum, of confusing nobility of
language with the language of the nobility. There was an increasing
fear of the trivial word that might destroy the illusion of the grand
manner, and also of the technical term that should be too suggestive
of specialization. All terms were to be avoided that were not readily
intelligible to a lady or gentleman in the drawing-room. And so it
came to pass that by the end of the eighteenth century the grand
manner, or elevated style, had come to be largely an art of ingenious
circumlocution, and Buffon gives some countenance to this conception of
classic dignity and representativeness when he declares that one should
describe objects “only by the most general terms.” At all events the
reply of the romantic genius to this doctrine is the demand for local
color, for the concrete and picturesque phrase. The general truth at
which the classicist aims the Rousseauist dismisses as identical with
the gray and the academic, and bends all his efforts to the rendering
of the vivid and unique detail. Of the readiness of the romantic genius
to show (or one is tempted to say) to advertise his originality by
trampling verbal decorum under foot along with every other kind of
decorum, I shall have more to say later. He is ready to employ not only
the homely and familiar word that the pseudo-classicist had eschewed
as “low,” but words so local and technical as to be unintelligible to
ordinary readers. Chateaubriand deals so specifically with the North
American Indian and his environment that the result, according to
Sainte-Beuve, is a sort of “tattooing” of his style. Hugo bestows a
whole dictionary of architectural terms upon the reader in his “Nôtre
Dame,” and of nautical terms in his “Toilers of the Sea.” In order to
follow some of the passages in Balzac’s “César Birotteau,” one needs
to be a lawyer or a professional accountant, and it has been said that
in order to do justice to a certain description in Zola one would need
to be a pork-butcher. In this movement towards a highly specialized
vocabulary one should note a coöperation, as so often elsewhere,
between the two wings of the naturalistic movement--the scientific and
the emotional. The Rousseauist is, like the scientist, a specialist--he
specializes in his own sensations. He goes in quest of emotional
thrills for their own sake, just as Napoleon’s generals, according to
Sainte-Beuve, waged war without any ulterior aim but for the sheer lust
of conquest. The vivid images and picturesque details are therefore
not sufficiently structural; each one tends to thrust itself forward
without reference to the whole and to demand attention for its own sake.
The pursuit of the unrelated thrill without reference to its
motivation or probability leads in the romantic movement to a sort of
descent--often, it is true, a rapturous and lyrical descent--from the
dramatic to the melodramatic. It is possible to trace this one-sided
emphasis on wonder not merely in vocabulary but in the increasing
resort to the principle of contrast. One suspects, for example, that
Rousseau exaggerates the grotesqueness of his youthful failure as a
musical composer at Lausanne in order that his success in the same
rôle before the king and all the ladies of the court at Versailles may
“stick more fiery off.” The contrast that Chateaubriand establishes
between the two banks of the Mississippi at the beginning of his
“Atala” is so complete as to put some strain on verisimilitude. One
may note in this same description, as a somewhat different way of
sacrificing the probable to the picturesque, the bears drunk on wild
grapes and reeling on the branches of the elms. To prove that it was
possible on some particular occasion to look down the vista of a forest
glade on the lower Mississippi and see it closed by a drunken bear does
not meet the difficulty at all. For art has to do, as was remarked long
ago, not with the possible but the probable; and a bear in this posture
is a possible but scarcely a probable bear.
To return to the principle of contrast: Hugo dilates upon his puniness
as an infant (“abandoned by everybody, even by his mother”) in order
to make his later achievement seem still more stupendous.[45] The
use of the antithesis as the auxiliary of surprise, the abrupt and
thrilling passage from light to shade or the contrary, finds perhaps
its culminating expression in Hugo. A study of this one figure as it
appears in his words and ideas, in his characters and situations and
subjects, would show that he is the most melodramatic genius for whom
high rank has ever been claimed in literature. The suddenness of Jean
Valjean’s transformation from a convict into a saint may serve as a
single instance of Hugo’s readiness to sacrifice verisimilitude to
surprise in his treatment of character.
Closely allied to the desire to break up the monotonous surface of
“good form” by the pointed and picturesque style in writing is the rise
of the pointed and picturesque style in dress. A man may advertise
his genius and originality (in the romantic sense of these terms) by
departing from the accepted modes of costume as well as from the
accepted modes of speech. Gautier’s scarlet waistcoat at the first
performance of Hernani is of the same order as his flamboyant epithets,
his riot of local color, and was at least as effective in achieving
the main end of his life--to be, in his own phrase, the “terror of the
sleek, baldheaded bourgeois.” In assuming the Armenian garb to the
astonishment of the rustics of Motiers-Travers, Rousseau anticipates
not merely Gautier but innumerable other violators of conventional
correctness: here as elsewhere he deserves to rank as the classic
instance, one is tempted to say, of romantic eccentricity. La Bruyère,
an exponent of the traditional good-breeding against which Rousseauism
is a protest, says that the gentleman allows himself to be dressed by
his tailor. He wishes to be neither ahead of the mode nor behind it,
being reluctant as he is in all things to oppose his private sense to
the general sense. His point of view in the matter of dress is not so
very remote from that of a genuine classicism, whereas the enthusiast
who recently went about the streets of New York (until taken in by
the police) garbed as a contemporary of Pericles is no less plainly a
product of Rousseauistic revolt.
Chateaubriand’s relation to Rousseauism in this matter calls for
special comment. He encouraged, and to some extent held, the belief
that to show genius and originality one must be irregular and
tempestuous in all things, even in the arrangement of one’s hair. At
the same time he preached reason. His heart, in short, was romantic,
his head classical. Both as a classicist and a romanticist he was ready
to repudiate on the one hand his master Rousseau, and on the other
his own disciples. As a romantic genius he wished to regard himself
as unique and so unrelated to Rousseau. At the same time he also
looked upon it as a sort of insolence for any of his own followers to
aspire to such a lonely preëminence in grief as René. As a classicist
he saw that great art aims at the normal and the representative, and
that it is therefore absurd for people to pattern themselves on such
morbid and exceptional characters as René and Childe Harold. Most
of the romanticists indeed showed themselves very imitative even in
their attempts at uniqueness, and the result was a second or third
hand, or as one is tempted to say, a stale eccentricity. In their mere
following of the mode many of the French romanticists of 1830 were
ready to impose a painful discipline upon themselves[46] in order to
appear abnormal, in order, for instance, to acquire a livid Byronic
complexion. Some of those who wished to seem elegiac like Lamartine
rather than to emulate the violent and histrionic revolt of the Conrads
and Laras actually succeeded, we are told, in giving themselves
consumption (hence the epithet _école poitrinaire_).
In outer and visible freakishness the French romanticists of 1830
probably bore away the palm, though in inner and spiritual remoteness
from normal human experience they can scarcely vie with the early
German romanticists. And this is doubtless due to the fact that in
France there was a more definite outer standard from which to advertise
their departure, and also to the fact that the revolt against this
standard was so largely participated in by the painters and by writers
like Gautier who were also interested in painting. Chateaubriand
writes of the romantic painters (and the passage will also serve to
illustrate his attitude towards his own disciples): “[These artists]
rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures.
Some of them wear frightful mustaches, one would suppose that they
are going forth to conquer the world--their brushes are halberds,
their paint-scratchers sabres; others have enormous beards and hair
that puffs out or hangs down their shoulders; they smoke a cigar
volcanically. These cousins of the rainbow, to use a phrase of our old
Régnier, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests,
cataracts, tempests, or it may be with slaughters, tortures and
scaffolds. One finds among them human skulls, foils, mandolins, helmets
and dolmans. … They aim to form a separate species between the ape and
the satyr; they give you to understand that the secrecy of the studio
has its dangers and that there is no safety for the models.”
These purely personal eccentricities that so marked the early stages in
the warfare between the Bohemian and the philistine have as a matter
of fact diminished in our own time. Nowadays a man of the distinction
of Disraeli or even of Bulwer-Lytton[47] would scarcely affect, as
they did, the flamboyant style in dress. But the underlying failure
to discriminate between the odd and the original has persisted and has
worked out into even extremer consequences. One may note, as I have
said, even in the early figures in the movement a tendency to play to
the gallery, a something that suggests the approach of the era of the
lime-light and the big headline. Rousseau himself has been called the
father of yellow journalists. There is an unbroken development from
the early exponents of original genius down to cubists, futurists and
post-impressionists and the corresponding schools in literature. The
partisans of expression as opposed to form in the eighteenth century
led to the fanatics of expression in the nineteenth and these have
led to the maniacs of expression of the twentieth. The extremists in
painting have got so far beyond Cézanne, who was regarded not long ago
as one of the wildest of innovators, that Cézanne is, we are told, “in
a fair way to achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic.” Poe
was fond of quoting a saying of Bacon’s that “there is no excellent
beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” This saying
became known in France through Baudelaire’s rendering of Poe and was
often ascribed to Poe himself. It was taken to mean that the stranger
one became the nearer one was getting to perfect beauty. And if we
grant this view of beauty we must admit that some of the decadents
succeeded in becoming very beautiful indeed. But the more the element
of proportion in beauty is sacrificed to strangeness the more the
result will seem to the normal man to be, not beauty at all, but rather
an esoteric cult of ugliness. The romantic genius therefore denounces
the normal man as a philistine and at the same time, since he cannot
please him, seeks at least to shock him and so capture his attention
by the very violence of eccentricity.
The saying I have quoted from Bacon is perhaps an early example of the
inner alliance between things that superficially often seem remote--the
scientific spirit and the spirit of romance. Scientific discovery has
given a tremendous stimulus to wonder and curiosity, has encouraged a
purely exploratory attitude towards life and raised an overwhelming
prepossession in favor of the new as compared with the old. Baconian
and Rousseauist evidently come together by their primary emphasis on
novelty. The movement towards a more and more eccentric conception
of art and literature has been closely allied in practice with the
doctrine of progress--and that from the very dawn of the so-called
Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate
the havoc that has been wrought by the transfer of the belief that
the latest thing is the best--a belief that is approximately true
of automobiles--from the material order to an entirely different
realm.[48] The very heart of the classical message, one cannot repeat
too often, is that one should aim first of all not to be original,
but to be human, and that to be human one needs to look up to a sound
model and imitate it. The imposition of form and proportion upon one’s
expansive impulses which results from this process of imitation is,
in the true sense of that much abused word, culture. Genuine culture
is difficult and disciplinary. The mediation that it involves between
the conflicting claims of form and expression requires the utmost
contention of spirit. We have here a clue to the boundless success
of the Rousseauistic doctrine of spontaneity, of the assertion that
genius resides in the region of the primitive and unconscious and is
hindered rather than helped by culture. It is easier to be a genius
on Rousseauistic lines than to be a man on the terms imposed by the
classicist. There is a fatal facility about creation when its quality
is not tested by some standard set above the creator’s temperament;
and the same fatal facility appears in criticism when the critic does
not test creation by some standard set above both his own temperament
and that of the creator. The romantic critic as a matter of fact
confines his ambition to receiving so keen an impression from genius,
conceived as something purely temperamental, that when this creative
expression is passed through his temperament it will issue forth as a
fresh expression. Taste, he holds, will thus tend to become one with
genius, and criticism, instead of being cold and negative like that of
the neo-classicist, will itself grow creative.[49] But the critic who
does not get beyond this stage will have gusto, zest, relish, what you
will, he will not have taste. For taste involves a difficult mediation
between the element of uniqueness in both critic and creator and that
which is representative and human. Once eliminate this human standard
that is set above the temperament of the creator and make of the critic
in turn a mere pander to “genius” and it is hard to see what measure
of a man’s excellence is left save his intoxication with himself; and
this measure would scarcely seem to be trustworthy. “Every ass that’s
romantic,” says Wolseley in his Preface to “Valentinian” (1686)
“believes he’s inspired.”
An important aspect of the romantic theory of genius remains to be
considered. This theory is closely associated in its rise and growth
with the theory of the master faculty or ruling passion. A man can
do that for which he has a genius without effort, whereas no amount
of effort can avail to give a man that for which he has no native
aptitude.[50] Buffon affirmed in opposition to this view that genius is
only a capacity for taking pains or, as an American recently put it, is
ten per cent inspiration and ninety per cent perspiration. This notion
of genius not only risks running counter to the observed facts as to
the importance of the native gift but it does not bring out as clearly
as it might the real point at issue. Even though genius were shown
to be ninety per cent inspiration a man should still, the classicist
would insist, fix his attention on the fraction that is within his
power. Thus Boileau says in substance at the outset of his “Art of
Poetry” that a poet needs to be born under a propitious star. Genius
is indispensable, and not merely genius in general but genius for the
special kind of poetry in which he is to excel. Yet granting all this,
he says to the poetical aspirant, bestir yourself! The mystery of grace
will always be recognized in any view of life that gets at all beneath
the surface. Yet it is still the better part to turn to the feasibility
of works. The view of genius as merely a temperamental overflow is as
a matter of fact only a caricature of the doctrine of grace. It suits
the spiritual indolence of the creator who seeks to evade the more
difficult half of his problem--which is not merely to create but to
humanize his creation. Hawthorne, for example, is according to Mr.
Brownell, too prone (except in the “Scarlet Letter”) to get away from
the clear sunlight of normal human experience into a region of somewhat
crepuscular symbolism, and this is because he yielded too complacently
and fatalistically to what he conceived to be his genius. The theory
of genius is perhaps the chief inheritance of the New England
transcendentalists from romanticism. Hawthorne was more on his guard
against the extreme implications of the theory than most other members
of this group. It remains to be seen how much the exaltation of genius
and depreciation of culture that marks one whole side of Emerson will
in the long run tell against his reputation. The lesser New England men
showed a rare incapacity to distinguish between originality and mere
freakishness either in themselves or in others.
It is fair to say that in lieu of the discipline of culture the
romantic genius has often insisted on the discipline of technique;
and this has been especially true in a country like France with its
persistent tradition of careful workmanship. Gautier, for example,
would have one’s “floating dream sealed”[51] in the hardest and most
resisting material, that can only be mastered by the perfect craftsman;
and he himself, falling into a confusion of the arts, tries to display
such a craftsmanship by painting and carving with words. Flaubert,
again, refines upon the technique of writing to a point where it
becomes not merely a discipline but a torture. But if a man is to
be a romantic genius in the fullest sense he must, it should seem,
repudiate even the discipline of technique as well as the discipline of
culture in favor of an artless spontaneity. For after all the genius
is only the man who retains the virtues of the child, and technical
proficiency is scarcely to be numbered among these virtues. The German
romanticists already prefer the early Italian painters because of their
naïveté and divine awkwardness to the later artiste who had a more
conscious mastery of their material. The whole Pre-Raphaelite movement
is therefore only one aspect of Rousseau’s return to nature. To later
primitivists the early Italians themselves seem far too deliberate.
They would recover the spontaneity displayed in the markings on
Alaskan totem poles or in the scratchings of the caveman on the
flint. A prerequisite to pure genius, if we are to judge by their own
productions, is an inability to draw. The futurists in their endeavor
to convey symbolically their own “soul” or “vision”--a vision be it
noted of pure flux and motion--deny the very conditions of time and
space that determine the special technique of painting; and inasmuch
as to express one’s “soul” means for these moderns, as it did for the
“genius” of the eighteenth century, to express the ineffable difference
between themselves and others, the symbolizing of this soul to which
they have sacrificed both culture and technique remains a dark mystery.
An eccentricity so extreme as to be almost or quite indistinguishable
from madness is then the final outcome of the revolt of the original
genius from the regularity of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth
century had, one must confess, become too much like the Happy Valley
from which Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, sought an egress. It was fair
to the eye and satisfied all man’s ordinary needs, but it seemed at the
same time to hem him in oppressively, and limit unduly his horizons.
For the modern man, as for the prince in Johnson’s tale, a regular
round of assured felicities has counted for nought as compared with the
passion for the open; though now that he has tasted strange adventures,
the modern man will scarcely decide at the end, like the prince, to
“return to Abyssinia.” I have already spoken of the rationalistic and
pseudo-classic elements in the eighteenth century that the romantic
rebels found so intolerable. It is impossible to follow “reason,” they
said in substance, and also to slake one’s thirst for the “infinite”;
it is impossible to conform and imitate and at the same time to be free
and original and spontaneous. Above all it is impossible to submit
to the yoke of either reason or imitation and at the same time to be
imaginative. This last assertion will always be the main point at issue
in any genuine debate between classicist and romanticist. The supreme
thing in life, the romanticist declares, is the creative imagination,
and it can be restored to its rights only by repudiating imitation. The
imagination is supreme the classicist grants but adds that to imitate
rightly is to make the highest use of the imagination. To understand
all that is implied in this central divergence between classicist
and romanticist we shall need to study in more detail the kind of
imaginative activity that has been encouraged in the whole movement
extending from the rise of the original genius in the eighteenth
century to the present day.