ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL
The period that began in the late eighteenth century and in the midst
of which we are still living has witnessed an almost unparalleled
triumph, as I have just said, of the sense of the individual (_sens
propre_) over the general sense of mankind (_sens commun_). Even
the collectivistic schemes that have been opposed to individualism
during this period are themselves, judged by traditional standards,
violently individualistic. Now the word individualism needs as much
as any other general term to be treated Socratically: we need in the
interests of our present subject to discriminate between different
varieties of individualism. Perhaps as good a working classification
as any is to distinguish three main varieties: a man may wish to act,
or think, or feel, differently from other men, and those who are
individualistic in any one of these three main ways may have very
little in common with one another. To illustrate concretely, Milton’s
plea in his “Areopagitica” for freedom of conscience makes above all
for individualism of action. (_La foi qui n’agit pas est-ce une foi
sincère?_) Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, pleads in his Dictionary
and elsewhere for tolerance, not so much because he wishes to act or
feel in his own way as because he wishes to think his own thoughts.
Rousseau is no less obviously ready to subordinate both thought and
action to sensibility. His message is summed up once for all in the
exclamation of Faust, “Feeling is all.” He urges war on the general
sense only because of the restrictions it imposes on the free expansion
of his emotions and the enhancing of these emotions by his imagination.
Now the warfare that Rousseau and the individualists of feeling have
waged on the general sense has meant in practice a warfare on two great
traditions, the classical and the Christian. I have already pointed out
that these two traditions, though both holding the idea of imitation,
were not entirely in accord with one another, that the imitation of
Horace differs widely from the imitation of Christ. Yet their diverging
from one another is as nothing compared with their divergence from
the individualism of the primitivist. For the man who imitates Christ
in any traditional sense this world is not an Arcadian dream but a
place of trial and probation. “Take up your cross and follow me.” The
following of this great exemplar required that the instinctive self,
which Rousseau would indulge, should be either sternly rebuked or else
mortified utterly. So far from Nature and God being one, the natural
man is so corrupt, according to the more austere Christian, that the
gap between him and the divine can be traversed only by a miracle of
grace. He should therefore live in fear and trembling as befits a being
upon whom rests the weight of the divine displeasure. “It is an humble
thing to be a man.” Humility indeed is, in the phrase of Jeremy Taylor,
the special ornament and jewel of the Christian religion, and one is
tempted to add, of all religion in so far as it is genuine. Genuine
religion must always have in some form the sense of a deep inner cleft
between man’s ordinary self and the divine. But some Christians were
more inclined from the start, as we can see in the extreme forms of
the doctrine of grace, to push their humility to an utter despair of
human nature. The historical explanation of this despair is obvious:
it is a sharp rebound from the pagan riot; an excessive immersion in
this world led to an excess of otherworldliness. At the same time
the conviction as to man’s helplessness was instilled into those,
who, like St. Augustine, had witnessed in some of its phases the slow
disintegration of the Roman Empire. Human nature had gone bankrupt;
and for centuries it needed to be administered, if I may continue the
metaphor, in receivership. The doctrine of grace was admirably adapted
to this end.
The pagan riot from which the church reacted so sharply, was not,
however, the whole of the ancient civilization. I have already said
that there was at the heart of this civilization at its best a great
idea--the idea of proportionateness. The ancients were in short
not merely naturalistic but humanistic, and the idea of proportion
is just as fundamental in humanism as is humility in religion.
Christianity, one scarcely need add, incorporated within itself,
however disdainfully, many humanistic elements from Greek and Roman
culture. Yet it is none the less true that in his horror at the pagan
worldliness the Christian tended to fly into the opposite extreme of
unworldliness, and in this clash between naturalism and supernaturalism
the purely human virtues of mediation were thrust more or less into the
background. Yet by its very defect on the humanistic side the doctrine
of grace was perhaps all the better fitted for the administration of
human nature in receivership. For thus to make man entirely distrustful
of himself and entirely dependent on God, meant in practice to make
him entirely dependent on the Church. Man became ignorant and fanatical
in the early Christian centuries, but he also became humble, and
in the situation then existing that was after all the main thing.
The Church as receiver for human nature was thus enabled to rescue
civilization from the wreck of pagan antiquity and the welter of the
barbarian invasions. But by the very fact that the bases of life in
this world gradually grew more secure man became less otherworldly.
He gradually recovered some degree of confidence in himself. He gave
increasing attention to that side of himself that the ascetic Christian
had repressed. The achievements of the thirteenth century which mark
perhaps the culmination of Christian civilization were very splendid
not only from a religious but also from a humanistic point of view. But
although the critical spirit was already beginning to awake, it did
not at that time, as I have already said, actually break away from the
tutelage of the Church.
This emancipation of human nature from theological restraint took place
in far greater measure at the Renaissance. Human nature showed itself
tired of being treated as a bankrupt, of being governed from without
and from above. It aspired to become autonomous. There was in so far
a strong trend in many quarters towards individualism. This rupture
with external authority meant very diverse things in practice. For
some who, in Lionardo’s phrase, had caught a glimpse of the antique
symmetry it meant a revival of genuine humanism; for others it meant
rather a revival of the pagan and naturalistic side of antiquity. Thus
Rabelais, in his extreme opposition to the monkish ideal, already
proclaims, like Rousseau, the intrinsic excellence of man, while
Calvin and others attempted to revive the primitive austerity of
Christianity that had been corrupted by the formalism of Rome. In
short, naturalistic, humanistic, and religious elements are mingled in
almost every conceivable proportion in the vast and complex movement
known as the Renaissance; all these elements indeed are often mingled
in the same individual. The later Renaissance finally arrived at what
one is tempted to call the Jesuitical compromise. There was a general
revamping of dogma and outer authority, helped forward by a society
that had taken alarm at the excesses of the emancipated individual.
If the individual consented to surrender his moral autonomy, the
Church for its part consented to make religion comparatively easy and
pleasant for him, to adapt it by casuistry and other devices to a human
nature that was determined once for all to take a less severe and
ascetic view of life. One might thus live inwardly to a great extent
on the naturalistic level while outwardly going through the motions
of a profound piety. There is an unmistakable analogy between the
hollowness of a religion of this type and the hollowness that one feels
in so much neo-classical decorum. There is also a formalistic taint
in the educational system worked out by the Jesuits--a system in all
respects so ingenious and in some respects so admirable. The Greek and
especially the Latin classics are taught in such a way as to become
literary playthings rather than the basis of a philosophy of life; a
humanism is thus encouraged that is external and rhetorical rather than
vital, and this humanism is combined with a religion that tends to
stress submission to outer authority at the expense of inwardness and
individuality. The reproach has been brought against this system that
it is equally unfitted to form a pagan hero or a Christian saint. The
reply to it was Rousseau’s educational naturalism--his exaltation of
the spontaneity and genius of the child.
Voltaire says that every Protestant is a Pope when he has his Bible
in his hand. But in practice Protestantism has been very far from
encouraging so complete a subordination of the general sense to the
sense of the individual. In the period that elapsed between the first
forward push of individualism in the Renaissance and the second forward
push in the eighteenth century, each important Protestant group worked
out its creed or convention and knew how to make it very uncomfortable
for any one of its members who rebelled against its authority.
Protestant education was also, like that of the Jesuits, an attempt to
harmonize Christian and classical elements.
I have already spoken elsewhere of what was menacing all these
attempts, Protestant as well as Catholic, to revive the principle
of authority, to put the general sense once more on a traditional
and dogmatic basis and impose it on the sense of the individual. The
spirit of free scientific enquiry in the Renaissance had inspired great
naturalists like Kepler and Galileo, and had had its prophet in Bacon.
So far from suffering any setback in the seventeenth century, science
had been adding conquest to conquest. The inordinate self-confidence
of the modern man would seem to be in large measure an outcome of this
steady advance of scientific discovery, just as surely as the opposite,
the extreme humility that appears in the doctrine of grace, reflects
the despair of those who had witnessed the disintegration of the
Roman Empire. The word humility, if used at all nowadays, means that
one has a mean opinion of one’s self in comparison with other men, and
not that one perceives the weakness and nothingness of human nature in
itself in comparison with what is above it. But it is not merely the
self-confidence inspired by science that has undermined the traditional
disciplines, humanistic and religious, and the attempts to mediate
between them on a traditional basis; it is not merely that science
has fascinated man’s imagination, stimulated his wonder and curiosity
beyond all bounds and drawn him away from the study of his own nature
and its special problems to the study of the physical realm. What has
been even more decisive in the overthrow of the traditional disciplines
is that science has won its triumphs not by accepting dogma and
tradition but by repudiating them, by dealing with the natural law, not
on a traditional but on a positive and critical basis. The next step
that might logically have been taken, one might suppose, would have
been to put the human law likewise on a positive and critical basis. On
the contrary the very notion that man is subject to two laws has been
obscured. The truths of humanism and religion, being very much bound
up with certain traditional forms, have been rejected along with these
forms as obsolescent prejudice, and the attempt has been made to treat
man as entirely the creature of the natural law. This means in practice
that instead of dying to his ordinary self, as the austere Christian
demands, or instead of imposing a law of decorum upon his ordinary
self, as the humanist demands, man has only to develop his ordinary
self freely.
At the beginning, then, of the slow process that I have been tracing
down in briefest outline from mediæval Christianity, we find a pure
supernaturalism; at the end, a pure naturalism. If we are to understand
the relationship of this naturalism to the rise of a romantic morality,
we need to go back, as we have done in our study of original genius,
to the England of the early eighteenth century. Perhaps the most
important intermediary stage in the passage from a pure supernaturalism
to a pure naturalism is the great deistic movement which flourished
especially in the England of this period. Deism indeed is no new
thing. Deistic elements may be found even in the philosophy of the
Middle Ages. But for practical purposes one does not need in one’s
study of deism to go behind English thinkers like Shaftesbury and his
follower Hutcheson. Shaftesbury is a singularly significant figure.
He is not only the authentic precursor of innumerable naturalistic
moralists in England, France, and Germany, but one may also trace
in his writings the connection between modern naturalistic morality
and ancient naturalistic morality in its two main forms--Stoic and
Epicurean. The strict Christian supernaturalist had maintained that the
divine can be known to man only by the outer miracle of revelation,
supplemented by the inner miracle of grace. The deist maintains, on
the contrary, that God reveals himself also through outer nature which
he has fitted exquisitely to the needs of man, and that inwardly man
may be guided aright by his unaided thoughts and feelings (according
to the predominance of thought or feeling the deist is rationalistic
or sentimental). Man, in short, is naturally good and nature herself
is beneficent and beautiful. The deist finally pushes this harmony in
God and man and nature so far that the three are practically merged.
At a still more advanced stage God disappears, leaving only nature
and man as a modification of nature, and the deist gives way to the
pantheist who may also be either rationalistic or emotional. The
pantheist differs above all from the deist in that he would dethrone
man from his privileged place in creation, which means in practice that
he denies final causes. He no longer believes, for example, like that
sentimental deist and disciple of Rousseau, Bernardin de St. Pierre,
that Providence has arranged everything in nature with an immediate eye
to man’s welfare; that the markings on the melon, for instance, “seem
to show that it is destined for the family table.”[73]
Rousseau himself, though eschewing this crude appeal to final causes,
scarcely got in theory at least beyond the stage of emotional deism.
The process I have been describing is illustrated better in some
aspects by Diderot who began as a translator of Shaftesbury and who
later got so far beyond mere deism that he anticipates the main ideas
of the modern evolutionist and determinist. Diderot is at once an
avowed disciple of Bacon, a scientific utilitarian in short, and also
a believer in the emancipation of the emotions. Rousseau’s attack
on science is profoundly significant for other reasons, but it is
unfortunate in that it obscures the connection that is so visible in
Diderot between the two sides of the naturalistic movement. If men had
not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less
ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they
were naturally good. There was another reason why men were eager to
be told that they were naturally good and that they could therefore
trust the spontaneous overflow of their emotions. This reason is to be
sought in the inevitable recoil from the opposite doctrine of total
depravity and the mortal constraint that it had put on the instincts of
the natural man. I have said that many churchmen, notably the Jesuits,
sought to dissimulate the full austerity of Christian doctrine and
thus retain their authority over a world that was moving away from
austerity and so threatening to escape them. But other Catholics,
notably the Jansenists, as well as Protestants like the Calvinists,
were for insisting to the full on man’s corruption and for seeking to
maintain on this basis what one is tempted to call a theological reign
of terror. One whole side of Rousseau’s religion can be understood
only as a protest against the type of Christianity that is found in a
Pascal or a Jonathan Edwards. The legend of the abyss that Pascal saw
always yawning at his side has at least a symbolical value. It is the
wont of man to oscillate violently between extremes, and each extreme
is not only bad in itself but even worse by the opposite extreme that
it engenders. From a God who is altogether fearful, men are ready to
flee to a God who is altogether loving, or it might be more correct to
say altogether lovely. “Listen, my children,” said Mother Angélique of
Port-Royal to her nuns a few hours before her death, “listen well to
what I say. Most people do not know what death is, and never give the
matter a thought. But my worst forebodings were as nothing compared
with the terrors now upon me.” In deliberate opposition to such
expressions of the theological terror, Rousseau imagined the elaborate
complacency and self-satisfaction of the dying Julie, whose end was
not only calm but æsthetic (_le dernier jour de sa vie en fut aussi le
plus charmant_).
A sensible member of Edwards’s congregation at Northampton might
conceivably have voted with the majority to dismiss him, not only
because he objected to this spiritual terrorism in itself, but
also because he saw the opposite extreme that it would help to
precipitate--the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are
now suffering.
The effusiveness, then, that began to appear in the eighteenth century
is one sign of the progress of naturalism, which is itself due to
the new confidence inspired in man by scientific discovery coupled
with a revulsion from the austerity of Christian dogma. This new
effusiveness is also no less palpably a revulsion from the excess of
artificial decorum and this revulsion was in turn greatly promoted by
the rapid increase in power and influence at this time of the middle
class. Reserve is traditionally aristocratic. The plebeian is no less
traditionally expansive. It cannot be said that the decorous reserve
of the French aristocracy that had been more or less imitated by other
European aristocracies was in all respects commendable. According to
this decorum a man should not love his wife, or if he did, should be
careful not to betray the fact in public. It was also good “form”
to live apart from one’s children and bad form to display one’s
affection for them. The protest against a decorum that repressed even
the domestic emotions may perhaps best be followed in the rise of the
middle class drama. According to strict neo-classic decorum only the
aristocracy had the right to appear in tragedy, whereas the man of the
middle class was relegated to comedy and the man of the people to
farce. The intermediate types of play that multiply in the eighteenth
century (_drame bourgeois_, _comédie larmoyante_, etc.) are the reply
of the plebeian to this classification. He is beginning to insist that
his emotions too shall be taken seriously. But at the same time he is,
under the influence of the new naturalistic philosophy, so bent on
affirming his own goodness that in getting rid of artificial decorum
he gets rid of true decorum likewise and so strikes at the very root
of the drama. For true drama in contradistinction to mere melodrama
requires in the background a scale of ethical values, or what amounts
to the same thing, a sense of what is normal and representative and
decorous, and the quality of the characters is revealed by their
responsible choices good or bad with reference to some ethical scale,
choices that the characters reveal by their actions and not by any
explicit moralizing. But in the middle class drama there is little
action in this sense: no one _wills_ either his goodness or badness,
but appears more or less as the creature of accident or fate (in a very
un-Greek sense), or of a defective social order; and so instead of
true dramatic conflict and proper motivation one tends to get domestic
tableaux in which the characters weep in unison. For it is understood
not only that man (especially the bourgeois) is good but that the
orthodox way for this goodness to manifest itself is to overflow
through the eyes. Perhaps never before or since have tears been shed
with such a strange facility. At no other time have there been so many
persons who, with streaming eyes, called upon heaven and earth to bear
witness to their innate excellence. A man would be ashamed, says La
Bruyère, speaking from the point of view of _l’honnête homme_ and
his decorum, to display his emotions at the theatre. By the time of
Diderot he would have been ashamed not to display them. It had become
almost a requirement of good manners to weep and sob in public. At the
performance of the “Père de Famille” in 1769 we are told that every
handkerchief was in use. The Revolution seems to have raised doubts as
to the necessary connection between tearfulness and goodness. The “Père
de Famille” was hissed from the stage in 1811. Geoffroy commented in
his feuilleton: “We have learned by a fatal experience that forty years
of declamation and fustian about sensibility, humanity and benevolence,
have served only to prepare men’s hearts for the last excesses of
barbarism.”
The romanticist indulged in the luxury of grief and was not incapable
of striking an attitude. But as a rule he disdained the facile
lachrymosity of the man of feeling as still too imitative and
conventional. For his part, he has that within which passes show. To
estimate a play solely by its power to draw tears is, as Coleridge
observes, to measure it by a virtue that it possesses in common with
the onion; and Chateaubriand makes a similar observation. Yet one
should not forget that the romantic emotionalist derives directly from
the man of feeling. One may indeed study the transition from the one
to the other in Chateaubriand himself. For example, in his early work
the “Natchez” he introduces a tribe of Sioux Indians who are still
governed by the natural pity of Rousseau, as they prove by weeping on
the slightest occasion. Lamartine again is close to Rousseau when he
expatiates on the “genius” that is to be found in a tear; and Musset
is not far from Diderot when he exclaims, “Long live the melodrama at
which Margot wept” (_Vive le mélodrame où Margot a pleuré_).
Though it is usual to associate this effusiveness with Rousseau it
should be clear from my brief sketch of the rise of the forces that
were destined to overthrow the two great traditions--the Christian
tradition with its prime emphasis on humility and the classical with
its prime emphasis on decorum--that Rousseau had many forerunners. It
would be easy enough, for example, to cite from English literature
of the early eighteenth-century domestic tableaux[74] that look
forward equally to the middle class drama and to Rousseau’s picture
of the virtues of Julie as wife and mother. Yet Rousseau, after all,
deserves his preëminent position as the arch-sentimentalist by the
very audacity of his revolt in the name of feeling from both humility
and decorum. Never before and probably never since has a man of such
undoubted genius shown himself so lacking in humility and decency
(to use the old-fashioned synonym for decorum) as Rousseau in the
“Confessions.” Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready as he
declares to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of
the last judgment, with the book of his “Confessions” in his hand,
and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race: “Let a single
one assert to Thee if he dare: I am better than that man.” As Horace
Walpole complains he meditates a gasconade for the end of the world.
It is possible to maintain with M. Lemaître that Rousseau’s character
underwent a certain purification as he grew older, but never at any
time, either at the beginning or at the end, is it possible, as M.
Lemaître admits, to detect an atom of humility--an essential lack that
had already been noted by Burke.
The affront then that Rousseau puts upon humility at the very opening
of his “Confessions” has like so much else in his life and writings
a symbolical value. He also declares war in the same passage in the
name of what he conceives to be his true self--that is his emotional
self--against decorum or decency. I have already spoken of one of
the main objections to decorum: it keeps one tame and conventional
and interferes with the explosion of original genius. Another and
closely allied grievance against decorum is implied in Rousseau’s
opening assertion in the Confessions that his aim is to show a man
in all the truth of his nature, and human nature can be known in
its truth only, it should seem, when stripped of its last shred of
reticence. Rousseau therefore already goes on the principle recently
proclaimed by the Irish Bohemian George Moore, that the only thing a
man should be ashamed of is of being ashamed. If the first objection to
decorum--that it represses original genius--was urged especially by the
romanticists, the second objection--that decorum interferes with truth
to nature--was urged especially by the so-called realists of the later
nineteenth century (and realism of this type is, as has been said, only
romanticism going on all fours). Between the Rousseauistic conception
of nature and that of the humanist the gap is especially wide. The
humanist maintains that man attains to the truth of his nature only by
imposing decorum upon his ordinary self. The Rousseauist maintains that
man attains to this truth only by the free expansion of his ordinary
self. The humanist fears to let his ordinary self unfold freely at the
expense of decorum lest he merit some such comment as that made on
the “Confessions” by Madame de Boufflers who had been infatuated with
Rousseau during his lifetime: that it was the work not of a man but of
an unclean animal.[75]
The passages of the “Confessions” that deserve this verdict do not, it
is hardly necessary to add, reflect directly Rousseau’s moral ideal.
In his dealings with morality as elsewhere he is, to come back to
Schiller’s distinction, partly idyllic and partly satirical. He is
satiric in his attitude towards the existing forms--forms based upon
the Christian tradition that man is naturally sinful and that he needs
therefore the discipline of fear and humility, or else forms based upon
the classical tradition that man is naturally one-sided and that he
needs therefore to be disciplined into decorum and proportionateness.
He is idyllic in the substitutes that he would offer for these
traditional forms. The substitutes are particularly striking in their
refusal to allow any place for fear. Fear, according to Ovid, created
the first Gods, and religion has been defined by an old English poet
as the “mother of form and fear.” Rousseau would put in the place of
form a fluid emotionalism, and as for fear, he would simply cast it
out entirely, a revulsion, as I have pointed out, from the excessive
emphasis on fear in the more austere forms of Christianity. Be
“natural,” Rousseau says, and eschew priests and doctors, and you will
be emancipated from fear.
Rousseau’s expedient for getting rid of man’s sense of his own
sinfulness on which fear and humility ultimately rest is well known.
Evil, says Rousseau, foreign to man’s constitution, is introduced into
it from without. The burden of guilt is thus conveniently shifted upon
society. Instead of the old dualism between good and evil in the breast
of the individual, a new dualism is thus set up between an artificial
and corrupt society and “nature.” For man, let me repeat, has,
according to Rousseau, fallen from nature in somewhat the same way as
in the old theology he fell from God, and it is here that the idyllic
element comes in, for, let us remind ourselves once more, Rousseau’s
nature from which man has fallen is only an Arcadian dream.
The assertion of man’s natural goodness is plainly something very
fundamental in Rousseau, but there is something still more fundamental,
and that is the shifting of dualism itself, the virtual denial of a
struggle between good and evil in the breast of the individual. That
deep inner cleft in man’s being on which religion has always put so
much emphasis is not genuine. Only get away from an artificial society
and back to nature and the inner conflict which is but a part of the
artificiality will give way to beauty and harmony. In a passage in his
“Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,” Diderot puts the underlying
thesis of the new morality almost more clearly than Rousseau: “Do
you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once
existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an
artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts
throughout life.”
The denial of the reality of the “civil war in the cave” involves an
entire transformation of the conscience. The conscience ceases to be
a power that sits in judgment on the ordinary self and inhibits its
impulses. It tends so far as it is recognized at all, to become itself
an instinct and an emotion. Students of the history of ethics scarcely
need to be told that this transformation of the conscience was led up
to by the English deists, especially by Shaftesbury and his disciple
Hutcheson.[76] Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are already æsthetic in all
senses of the word; æsthetic in that they tend to base conduct upon
feeling, and æsthetic in that they incline to identify the good and
the beautiful. Conscience is ceasing for both of them to be an inner
check on the impulses of the individual and becoming a moral _sense_, a
sort of expansive instinct for doing good to others. Altruism, as thus
conceived, is opposed by them to the egoism of Hobbes and his followers.
But for the full implications of this transformation of conscience
and for æsthetic morality in general one needs to turn to Rousseau.
Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there
are a few in whom the voice of “nature” is still strong and who, to
be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves
go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century
an almost technical meaning, are the “beautiful souls.” The _belle
âme_ is practically indistinguishable from the _âme sensible_ and has
many points in common with the original genius. Those whose souls are
beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine
multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of
less exquisite sensibility. “There are unfortunates too privileged to
follow the common pathway.”[77] The beautiful soul is unintelligible
to those of coarser feelings. His very superiority, his preternatural
fineness of sensation, thus predestines him to suffering. We are here
at the root of romantic melancholy as will appear more fully later.
The most important aspect of the whole conception is, however, the
strictly ethical--the notion that the beautiful soul has only to be
instinctive and temperamental to merit the praise that has in the past
been awarded only to the purest spirituality. “As for Julie,” says
Rousseau, “who never had any other guide but her heart and could have
no surer guide, she gives herself up to it without scruple, and to do
right, has only to do all that it asks of her.”[78] Virtue indeed,
according to Rousseau, is not merely an instinct but a passion and
even a voluptuous passion, moving in the same direction as other
passions, only superior to them in vehemence. “Cold reason has never
done anything illustrious; and you can triumph over the passions only
by opposing them to one another. When the passion of virtue arises, it
dominates everything and holds everything in equipoise.”[79]
This notion of the soul that is spontaneously beautiful and therefore
good made an especial appeal to the Germans and indeed is often
associated with Germany more than with any other land.[80] But examples
of moral æstheticism are scarcely less frequent elsewhere from
Rousseau to the present. No one, for example, was ever more convinced
of the beauty of his own soul than Renan. “Morality,” says Renan, “has
been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit, as obedience
to a law, as an inner struggle between opposite laws. As for me, I
declare that when I do good I obey no one, I fight no battle and win no
victory. The cultivated man has only to follow the delicious incline of
his inner impulses.”[81] Therefore, as he says elsewhere, “Be beautiful
and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do.
This is the whole of morality.”[82]
The doctrine of the beautiful soul is at once a denial and a parody
of the doctrine of grace; a denial because it rejects original sin;
a parody because it holds that the beautiful soul acts aright, not
through any effort of its own but because nature acts in it and through
it even as a man in a state of grace acts aright not through any merit
of his own but because God acts in him and through him. The man who
saw everything from the angle of grace was, like the beautiful soul or
the original genius, inclined to look upon himself as exceptional and
superlative. Bunyan entitles the story of his own inner life “Grace
abounding to the chief of sinners.” But Bunyan flatters himself. It
is not easy to be chief in such a lively competition. Humility and
pride were evidently in a sort of grapple with one another in the
breast of the Jansenist who declared that God had killed three men
in order to compass his salvation. In the case of the beautiful soul
the humility disappears, but the pride remains. He still looks upon
himself as superlative but superlative in goodness. If all men were
like himself, Renan declares, it would be appropriate to say of them:
Ye are Gods and sons of the most high.[83] The partisan of grace holds
that works are of no avail compared with the gratuitous and unmerited
illumination from above. The beautiful soul clings to his belief in
his own innate excellence, no matter how flagrant the contradiction
may be between this belief and his deeds. One should not fail to note
some approximation to the point of view of the beautiful soul in those
forms of Christianity in which the sense of sin is somewhat relaxed
and the inner light very much emphasized--for example among the German
pietists and the quietists of Catholic countries.[84] We even hear of
persons claiming to be Christians who as the result of debauchery have
experienced a spiritual awakening (_Dans la brute assoupie, un ange se
réveille_). But such doctrines are mere excrescences and eccentricities
in the total history of Christianity. Even in its extreme insistence
on grace, Christianity has always tended to supplement rather than
contradict the supreme maxim of humanistic morality as enunciated by
Cicero: “The whole praise of virtue is in action.” The usual result
of the doctrine of grace when sincerely held is to make a man feel
desperately sinful at the same time that he is less open to reproach
than other men in his actual behavior. The beautiful soul on the
other hand can always take refuge in his feelings from his real
delinquencies. According to Joubert, Chateaubriand was not disturbed
by actual lapses in his conduct because of his persuasion of his own
innate rectitude.[85] “Her conduct was reprehensible,” says Rousseau
of Madame de Warens, “but her heart was pure.” It does not matter
what you do if only through it all you preserve the sense of your own
loveliness. Indeed the more dubious the act the more copious would
seem to be the overflow of fine sentiments to which it stimulates
the beautiful soul. Rousseau dilates on his “warmth of heart,” his
“keenness of sensibility,” his “innate benevolence for his fellow
creatures,” his “ardent love for the great, the true, the beautiful,
the just,” on the “melting feeling, the lively and sweet emotion that
he experiences at the sight of everything that is virtuous, generous
and lovely,” and concludes: “And so my third child was put into the
foundling hospital.”
If we wish to see the psychology of Rousseau writ large we should turn
to the French Revolution. That period abounds in persons whose goodness
is in theory so superlative that it overflows in a love for all men,
but who in practice are filled like Rousseau in his later years with
universal suspicion. There was indeed a moment in the Revolution when
the madness of Rousseau became epidemic, when suspicion was pushed
to such a point that men became “suspect of being suspect.” One of
the last persons to see Rousseau alive at Ermenonville was Maximilien
Robespierre. He was probably a more thoroughgoing Rousseauist than
any other of the Revolutionary leaders. Perhaps no passage that could
be cited illustrates with more terrible clearness the tendency of the
new morality to convert righteousness into self-righteousness than
the following from his last speech before the Convention at the very
height of the Reign of Terror. Himself devoured by suspicion, he is
repelling the suspicion that he wishes to erect his own power on the
ruins of the monarchy. The idea, he says, that “he can descend to the
infamy of the throne will appear probable only to those perverse beings
who have not even the right to believe in virtue. But why speak of
virtue? Doubtless virtue is a natural passion. But how could they be
familiar with it, these venal spirits who never yielded access to aught
save cowardly and ferocious passions? … Yet virtue exists as you can
testify, feeling and pure souls; it exists, that tender, irresistible,
imperious passion, torment and delight of magnanimous hearts, that
profound horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed,
that sacred love for one’s country, that still more sublime and
sacred love for humanity, without which a great revolution is only a
glittering crime that destroys another crime; it exists, that generous
ambition to found on earth the first Republic of the world; that egoism
of undegenerate men who find a celestial voluptuousness in the calm of
a pure conscience and the ravishing spectacle of public happiness(!).
You feel it at this moment burning in your souls. I feel it in mine.
But how could our vile calumniators have any notion of it?” etc.
In Robespierre and other revolutionary leaders one may study the
implications of the new morality--the attempt to transform virtue into
a natural passion--not merely for the individual but for society. M.
Rod entitled his play on Rousseau “The Reformer.” Both Rousseau and his
disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense,--that is they
are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men. Inasmuch
as there is no conflict between good and evil in the breast of the
beautiful soul he is free to devote all his efforts to the improvement
of mankind, and he proposes to achieve this great end by diffusing the
spirit of brotherhood. All the traditional forms that stand in the way
of this free emotional expansion he denounces as mere “prejudices,”
and inclines to look on those who administer these forms as a gang of
conspirators who are imposing an arbitrary and artificial restraint on
the natural goodness of man and so keeping it from manifesting itself.
With the final disappearance of the prejudices of the past and those
who base their usurped authority upon them, the Golden Age will be
ushered in at last; everybody will be boundlessly self-assertive and
at the same time temper this self-assertion by an equally boundless
sympathy for others, whose sympathy and self-assertion likewise know no
bounds. The world of Walt Whitman will be realized, a world in which
there is neither inferior nor superior but only comrades. This vision
(such for example as appears at the end of Shelley’s “Prometheus”) of
a humanity released from all evil artificially imposed from without,
a humanity “where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea” and
“whose nature is its own divine control,” is the true religion of the
Rousseauist. It is this image of a humanity glorified through love
that he sets up for worship in the sanctuary left vacant by “the great
absence of God.”
This transformation of the Arcadian dreamer into the Utopist is due
in part, as I have already suggested, to the intoxication produced
in the human spirit by the conquests of science. One can discern the
coöperation of Baconian and Rousseauist from a very early stage of the
great humanitarian movement in the midst of which we are still living.
Both Baconian and Rousseauist are interested not in the struggle
between good and evil in the breast of the individual, but in the
progress of mankind as a whole. If the Rousseauist hopes to promote
the progress of society by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood the
Baconian or utilitarian hopes to achieve the same end by perfecting
its machinery. It is scarcely necessary to add that these two main
types of humanitarianism may be contained in almost any proportion in
any particular person. By his worship of man in his future material
advance, the Baconian betrays no less surely than the Rousseauist his
faith in man’s natural goodness. This lack of humility is especially
conspicuous in those who have sought to develop the positive
observations of science into a closed system with the aid of logic and
pure mathematics. Pascal already remarked sarcastically of Descartes
that he had no need of God except to give an initial fillip to his
mechanism. Later the mechanist no longer grants the need of the initial
fillip. According to the familiar anecdote, La Place when asked by
Napoleon in the course of an explanation of his “Celestial Mechanics”
where God came in, replied that he had no need of a God in his system.
As illustrating the extreme of humanitarian arrogance one may take
the following from the physicist and mathematician, W. K. Clifford:
“The dim and shadowy outlines of the superhuman deity fade slowly from
before us; and as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive
with greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and
nobler figure--of Him who made all gods and shall unmake them. From
the dim dawn of history and from the inmost depths of every soul the
face of our father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth
in his eyes and says, ‘Before Jehovah was, I am.’” The fire, one is
tempted to say, of eternal lust! Clifford is reported to have once hung
by his toes from the cross-bar of a weathercock on a church-tower. As
a bit of intellectual acrobatics the passage I have just quoted has
some analogy with this posture. Further than this, man’s intoxication
with himself is not likely to go. The attitude of Clifford is even more
extreme in its way than that of Jonathan Edwards in his. However, there
are already signs that the man of science is becoming, if not humble,
at least a trifle less arrogant.
One can imagine the Rousseauist interrupting at this point to remark
that one of his chief protests has always been against the mechanical
and utilitarian and in general the scientific attitude towards life.
This is true. Something has already been said about this protest and
it will be necessary to say more about it later. Yet Rousseauist and
Baconian agree, as I have said, in turning away from the “civil war in
the cave” to humanity in the lump. They agree in being more or less
rebellious towards the traditional forms that put prime emphasis on
the “civil war in the cave”--whether the Christian tradition with its
humility or the classical with its decorum. No wonder Prometheus was
the great romantic hero. Prometheus was at once a rebel, a lover of man
and a promoter of man’s material progress. We have been living for over
a century in what may be termed an age of Promethean individualism.
The Rousseauist especially feels an inner kinship with Prometheus and
other Titans. He is fascinated by every form of insurgency. Cain and
Satan are both romantic heroes. To meet the full romantic requirement,
however, the insurgent must also be tender-hearted. He must show an
elemental energy in his explosion against the established order and
at the same time a boundless sympathy for the victims of it. One of
Hugo’s poems tells of a Mexican volcano, that in sheer disgust at
the cruelty of the members of the Inquisition, spits lava upon them.
This compassionate volcano symbolizes in both of its main aspects
the romantic ideal. Hence the enormous international popularity
of Schiller’s “Robbers.” One may find innumerable variants of the
brigand Karl Moor who uses his plunder “to support meritorious young
men at college.” The world into which we enter from the very dawn of
romanticism is one of “glorious rascals,” and “beloved vagabonds.”
“Sublime convicts,” says M. Lasserre, “idlers of genius,
angelic female poisoners, monsters inspired by God, sincere
comedians, virtuous courtesans, metaphysical mountebanks,
faithful adulterers, form only one half--the sympathetic half
of humanity according to romanticism. The other half, the
wicked half, is manufactured by the same intellectual process
under the suggestion of the same revolutionary instinct.
It comprises all those who hold or stand for a portion of
any discipline whatsoever, political, religious, moral or
intellectual--kings, ministers, priests, judges, soldiers,
policemen, husbands and critics.”[86]
The Rousseauist is ever ready to discover beauty of soul in any one
who is under the reprobation of society. The figure of the courtesan
rehabilitated through love that has enjoyed such popularity during the
past hundred years goes back to Rousseau himself.[87] The underlying
assumption of romantic morality is that the personal virtues, the
virtues that imply self-control, count as naught compared with the
fraternal spirit and the readiness to sacrifice one’s self for
others. This is the ordinary theme of the Russian novel in which
one finds, as Lemaître remarks, “the Kalmuck exaggerations of our
French romantic ideas.” For example Sonia in “Crime and Punishment”
is glorified because she prostitutes herself to procure a livelihood
for her family. One does not however need to go to Russia for what is
scarcely less the assumption of contemporary America. If it can only
be shown that a person is sympathetic we are inclined to pardon him
his sins of unrestraint, his lack, for example, of common honesty.
As an offset to the damaging facts brought out at the investigation
of the sugar trust, the defense sought to establish that the late H.
O. Havemeyer was a beautiful soul. It was testified that he could
never hear little children sing without tears coming into his eyes.
His favorite song, some one was unkind enough to suggest, was “little
drops of water, little grains of sand.” The newspapers again reported
not long ago that a notorious Pittsburg grafter had petitioned for
his release from the penitentiary on the grounds that he wished to
continue his philanthropic activities among the poor. Another paragraph
that appeared recently in the daily press related that a burglar while
engaged professionally in a house at Los Angeles discovered that the
lady of the house had a child suffering from croup, and at once came to
her aid, explaining that he had six children of his own. No one could
really think amiss of this authentic descendant of Schiller’s Karl
Moor. For love, according to the Rousseauist, is not the fulfillment
of the law but a substitute for it. In “Les Misérables” Hugo contrasts
Javert who stands for the old order based on obedience to the law
with the convict Jean Valjean who stands for the new regeneration of
man through love and self-sacrifice. When Javert awakens to the full
ignominy of his rôle he does the only decent thing--he commits suicide.
Hugo indeed has perhaps carried the new evangel of sympathy as a
substitute for all the other virtues further than any one else and with
fewer weak concessions to common sense. Sultan Murad, Hugo narrates,
was “sublime.” He had his eight brothers strangled, caused his uncle to
be sawn in two between two planks, opened one after the other twelve
children to find a stolen apple, shed an ocean of blood and “sabred the
world.” One day while passing in front of a butcher-shop he saw a pig
bleeding to death, tormented by flies and with the sun beating upon
its wound. Touched by pity, the Sultan pushes the pig into the shade
with his foot and with an “enormous and superhuman gesture” drives away
the flies. When Murad dies the pig appears before the Almighty and,
pleading for him against the accusing host of his victims, wins his
pardon. Moral: “A succored pig outweighs a world oppressed”[88] (_Un
pourceau secouru vaut un monde égorgé_).
This subordination of all the other values of life to sympathy is
achieved only at the expense of the great humanistic virtue--decorum
or a sense of proportion. Now not to possess a sense of proportion is,
however this lack may be manifested, to be a pedant; and, if there is
ever a humanistic reaction, Hugo, one of the chief products of the age
of original genius, will scarcely escape the charge of pedantry. But
true religion also insists on a hierarchy of the virtues. Burke speaks
at least as much from a religious as from a humanistic point of view
when he writes:
“The greatest crimes do not arise so much from a want of
feeling for others as from an over-sensibility for ourselves
and an over-indulgence to our own desires. … They [the
‘philosophes’] explode or render odious or contemptible that
class of virtues which restrain the appetite. These are at
least nine out of ten of the virtues. In the place of all
this they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or
benevolence. By these means their morality has no idea in it
of restraint or indeed of a distinct and settled principle of
any kind. When their disciples are thus left free and guided
only by present feeling, they are no longer to be depended
on for good and evil. The men who to-day snatch the worst
criminals from justice will murder the most innocent persons
to-morrow.”[89]
The person who seeks to get rid of ninety per cent of the virtues in
favor of an indiscriminate sympathy does not simply lose his scale of
values. He arrives at an inverted scale of values. For the higher the
object for which one feels sympathy the more the idea of obligation
is likely to intrude--the very thing the Rousseauist is seeking to
escape. One is more irresponsible and therefore more spontaneous in the
Rousseauistic sense in lavishing one’s pity on a dying pig. Medical
men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the
members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis).
But Rousseau already exhibits this “psychosis.” He abandoned his five
children one after the other, but had we are told an unspeakable
affection for his dog.[90]
Rousseau’s contemporary, Sterne, is supposed to have lavished a
somewhat disproportionate emotion upon an ass. But the ass does
not really come into his own until a later stage of the movement.
Nietzsche has depicted the leaders of the nineteenth century as
engaged in a veritable onolatry or ass-worship. The opposition between
neo-classicist and Rousseauist is indeed symbolized in a fashion by
their respective attitude towards the ass. Neo-classical decorum
was, it should be remembered, an all-pervading principle. It imposed
a severe hierarchy, not only upon objects, but upon the words that
express these objects. The first concern of the decorous person was to
avoid lowness, and the ass he looked upon as hopelessly low--so low
as to be incapable of ennoblement even by a resort to periphrasis.
Homer therefore was deemed by Vida to have been guilty of outrageous
indecorum in comparing Ajax to an ass. The partisans of Homer sought
indeed to prove that the ass was in the time of Homer a “noble” animal
or at least that the word ass was “noble.” But the stigma put upon
Homer by Vida--reinforced as it was by the similar attacks of Scaliger
and others--remained.
The rehabilitation of the ass by the Rousseauist is at once a protest
against an unduly squeamish decorum, and a way of proclaiming the new
principle of unbounded expansive sympathy. In dealing with both words
and what they express, one should show a democratic inclusiveness.
Something has already been said of the war the romanticist waged in
the name of local color against the impoverishment of vocabulary by
the neo-classicists. But the romantic warfare against the aristocratic
squeamishness of the neo-classic vocabulary goes perhaps even deeper.
Take, for instance, Wordsworth’s view as to the proper language of
poetry. Poetical decorum had become by the end of the eighteenth
century a mere varnish of conventional elegance. Why should mere
polite prejudice, so Wordsworth reasoned, and the “gaudiness and inane
phraseology” in which it resulted be allowed to interfere with the
“spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion”? And so he proceeds to set
up a view of poetry that is only the neo-classical view turned upside
down. For the proper subjects and speech of poetry he would turn from
the highest class of society to the lowest, from the aristocrat to
the peasant. The peasant is more poetical than the aristocrat because
he is closer to nature, for Wordsworth as he himself avows, is less
interested in the peasant for his own sake than because he sees in him
a sort of emanation of the landscape.[91]
One needs to keep all this background in mind if one wishes to
understand the full significance of a poem like “Peter Bell.”
Scaliger blames Homer because he stoops to mention in his description
of Zeus something so trivial as the eyebrows. Wordsworth seeks to
bestow poetical dignity and seriousness on the “long left ear” of an
ass.[92] The ass is thus exalted one scarcely need add, because of
his compassionateness. The hard heart of Peter Bell is at last melted
by the sight of so much goodness. He aspires to be like the ass and
finally achieves his wish.
The French romanticists, Hugo, for instance, make an attack on decorum
somewhat similar to that of Wordsworth. Words formerly lived, says
Hugo, divided up into castes. Some had the privilege of mounting into
the king’s coaches at Versailles, whereas others were relegated to
the rabble. I came along and clapped a red liberty cap on the old
dictionary. I brought about a literary ’93,[93] etc. Hugo’s attack
on decorum is also combined with an even more violent assertion than
Wordsworth’s of the ideal of romantic morality--the supremacy of pity.
He declares in the “Legend of the Ages” that an ass that takes a step
aside to avoid crushing a toad is “holier than Socrates and greater
than Plato.”[94] For this and similar utterances Hugo deserves to be
placed very nearly if not quite at the head of romantic onolaters.
We have said that the tremendous burden put upon sympathy in romantic
morality is a result of the assumption that the “civil war in the cave”
is artificial and that therefore the restraining virtues (according
to Burke ninety per cent of the virtues) which imply this warfare
are likewise artificial. If the civil war in the cave should turn
out to be not artificial but a fact of the gravest import, the whole
spiritual landscape would change immediately. Romantic morality would
in that case be not a reality but a mirage. We need at all events to
grasp the central issue firmly. Humanism and religion have always
asserted in some form or other the dualism of the human spirit. A man’s
spirituality is in inverse ratio to his immersion in temperament. The
whole movement from Rousseau to Bergson is, on the other hand, filled
with the glorification of instinct. To become spiritual the beautiful
soul needs only to expand along the lines of temperament and with this
process the cult of pity or sympathy does not interfere. The romantic
moralist tends to favor expansion on the ground that it is vital,
creative, infinite, and to dismiss whatever seems to set bounds to
expansion as something inert, mechanical, finite. In its onslaughts on
the veto power whether within or without the breast of the individual
it is plain that no age has ever approached the age of original
genius in the midst of which we are still living. Goethe defines the
devil as the spirit that always says no, and Carlyle celebrates his
passage from darkness to light as an escape from the Everlasting Nay
to the Everlasting Yea. We rarely pause to consider what a reversal
of traditional wisdom is implied in such conceptions. In the past,
the spirit that says no has been associated rather with the divine.
Socrates tells us that the counsels of his “voice” were always
negative, never positive.[95] According to the ancient Hindu again the
divine is the “inner check.” God, according to Aristotle, is pure Form.
In opposition to all this emphasis on the restricting and limiting
power, the naturalist, whether scientific or emotional, sets up a
program of formless, fearless expansion; which means in practice that
he recognizes no bounds either to intellectual or emotional curiosity.