to offer the element of wonder and surprise awakened by the perpetual
novelty, the infinite otherwiseness of things, as a substitute for
the awe that is associated with their infinite oneness; or rather to
refuse to discriminate between these two infinitudes and so to confound
the two main directions of the human spirit, its religious East, as
one may say, with its West of wonder and romance. This confusion may
be illustrated by the romantic attitude towards what is perhaps the
most Eastern of all Eastern lands,--India. The materials for the study
of India in the Occident were accumulated by Englishmen towards the
end of the eighteenth century, but the actual interpretation of this
material is due largely to German romanticists, notably to Friedrich
Schlegel.[96] Alongside the romantic Hellenist and the romantic
mediævalist we find the romantic Indianist. It is to India even more
than to Spain that one needs to turn, says Friedrich Schlegel, for the
supremely romantic[97]--that is, the wildest and most unrestrained
luxuriance of imagination. Now in a country so vast and so ancient as
India you can find in some place or at some period or other almost
anything you like. If, for example, W. B. Yeats waxes enthusiastic
over Tagore we may be sure that there is in the work of Tagore
something akin to æsthetic romanticism. But if we take India at the top
of her achievement in the early Buddhistic movement, let us say, we
shall find something very different. The early Buddhistic movement in
its essential aspects is at the extreme opposite pole from romanticism.
The point is worth making because certain misinterpretations that
still persist both of Buddhism and other movements in India can
be traced ultimately to the bad twist that was given to the whole
subject by romanticists like the Schlegels. The educated Frenchman,
for instance, gets his ideas of India largely from certain poems of
Leconte de Lisle who reflects the German influence. But the sense of
universal and meaningless flux that pervades these poems without any
countervailing sense of a reality behind the shows of nature is a
product of romanticism, working in coöperation with science, and is
therefore antipodal to the absorption of the true Hindu in the oneness
of things. We are told, again, that Schopenhauer was a Buddhist. Did
he not have an image of Buddha in his bedroom? But no doctrine perhaps
is more remote from the genuine doctrine of Buddha than that of this
soured and disillusioned romanticist. The nature of true Buddhism and
its opposition to all forms of romanticism is worth dwelling on for
a moment. Buddha not only asserted the human law with unusual power
but he also did what, in the estimation of some, needs doing in our
own day--he put this law, not on a traditional, but on a positive and
critical basis. This spiritual positivism of Buddha is, reduced to its
simplest terms, a psychology of desire. Not only is the world outside
of man in a constant state of flux and change, but there is an element
within man that is in constant flux and change also and makes itself
felt practically as an element of expansive desire. What is unstable in
him longs for what is unstable in the outer world. But he may escape
from the element of flux and change, nay he must aspire to do so, if
he wishes to be released from sorrow. This is to substitute the noble
for the ignoble craving. The permanent or ethical element in himself
towards which he should strive to move is known to him practically as a
power of inhibition or inner check upon expansive desire. Vital impulse
(_élan vital_) may be subjected to vital control (_frein vital_). Here
is the Buddhist equivalent of the “civil war in the cave” that the
romanticist denies. Buddha does not admit a soul in man in the sense
that is often given to the word, but on this opposition between vital
impulse and vital control as a psychological fact he puts his supreme
emphasis. The man who drifts supinely with the current of desire is
guilty according to Buddha of the gravest of all vices--spiritual or
moral indolence (_pamāda_). He on the contrary who curbs or reins in
his expansive desires is displaying the chief of all the virtues,
spiritual vigilance or strenuousness (_appamāda_). The man who is
spiritually strenuous has entered upon the “path.” The end of this
path and the goal of being cannot be formulated in terms of the finite
intellect, any more than the ocean can be put into a cup. But progress
on the path may be known by its fruits--negatively by the extinction of
the expansive desires (the literal meaning of Nirvâna), positively by
an increase in peace, poise, centrality.
A man’s rank in the scale of being is, then, according to the Buddhist
determined by the quality of his desires; and it is within his power to
determine whether he shall let them run wild or else control them to
some worthy end. We hear of the fatalistic East, but no doctrine was
ever less fatalistic than that of Buddha. No one ever put so squarely
upon the individual what the individual is ever seeking to evade--the
burden of moral responsibility. “Self is the lord of self. Who else
can be the lord? … You yourself must make the effort. The Buddhas are
only teachers.”[98] But does not all this emphasis on self, one may
ask, tend to hardness and indifference towards others, towards the
undermining of that compassion to which the romantic moralist is ready
to sacrifice all the other virtues? Buddha may be allowed to speak for
himself: “Even as a mother cherishes her child, her only child, so let
a man cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.”[99] Buddha thus
seems to fulfil Pascal’s requirement for a great man: he unites in
himself opposite virtues and occupies all the space between them.
Enough has been said to make plain that the infinite indeterminate
desire of the romanticist and the Buddhist repression of desire are the
most different things conceivable. Chateaubriand it has been said was
an “invincibly restless soul,” a soul of desire (_une âme de désir_),
but these phrases are scarcely more applicable to him than to many
other great romanticists. They are fitly symbolized by the figures that
pace to and fro in the Hall of Eblis and whose hearts are seen through
their transparent bosoms to be lapped in the flames of unquenchable
longing. The romanticist indeed bases, as I have said, on the very
intensity of his longing his claims to be an idealist and even a
mystic. William Blake, for example, has been proclaimed a true mystic.
The same term has also been applied to Buddha. Without pretending to
have fathomed completely so unfathomable a being as Buddha or even the
far less unfathomable William Blake, one may nevertheless assert with
confidence that Buddha and Blake stand for utterly incompatible views
of life. If Blake is a mystic then Buddha must be something else. To
be assured on this point one needs only to compare the “Marriage of
Heaven and Hell” with the “Dhammapada,” an anthology of some of the
most authentic and authoritative material in early Buddhism. “He who
desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. … The road of excess leads
to the palace of wisdom,” says Blake. “Even in heavenly pleasures he
finds no satisfaction; the disciple who is fully awakened delights
only in the destruction of all desires. … Good is restraint in all
things,” says Buddha. Buddha would evidently have dismissed Blake as
a madman, whereas Blake would have looked on Buddhism as the ultimate
abomination. My own conviction is that Buddha was a genuine sage well
worthy of the homage rendered him by multitudes of men for more than
twenty-four centuries, whereas Blake was only a romantic æsthete who
was moving in his imaginative activity towards madness and seems at the
end actually to have reached the goal.
I have been going thus far afield to ancient India and to Buddha, not
that I might, like a recent student of Buddhism, enjoy “the strangeness
of the intellectual landscape,” but on the contrary that I might
suggest that there is a centre of normal human experience and that
Buddhism, at least in its ethical aspects, is nearer to this centre
than æsthetic romanticism. Buddha might perhaps marvel with more
reason at our strangeness than we at his. Buddha’s assertion of man’s
innate moral laziness in particular accords more closely with what
most of us have experienced than Rousseau’s assertion of man’s natural
goodness. This conception of the innate laziness of man seems to me
indeed so central that I am going to put it at the basis of the point
of view I am myself seeking to develop, though this point of view is
not primarily Buddhistic. This conception has the advantage of being
positive rather than dogmatic. It works out in practice very much like
the original sin of the Christian theologian. The advantage of starting
with indolence rather than sin is that many men will admit that they
are morally indolent who will not admit that they are sinful. For
theological implications still cluster thickly about the word sin, and
these persons are still engaged more or less consciously in the great
naturalistic revolt against theology.
The spiritual positivist then will start from a fact of immediate
perception--from the presence namely in the breast of the individual
of a principle of vital control (_frein vital_), and he will measure
his spiritual strenuousness or spiritual sloth by the degree to which
he exercises or fails to exercise this power. In accordance with the
keenness of a man’s perception of a specially human order that is
known practically as a curb upon his ordinary self, he may be said to
possess insight. The important thing is that the insight should not
be sophisticated, that a man should not fall away from it into some
phantasmagoria of the intellect or emotions. A man sometimes builds up
a whole system of metaphysics as a sort of screen between himself and
his obligations either to himself or others. Mrs. Barbauld suspected
that Coleridge’s philosophy was only a mask for indolence. Carlyle’s
phrase for Coleridge was even harsher: “putrescent indolence,” a phrase
that might be applied with more justice perhaps to Rousseau. One may
learn from Rousseau the art of sinking to the region of instinct that
is below the rational level instead of struggling forward to the
region of insight that is above it, and at the same time passing for a
sublime enthusiast; the art of looking backwards and downwards, and at
the same time enjoying the honor that belongs only to those who look
forwards and up. We need not wonder at the warm welcome that this new
art received. I have said that that man has always been accounted a
benefactor who has substituted for the reality of spiritual discipline
some ingenious art of going through the motions and that the decorum of
the neo-classical period had largely sunk to this level. Even in the
most decorous of modern ages, that of Louis XIV, it was very common, as
every student of the period knows, for men to set up as personages in
the grand manner and at the same time behind the façade of conventional
dignity to let their appetites run riot. It would have been perfectly
legitimate at the end of the eighteenth century to attack in the name
of true decorum a decorum that had become the “varnish of vice” and
“mask of hypocrisy.” What Rousseau actually opposed to pseudo-decorum
was perhaps the most alluring form of sham spirituality that the
world has ever seen--a method not merely of masking but of glorifying
one’s spiritual indolence. “You wish to have the pleasures of vice
and the honor of virtue,” wrote Julie to Saint-Preux in a moment of
unusual candor. The Rousseauist may indulge in the extreme of psychic
unrestraint and at the same time pose as a perfect idealist or even, if
one is a Chateaubriand, as a champion of religion. Chateaubriand’s life
according to Lemaître was a “magnificent series of attitudes.”
I do not mean to assert that the Rousseauist is always guilty of the
pose and theatricality of which there is more than a suggestion in
Chateaubriand. There is, however, much in the Rousseauistic view of
life that militates against a complete moral honesty. “Of all the men I
have known,” says Rousseau, “he whose character derives most completely
from his temperament alone is Jean-Jacques.”[100] The ugly things that
have a way of happening when impulse is thus left uncontrolled do
not, as we have seen, disturb the beautiful soul in his complacency.
He can always point an accusing finger at something or somebody else.
The faith in one’s natural goodness is a constant encouragement to
evade moral responsibility. To accept responsibility is to follow the
line of maximum effort, whereas man’s secret desire is to follow, if
not the line of least, at all events the line of lesser resistance.
The endless twisting and dodging and proneness to look for scapegoats
that results is surely the least reputable aspect of human nature.
Rousseau writes to Madame de Francueil (20 April, 1751) that it was
her class, the class of the rich, that was responsible for his having
had to abandon his children. With responsibility thus shifted from
one’s self to the rich, the next step is inevitable, namely to start a
crusade against the members of a class which, without any warrant from
“Nature,” oppresses its brothers, the members of other classes, and
forces them into transgression. A man may thus dodge his duties as a
father, and at the same time pose as a paladin of humanity. Rousseau is
very close here to our most recent agitators. If a working girl falls
from chastity, for example, do not blame her, blame her employer. She
would have remained a model of purity if he had only added a dollar or
two a week to her wage. With the progress of the new morality every
one has become familiar with the type of the perfect idealist who is
ready to pass laws for the regulation of everybody and everything
except himself, and who knows how to envelop in a mist of radiant words
schemes the true driving power of which is the desire to confiscate
property.
The tendency to make of society the universal scapegoat is not, one
scarcely needs add, to be ascribed entirely to the romantic moralist.
It is only one aspect of the denial of the human law, of the assumption
that because man is partly subject to the natural law he is entirely
subject to it; and in this dehumanizing of man the rationalist has
been at least as guilty as the emotionalist. If the Rousseauist hopes
to find a substitute for all the restraining virtues in sympathy, the
rationalistic naturalist, who is as a rule utilitarian with a greater
or smaller dash of pseudo-science, hopes to find a substitute for these
same virtues in some form of machinery. The legislative mill to which
our “uplifters” are so ready to resort, is a familiar example. If our
modern society continues to listen to those who are seeking to persuade
it that it is possible to find mechanical or emotional equivalents for
self-control, it is likely, as Rousseau said of himself, to show a
“great tendency to degenerate.”
The fact on which the moral positivist would rest his effort to
rehabilitate self-control is, as I have said, the presence in man of
a restraining, informing and centralizing power that is anterior to
both intellect and emotion. Such a power, it must be freely granted, is
not present equally in all persons; in some it seems scarcely to exist
at all. When released from outer control, they are simply unchained
temperaments; whereas in others this superrational perception seems to
be singularly vivid and distinct. This is the psychological fact that
underlies what the theologian would term the mystery of grace.
Rousseau himself was not quite so temperamental as might be inferred
from what has been said about his evasion of ethical effort. There were
moments when the dualism of the spirit came home to him, moments when
he perceived that the conscience is not itself an expansive emotion
but rather a judgment and a check upon expansive emotion. Yet his
general readiness to subordinate his ethical self to his sensibility is
indubitable. Hence the absence in his personality and writing of the
note of masculinity. There is indeed much in his make-up that reminds
one less of a man than of a high-strung impressionable woman. Woman,
most observers would agree, is more natural in Rousseau’s sense, that
is, more temperamental, than man. One should indeed always temper
these perilous comparisons of the sexes with the remark of La Fontaine
that in this matter he knew a great many men who were women. Now to be
temperamental is to be extreme, and it is in this sense perhaps that
the female of the species may be said to be “fiercer than the male.”
Rousseau’s failure to find “any intermediary term between everything
and nothing” would seem to be a feminine rather than a masculine
trait. Decorum in the case of women, even more perhaps than in the
case of men, tends to be a mere conformity to what is established
rather than the immediate perception of a law of measure and proportion
that sets bounds to the expansive desires. “Women believe innocent
everything that they dare,” says Joubert, whom no one will accuse of
being a misogynist. Those who are thus temperamental have more need
than others of outer guidance. “His feminine nature,” says C. E. Norton
of Ruskin, “needed support such as it never got.”[101]
If women are more temperamental than men it is only fair to add that
they have a greater fineness of temperament. Women, says Joubert again,
are richer in native virtues, men in acquired virtues. At times when
men are slack in acquiring virtues in the truly ethical sense--and
some might maintain that the present is such a time--the women may
be not only men’s equals but their superiors. Rousseau had this
feminine fineness of temperament. He speaks rightly of his “exquisite
faculties.” He also had no inconsiderable amount of feminine charm. The
numerous members of the French aristocracy whom he fascinated may be
accepted as competent witnesses on this point. The mingling of sense
and spirit that pervades Rousseau, his pseudo-Platonism as I have
called it elsewhere, is also a feminine rather than a masculine trait.
There is likewise something feminine in Rousseau’s preference for
illusion. Illusion is the element in which woman even more than man
would seem to live and move and have her being. It is feminine and
also romantic to prefer to a world of sharp definition a world of magic
and suggestiveness. W. Bagehot (it will be observed that in discussing
this delicate topic I am prone to take refuge behind authorities)
attributes the triumph of an art of shifting illusion over an art
of clear and firm outlines to the growing influence of women.[102]
Woman’s being is to that of man, we are told, as is moonlight unto
sunlight--and the moon is the romantic orb. The whole of German romance
in particular is bathed in moonshine.[103]
The objection of the classicist to the so-called enlightenment of the
eighteenth century is that it did not have in it sufficient light. The
primitivists on the contrary felt that it had too much light--that the
light needed to be tempered by darkness. Even the moon is too effulgent
for the author of “Hymns to the Night.” No movement has ever avowed
more openly its partiality for the dim and the crepuscular. The German
romanticists have been termed “twilight men.” What many of them admire
in woman as in children and plants, is her unconsciousness and freedom
from analysis--an admiration that is also a tribute in its way to the
“night side” of nature.[104]
Discussions of the kind in which I have been indulging regarding the
unlikeness of woman and man are very dreary unless one puts at least
equal emphasis on their fundamental likeness. Woman, before being
woman, is a human being and so subject to the same law as man. So far
as men and women both take on the yoke of this law, they move towards
a common centre. So far as they throw it off and live temperamentally,
there tends to arise the most odious of all forms of warfare--that
between the sexes. The dictates of the human law are only too likely
to yield in the case of both men and women to the rush of outer
impressions and the tumult of the desires within. This is what La
Rochefoucauld means when he says that “the head is always the dupe of
the heart.” Nevertheless feeling is even more likely to prevail over
judgment in woman than it is in man. To be judicial indeed to the
point of hardness and sternness has always been held to be unfeminine.
It is almost woman’s prerogative to err on the side of sympathy.
But even woman cannot be allowed to substitute sympathy for true
conscience--that is for the principle of control. In basing conduct
on feeling Rousseau may be said to have founded a new sophistry.
The ancient sophist at least made man the measure of all things. By
subordinating judgment to sensibility Rousseau may be said to have made
woman the measure of all things.
The affirmation of a human law must ultimately rest on the perception
of a something that is set above the flux upon which the flux itself
depends--on what Aristotle terms an unmoved mover. Otherwise conscience
becomes a part of the very flux and element of change it is supposed
to control. In proportion as he escapes from outer control man must
be conscious of some such unmoved mover if he is to oppose a definite
aim or purpose to the indefinite expansion of his desires. Having some
such firm centre he may hope to carry through to a fortunate conclusion
the “civil war in the cave.” He may, as the wise are wont to express
it, build himself an island in the midst of the flood. The romantic
moralist, on the other hand, instead of building himself an island is
simply drifting with the stream. For feeling not only shifts from man
to man, it is continually shifting in the same man; so that morality
becomes a matter of mood, and romanticism here as elsewhere might be
defined as the despotism of mood. At the time of doing anything, says
Mrs. Shelley, Shelley deemed himself right; and Rousseau says that
in the act of abandoning his own children he felt “like a member of
Plato’s republic.”
The man who makes self-expression and not self-control his primary
endeavor becomes subject to every influence, “the very slave of
circumstance and impulse borne by every breath.”[105] This is what it
means in practice no longer to keep a firm hand on the rudder of one’s
personality, but to turn one’s self over to “nature.” The partisan
of expression becomes the thrall of his impressions so that the whole
Rousseauistic conception may be termed indifferently impressionistic or
expressionistic. For the beautiful soul in order to express himself has
to indulge his emotions instead of hardening and bracing them against
the shock of circumstance. The very refinement of sensibility which
constitutes in his own eyes his superiority to the philistine makes him
quiver responsive to every outer influence; he finally becomes subject
to changes in the weather, or in Rousseau’s own phrase, the “vile
plaything of the atmosphere and seasons.”
This rapid shifting of mood in the romanticist, in response to
inner impulse or outer impression, is almost too familiar to need
illustration. Here is an example that may serve for a thousand from
that life-long devotee of the great god Whim--Hector Berlioz. When at
Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from
the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille’s
marriage to another. “In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry
to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act
of justice done, I too must die.” Accordingly he loads his pistols,
supplies himself with a disguise as a lady’s maid, so as to be able
to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets
“two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum.”
While awaiting the departure of the diligence he “rages up and down
the streets of Florence like a mad dog.” Later, as the diligence is
traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a “‘Ha’! so
hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside
as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller.” But on reaching
Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not
only forgets his errand, but spends there “the twenty happiest days” of
his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to
be temperamental.
In this exaltation of environmental influences one should note
again the coöperation of Rousseauist and Baconian, of emotional and
scientific naturalist. Both are prone to look upon man as being made by
natural forces and not as making himself. To deal with the substitutes
that Rousseauist and Baconian have proposed for traditional morality,
is in fact to make a study of the varieties--and they are numerous--of
naturalistic fatalism. The upshot of the whole movement is to discredit
moral effort on the part of the individual. Why should a man believe
in the efficacy of this effort, why should he struggle to acquire
character if he is convinced that he is being moulded like putty by
influences beyond his control--the influence of climate, for example?
Both science and romanticism have vied with one another in making of
man a mere stop on which Nature may play what tune she will. The Æolian
harp enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a romantic symbol. The man
of science for his part is ready to draw up statistical tables showing
what season of the year is most productive of suicide and what type of
weather impels bank-cashiers most irresistibly to embezzlement. A man
on a mountain top, according to Rousseau, enjoys not only physical but
spiritual elevation, and when he descends to the plain the altitude
of his mind declines with that of his body. Ruskin’s soul, says C. E.
Norton, “was like an Æolian harp, its strings quivering musically in
serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered
and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might
break the sounding board itself.” It is not surprising Ruskin makes
other men as subject to “skyey influences” as himself. “The mountains
of the earth are,” he says, “its natural cathedrals. True religion can
scarcely be achieved away from them. The curate or hermit of the field
and fen, however simple his life or painful his lodging, does not often
attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a
decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the _prophetic vision or
the martyr’s passion_.” The corruptions of Romanism “are traceable for
the most part to lowland prelacy.”[106]
Is then the Rousseauist totally unable to regulate his impressions?
It is plain that he cannot control them from within because the whole
idea of a vital control of this kind is, as we have seen, foreign to
the psychology of the beautiful soul. Yet it is, according to Rousseau,
possible to base morality on the senses--on outer perception that
is--and at the same time get the equivalent of a free-will based on
inner perception. He was so much interested in this subject that he
had planned to devote to it a whole treatise to be entitled “Sensitive
morality or the materialism of the sage.” A man cannot resist an outer
impression but he may at least get out of its way and put himself in
the way of another impression that will impel him to the desired course
of conduct. “The soul may then be put or maintained in the state most
favorable to virtue.” “Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness,
light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, rest, everything,
acts on our physical frame.” By a proper adjustment of all these outer
elements we may govern in their origins the feelings by which we allow
ourselves to be dominated.[107]
Rousseau’s ideas about sensitive morality are at once highly chimerical
and highly significant. Here as elsewhere one may say with Amiel
that nothing of Rousseau has been lost. His point of view has an
inner kinship with that of the man of science who asserts that man is
necessarily the product of natural forces, but that one may at least
modify the natural forces. For example, moral effort on the part of
the individual cannot overcome heredity. It is possible, however, by
schemes of eugenics to regulate heredity. The uneasy burden of moral
responsibility is thus lifted from the individual, and the moralist
in the old-fashioned sense is invited to abdicate in favor of the
biologist. It would be easy enough to trace similar assumptions in the
various forms of socialism and other “isms” almost innumerable of the
present hour.
Perhaps the problem to which I have already alluded may as well be
faced here. How does it happen that Rousseau who attacked both science
and literature as the chief sources of human degeneracy should be an
arch-æsthete, the authentic ancestor of the school of art for art’s
sake and at the same time by his sensitive (or æsthetic) morality play
into the hands of the scientific determinist? If one is to enter deeply
into the modern movement one needs to consider both wherein scientific
and emotional naturalists clash and wherein they agree. The two types
of naturalists agree in their virtual denial of a superrational realm.
They clash above all in their attitude towards what is on the rational
level. The scientific naturalist is assiduously analytical. Rousseau,
on the other hand, or rather one whole side of Rousseau, is hostile
to analysis. The arts and sciences are attacked because they are the
product of reflection. “The man who reflects is a depraved animal,”
because he has fallen away from the primitive spontaneous unity of
his being. Rousseau is the first of the great anti-intellectualists.
By assailing both rationalism and pseudo-classic decorum in the name
of instinct and emotion he appealed to men’s longing to get away
from the secondary and the derivative to the immediate. True decorum
satisfies the craving for immediacy because it contains within itself
an element of superrational perception. The “reason” of a Plato or an
Aristotle also satisfies the craving for immediacy because it likewise
contains within itself an element of superrational perception. A reason
or a decorum of this kind ministers to another deep need of human
nature--the need to lose itself in a larger whole. Once eliminate the
superrational perception and reason sinks to the level of rationalism,
consciousness becomes mere self-consciousness. It is difficult, as
St. Evremond said, for man to remain in the long run in this doubtful
middle state. Having lost the unity of insight, he will long for the
unity of instinct. Hence the paradox that this most self-conscious
of all movements is filled with the praise of the unconscious. It
abounds in persons who, like Walt Whitman, would turn and live with the
animals, or who, like Novalis, would fain strike root into the earth
with the plant. Animals[108] and plants are not engaged in any moral
struggle, they are not inwardly divided against themselves.
Here is the source of the opposition between the abstract and
analytical head, deadly to the sense of unity, and the warm immediate
heart that unifies life with the aid of the imagination--an opposition
that assumes so many forms from Rousseau to Bergson. The Rousseauist
always betrays himself by arraigning in some form or other, “the false
secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” One should indeed
remember that there were obscurantists before Rousseau. Pascal also
arrays the heart against the head; but his heart is at the farthest
remove from that of Rousseau; it stands for a superrational perception.
Christians like Pascal may indulge with comparative impunity in a
certain amount of obscurantism. For they have submitted to a tradition
that supplies them with distinctions between good and evil and at the
same time controls their imagination. But for the individualist who
has broken with tradition to deny his head in the name of his heart is
a deadly peril. He above all persons should insist that the power by
which we multiply distinctions, though secondary, is not false--that
the intellect, of however little avail in itself, is invaluable when
working in coöperation with the imagination in the service of either
inner or outer perception. It is only through the analytical head and
its keen discriminations that the individualist can determine whether
the unity and infinitude towards which his imagination is reaching (and
it is only through the imagination that one can have the sense of unity
and infinitude) is real or merely chimerical. Need I add that in making
these distinctions between imagination, intellect, feeling, etc.,
I am not attempting to divide man up into more or less watertight
compartments, into hard and fast “faculties,” but merely to express,
however imperfectly, certain obscure and profound facts of experience?
The varieties of what one may term the rationalistic error, of the
endeavor of the intellect to emancipate itself from perception and
set up as an independent power, are numerous. The variety that was
perhaps formerly most familiar was that of the theologian who sought
to formulate intellectually what must ever transcend formulation. The
forms of the rationalistic error that concern our present subject can
be traced back for the most part to Descartes, the father of modern
philosophy, and are indeed implicit in his famous identification
of thought and being (_Je pense, donc je suis_). The dogmatic and
arrogant rationalism that denies both what is above and what is below
itself, both the realm of awe and the realm of wonder, which prevailed
among the Cartesians of the Enlightenment, combined, as I have said,
with pseudo-classic decorum to produce that sense of confinement and
smugness against which the original genius protested. Man will always
crave a view of life to which perception lends immediacy and the
imagination infinitude. A view of life like that of the eighteenth
century that reduces unduly the rôle of both imagination and perception
will always seem to him unvital and mechanical. “The Bounded,” says
Blake, “is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a
Universe would soon become a Mill with complicated wheels.”
The mechanizing of life against which the romanticist protested may
as I said be largely associated with the influence of Descartes. It
is not however the whole truth about Descartes to say that he forgot
the purely instrumental rôle of the intellect and encouraged it to
set up as an independent power. As a matter of fact he also used the
intellect as an instrument in the service of outer perception. Taking
as his point of departure the precise observations that science was
accumulating, he sought to formulate mathematically the natural law.
Now the more one reduces nature to a problem of space and movement,
the more one is enabled to measure nature; and the method of exact
measurement may be justified, if not on metaphysical, at least on
practical grounds. It helps one, if not to understand natural forces,
at least to control them. It thereby increases man’s power and
ministers to utility. In a word, the intellect when thus pressed into
the service of outer perception makes for material efficiency. In a
sense science becomes scientific only in proportion as it neglects
the qualitative differences between phenomena, e.g. between light and
sound, and treats them solely from the point of view of quantity. But
the penalty that science pays for this quantitative method is a heavy
one. The farther it gets away from the warm immediacy of perception
the less real it becomes; for that only is real to a man that he
immediately perceives. Perfectly pure science tends to become a series
of abstract mathematical formulæ without any real content. By his
resort to such a method, the man of science is in constant danger of
becoming a mere rationalist. At bottom he is ignorant of the reality
that lies behind natural phenomena; he must even be ignorant of it,
for it lays hold upon the infinite, and so must elude a finite being
like man. But the desire to conceal his own ignorance from himself and
others, the secret push for power and prestige that lies deep down in
the breast of the man of science as in that of every other man, impels
him to attach an independent value to the operations of the intellect
that have only an instrumental value in the service of outer perception
and to conceive that he has locked up physical nature in his formulæ.
The man of science thus falls victim to a special form of metaphysical
illusion. The gravity of the error of the scientific intellectualist is
multiplied tenfold when he conceives that his formulæ cover not merely
the natural law but the human law as well, when he strives, like Taine,
to convert man himself into a “walking theorem,” a “living geometry.”
This denial of every form of spontaneity was rightly felt by the
romanticists to be intolerable.
Goethe contrasts the smug satisfaction of Wagner in his dead formulæ
that give only what is external and secondary, with Faust’s fierce
craving for immediacy and therefore his impatience with an analysis
that gives only the dry bones from which the vital breath has departed.
Wagner is a philistine because he is not tormented by the thirst for
the infinite. Faust, on the other hand, reaches out beyond the mere
intellect towards the spirit that is behind the shows of nature, but
this spirit appears to him and reduces him to despair by declaring that
he is trying to grasp something that is not only infinite but alien to
him. Instead of turning from this alien spirit to the spirit that is
relevant to man, a spirit that sets bounds to every inordinate craving,
including the inordinate craving for knowledge (_libido sciendi_),
Faust gives himself to the devil in what was, in the time of the
youthful Goethe, the newest fashion: he becomes a Rousseauist. Instead
of striking into the ascending path of insight, he descends to the
level of impulse. Seen from this level the power by which we multiply
distinctions seems to him, as it was to seem later to Wordsworth, not
merely secondary but false, and so definition yields to indiscriminate
feeling (_Gefühl ist alles_). In general the Rousseauistic reply to the
Cartesian attempt to identify thought and being is the identification
of being with emotion (_je sens donc je suis_).
The Mephistopheles of Goethe has often been taken as a symbol of
the iconoclastic and Voltairian side of the eighteenth century. The
rationalists assailed the traditional forms that imply a superrational
realm as mere “prejudice,” and, failing to find in insight a substitute
for these discarded forms, they succumbed in turn to the emotionalists.
A “reason” that is not grounded in insight will always seem to men
intolerably cold and negative and will prove unable to withstand the
assault of the primary passions. The reason of a Plato or an Aristotle
is on a different footing altogether because, as I have said, it
includes an element of inner perception. One may note here that the
difficulties of the present subject arise in no small degree from the
ambiguities that cluster about the word reason. It may not only mean
the imaginative insight[109] of a Plato and the abstract reasoning
of a Descartes but is often employed by the classicist himself as
a synonym of good sense. Good sense may be defined as a correct
perception of the ordinary facts of life and of their relation to one
another. It may be of very many grades, corresponding to the infinite
diversity of the facts to be perceived. A man may evidently have good
sense in dealing with one order of facts, and quite lack it in dealing
with some different order of facts. As the result of long observation
and experience of a multitude of minute relationships, of the facts
that ordinarily follow one another or coexist in some particular field,
a man’s knowledge of this field becomes at last, as it were, automatic
and unconscious. A sea captain for example acquires at last an
intuitive knowledge of the weather, the broker, an intuitive knowledge
of stocks. The good sense or practical judgment of the sea captain in
his particular calling and of the broker in his is likely to be greater
than that of less experienced persons. One cannot, however, assert that
a man’s good sense is always in strict ratio to his experience. Some
persons seem to have an innate gift for seeing things as they are,
others a gift equally innate for seeing things as they are not.
Again the field in which one displays one’s good sense or practical
judgment may fall primarily under either the human law or the natural
law, may belong in Aristotelian phrase to the domain either of the
probable or of the necessary. To take a homely illustration, a
man is free to choose the temperature of his bath, but only within
the limits of natural necessity--in this case the temperature at
which water freezes and that at which water boils. He will show his
practical judgment by choosing water that is neither too hot nor too
cold and this so far as he is concerned will be the golden mean. Here
as elsewhere the golden mean is nothing mechanical, but may vary
not only from individual to individual but in the same individual
according to his age, the state of his health, etc. In determining what
conforms to the golden mean or law of measure there must always be a
mediation between the particular instance and the general principle,
and it is here that intuition is indispensable. But even so there is
a centre of normal human experience, and the person who is too far
removed from it ceases to be probable. Aged persons may exist who find
bathing in ice-water beneficial, but they are not representative.
Now creative art, in distinct ratio to its dignity, deals not with
what may happen in isolated cases but with what happens according to
probability or necessity. It is this preoccupation with the universal
that as Aristotle says makes poetry a more serious and philosophical
thing than history. There enters indeed into true art an element of
vital novelty and surprise. But the more cultivated the audience to
which the creator addresses himself the more will it insist that the
surprise be not won at the expense of motivation. It will demand that
characters and incidents be not freakish, not too remote from the
facts that normally follow one another or coexist, whether in nature
or human nature. One needs, in short, to deal with both art and life
from some ethical centre. The centre with reference to which one has
good sense may be only the ethos of one’s time and country, but if
one’s good sense has, as in the case of the great poets, the support
of the imagination, it may pass beyond to something more abiding. “Of
Pope’s intellectual character,” says Dr. Johnson, “the constituent and
fundamental principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception
of consonance and propriety. He saw immediately of his own conceptions
what was to be chosen, and what to be rejected.” One may grant all this
and at the same time feel the difference between the “reason” of a Pope
and the reason of a Sophocles.
Good sense of the kind Dr. Johnson describes and decorum are not
strictly speaking synonymous. To be decorous not only must one have
a correct perception of what to do, but one must actually be able to
do it; and this often requires a long and difficult training. We have
seen that Rousseau’s spite against eighteenth-century Paris was largely
due to the fact that he had not acquired young enough the habits that
would have made it possible for him to conform to its convention.
“I affected,” says Rousseau with singular candor, “to despise the
politeness I did not know how to practice.” As a matter of fact he had
never adjusted himself to the decorum and good sense of any community.
His attitude towards life was fundamentally Bohemian. But a person who
was sensible and decorous according to the standards of some other
country might have emphasized the differences between his good sense
and decorum and the good sense and decorum of eighteenth-century Paris.
The opponents of the traditional order in the eighteenth century
were fond of introducing some Persian or Chinese to whom this order
seemed no true order at all but only “prejudice” or “abuse.” The
conclusion would seem to be that because the good sense and decorum
of one time and country do not coincide exactly with those of another
time and country, therefore good sense and decorum themselves have
in them no universal element, and are entirely implicated in the
shifting circumstances of time and place. But behind the ethos of
any particular country, that of Greece, for instance, there are, as
Antigone perceived, the “unwritten laws of heaven,” and something of
this permanent order is sure to shine through even the most imperfect
convention. Though no convention is final, though man and all he
establishes are subject to the law of change, it is therefore an
infinitely delicate and perilous task to break with convention. One
can make this break only in favor of insight; which is much as if one
should say that the only thing that may safely be opposed to common
sense is a commoner sense, or if one prefers, a common sense that is
becoming more and more imaginative. Even so, the wiser the man, one
may surmise, the less likely he will be to indulge in a violent and
theatrical rupture with his age, after the fashion of Rousseau. He will
like Socrates remember the counsel of the Delphian oracle to follow
the “usage of the city,”[110] and while striving to gain a firmer hold
upon the human law and to impose a more strenuous discipline upon his
ordinary self, he will so far as possible conform to what he finds
established. A student of the past cannot help being struck by the fact
that men are found scattered through different times and countries and
living under very different conventions who are nevertheless in virtue
of their insight plainly moving towards a common centre. So much so
that the best books of the world seem to have been written, as Emerson
puts it, by one all-wise, all-seeing gentleman. A curious circumstance
is that the writers who are most universal in virtue of their
imaginative reason or inspired good sense, are likewise as a rule the
writers who realized most intensely the life of their own age. No other
Spanish writer, for example, has so much human appeal as Cervantes,
and at the same time no other brings us so close to the heart of
sixteenth-century Spain. In the writings attributed to Confucius one
encounters, mixed up with much that is almost inconceivably remote from
us, maxims that have not lost their validity to-day; maxims that are
sure to be reaffirmed wherever and whenever men attain to the level of
humanistic insight. In the oldest Buddhist documents again one finds
along with a great deal that is very expressive of ancient India, and
thus quite foreign to our idiosyncrasy, a good sense which is even more
imaginative and inspired, and therefore more universal, than that of
Confucius, and which is manifested, moreover, on the religious rather
than on the humanistic level. We are dealing here with indubitable
facts, and should plant ourselves firmly upon them as against those who
would exaggerate either the constant or the variable elements in human
nature.
Enough has been said to show the ambiguities involved in the word
reason. Reason may mean the abstract and geometrical reason of a
Descartes, it may mean simply good sense, which may itself exist in
very many grades ranging from an intuitive mastery of some particular
field to the intuitive mastery of the ethos of a whole age, like the
reason of a Pope. Finally reason may be imaginative and be thereby
enabled to go beyond the convention of a particular time and country,
and lay hold in varying degrees on “the unwritten laws of heaven.” I
have already traced in some measure the process by which reason in
the eighteenth century had come to mean abstract and geometrical (or
as one may say Cartesian) reason or else unimaginative good sense.
Cartesian reason was on the one hand being pressed into the service
of science and its special order of perceptions; on the other hand it
was being used frequently in coöperation with an unimaginative good
sense to attack the traditional forms that imply a realm of insight
which is above both abstract reason and ordinary good sense. Men were
emboldened to use reason in this way because they were flushed not
only by the increasing mastery of man over nature through science,
but by the positive and anti-traditional method through which this
mastery had been won. Both those who proclaimed and those who denied a
superrational realm were at least agreed in holding that the faith in
any such realm was inseparable from certain traditional forms. Pascal,
for example, held not only that insight in religion is annexed to
the acceptance of certain dogmas--and this offended the new critical
spirit--but furthermore that insight could exist even in the orthodox
only by a special divine gift or grace, and this offended man’s
reviving confidence in himself. People were ready to applaud when a
Voltaire declared it was time to “take the side of human nature against
this sublime misanthropist.” The insight into the law of decorum on
which classicism must ultimately rest was in much the same way held
to be inseparable from the Græco-Roman tradition; and so the nature
of classical insight as a thing apart from any tradition tended to
be obscured in the endless bickerings of ancients and moderns. The
classical traditionalists, however, were less prone than the Christian
traditionalists (Jansenists, Jesuits and Protestants) to weaken their
cause still further by wrangling among themselves.
Inasmuch as both Christians and humanists failed to plant themselves
on the fact of insight, the insight came more and more to be
rejected along with the special forms from which it was deemed to be
inseparable. As a result of this rejection “reason” was left to cope
unaided with man’s impulses and expansive desires. Now Pascal saw
rightly that the balance of power in such a conflict between reason
and impulse was held by the imagination, and that if reason lacked
the support of insight the imagination would side with the expansive
desires and reason would succumb. Moreover the superrational insight,
or “heart” as Pascal calls it, that can alone keep man from being
thus overwhelmed, comes, as he holds, not through reason but through
grace and is at times actually opposed to reason. (“The heart,” he
says, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.”) Instead of
protesting against the asceticism of this view as the true positivist
would do, instead of insisting that reason and imagination may pull
together harmoniously in the service of insight, the romantic moralist
opposed to the superrational “heart” of the austere Christian a
subrational “heart,” and this involved an attempt to base morality
on the very element in human nature it is designed to restrain. The
positivist will plant himself first of all on the fact of insight and
will define it as the immediate perception of a something anterior
to both thought and feeling, that is known practically as a power of
control over both. The beautiful soul, as we have seen, has no place
for any such power in his scheme of things, but hopes to satisfy all
ethical elements simply by letting himself go. Rousseau (following
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) transforms conscience itself from an inner
check into an expansive emotion. While thus corrupting conscience
in its very essence he does not deny conscience. On the contrary he
grows positively rhapsodic over conscience and other similar words.
“Rousseau took wisdom from men’s souls,” says Joubert, “by talking to
them of virtue.” In short, Rousseau displays the usual dexterity of the
sophist in juggling with ill-defined general terms. If one calls for
sharp definition one is at once dismissed as a mere rationalist who
is retreating into a false secondary power from a warm immediacy. The
traditional distinctions regarding good and bad were thus discarded
at the same time that discredit was cast on the keen analysis with
which it would have been possible to build up new distinctions--all
in favor of an indiscriminate emotionalism. This discomfiture of both
tradition and analysis in the field of the human law would not have
been so easy if at the same time man’s active attention and effort had
not been concentrated more and more on the field of the natural law.
In that field imagination and the analytical intellect were actually
pulling together in the service of perception with the result that man
was constantly gaining in power and utility. Emotional romanticists and
scientific utilitarians have thus, in spite of their surface clashes,
cooperated during the past century in the dehumanizing of man.
It is not enough to say of the representatives of both sides of this
great naturalistic movement that they eliminate the veto power from
human nature while continuing to use the old words, like virtue and
conscience, that imply a veto power. We have seen that they actually
attack the veto power as synonymous with evil. The devil is conceived
as the spirit that always says no. A purely affirmative morality
is almost necessarily an emotional morality. If there is no region
of insight above the reason which is felt by the natural man as an
element of vital control, and if cold reason, reason unsupported by
insight, never has done anything illustrious, as Rousseau truly says,
it follows that the only way to put driving power behind reason is to
turn virtue into a passion,--a passion that differs from other passions
merely in its greater imperiousness. For the beautiful soul virtue,
as we have seen in the case of Robespierre, is not only a tender,
imperious and voluptuous passion but even an intoxication. “I was,
if not virtuous,” says Rousseau, “at least intoxicated with virtue.”
In its extreme manifestations romantic morality is indeed only one
aspect, and surely the most singular aspect, of the romantic cult of
intoxication. No student of romanticism can fail to be struck by its
pursuit of delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake. It
is important to see how all these things are closely related to one
another and how they all derive from the attempt to put life on an
emotional basis. To rest conscience, for example, on emotion is to rest
it on what is always changing, not only from man to man but from moment
to moment in the same man. “If,” as Shelley says, “nought is, but that
it feels itself to be,” it will feel itself to be very different things
at different times. No part of man is exempt from the region of flux
and change. There is, as James himself points out, a kinship between
such a philosophy of pure motion and vertigo. Faust after all is only
consistent when having identified the spirit that says no, which is
the true voice of conscience, with the devil, he proceeds to dedicate
himself to vertigo (_dem Taumel weih’ ich mich_). Rousseau also, as
readers of the “Confessions” will remember, deliberately courted
giddiness by gazing down on a waterfall from the brink of a precipice
(making sure first that the railing on which he leaned was good and
strong). This naturalistic dizziness became epidemic among the Greeks
at the critical moment of their break with traditional standards.
“Whirl is King,” cried Aristophanes, “having driven out Zeus.” The
modern sophist is even more a votary of the god Whirl than the Greek,
for he has added to the mobility of an intellect that has no support in
either tradition or insight the mobility of feeling. Many Rousseauists
were, like Hazlitt, attracted to the French Revolution by its “grand
whirling movements.”
Even more significant than the cult of vertigo is the closely allied
cult of intoxication. “Man being reasonable,” says Byron, with true
Rousseauistic logic, “must therefore get drunk. The best of life is
but intoxication.” The subrational and impulsive self of the man who
has got drunk is not only released from the surveillance of reason
in any sense of the word, but his imagination is at the same tune
set free from the limitations of the real. If many Rousseauists have
been rightly accused of being “lovers of delirium,” that is because
in delirium the fancy is especially free to wander wild in its own
empire of chimeras. To compose a poem, as Coleridge is supposed to have
composed “Kubla Khan,” in an opium dream without any participation of
his rational self is a triumph of romantic art. “I should have taken
more opium when I wrote it,” said Friedrich Schlegel in explanation of
the failure of his play “Alarcos.” What more specially concerns our
present topic is the carrying over of this subrational “enthusiasm”
into the field of ethical values, and this calls for certain careful
distinctions. Genuine religion--whether genuine Christianity or genuine
Buddhism--is plainly unfriendly in the highest degree to every form of
intoxication. Buddhism, for example, not only prohibits the actual use
of intoxicants but it pursues implacably all the subtler intoxications
of the spirit. The attitude of the humanist towards intoxication is
somewhat more complex. He recognizes how deep in man’s nature is the
craving for some blunting of the sharp edge of his consciousness and
at least a partial escape from reason and reality; and so he often
makes a place on the recreative side of life for such moments of escape
even if attained with the aid of wine. _Dulce est desipere in loco._
Pindar, who displays so often in his verse the high seriousness of the
ethical imagination, is simply observing the decorum of the occasion
when he celebrates in a song for the end of a feast “the time when the
wearisome cares of men have vanished from their reasons and on a wide
sea of golden wealth we are all alike voyaging to some visionary shore.
He that is penniless is then rich, and even they that are wealthy find
their hearts expanding, when they are smitten by the arrows of the
vine.” The true Greek, one scarcely needs add, put his final emphasis,
as befitted a child of Apollo, not on intoxication but on the law of
measure and sobriety--on preserving the integrity of his mind, to
render literally the Greek word for the virtue that he perhaps prized
the most.[111] One must indeed remember that alongside the Apollonian
element in Greek life is the orgiastic or Dyonisiac element. But when
Euripides sides imaginatively with the frenzy of Dionysus, as he does
in his “Bacchae,” though ostensibly preaching moderation, we may affirm
that he is falling away from what is best in the spirit of Hellas and
revealing a kinship with the votaries of the god Whirl. The cult of
intoxication has as a matter of fact appeared in all times and places
where men have sought to get the equivalent of religious vision and the
sense of oneness that it brings without rising above the naturalistic
level. True religious vision is a process of concentration, the result
of the imposition of the veto power upon the expansive desires of the
ordinary self. The various naturalistic simulations of this vision
are, on the contrary, expansive, the result of a more or less complete
escape from the veto power, whether won with the aid of intoxicants or
not. The emotional romanticists from Rousseau down have left no doubt
as to the type of vision they represented. Rousseau dilates with a sort
of fellow feeling on the deep potations that went on in the taverns
of patriarchal Geneva.[112] Renan looks with disfavor on those who
are trying to diminish drunkenness among the common people. He merely
asks that this drunkenness “be gentle, amiable, accompanied by moral
sentiments.” Perhaps this side of the movement is best summed up in the
following passage of William James: “The sway of alcohol over mankind
is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties
of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry
criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and
says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the
great exciter of the _Yes_ function in man. It brings its votary from
the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the
moment one with truth.”[113]
The American distiller who named one of his brands “Golden Dream
Whiskey” was evidently too modest. If an adept in the new psychology he
might have set up as a pure idealist, as the opener up of an especially
radiant pathway to the “truth.”
The primitivist then attacks sober discrimination as an obstacle both
to warm immediacy of feeling and to unity. He tends to associate the
emotional unity that he gains through intoxication with the unity of
instinct which he so admires in the world of the subrational. “The
romantic character,” says Ricarda Huch, “is more exposed to waste
itself in debaucheries than any other; for only in intoxication,
whether of love or wine, when the one half of its being, consciousness,
is lulled to sleep, can it enjoy the bliss for which it envies every
beast--the bliss of feeling itself one.”[114] The desires of the
animal, however, work within certain definite limits. They are not,
like those of the primitivist, inordinate, the explanation being that
they are less stimulated than the desires of the primitivist by the
imagination. Even if he gets rid of intellect and moral effort, the
primitivist cannot attain the unity of instinct because he remains too
imaginative; at the same time he proclaims and proclaims rightly that
the imagination is the great unifying power--the power that can alone
save us from viewing things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.”
We should attend carefully at this point for we are coming to the
heart of the great romantic sophism. The Rousseauist does not attain
to the unity of the man whose impulses and desires are controlled and
disciplined to some ethical centre. He does not, in spite of all his
praise of the unconscious and of the “sublime animals,” attain to the
unity of instinct. In what sense then may he be said to attain unity?
The obvious reply is that he attains unity only in dreamland. For
the nature to which he would return, one cannot repeat too often, is
nothing real, but a mere nostalgic straining of the imagination away
from the real. It is only in dreamland that one can rest unity on the
expansive forces of personality that actually divide not only one
individual from another but the same individual from himself. It is
only in dreamland that, in the absence of both inner and outer control,
“all things” will “flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” Such a unity
will be no more than a dream unity, even though one term it the ideal
and sophisticate in its favor all the traditional terms of religion and
morality. A question that forces itself at every stage upon the student
of this movement is: _What is the value of unity without reality?_
For two things are equally indubitable: first, that romanticism on
the philosophical side, is a protest in the name of unity against the
disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist; second,
that what the primitivist wants in exchange for analysis is not reality
but illusion. Rousseau who inclines like other æsthetes to identify the
true with the beautiful was, we are told, wont to exclaim: “There is
nothing beautiful save that which is not”; a saying to be matched with
that of “La Nouvelle Héloïse”: “The land of chimeras is alone worthy
of habitation.” Similar utterances might be multiplied from French,
English, and German romanticists.[115] To be sure, the word “reality”
is perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain recent
votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have promised us that if
we surrender to the flux we shall have a “vision” not only of unity
but also of reality; and so they have transferred to the cult of their
divinity all the traditional language of religion.
We do not, however, need for the present to enter into a discussion as
to the nature of reality, but simply to stick to strict psychological
observation. From this point of view it is not hard to see that the
primitivist makes his primary appeal not to man’s need for unity and
reality but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this need
is in his tale (“The Island”) of a ship’s crew that overpowered its
officers and then set sail for Otaheite; what impelled these Arcadian
mutineers was not the desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life
with its rigid conventions, but
The wish--which ages have not yet subdued
In man--to have no master save his mood.
Now to have no master save one’s mood is to be wholly temperamental.
In Arcadia--the ideal of romantic morality--those who are wholly
temperamental unite in sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to
consider more fully what this triumph of temperament means in the real
world.