ROMANTIC IMAGINATION
I have already spoken of the contrast established by the theorists of
original genius in the eighteenth century between the different types
of imagination--especially between the literary and the scientific
imagination. According to these theorists, it will be remembered, the
scientific imagination should be strictly subordinated to judgment,
whereas the literary imagination, freed from the shackles of imitation,
should be at liberty to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras,
or, at all events, should be far less sharply checked by judgment.
It is easy to follow the extension of these English views of genius
and imagination into the France of Rousseau and Diderot, and then
the elaboration of these same views, under the combined influence of
both France and England, in Germany. I have tried to show that Kant,
especially in his “Critique of Judgment,” and Schiller in his “Æsthetic
Letters” (1795) prepare the way for the conception of the creative
imagination that is at the very heart of the romantic movement.
According to this romantic conception, as we have seen, the imagination
is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from
all constraint whatever. This extreme romantic emancipation of the
imagination was accompanied by an equally extreme emancipation of the
emotions. Both kinds of emancipation are, as I have tried to show,
a recoil partly from neo-classical judgment--a type of judgment
which seemed to oppress all that is creative and spontaneous in man
under a weight of outer convention; partly, from the reason of the
Enlightenment, a type of reason that was so logical and abstract that
it seemed to mechanize the human spirit, and to be a denial of all
that is immediate and intuitive. The neo-classical judgment, with its
undue unfriendliness to the imagination, is itself a recoil, let us
remember, from the imaginative extravagance of the “metaphysicals,” the
intellectual romanticists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and also, if we take a sufficiently wide view, from the Quixotic type
of romanticism, the romanticism of action, that we associate with the
Middle Ages.
Now not only are men governed by their imaginations (the imagination,
as Pascal says, disposes of everything), but the type of imagination
by which most men are governed may be defined in the widest sense
of the word as romantic. Nearly every man cherishes his dream, his
conceit of himself as he would like to be, a sort of “ideal” projection
of his own desires, in comparison with which his actual life seems
a hard and cramping routine. “Man must conceive himself what he is
not,” as Dr. Johnson says, “for who is pleased with what he is?” The
ample habitation that a man rears for his fictitious or “ideal” self
often has some slight foundation in fact, but the higher he rears
it the more insecure it becomes, until finally, like Perrette in
the fable, he brings the whole structure down about his ears by the
very gesture of his dream. “We all of us,” La Fontaine concludes in
perhaps the most delightful account of the romantic imagination in
literature, “wise as well as foolish, indulge in daydreams. There is
nothing sweeter. A flattering illusion carries away our spirits. All
the wealth in the world is ours, all honors and all women,”[52] etc.
When Johnson descants on the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,”[53]
and warns us to stick to “sober probability,” what he means is the
dangerous prevalence of day-dreaming. The retreat of the Rousseauist
into some “land of chimeras” or tower of ivory assumes forms almost
incredibly complex and subtle, but at bottom the ivory tower is only
one form of man’s ineradicable longing to escape from the oppression
of the actual into some land of heart’s desire, some golden age of
fancy. As a matter of fact, Rousseau’s imaginative activity often
approaches very closely to the delights of day-dreaming as described
by La Fontaine. He was never more imaginative, he tells us, than
when on a walking-trip--especially when the trip had no definite
goal, or at least when he could take his time in reaching it. The
_Wanderlust_ of body and spirit could then be satisfied together.
Actual vagabondage seemed to be an aid to the imagination in its escape
from verisimilitude. One should note especially Rousseau’s account of
his early wandering from Lyons to Paris and the airy structures that
he raised on his anticipations of what he might find there. Inasmuch
as he was to be attached at Paris to the Swiss Colonel Godard, he
already traced for himself in fancy, in spite of his short-sightedness,
a career of military glory. “I had read that Marshal Schomberg was
short-sighted, why shouldn’t Marshal Rousseau be so too?” In the
meanwhile, touched by the sight of the groves and brooks, “I felt in
the midst of my glory that my heart was not made for so much turmoil,
and soon without knowing how, I found myself once more among my beloved
pastorals, renouncing forever the toils of Mars.”
Thus alongside the real world and in more or less sharp opposition to
it, Rousseau builds up a fictitious world, that _pays des chimères_,
which is alone, as he tells us, worthy of habitation. To study his
imaginative activity is simply to study the new forms that he gives
to what I have called man’s ineradicable longing for some Arcadia,
some land of heart’s desire. Goethe compares the illusions that man
nourishes in his breast to the population of statues in ancient Rome
which were almost as numerous as the population of living men. The
important thing from the point of view of sanity is that a man should
not blur the boundaries between the two populations, that he should not
cease to discriminate between his fact and his fiction. If he confuses
what he dreams himself to be with what he actually is, he has already
entered upon the pathway of madness. It was, for example, natural
for a youth like Rousseau who was at once romantic and musical, to
dream that he was a great composer; but actually to set up as a great
composer and to give the concert at Lausanne, shows an unwillingness to
discriminate between his fictitious and his real world that is plainly
pathological. If not already a megalomaniac, he was even then on the
way to megalomania.
To wander through the world as though it were an Arcadia or enchanted
vision contrived for one’s especial benefit is an attitude of
childhood--especially of imaginative childhood. “Wherever children
are,” says Novalis, “there is the golden age.” As the child grows and
matures there is a more or less painful process of adjustment between
his “vision” and the particular reality in which he is placed. A little
sense gets knocked into his head, and often, it must be confessed, a
good deal of the imagination gets knocked out. As Wordsworth complains,
the vision fades into the light of common day. The striking fact about
Rousseau is that, far more than Wordsworth, he held fast to his vision.
He refused to adjust it to an unpalatable reality. During the very
years when the ordinary youth is forced to subordinate his luxurious
imaginings to some definite discipline he fell under the influence of
Madame de Warens who encouraged rather than thwarted his Arcadian bent.
Later, when almost incurably confirmed in his penchant for revery, he
came into contact with the refined society of Paris, an environment
requiring so difficult an adjustment that no one we are told could
accomplish the feat unless he had been disciplined into the appropriate
habits from the age of six. He is indeed the supreme example of the
unadjusted man, of the original genius whose imagination has never
suffered either inner or outer constraint, who is more of an Arcadian
dreamer at sixty perhaps than he was at sixteen. He writes to the
Bailli de Mirabeau (31 January, 1767):
“The fatigue of thinking becomes every day more painful to me.
I love to dream, but freely, allowing my mind to wander without
enslaving myself to any subject. … This idle and contemplative
life which you do not approve and which I do not excuse,
becomes to me daily more delicious; to wander alone endlessly
and ceaselessly among the trees and rocks about my dwelling,
to muse or rather to be as irresponsible as I please, and as
you say, to go wool-gathering; … finally to give myself up
unconstrainedly to my fantasies which, thank heaven, are all
within my power: that, sir, is for me the supreme enjoyment,
than which I can imagine nothing superior in this world for a
man at my age and in my condition.”
Rousseau, then, owes his significance not only to the fact that he was
supremely imaginative in an age that was disposed to deny the supremacy
of the imagination, but to the fact that he was imaginative in a
particular way. A great multitude since his time must be reckoned among
his followers, not because they have held certain ideas but because
they have exhibited a similar quality of imagination. In seeking to
define this quality of imagination we are therefore at the very heart
of our subject.
It is clear from what has already been said that Rousseau’s imagination
was in a general way Arcadian, and this, if not the highest, is perhaps
the most prevalent type of imagination. In surveying the literature of
the world one is struck not only by the universality of the pastoral
or idyllic element, but by the number of forms it has assumed--forms
ranging from the extreme of artificiality and conventionalism to the
purest poetry. The very society against the artificiality of which
Rousseau’s whole work is a protest is itself in no small degree a
pastoral creation. Various elements indeed entered into the life of
the drawing-room as it came to be conceived towards the beginning
of the seventeenth century. The Marquise de Rambouillet and others
who set out at this time to live in the grand manner were in so
far governed either by genuine or by artificial decorum. But at the
same time that the creators of _le grand monde_ were aiming to be
more “decent” than the men and women of the sixteenth century, they
were patterning themselves upon the shepherds and shepherdesses of
D’Urfé’s interminable pastoral “l’Astrée.” They were seeking to create
a sort of enchanted world from which the harsh cares of ordinary life
were banished and where they might be free, like true Arcadians, to
discourse of love. This discourse of love was associated with what
I have defined as intellectual romanticism. In spite of the attacks
by the exponents of humanistic good sense (Molière, Boileau, etc.)
on this drawing-room affectation, it lingered on and still led in
the eighteenth century, as Rousseau complained, to “inconceivable
refinements.”[54] At the same time we should recollect that there is
a secret bond between all forms of Arcadian dreaming. Not only was
Rousseau fascinated, like the early _précieux_ and _précieuses_, by
D’Urfé’s pastoral, but he himself appealed by his renewal of the main
pastoral theme of love to the descendants of these former Arcadians
in the polite society of his time. The love of Rousseau is associated
not like that of the _précieux_, with the intellect, but with the
emotions, and so he substitutes for a “wire-drawn and super-subtilized
gallantry,” the ground-swell of elemental passion.[55] Moreover, the
definitely primitivistic coloring that he gave to his imaginative
renewal of the pastoral dream appealed to an age that was reaching the
last stages of over-refinement. Primitivism is, strictly speaking,
nothing new in the world. It always tends to appear in periods of
complex civilization. The charms of the simple life and of a return
to nature were celebrated especially during the Alexandrian period
of Greek literature for the special delectation no doubt of the most
sophisticated members of this very sophisticated society. “Nothing,” as
Dr. Santayana says, “is farther from the common people than the corrupt
desire to be primitive.” Primitivistic dreaming was also popular
in ancient Rome at its most artificial moment. The great ancients,
however, though enjoying the poetry of the primitivistic dream, were
not the dupes of this dream. Horace, for example, lived at the most
artificial moment of Rome when primitivistic dreaming was popular as
it had been at Alexandria. He descants on the joys of the simple life
in a well-known ode. One should not therefore hail him, like Schiller,
as the founder of the sentimental school “of which he has remained the
unsurpassed model.”[56] For the person who plans to return to nature
in Horace’s poem is the old usurer Alfius, who changes his mind at
the last moment and puts out his mortgages again. In short, the final
attitude of the urbane Horace towards the primitivistic dream--it could
hardly be otherwise--is ironical.
Rousseau seems destined to remain the supreme example, at least in the
Occident, of the man who takes the primitivistic dream seriously, who
attempts to set up primitivism as a philosophy and even as a religion.
Rousseau’s account of his sudden illumination on the road from Paris
to Vincennes is famous: the scales, he tells us, fell from his eyes
even as they had from the eyes of Paul on the road to Damascus, and
he saw how man had fallen from the felicity of his primitive estate;
how the blissful ignorance in which he had lived at one with himself
and harmless to his fellows had been broken by the rise of intellectual
self-consciousness and the resulting progress in the sciences and
arts. Modern students of Rousseau have, under the influence of James,
taken this experience on the road to Vincennes to be an authentic
case of conversion,[57] but this is merely one instance of our modern
tendency to confound the subrational with the superrational. What one
finds in this alleged conversion when one looks into it, is a sort of
“subliminal uprush” of the Arcadian memories of his youth, especially
of his life at Annecy and Les Charmettes, and at the same time the
contrast between these Arcadian memories and the hateful constraints
he had suffered at Paris in his attempts to adjust himself to an
uncongenial environment.
We can trace even more clearly perhaps the process by which the
Arcadian dreamer comes to set up as a seer, in Rousseau’s relation of
the circumstances under which he came to compose his “Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality.” He goes off on a sort of picnic with Thérèse
into the forest of St. Germain and gives himself up to imagining the
state of primitive man. “Plunged in the forest,” he says, “I sought
and found there the image of primitive times of which I proudly
drew the history; I swooped down on the little falsehoods of men; I
ventured to lay bare their nature, to follow the progress of time and
of circumstances which have disfigured it, and comparing artificial
man (_l’homme de l’homme_) with natural man, to show in his alleged
improvement the true source of his miseries. My soul, exalted by these
sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity. Seeing
from this vantage point that the blind pathway of prejudices followed
by my fellows was also that of their errors, misfortunes and crimes, I
cried out to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear: Madmen,
who are always complaining of nature, know that all your evils come
from yourselves alone.”
The golden age for which the human heart has an ineradicable longing
is here presented not as poetical, which it certainly is, but as a
“state of nature” from which man has actually fallen. The more or less
innocent Arcadian dreamer is being transformed into the dangerous
Utopist. He puts the blame of the conflict and division of which he is
conscious in himself upon the social conventions that set bounds to
his temperament and impulses; once get rid of these purely artificial
restrictions and he feels that he will again be at one with himself and
“nature.” With such a vision of nature as this it is not surprising
that every constraint is unendurable to Rousseau, that he likes, as
Berlioz was to say of himself later, to “make all barriers crack.”
He is ready to shatter all the forms of civilized life in favor of
something that never existed, of a state of nature that is only the
projection of his own temperament and its dominant desires upon the
void. His programme amounts in practice to the indulgence of infinite
indeterminate desire, to an endless and aimless vagabondage of the
emotions with the imagination as their free accomplice.
This longing of the highly sophisticated person to get back to the
primitive and naïve and unconscious, or what amounts to the same
thing, to shake off the trammels of tradition and reason in favor of
free and passionate self-expression, underlies, as I have pointed out,
the conception of original genius which itself underlies the whole
modern movement. A book reflecting the primitivistic trend of the
eighteenth century, and at the same time pointing the way, as we shall
see presently, to the working out of the fundamental primitivistic
contrast between the natural and the artificial in the romanticism
of the early nineteenth century, is Schiller’s “Essay on Simple and
Sentimental Poetry.” The poetry that does not “look before or after,”
that is free from self-questioning and self-consciousness, and has a
childlike spontaneity, Schiller calls simple or naïve. The poet, on the
other hand, who is conscious of his fall from nature and who, from the
midst of his sophistication, longs to be back once more at his mother’s
bosom, is sentimental. Homer and his heroes, for example, are naïve;
Werther, who yearns in a drawing-room for the Homeric simplicity, is
sentimental. The longing of the modern man for nature, says Schiller,
is that of the sick man for health. It is hard to see in Schiller’s
“nature” anything more than a development of Rousseau’s primitivistic
Arcadia. To be sure, Schiller warns us that, in order to recover the
childlike and primitive virtues still visible in the man of genius,
we must not renounce culture. We must not seek to revert lazily to
an Arcadia, but must struggle forward to an Elysium. Unfortunately
Schiller’s Elysium has a strange likeness to Rousseau’s Arcadia; and
that is because Schiller’s own conception of life is, in the last
analysis, overwhelmingly sentimental. His most Elysian conception,
that of a purely æsthetic Greece, a wonderland of unalloyed beauty, is
also a bit of Arcadian sentimentalizing. Inasmuch as Rousseau’s state
of nature never existed outside of dreamland, the Greek who is simple
or naïve in this sense is likewise a myth. He has no real counterpart
either in the Homeric age or any other age of Greece. It is hard to
say which is more absurd, to make the Greeks naïve, or to turn Horace
into a sentimentalist. One should note how this romantic perversion
of the Greeks for which Schiller is largely responsible is related
to his general view of the imagination. We have seen that in the
“Æsthetic Letters” he maintains that if the imagination is to conceive
the ideal it must be free; and that to be free it must be emancipated
from purpose and engage in a sort of play. If the imagination has to
subordinate itself to a real object it ceases in so far to be free.
Hence the more ideal the imagination the farther it gets away from a
real object. By his theory of the imagination, Schiller thus encourages
that opposition between the ideal and the real which figures so largely
in romantic psychology. A man may consent to adjust a mere dream to
the requirements of the real, but when his dream is promoted to the
dignity of an ideal it is plain that he will be less ready to make
the sacrifice. Schiller’s Greece is very ideal in the sense I have
just defined. It hovers before the imagination as a sort of Golden
Age of pure beauty, a land of chimeras that is alone worthy of the
æsthete’s habitation. As an extreme type of the romantic Hellenist,
one may take Hölderlin, who was a disciple at once of Schiller and of
Rousseau. He begins by urging emancipation from every form of outer
and traditional control in the name of spontaneity. “Boldly forget,”
he cries in the very accents of Rousseau, “what you have inherited and
won--all laws and customs--and like new-born babes lift up your eyes
to godlike nature.” Hölderlin has been called a “Hellenizing Werther,”
and Werther, one should recollect, is only a German Saint-Preux, who is
in turn, according to Rousseau’s own avowal, only an idealized image
of Rousseau. The nature that Hölderlin worships and which is, like the
nature of Rousseau, only an Arcadian intoxication of the imagination,
he associates with a Greece which is, like the Greece of Schiller,
a dreamland of pure beauty. He longs to escape into this dreamland
from an actual world that seems to him intolerably artificial. The
contrast between his “ideal” Greece and reality is so acute as to make
all attempt at adjustment out of the question. As a result of this
maladjustment his whole being finally gave way and he lingered on for
many years in madness.
The acuteness of the opposition between the ideal and the real in
Hölderlin recalls Shelley, who was also a romantic Hellenist, and at
the same time perhaps the most purely Rousseauistic of the English
romantic poets. But Shelley was also a political dreamer, and here one
should note two distinct phases in his dream: a first phase that is
filled with the hope of transforming the real world into an Arcadia[58]
through revolutionary reform; and then a phase of elegiac disillusion
when the gap between reality and his ideal refuses to be bridged.[59]
Something of the same radiant political hope and the same disillusion
is found in Wordsworth. In the first flush of his revolutionary
enthusiasm, France seemed to him to be “standing on the top of golden
hours” and pointing the way to a new birth of human nature:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times,
In which the meagre stale forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When it became evident that the actual world and Utopia did not
coincide after all, when the hard sequences of cause and effect that
bind the present inexorably to the past refused to yield to the
creations of the romantic imagination, what ensued in Wordsworth
was not so much an awakening to true wisdom as a transformation of
the pastoral dream. The English Lake Country became for him in some
measure as it was later to be for Ruskin, the ivory tower into which
he retreated from the oppression of the real. He still continued to
see, if not the general order of society, at least the denizens of his
chosen retreat through the Arcadian mist, and contrasted their pastoral
felicity with the misery of men “barricadoed in the walls of cities.” I
do not mean to disparage the poetry of humble life or to deny that many
passages may be cited from Wordsworth that justify his reputation as an
inspired teacher: I wish merely to point out here and elsewhere what is
specifically romantic in the quality of his imagination.
After all it is to Rousseau himself even more than to his German or
English followers that one needs to turn for the best examples of
the all-pervasive conflict between the ideal and the actual. The
psychology of this conflict is revealed with special clearness in the
four letters that he wrote to M. de Malesherbes, and into which he has
perhaps put more of himself than into any other similar amount of his
writing. His natural indolence and impatience at the obligations and
constraints of life were, he avows to M. de Malesherbes, increased
by his early reading. At the age of eight he already knew Plutarch
by heart and had read “all novels” and shed tears over them, he adds
“by the pailful.” Hence was formed his “heroic and romantic taste”
which filled him with aversion for everything that did not resemble
his dreams. He had hoped at first to find the equivalent of these
dreams among actual men, but after painful disillusions he had come
to look with disdain on his age and his contemporaries. “I withdrew
more and more from human society and created for myself a society
in my imagination, a society that charmed me all the more in that I
could cultivate it without peril or effort and that it was always at
my call and such as I required it.” He associated this dream society
with the forms of outer nature. The long walks in particular that he
took during his stay at the Hermitage were, he tells us, filled with
a “continual delirium” of this kind. “I peopled nature with beings
according to my heart. … I created for myself a golden age to suit my
fancy.” It is not unusual for a man thus to console himself for his
poverty in the real relations of life by accumulating a huge hoard of
fairy gold. Where the Rousseauist goes beyond the ordinary dreamer is
in his proneness to regard his retirement into some land of chimeras as
a proof of his nobility and distinction. Poetry and life he feels are
irreconcilably opposed to each other, and he for his part is on the
side of poetry and the “ideal.” Goethe symbolized the hopelessness of
this conflict in the suicide of the young Werther. But though Werther
died, his creator continued to live, and more perhaps than any other
figure in the whole Rousseauistic movement perceived the peril of this
conception of poetry and the ideal. He saw phantasts all about him who
refused to be reconciled to the gap between the infinitude of their
longing and the platitude of their actual lot. Perhaps no country and
time ever produced more such phantasts than Germany of the Storm and
Stress and romantic periods--partly no doubt because it did not offer
any proper outlet for the activity of generous youths. Goethe himself
had been a phantast, and so it was natural in works like his “Tasso”
that he should show himself specially preoccupied with the problem
of the poet and his adjustment to life. About the time that he wrote
this play, he was, as he tells us, very much taken up with thoughts of
“Rousseau and his hypochondriac misery.” Rousseau for his part felt
a kinship between himself and Tasso, and Goethe’s Tasso certainly
reminds us very strongly of Rousseau. Carried away by his Arcadian
imaginings, Tasso violates the decorum that separates him from the
princess with whom he has fallen in love. As a result of the rebuffs
that follow, his dream changes into a nightmare, until he finally falls
like Rousseau into wild and random suspicion and looks on himself as
the victim of a conspiracy. In opposition to Tasso is the figure of
Antonio, the man of the world, whose imagination does not run away with
his sense of fact, and who is therefore equal to the “demands of the
day.” The final reconciliation between Tasso and Antonio, if not very
convincing dramatically, symbolizes at least what Goethe achieved in
some measure in his own life. There were moments, he declares, when
he might properly look upon himself as mad, like Rousseau. He escaped
from this world of morbid brooding, this giddy downward gazing into
the bottomless pit of the romantic heart against which he utters a
warning in Tasso, by his activity at the court of Weimar, by classical
culture, by scientific research. Goethe carries the same problem of
reconciling the ideal to the real a stage further in his “Wilhelm
Meister.” The more or less irresponsible and Bohemian youth that we
see at the beginning learns by renunciation and self-limitation to
fit into a life of wholesome activity. Goethe saw that the remedy for
romantic dreaming is work, though he is open to grave criticism, as I
shall try to show elsewhere, for his unduly naturalistic conception of
work. But the romanticists as a rule did not wish work in any sense and
so, attracted as they were by the free artistic life of Meister at the
beginning, they looked upon his final adjustment to the real as a base
capitulation to philistinism. Novalis described the book as a “Candide
directed against poetry,” and set out to write a counterblast in
“Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” This apotheosis of pure poetry, as he meant
it to be, is above all an apotheosis of the wildest vagabondage of the
imagination. Novalis did not, however, as a result of the conflict
between the ideal and the real, show any signs of going mad like
Hölderlin, or of simply fading from life like his friend Wackenroder.
Like E. T. A. Hoffmann and a certain number of other phantasts he had
a distinct gift for leading a dual life--for dividing himself into
a prosaic self which went one way, and a poetical self which went
another.
This necessary and fatal opposition between poetry and prose the
romanticist saw typified in “Don Quixote,” and of course he sided with
the idealism of the knight against the philistine good sense of Sancho
Panza; and so for the early romanticists as well as for those who were
of their spiritual posterity,--Heine, for example, and Flaubert,--“Don
Quixote” was a book to evoke not laughter but tears.
To the romantic conception of the ideal can be traced the increasing
lack of understanding between the poet, or in general the creator, and
the public during the past century. Many neo-classical writers may,
like Boileau, have shown an undue reverence for what they conceived to
be the general sense of their time, but to measure one’s inspiration
by one’s remoteness from this general sense is surely a far more
dangerous error; and yet one was encouraged to do this very thing by
the views of original genius that were held in the eighteenth century.
Certain late neo-classicists lacked imagination and were at the same
time always harping on good sense. It was therefore assumed that to
insist on good sense was necessarily proof of a lack of imagination.
Because the attempt to achieve the universal had led to a stale and
lifeless imitation it was assumed that a man’s genius consists in
his uniqueness, in his unlikeness to other men. Now nothing is more
private and distinctive in a man than his feelings, so that to be
unique meant practically for Rousseau and his followers to be unique
in feeling. Feeling alone they held was vital and immediate. As a
matter of fact the element in a man’s nature that he possesses in
common with other men is also something that he _senses_, something
that is in short intuitive and immediate. But good sense the genius
identifies with lifeless convention and so measures his originality by
the distance of his emotional and imaginative recoil from it. Of this
warfare between sense and sensibility that begins in the eighteenth
century, the romantic war between the poet and the philistine is only
the continuation. This war has been bad for both artist and public. If
the artist has become more and more eccentric, it must be confessed
that the good sense of the public against which he has protested
has been too flatly utilitarian. The poet who reduces poetry to the
imaginative quest of strange emotional adventure, and the plain
citizen who does not aspire beyond a reality that is too literal and
prosaic, both suffer; but the æsthete suffers the more severely--so
much so that I shall need to revert to this conception of poetry in
my treatment of romantic melancholy. It leads at last to a contrast
between the ideal and the real such as is described by Anatole France
in his account of Villiers de l’Isle Adam. “For thirty years,” says M.
France, “Villiers wandered around in cafés at night, fading away like
a shadow at the first glimmer of dawn. … His poverty, the frightful
poverty of cities, had so put its stamp on him and fashioned him so
thoroughly that he resembled those vagabonds, who, dressed in black,
sleep on park benches. He had the livid complexion with red blotches,
the glassy eye, the bowed back of the poor; and yet I am not sure we
should call him unhappy, for he lived in a perpetual dream and that
dream was radiantly golden. … His dull eyes contemplated within himself
dazzling spectacles. He passed through the world like a somnambulist
seeing nothing of what we see and seeing things that it is not given
us to behold. Out of the commonplace spectacle of life he succeeded in
creating an ever fresh ecstasy. On those ignoble café tables in the
midst of the odor of beer and tobacco, he poured forth floods of purple
and gold.”
This notion that literal failure is ideal success, and conversely, has
been developed in a somewhat different form by Rostand in his “Cyrano
de Bergerac.” By his refusal to compromise or adjust himself to things
as they are, Cyrano’s real life has become a series of defeats. He is
finally forced from life by a league of all the mediocrities whom his
idealism affronts. His discomfiture is taken to show, not that he is
a Quixotic extremist, but that he is the superior of the successful
Guise, the man who has stooped to compromise, the French equivalent
of the Antonio whom Goethe finally came to prefer to Tasso. Rostand’s
“Chanticleer” is also an interesting study of romantic idealism and
of the two main stages through which it passes--the first stage when
one relates one’s ideal to the real; the second, when one discovers
that the ideal and the real are more or less hopelessly dissevered.
Chanticleer still maintains his idealistic pose even after he has
discovered that the sun is not actually made to rise by his crowing.
In this hugging of his illusion in defiance of reality Chanticleer
is at the opposite pole from Johnson’s astronomer in “Rasselas” who
thinks that he has control of the weather, but when disillusioned is
humbly thankful at having escaped from this “dangerous prevalence
of imagination,” and entered once more into the domain of “sober
probability.”
The problem, then, of the genius or the artist versus the philistine
has persisted without essential modification from the eighteenth
century to the present day--from the suicide of Chatterton, let us
say, to the suicide of John Davidson. The man of imagination spurns
in the name of his “ideal” the limits imposed upon it by a dull
respectability, and then his ideal turns out only too often to lack
positive content and to amount in practice to the expansion of infinite
indeterminate desire. What the idealist opposes to the real is not only
something that does not exist, but something that never can exist. The
Arcadian revery which should be allowed at most as an occasional solace
from the serious business of living is set up as a substitute for
living. The imaginative and emotional dalliance of the Rousseauistic
romanticist may assume a bewildering variety of forms. We have already
seen in the case of Hölderlin how easily Rousseau’s dream of a state
of nature passes over--and that in spite of Rousseau’s attacks on
the arts--into the dream of a paradise of pure beauty. The momentous
matter is not that a man’s imagination and emotions go out towards
this or that particular haven of refuge in the future or in the past,
in the East or in the West, but that his primary demand on life is for
some haven of refuge; that he longs to be away from the here and now
and their positive demands on his character and will. Poe may sing of
“the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” but he
is not therefore a classicist. With the same wistfulness innumerable
romanticists have looked towards the Middle Ages. So C. E. Norton
says that Ruskin was a white-winged anachronism,[60] that he should
have been born in the thirteenth century. But one may surmise that a
man with Ruskin’s special quality of imagination would have failed
to adjust himself to the actual life of the thirteenth or any other
century. Those who put their Arcadia in the Middle Ages or some other
period of the past have at least this advantage over those who put it
in the present, they are better protected against disillusion. The man
whose Arcadia is distant from him merely in space may decide to go and
see for himself, and the results of this overtaking of one’s dream are
somewhat uncertain. The Austrian poet Lenau, for example, actually
took a trip to his primitive paradise that he had imagined somewhere
in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Perhaps it is not surprising that
he finally died mad. The disenchantment of Chateaubriand in his quest
for a Rousseauistic Arcadia in America and for Arcadian savages I
describe later. In his journey into the wilderness Chateaubriand
reveals himself as a spiritual lotos-eater no less surely than the man
who takes flight into what is superficially most remote from the virgin
forest--into some palace of art. His attitude towards America does not
differ psychically from that of many early romanticists towards Italy.
Italy was their land of heart’s desire, the land that filled them with
ineffable longing (_Sehnsucht nach Italien_), a palace of art that,
like the Latin Quarter of later Bohemians, had some points of contact
with Mohammed’s paradise. A man may even develop a romantic longing for
the very period against which romanticism was originally a protest and
be ready to “fling his cap for polish and for Pope.” One should add
that the romantic Eldorado is not necessarily rural. Lamb’s attitude
towards London is almost as romantic as that of Wordsworth towards the
country. Dr. Johnson cherished urban life because of its centrality.
Lamb’s imaginative dalliance, on the other hand, is stimulated by the
sheer variety and wonder of the London streets as another’s might be
by the mountains or the sea.[61] Lamb could also find an Elysium of
unmixed æsthetic solace in the literature of the past--especially in
Restoration Comedy.
The essence of the mood is always the straining of the imagination away
from the here and now, from an actuality that seems paltry and faded
compared to the radiant hues of one’s dream. The classicist, according
to A. W. Schlegel,[62] is for making the most of the present, whereas
the romanticist hovers between recollection and hope. In Shelleyan
phrase he “looks before and after and pines for what is not.” He
inclines like the Byronic dandy, Barbey d’Aurevilly, to take for his
mottoes the words “Too late” and “Nevermore.”
Nostalgia, the term that has come to be applied to the infinite
indeterminate longing of the romanticist--his never-ending quest
after the ever-fleeting object of desire--is not, from the point of
view of strict etymology, well-chosen. Romantic nostalgia is not
“homesickness,” accurately speaking, but desire to get away from
home. Odysseus in Homer suffers from true nostalgia. The Ulysses of
Tennyson, on the other hand, is nostalgic in the romantic sense when he
leaves home “to sail beyond the sunset.” Ovid, as Goethe points out,
is highly classical even in his melancholy. The longing from which
he suffers in his exile is very determinate: he longs to get back to
Rome, the centre of the world. Ovid indeed sums up the classic point
of view when he says that one cannot desire the unknown (_ignoti
nulla cupido_).[63] The essence of nostalgia is the desire for the
unknown. “I was burning with desire,” says Rousseau, “without any
definite object.” One is filled with a desire to fly one knows not
whither, to be off on a journey into the blue distance.[64] Music is
exalted by the romanticists above all other arts because it is the
most nostalgic, the art that is most suggestive of the hopeless gap
between the “ideal” and the “real.” “Music,” in Emerson’s phrase,
“pours on mortals its beautiful disdain.” “Away! away!” cries Jean Paul
to Music. “Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I
have found not, and shall not find.” In musical and other nostalgia,
the feelings receive a sort of infinitude from the coöperation of the
imagination; and this infinitude, this quest of something that must
ever elude one, is at the same time taken to be the measure of one’s
idealism. The symmetry and form that the classicist gains from working
within bounds are no doubt excellent, but then the willingness to work
within bounds betokens a lack of aspiration. If the primitivist is
ready, as some one has complained, to turn his back on the bright forms
of Olympus and return to the ancient gods of chaos and of night, the
explanation is to be sought in this idea of the infinite. It finally
becomes a sort of Moloch to which he is prepared to sacrifice most
of the values of civilized life. The chief fear of the classicist is
to be thought monstrous. The primitivist on the contrary is inclined
to see a proof of superior amplitude of spirit in mere grotesqueness
and disproportion. The creation of monsters is, as Hugo says, a
“satisfaction due to the infinite.”[65]
The breaking down by the emotional romanticist of the barriers that
separate not merely the different literary genres but the different
arts is only another aspect of his readiness to follow the lure
of the infinite. The title of a recent bit of French decadent
verse--“Nostalgia in Blue Minor”--would already have been perfectly
intelligible to a Tieck or a Novalis. The Rousseauist--and that from a
very early stage in the movement--does not hesitate to pursue his ever
receding dream across all frontiers, not merely those that separate art
from art, but those that divide flesh from spirit and even good from
evil, until finally he arrives like Blake at a sort of “Marriage of
Heaven and Hell.” When he is not breaking down barriers in the name of
the freedom of the imagination he is doing so in the name of what he is
pleased to term love.
“The ancient art and poetry,” says A. W. Schlegel, “rigorously
separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights
in indissoluble mixtures. All contrarieties: nature and art,
poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and
anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and
celestial, life and death, are by it blended together in the
most intimate combination. As the oldest lawgivers delivered
their mandatory instructions and prescriptions in measured
melodies; as this is fabulously ascribed to Orpheus, the first
softener of the yet untamed race of mortals; in like manner
the whole of the ancient poetry and art is, as it were a
_rhythmical nomos_ (law), an harmonious promulgation of the
permanently established legislation of a world submitted to a
beautiful order, and reflecting in itself the eternal images of
things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression
of the secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in
the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually
striving after new and marvellous births; the life-giving
spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the
waters. The former is more simple, clear, and like to nature in
the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter,
notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to
the secret of the universe. For Conception can only comprise
each object separately, but nothing in truth can ever exist
separately and by itself; Feeling perceives all in all at one
and the same time.”[66]
Note the assumption here that the clear-cut distinctions of classicism
are merely abstract and intellectual, and that the only true unity is
the unity of feeling.
In passages of this kind A. W. Schlegel is little more than the
popularizer of the ideas of his brother Friedrich. Perhaps no one in
the whole romantic movement showed a greater genius for confusion than
Friedrich Schlegel; no one, in Nietzsche’s phrase, had a more intimate
knowledge of all the bypaths to chaos. Now it is from the German group
of which Friedrich Schlegel was the chief theorist that romanticism
as a distinct and separate movement takes its rise. We may therefore
pause appropriately at this point to consider briefly how the epithet
romantic of which I have already sketched the early history came to
be applied to a distinct school. In the latter part of the eighteenth
century, it will be remembered, romantic had become a fairly frequent
word in English and also (under English influence) a less frequent,
though not rare word, in French and German; it was often used favorably
in all these countries as applied to nature, and usually indeed in
this sense in France and Germany; but in England, when applied to
human nature and as the equivalent of the French _romanesque_, it had
ordinarily an unfavorable connotation; it signified the “dangerous
prevalence of imagination” over “sober probability,” as may be seen
in Foster’s essay “On the Epithet Romantic.” One may best preface a
discussion of the next step--the transference of the word to a distinct
movement--by a quotation from Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann (21
March, 1830):
“This division of poetry into classic and romantic,” says
Goethe, “which is to-day diffused throughout the whole world
and has caused so much argument and discord, comes originally
from Schiller and me. It was my principle in poetry always to
work objectively. Schiller on the contrary wrote nothing that
was not subjective; he thought his manner good, and to defend
it he wrote his article on naïve and sentimental poetry. … The
Schlegels got hold of this idea, developed it and little by
little it has spread throughout the whole world. Everybody is
talking of romanticism and classicism. Fifty years ago nobody
gave the matter a thought.”
One statement in this passage of Goethe’s is perhaps open to
question--that concerning the obligation of the Schlegels, or rather
Friedrich Schlegel, to Schiller’s treatise. A comparison of the date
of publication of the treatise on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” with
the date of composition of Schlegel’s early writings would seem to
show that some of Schlegel’s distinctions, though closely related to
those of Schiller, do not derive from them so immediately as Goethe
seems to imply.[67] Both sets of views grow rather inevitably out
of a primitivistic or Rousseauistic conception of “nature” that had
been epidemic in Germany ever since the Age of Genius. We need also
to keep in mind certain personal traits of Schlegel if we are to
understand the development of his theories about literature and art.
He was romantic, not only by his genius for confusion, but also one
should add, by his tendency to oscillate violently between extremes.
For him as for Rousseau there was “no intermediary term between
everything and nothing.” One should note here another meaning that
certain romanticists give to the word “ideal”--Hazlitt, for example,
when he says that the “ideal is always to be found in extremes.”
Every imaginable extreme, the extreme of reaction as well as the
extreme of radicalism, goes with romanticism; every genuine mediation
between extremes is just as surely unromantic. Schlegel then was very
idealistic in the sense I have just defined. Having begun as an extreme
partisan of the Greeks, conceived in Schiller’s fashion as a people
that was at once harmonious and instinctive, he passes over abruptly to
the extreme of revolt against every form of classicism, and then after
having posed in works like his “Lucinde” as a heaven-storming Titan
who does not shrink at the wildest excess of emotional unrestraint,
he passes over no less abruptly to Catholicism and its rigid outer
discipline. This last phase of Schlegel has at least this much in
common with his phase of revolt, that it carried with it a cult of the
Middle Ages. The delicate point to determine about Friedrich Schlegel
and many other romanticists is why they finally came to place their
land of heart’s desire in the Middle Ages rather than in Greece. In
treating this question one needs to take at least a glance at the
modification that Herder (whose influence on German romanticism is very
great) gave to the primitivism of Rousseau. Cultivate your genius,
Rousseau said in substance, your ineffable difference from other men,
and look back with longing to the ideal moment of this genius--the age
of childhood, when your spontaneous self was not as yet cramped by
conventions or “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” Cultivate
your national genius, Herder said in substance, and look back wistfully
at the golden beginnings of your nationality when it was still naïve
and “natural,” when poetry instead of being concocted painfully by
individuals was still the unconscious emanation of the folk. Herder
indeed expands primitivism along these lines into a whole philosophy
of history. The romantic notion of the origin of the epic springs
out of this soil, a notion that is probably at least as remote from
the facts as the neo-classical notion--and that is saying a great
deal. Any German who followed Herder in the extension that he gave
to Rousseau’s views about genius and spontaneity could not only see
the folk soul mirrored at least as naïvely in the “Nibelungenlied” as
in the “Iliad,” but by becoming a mediæval enthusiast he could have
the superadded pleasure of indulging not merely personal but racial
and national idiosyncrasy. Primitivistic mediævalism is therefore an
important ingredient, especially in the case of Germany, in romantic
nationalism--the type that has flourished beyond all measure during
the past century. Again, though one might, like Hölderlin, cherish an
infinite longing for the Greeks, the Greeks themselves, at least the
Greeks of Schiller, did not experience longing; but this fact came
to be felt more and more by F. Schlegel and other romanticists as an
inferiority, showing as it did that they were content with the finite.
As for the neo-classicists who were supposed to be the followers of
the Greeks, their case was even worse; they not only lacked aspiration
and infinitude, but were sunk in artificiality, and had moreover become
so analytical that they must perforce see things in “disconnection
dead and spiritless.” The men of the Middle Ages, on the other hand,
as F. Schlegel saw them, were superior to the neo-classicists in being
naïve; their spontaneity and unity of feeling had not yet suffered
from artificiality, or been disintegrated by analysis.[68] At the same
time they were superior to the Greeks in having aspiration and the
sense of the infinite. The very irregularity of their art testified to
this infinitude. It is not uncommon in the romantic movement thus to
assume that because one has very little form one must therefore have
a great deal of “soul.” F. Schlegel so extended his definition of the
mediæval spirit as to make it include writers like Shakespeare and
Cervantes, who seemed to him to be vital and free from formalism. The
new nationalism was also made to turn to the profit of the Middle Ages.
Each nation in shaking off the yoke of classical imitation and getting
back to its mediæval past, was recovering what was primitive in its own
genius, was substituting what was indigenous for what was alien to it.
The person who did more than any one else to give international
currency to the views of the Schlegels about classic and romantic and
to their primitivistic mediævalism was Madame de Staël in her book
on Germany. It was with special reference to Madame de Staël and her
influence that Daunou wrote the following passage in his introduction
to La Harpe, a passage that gives curious evidence of the early
attitude of French literary conservatives towards the new school:
“One of the services that he [La Harpe] should render nowadays
is to fortify young people against vain and gothic doctrines
which would reduce the fine arts to childhood if they could
ever gain credit in the land of Racine and Voltaire. La Harpe
uttered a warning against these doctrines when he discovered
the first germs of them in the books of Diderot, Mercier and
some other innovators. Yet these writers were far from having
professed fully the barbaric or childish system which has been
taught and developed among us for a few years past; it is of
foreign origin; it had no name in our language and the name
that has been given to it is susceptible in fact of no precise
meaning. Romanticism, for thus it is called, was imported
into our midst along with Kantism, with mysticism and other
doctrines of the same stamp which collectively might be named
obscurantism. These are words which La Harpe was happy enough
not to hear. He was accustomed to too much clearness in his
ideas and expression to use such words or even to understand
them. He did not distinguish two literatures. The literature
that nature and society have created for us and which for three
thousand years past has been established and preserved and
reproduced by masterpieces appeared to him alone worthy of a
Frenchman of the eighteenth century. He did not foresee that it
would be reduced some day to being only a particular kind of
literature, tolerated or reproved under the name of classic,
and that its noblest productions would be put on the same level
as the formless sketches of uncultivated genius and untried
talents. Yet more than once decadence has thus been taken for
an advance, and a retrograde movement for progress. Art is so
difficult. It is quicker to abandon it and to owe everything to
your genius. … Because perfection calls for austere toil you
maintain that it is contrary to nature. This is a system that
suits at once indolence and vanity. Is anything more needed to
make it popular, especially when it has as auxiliary an obscure
philosophy which is termed transcendent or transcendental? That
is just the way sound literature fell into decline beginning
with the end of the first century of the Christian era. It
became extinct only to revive after a long period of darkness
and barbarism; and that is how it will fall into decline again
if great examples and sage lessons should ever lose their
authority.”
The general public in England became at least vaguely aware of the new
movement with the translation of Madame de Staël’s “Germany” (1813)
and A. W. Schlegel’s “Dramatic Art and Literature” (1815). Byron wrote
in his reply to Bowles (1821): “Schlegel and Madame de Staël have
endeavored to reduce poetry to _two_ systems, classical and romantic.
The effect is only beginning.”
The distinction between classic and romantic worked out by the
Schlegels and spread abroad by Madame de Staël was, then, largely
associated with a certain type of mediævalism. Nevertheless one cannot
insist too strongly that the new school deserved to be called romantic,
not because it was mediæval, but because it displayed a certain quality
of imagination in its mediævalism. The longing for the Middle Ages is
merely a very frequent form of nostalgia, and nostalgia I have defined
as the pursuit of pure illusion. No doubt a man may be mediæval in
his leanings and yet very free from nostalgia. He may, for example,
prefer St. Thomas Aquinas to any modern philosopher on grounds that are
the very reverse of romantic; and in the attitude of any particular
person towards the Middle Ages, romantic and unromantic elements may
be mingled in almost any conceivable proportion; and the same may be
said of any past epoch that one prefers to the present. Goethe, for
instance, as has been remarked, took flight from his own reality,
but he did not, like the romanticists, take flight from all reality.
The classical world in which Goethe dwelt in imagination during his
latter years, in the midst of a very unclassical environment, was to
some extent at least real, though one can discern even in the case of
Goethe the danger of a classicism that is too aloof from the here
and now. But the mediævalist, in so far as he is romantic, does not
turn to a mediæval reality from a real but distasteful present. Here
as elsewhere his first requirement is not that his “vision” should be
true, but that it should be rich and radiant; and the more “ideal” the
vision becomes in this sense, the wider the gap that opens between
poetry and life.
We are thus brought back to the problem of the romantic imagination or,
one may term it, the eccentric imagination. The classical imagination,
I have said, is not free thus to fly off at a tangent, to wander wild
in some empire of chimeras. It has a centre, it is at work in the
service of reality. With reference to this real centre, it is seeking
to disengage what is normal and representative from the welter of the
actual. It does not evade the actual, but does select from it and seek
to impose upon it something of the proportion and symmetry of the
model to which it is looking up and which it is imitating. To say that
the classicist (and I am speaking of the classicist at his best) gets
at his reality with the aid of the imagination is but another way of
saying that he perceives his reality only through a veil of illusion.
The creator of this type achieves work in which illusion and reality
are inseparably blended, work which gives the “illusion of a higher
reality.”
Proportionate and decorous in this sense æsthetic romanticism can in
no wise be, but it does not follow that the only art of which the
Rousseauist is capable is an art of idyllic dreaming. Schiller makes a
remark about Rousseau that goes very nearly to the heart of the matter:
he is either, says Schiller, dwelling on the delights of nature or
else avenging her. He is either, that is, idyllic or satirical. Now
Rousseau himself says that he was not inclined to satire and in a sense
this is true. He would have been incapable of lampooning Voltaire in
the same way that Voltaire lampooned him, though one might indeed wish
to be lampooned by Voltaire rather than to be presented as Rousseau
has presented certain persons in his “Confessions.” In all that large
portion of Rousseau’s writing, however, in which he portrays the
polite society of his time and shows how colorless and corrupt it is
compared with his pastoral dream (for his “nature,” as I have said, is
only a pastoral dream) he is highly satirical. In general, he is not
restrained, at least in the “Confessions,” from the trivial and even
the ignoble detail by any weak regard for decorum. At best decorum
seems to him a hollow convention, at worst the “varnish of vice” and
the “mask of hypocrisy.” Every reader of the “Confessions” must be
struck by the presence, occasionally on the same page, of passages
that look forward to Lamartine, and of other passages that seem an
anticipation rather of Zola. The passage in which Rousseau relates
how he was abruptly brought to earth from his “angelic loves”[69] is
typical. In short Rousseau oscillates between an Arcadian vision that
is radiant but unreal, and a photographic and literal and often sordid
reality. He does not so use his imagination as to disengage the real
from the welter of the actual and so achieve something that strikes one
still as nature but a selected and ennobled nature.[70] “It is a very
odd circumstance,” says Rousseau, “that my imagination is never more
agreeably active than when my outer conditions are the least agreeable,
and that, on the contrary, it is less cheerful when everything is
cheerful about me. My poor head cannot subordinate itself to things. It
cannot embellish, it wishes to create. Real objects are reflected in
it at best such as they are; it can adorn only imaginary objects. If I
wish to paint the springtime I must be in winter,” etc.
This passage may be said to foreshadow the two types of art and
literature that have been prevalent since Rousseau--romantic art and
the so-called realistic art that tended to supplant it towards the
middle of the nineteenth century.[71] This so-called realism does not
represent any fundamental change of direction as compared with the
earlier romanticism; it is simply, as some one has put it, romanticism
going on all fours. The extreme of romantic unreality has always tended
to produce a sharp recoil. As the result of the wandering of the
imagination in its own realm of chimeras, one finally comes to feel
the need of refreshing one’s sense of fact; and the more trivial the
fact, the more certain one is that one’s feet are once more planted
on _terra firma_. Don Quixote is working for the triumph of Sancho
Panza. Besides this tendency of one extreme to produce the other,
there are special reasons that I shall point out more fully later for
the close relationship of the romanticism and the so-called realism
of the nineteenth century. They are both merely different aspects of
naturalism. What binds together realism and romanticism is their
common repudiation of decorum as something external and artificial.
Once get rid of decorum, or what amounts to the same thing, the
whole body of “artificial” conventions, and what will result is,
according to the romanticist, Arcadia. But what actually emerges with
the progressive weakening of the principle of restraint is _la bête
humaine_. The Rousseauist begins by walking through the world as though
it were an enchanted garden, and then with the inevitable clash between
his ideal and the real he becomes morose and embittered. Since men
have turned out not to be indiscriminately good he inclines to look
upon them as indiscriminately bad and to portray them as such. At
the bottom of much so-called realism therefore is a special type of
satire, a satire that is the product of violent emotional disillusion.
The collapse of the Revolution of 1848 produced a plentiful crop of
disillusion of this kind. No men had ever been more convinced of the
loftiness of their idealism than the Utopists of this period, or failed
more ignominiously when put to the test. All that remained, many
argued, was to turn from an ideal that had proved so disappointing
to the real, and instead of dreaming about human nature to observe
men as coolly, in Flaubert’s phrase, as though they were mastodons or
crocodiles. But what lurks most often behind this pretence to a cold
scientific impassiveness in observing human nature is a soured and
cynical emotionalism and a distinctly romantic type of imagination. The
imagination is still idealistic, still straining, that is, away from
the real, only its idealism has undergone a strange inversion; instead
of exaggerating the loveliness it exaggerates the ugliness of human
nature; it finds a sort of morose satisfaction in building for itself
not castles but dungeons in Spain. What I am saying applies especially
to the French realists who are more logical in their disillusion than
the men of other nations. They often establish the material environment
of their heroes with photographic literalness, but in their dealings
with what should be the specifically human side of these characters
they often resemble Rousseau at his worst: they put pure logic into the
service of pure emotion, and this is a way of achieving, not the real,
but a maximum of unreality. The so-called realistic writers abound in
extreme examples of the romantic imagination. The peasants of Zola
are not real, they are an hallucination. If a man is thus to let his
imagination run riot, he might, as Lemaître complains, have imagined
something more agreeable.
The same kinship between realism and romanticism might be brought out
in a writer whom Zola claimed as his master--Balzac. I do not refer
to the side of Balzac that is related to what the French call _le
bas romantisme_--his lapses into the weird and the melodramatic, his
occasional suggestions of the claptrap of Anne Radcliffe and the Gothic
romance--but to his general thesis and his handling of it. Balzac’s
attitude towards the society of his time is, like the attitude of
Rousseau towards the society of his time, satirical, but on entirely
different grounds: he would show the havoc wrought in this society
by its revolutionary emancipation from central control of the kind
that had been provided traditionally by the monarchy and the Catholic
Church, and the consequent disruption of the family by the violent and
egoistic expansion of the individual along the lines of his ruling
passion. But Balzac’s imagination is not on the side of his thesis;
not, that is, on the side of the principle of control; on the contrary,
it revels in its vision of a world in which men are overstepping all
ethical bounds in their quest of power and pleasure, of a purely
naturalistic world that is governed solely by the law of cunning and
the law of force. His imagination is so fascinated by this vision that,
like the imagination of Rousseau, though in an entirely different way,
he simply parts company with reality. Judged by the ultimate quality of
his imagination, and this, let me repeat, is always the chief thing to
consider in a creative artist, Balzac is a sort of inverted idealist.
Compared with the black fictions he conjures up in his painting of
Paris, the actual Paris seems pale and insipid. His Paris is not real
in short, but an hallucination--a lurid land of heart’s desire. As
Leslie Stephen puts it, for Balzac Paris is hell, but then hell is the
only place worth living in. The empire of chimeras over which he holds
sway is about as far on one side of reality as George Sand’s kingdom of
dreams is on the other. George Sand, more perhaps than any other writer
of her time, continues Rousseau in his purely idyllic manner. Her
idealized peasants are not any further from the truth and are certainly
more agreeable than the peasants of Balzac, who foreshadow the peasants
of Zola.
The writer, however, who shows the conflict between the romantic
imagination and the real better than either Balzac or Zola, better
than any other writer perhaps of the modern French movement, is
Flaubert. The fondness of this founder of realism for reality may be
inferred from a passage in one of his letters to George Sand: “I
had in my very youth a complete presentiment of life. It was like a
sickly kitchen smell escaping from a basement window.” In his attitude
towards the society of his time, he is, in the same sense, but in
a far greater degree than Rousseau, satirical. The stupidity and
mediocrity of the bourgeois are his target, just as Rousseau’s target
is the artificiality of the drawing-room. At the same time that he
shrinks back with nausea from this reality, Flaubert is like Gautier
“full of nostalgias,” even the nostalgia of the Middle Ages. “I am a
Catholic,” he exclaims, “I have in my heart something of the green
ooze of the Norman Cathedrals.” Yet he cannot acquiesce in a mediæval
or any other dream. Even Rousseau says that he was “tormented at times
by the nothingness of his chimeras.” Flaubert was tormented far more
by the nothingness of his. Perhaps indeed the predominant flavor in
Flaubert’s writing as a whole is that of an acrid disillusion. He
portrays satirically the real and at the same time mocks at the ideal
that he craves emotionally and imaginatively (this is only one of the
innumerable forms assumed by the Rousseauistic warfare between the head
and the heart). He oscillates rapidly between the pole of realism as
he conceives it, and the pole of romance, and so far as any serious
philosophy is concerned, is left suspended in the void. Madame Bovary
is the very type of the Rousseauistic idealist, misunderstood in virtue
of her exquisite faculty of feeling. She aspires to a “love beyond
all loves,” an infinite satisfaction that her commonplace husband and
environment quite deny her. At bottom Flaubert’s heart is with Madame
Bovary. “I am Madame Bovary,” he exclaims. Yet he exposes pitilessly
the “nothingness of her chimeras,” and pursues her to the very dregs
of her disillusion. I have already mentioned Flaubert’s cult for
“Don Quixote.” His intellectual origins were all there, he says; he
had known it by heart even when a boy. It has been said that “Madame
Bovary” bears the same relationship to æsthetic romanticism that “Don
Quixote” does to the romanticism of actual adventure of the Middle
Ages. Yet “Don Quixote” is the most genial, “Madame Bovary” the least
genial of masterpieces. This difference comes out no less clearly in
a comparison of M. Homais with Sancho Panza than in a comparison of
Madame Bovary with the Knight, and is so fundamental as to throw doubt
on the soundness of the whole analogy.
In M. Homais and like figures Flaubert simply means to symbolize
contemporary life and the immeasurable abyss of platitude in which
it is losing itself through its lack of imagination and ideal. Yet
this same platitude exercises on him a horrid fascination. For his
execration of the philistine is the nearest approach in his idealism to
a positive content, to an escape from sheer emptiness and unreality.
This execration must therefore be cherished if he is to remain
convinced of his own superiority. “If it were not for my indignation,”
he confesses in one place, “I should fall flat.” Unfortunately we come
to resemble what we habitually contemplate. “By dint of railing at
idiots,” says Flaubert, “one runs the risk of becoming idiotic one’s
self.”
In his discourse on the “Immortality of the Soul” (1659) Henry More
speaks of “that imagination which is most free, such as we use in
romantic inventions.” The price that the romantic imagination pays
for its freedom should by this time be obvious: the freer it becomes
the farther it gets away from reality. We have seen that the special
form of unreality encouraged by the æsthetic romanticism of Rousseau
is the dream of the simple life, the return to a nature that never
existed, and that this dream made its special appeal to an age that
was suffering from an excess of artificiality and conventionalism.
Before entering upon the next stage of our subject it might be well to
consider for a moment wherein the facts of primitive life, so far as
we can ascertain them, differ from Rousseau’s dream of primitive life;
why we are justified in assuming that the noble savage of Rousseau, or
the Greek of Schiller, or Hölderlin, or the man of the Middle Ages of
Novalis never had any equivalent in reality. More or less primitive men
have existed and still exist and have been carefully studied. Some of
them actually recall by various traits, their gentleness, for example,
Rousseau’s aboriginal man, and the natural pity that is supposed to
guide him. Why then will any one familiar with the facts of aboriginal
life smile when Rousseau speaks of the savage “attached to no place,
having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his
own will,”[72] and therefore displaying independence and initiative?
The answer is of course that genuine savages are, with the possible
exception of children, the most conventional and imitative of beings.
What one takes to be natural in them is often the result of a long and,
in the Rousseauistic sense, artificial discipline. The tendency to
take for pure and unspoiled nature what is in fact a highly modified
nature is one that assumes many forms. “When you see,” says Rousseau,
“in the happiest people in the world bands of peasants regulate the
affairs of state under an oak-tree and always behave sensibly, can
you keep from despising the refinements of other nations which make
themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?”
Rousseau is viewing these peasants through the Arcadian glamour. In
much the same way Emerson saw a proof of the consonance of democracy
with human nature in the working of the New England town-meeting. But
both Rousseau’s Swiss and Emerson’s New Englanders had been moulded by
generations of austere religious discipline and so throw little light
on the relation of democracy to human nature in itself.
A somewhat similar illusion is that of the man who journeys into a
far country and enjoys in the highest degree the sense of romantic
strangeness. He has escaped from the convention of his own society and
is inclined to look on the men and women he meets in the foreign land
as Arcadian apparitions. But these men and women have not escaped from
_their_ convention. On the contrary, what most delights him in them
(for example, what most delighted Lafcadio Hearn in the Japanese) may
be the result of an extraordinarily minute and tyrannical discipline
imposed in the name of the general sense upon the impulses of the
individual.
The relation of convention to primitive life is so well understood
nowadays that the Rousseauist has reversed his argument. Since
primitive folk (let us say the Bushmen of Australia) are more
conventional than the Parisian and Londoner we may infer that at some
time in the future when the ideal is at last achieved upon earth,
conventions will have disappeared entirely. But this is simply to
transfer the Golden Age from the past to the future, and also to miss
the real problem: for there is a real problem--perhaps indeed the
gravest of all problems--involved in the relation of the individual to
convention. If we are to grasp the nature of this problem we should
perceive first of all that the significant contrast is not that between
conditions more or less primitive and civilization, but that between a
civilization that does not question its conventions and a civilization
that has on the contrary grown self-conscious and critical. Thus the
Homeric Greeks, set up by Schiller as exemplars of the simple life,
were plainly subject to the conventions of an advanced civilization.
The Periclean Greeks were also highly civilized, but unlike the Homeric
Greeks, were becoming self-conscious and critical. In the same way
the European thirteenth century, in some respects the most civilized
that the world has seen, was governed by a great convention that
imposed very strict limits upon the liberty of the individual. The
critical spirit was already awake and tugging at the leashes of the
outer authority that confined it, but it did not actually break them.
Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas did not, for example, inquire into the
basis of the mediæval convention in the same way that Socrates and the
sophists inquired into the traditional opinions of Greece. But in the
eighteenth century, especially in France, and from that time down to
the present day, the revolt against convention has assumed proportions
quite comparable to anything that took place in ancient Greece. Perhaps
no other age has witnessed so many individuals who were, like Berlioz,
eager to make all traditional barriers crack in the interest of their
“genius” and its full expression. The state of nature in the name of
which Rousseau himself assailed convention, though in itself only a
chimera, a mere Arcadian projection upon the void, did indeed tend in a
rationalistic pseudo-classic age, to new forms of imaginative activity.
In the form that concerns us especially the imagination is free to give
its magic and glamour and infinitude to the emancipated emotions. This
type of romanticism did not result in any recovery of the supposed
primitive virtues, but it did bring about a revaluation of the received
notions of morality that can scarcely be studied too carefully.