ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE REAL
The fundamental thing in Rousseauistic morality is not, as we have
seen, the assertion that man is naturally good, but the denial of
the “civil war in the cave.” Though this denial is not complete in
Rousseau himself, nothing is more certain than that his whole tendency
is away from this form of dualism. The beautiful soul does the right
thing not as a result of effort, but spontaneously, unconsciously and
almost inevitably. In fact the beautiful soul can scarcely be said to
be a voluntary agent at all. “Nature” acts in him and for him. This
minimizing of moral struggle and deliberation and choice, this drift
towards a naturalistic fatalism, as it may be termed, is a far more
significant thing in Rousseau than his optimism. One may as a matter
of fact eliminate dualism in favor of nature and at the same time look
on nature as evil. This is precisely what one is likely to do if one
sees no alternative to temperamental living, while judging those who
live temperamentally not by their “ideal,” that is by their feeling of
their own loveliness, but by what they actually do. One will become
a realist in the sense that came to be attached to this word during
the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rousseau himself is often
realistic in this sense when he interrupts his Arcadian visions to
tell us what actually occurred. In the “Confessions,” as I have said,
passages that recall Lamartine alternate with passages that recall
Zola, and the transition from one type of passage to the other is
often disconcertingly sudden. In reading these realistic passages of
Rousseau we are led to reflect that his “nature” is not, in practice,
so remote from Taine’s nature as might at first appear. “What we
call _nature_,” says Taine, “is this brood of secret passions, often
maleficent, generally vulgar, always blind, which tremble and fret
within us, ill-covered by the cloak of decency and reason under which
we try to disguise them; we think we lead them and they lead us; we
think our actions our own, they are theirs.”[116]
The transition from an optimistic to a pessimistic naturalism can be
followed with special clearness in the stages by which the sentimental
drama of the eighteenth century passes over into the realistic drama of
a later period. Petit de Julleville contrasts the beginning and the end
of this development as follows: “[In the eighteenth century] to please
the public you had to say to it: ‘You are all at least at bottom good,
virtuous, full of feeling. Let yourselves go, follow your instincts;
listen to nature and you will do the right thing spontaneously.’ How
changed times are! Nowadays[117] any one who wishes to please, to be
read and petted and admired, to pass for great and become very rich,
should address men as follows: ‘You are a vile pack of rogues, and
profligates, you have neither faith nor law; you are impelled by your
instincts alone and these instincts are ignoble. Do not try though to
mend matters, that would be of no use at all.’”[118]
The connecting link between these different forms of the drama is
naturalistic fatalism, the suppression of moral responsibility for
either man’s goodness or badness. Strictly speaking, the intrusion of
the naturalistic element into the realm of ethical values and the
subversion by it of deliberation and choice and of the normal sequence
of moral cause and effect is felt from the human point of view not as
fate at all, but as chance. Emotional romanticism joins at this point
with other forms of romanticism, which all show a proclivity to prefer
to strict motivation, to probability in the Aristotelian sense, what is
fortuitous and therefore wonderful. This is only another way of saying
that the romanticist is moving away from the genuinely dramatic towards
melodrama. Nothing is easier than to establish the connection between
emotional romanticism and the prodigious efflorescence of melodrama,
the irresponsible quest for thrills, that has marked the past century.
What perhaps distinguishes this movement from any previous one is the
attempt to invest what is at bottom a melodramatic view of life with
philosophic and even religious significance. By suppressing the “civil
war in the cave” one strikes at the very root of true drama. It does
not then much matter from the dramatic point of view whether the burden
of responsibility for good or evil of which you have relieved the
individual is shifted upon “nature” or society. Shelley, for example,
puts the blame for evil on society. “Prometheus Unbound,” in which he
has developed his conception, is, judged as a play, only an ethereal
melodrama. The unaccountable collapse of Zeus, a monster of unalloyed
and unmotivated badness, is followed by the gushing forth in man of
an equally unalloyed and unmotivated goodness. The whole genius of
Hugo, again, as I have said in speaking of his use of antithesis, is
melodramatic. His plays may be described as parvenu melodramas. They
abound in every variety of startling contrast and strange happening,
the whole pressed into the service of “problems” manifold and even of a
philosophy of history. At the same time the poverty of ethical insight
and true dramatic motivation is dissimulated under profuse lyrical
outpourings and purple patches of local color. His Hernani actually
glories in not being a responsible agent, but an “unchained and fatal
force,”[119] and so more capable of striking astonishment into himself
and others. Yet the admirers of Hugo would not only promote him to the
first rank of poets, but would have us share his own belief that he is
a seer and a prophet.
It may be objected that the great dramatists of the past exalt this
power of fate and thus diminish moral responsibility. But the very
sharpest distinction must be drawn between the subrational fate of the
emotional romanticist and the superrational fate of Greek tragedy.
The fate of Æschylean tragedy, for instance, so far from undermining
moral responsibility rather reinforces it. It is felt to be the
revelation of a moral order of which man’s experience at any particular
moment is only an infinitesimal fragment. It does not seem, like the
subrational fate of the emotional romanticist, the intrusion into the
human realm of an alien power whether friendly or unfriendly. This
point might be established by a study of the so-called fate drama in
Germany (_Schicksaltragödie_), which, though blackly pessimistic, is
closely related to the optimistic sentimental drama of the eighteenth
century.[120] The German fate drama is in its essence ignoble because
its characters are specimens of sensitive morality--incapable, that is,
of opposing a firm human purpose to inner impulse or outer impression.
The fate that thus wells up from the depths of nature and overwhelms
their wills is not only malign and ironical, but as Grillparzer says,
makes human deeds seem only “throws of the dice in the blind night of
chance.”[121] It would be easy to follow similar conceptions of fate
down through later literature at least to the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Some of the earlier exponents of the sentimental drama, like Diderot,
were not so certain as one might expect that the discarding of
traditional decorum in favor of “nature” would result practically in a
reign of pure loveliness. At one moment Diderot urges men to get rid
of the civil war in the cave in order that they may be Arcadian, like
the savages of the South Sea, but at other moments--as in “Rameau’s
Nephew”--he shows a somewhat closer grip on the problem of what will
actually come to pass when a man throws off the conventions of a highly
organized civilization and sets out to live temperamentally. Diderot
sees clearly that he will be that least primitive of all beings, the
Bohemian. Rameau’s nephew, in his irresponsibility and emotional
instability, in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of his mood, anticipates
all the romantic Bohemians and persons of “artistic temperament” who
were to afflict the nineteenth century. But he is more than a mere
æsthete. At moments we can discern in him the first lineaments of the
superman, who knows no law save the law of might. One should recollect
that the actual influence of Diderot in France fell in the second
rather than in the first half of the nineteenth century--was upon the
realists rather than upon the romanticists. The same men that had a
cult for Diderot admired the Vautrins and the Rastignacs of Balzac and
the Julien Sorel of Stendhal. These characters are little Napoleons.
They live temperamentally in the midst of a highly organized society,
but they set aside its conventions of right and wrong in favor, not of
æsthetic enjoyment, but of power.
The ideal of romantic morality, as was seen in the last chapter,
is altruism. The real, it should be clear from the examples I have
been citing, is always egoism. But egoism may assume very different
forms. As to the main forms of egoism in men who have repudiated
outer control without acquiring self-control we may perhaps revive
profitably the old Christian classification of the three lusts--the
lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.
Goethe indeed may be said to have treated these three main ways of
being temperamental in three of his early characters--the lust of
knowledge in “Faust,” the lust of sensation in “Werther,” and the
lust of power in “Götz.” If we view life solely from the naturalistic
level and concern ourselves solely with the world of action, we are
justified in neglecting, like Hobbes, the other lusts and putting
supreme emphasis on the lust for power.[122] Professor F.J. Mather,
Jr., has distinguished between “hard” and “soft” sentimentalists.[123]
His distinction might perhaps be brought more closely into line with
my own distinctions if I ventured to coin a word and to speak of hard
and soft temperamentalists. The soft temperamentalist will prove unable
to cope in the actual world with the hard temperamentalist, and is
very likely to become his tool. Balzac has very appropriately made
Lucien de Rubempré, the romantic poet and a perfect type of a soft
temperamentalism, the tool of Vautrin, the superman.
Here indeed is the supreme opposition between the ideal and the real
in romantic morality. The ideal to which Rousseau invites us is either
the primitivistic anarchy of the “Second Discourse,” in which egoism is
tempered by “natural pity,” or else a state such as is depicted in the
“Social Contract,” in which egoism is held in check by a disinterested
“general will.” The preliminary to achieving either of these ideals is
that the traditional checks on human nature should be removed. But in
exact proportion as this programme of emancipation is carried out what
emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but
the ego and its fundamental will to power. Give a bootblack half the
universe, according to Carlyle, and he will soon be quarreling with
the owner of the other half. He will if he is a very temperamental
bootblack. Perhaps indeed all other evils in life may be reduced to the
failure to check that something in man that is reaching out for more
and ever for more. In a society in which the traditional inhibitions
are constantly growing weaker, the conflict I have just sketched
between the ideal and the real is becoming more and more acute. The
soft temperamentalists are overflowing with beautiful professions
of brotherly love, and at the same time the hard temperamentalists
are reaching out for everything in sight; and inasmuch as the hard
temperamentalists operate not in dreamland, but in the real world,
they are only too plainly setting the tone. Very often, of course,
the same temperamentalist has his hard and his soft side. The triumph
of egoism over altruism in the relations between man and man is even
more evident in the relations between nation and nation. The egoism
that results from the inbreeding of temperament on a national scale
runs in the case of the strong nations into imperialism.[124] We have
not reflected sufficiently on the fact that the soft temperamentalist
Rousseau is more than any other one person the father of _Kultur_;[125]
and that the exponents of Kultur in our own day have been revealed as
the hardest of hard temperamentalists.
To understand the particular craving that is met by Rousseauistic
idealism one would need to go with some care into the psychology of
the half-educated man. The half-educated man may be defined as the man
who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient
to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not
sufficient to acquire the new standards that come with a more thorough
cultivation. It was pointed out long ago that the characteristic of the
half-educated man is that he is incurably restless; that he is filled
with every manner of desire. In contrast with him the uncultivated man,
the peasant, let us say, and the man of high cultivation have few and
simple desires. Thus Socrates had fewer and simpler desires than the
average Athenian. But what is most noteworthy about the half-educated
man is not simply that he harbors many desires and is therefore
incurably restless, but that these desires are so often incompatible.
He craves various good things, but is not willing to pay the price--not
willing to make the necessary renunciations. He pushes to an extreme
what is after all a universal human proclivity--the wish to have one’s
cake and eat it too. Thus, while remaining on the naturalistic level,
he wishes to have blessings that accrue only to those who rise to the
humanistic or religious levels. He wishes to live in “a universe with
the lid off,” to borrow a happy phrase from the pragmatist, and at the
same time to enjoy the peace and brotherhood that are the fruits of
restraint. The moral indolence of the Rousseauist is such that he is
unwilling to adjust himself to the truth of the human law; and though
living naturalistically, he is loath to recognize that what actually
prevails on the naturalistic level is the law of cunning and the law
of force. He thus misses the reality of both the human and the natural
law and in the pursuit of a vague Arcadian longing falls into sheer
unreality. I am indeed overstating the case so far as Rousseau is
concerned. He makes plain in the “Emile” that the true law of nature
is not the law of love but the law of force. Emile is to be released
from the discipline of the human law and given over to the discipline
of nature; and this means in practice that he will have “to bow his
neck beneath the hard yoke of physical necessity.” In so far the
“nature” of Emile is no Arcadian dream. Where the Arcadian dreaming
begins is when Rousseau assumes that an Emile who has learned the
lesson of force from Nature herself, will not pass along this lesson
to others, whether citizens of his own or some other country, but will
rather display in his dealings with them an ideal fraternity. In the
early stages of the naturalistic movement, in Hobbes and Shaftesbury,
for example, egoism and altruism, the idea of power and the idea of
sympathy, are more sharply contrasted than they are in Rousseau and the
later romanticists. Shaftesbury assumes in human nature an altruistic
impulse or will to brotherhood that will be able to cope successfully
with the will to power that Hobbes declares to be fundamental. Many of
the romanticists, as we have seen, combine the cult of power with the
cult of brotherhood. Hercules, as in Shelley’s poem, is to bow down
before Prometheus, the lover of mankind. The extreme example, however,
is probably William Blake. He proclaims himself of the devil’s party,
he glorifies a free expansion of energy, he looks upon everything that
restricts this expansion as synonymous with evil. At the same time he
pushes his exaltation of sympathy to the verge of the grotesque.[126]
Such indeed is the jumble of incompatibles in Blake that he would
rest an illimitable compassion on the psychology of the superman. For
nothing is more certain than that the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
is among other things a fairly complete anticipation of Nietzsche.
The reasons are worth considering why the idea of power and the idea
of sympathy which Blake and so many other romanticists hoped to unite
have once more come to seem antipodal, why in the late stages of the
movement one finds a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy, just as in its early
stages one finds a Hobbes and a Shaftesbury. It is plain, first of
all, that what brought the two cults together for a time was their
common hatred of the past. With the triumph over the past fairly
complete, the incompatibility of power and sympathy became increasingly
manifest. Nietzsche’s attitude is that of a Prometheus whose sympathy
for mankind has changed to disgust on seeing the use that they are
actually making of their emancipation. Humanitarian sympathy seemed
to him to be tending not merely to a subversion, but to an inversion
of values, to a positive preference for the trivial and the ignoble.
He looked with special loathing on that side of the movement that is
symbolized in its homage to the ass. The inevitable flying apart of
power and sympathy was further hastened in Nietzsche and others by
the progress of evolution. Darwinism was dissipating the Arcadian
mist through which nature had been viewed by Rousseau and his early
followers. The gap is wide between Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and
claw” and the tender and pitiful nature of Wordsworth.[127] Nietzsche’s
preaching of ruthlessness is therefore a protest against the sheer
unreality of those who wish to be natural and at the same time
sympathetic. But how are we to get a real scale of values to oppose to
an indiscriminate sympathy? It is here that Nietzsche shows that he
is caught in the same fatal coil of naturalism as the humanitarian.
He accepts the naturalistic corruption of conscience which underlies
all other naturalistic corruptions. “The will to overcome an emotion,”
he says, “is ultimately only the will of another or of several other
emotions.”[128] All he can do with this conception of conscience is
to set over against the humanitarian suppression of values a scale
of values based on force and not a true scale of values based on the
degree to which one imposes or fails to impose on one’s temperamental
self a human law of vital control. The opposition between a Nietzsche
and a Tolstoy is therefore not specially significant; it is only that
between the hard and the soft temperamentalist. To be sure Nietzsche
can on occasion speak very shrewdly about the evils that have resulted
from temperamentalism--especially from the passion for an untrammeled
self-expression. But the superman himself is a most authentic
descendant of the original genius in whom we first saw this passion
dominant. The imagination of the superman, spurning every centre of
control, traditional or otherwise, so coöperates with his impulses
and desires as to give them “infinitude,” that is so as to make
them reach out for more and ever for more. The result is a frenzied
romanticism.[129]
“Proportionateness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves,”
says Nietzsche. “Our itching is really the itching for the infinite,
the immeasurable.” How the humanitarian loses proportionateness is
plain; it is by his readiness to sacrifice to sympathy the ninety
per cent or so of the virtues that imply self-control. The superman
would scarcely seem to redress the balance by getting rid of the same
restraining virtues in favor of power. He simply oscillates wildly
from the excess of which he is conscious in others or in himself into
the opposite excess, at imminent peril in either case to the ethical
basis of civilization. The patterns or models that the past had set
up for imitation and with reference to which one might rein in his
lusts and impose upon them proportionateness are rejected by every
type of romantic expansionist, not only as Nietzsche says, because
they do not satisfy the yearning for the infinite, but also, as we
have seen, because they do not satisfy the yearning for unity and
immediacy. Now so far as the forms of the eighteenth century were
concerned the romantic expansionist had legitimate grounds for protest.
But because the rationalism and artificial decorum of that period
failed to satisfy, he goes on to attack the analytical intellect
and decorum in general and this attack is entirely illegitimate. It
may be affirmed on the contrary that the power by which we multiply
distinctions is never so necessary as in an individualistic age, an age
that has broken with tradition on the ground that it wishes to be more
imaginative and immediate. There are various ways of being imaginative
and immediate, and analysis is needed, not to build up some abstract
system but to discriminate between the actual data of experience and
so to determine which one of these ways it is expedient to follow if
one wishes to become wise and happy. It is precisely at such moments
of individualistic break with the past that the sophist stands ready
to juggle with general terms, and the only protection against such
juggling is to define these terms with the aid of the most unflinching
analysis. Thus Bergson would have us believe that there are in France
two main types of philosophy, a rationalistic type that goes back to
Descartes and an intuitive type that goes back to Pascal,[130] and
gives us to understand that, inasmuch as he is an intuitionist, he
is in the line of descent from Pascal. Monstrous sophistries lurk in
this simple assertion, sophistries which if they go uncorrected are
enough to wreck civilization. The only remedy is to define the word
intuition, to discriminate practically and by their fruits between
subrational and superrational intuition. When analyzed and defined in
this way subrational intuition will be found to be associated with
vital impulse (_élan vital_) and superrational intuition with a power
of vital control (_frein vital_) over this impulse; and furthermore
it will be clear that this control must be exercised if men are to
be drawn towards a common centre, not in dreamland, but in the real
world. So far then from its being true that the man who analyzes must
needs see things in disconnection dead and spiritless, it is only by
analysis that he is, in an individualistic age, put on the pathway of
true unity, and also of the rôle of the imagination in achieving this
unity. For there is need to discriminate between the different types
of imagination no less than between the different types of intuition.
One will find through such analysis that the centre of normal human
experience that is to serve as a check on impulse (so far at least as
it is something distinct from the mere convention of one’s age and
time) can be apprehended only with the aid of the imagination. This is
only another way of saying that the reality that is set above one’s
ordinary self is not a fixed absolute but can be glimpsed, if at all,
only through a veil of illusion and is indeed inseparable from the
illusion. This realm of insight cannot be finally formulated for the
simple reason that it is anterior to formulæ. It must therefore from
the point of view of an intellect it transcends seem infinite though in
a very different sense from the outer infinite of expansive desire.
This inner or human infinite, so far from being incompatible with
decorum, is the source of true decorum. True decorum is only the
pulling back and disciplining of impulse to the proportionateness that
has been perceived with the aid of what one may term the ethical or
generalizing imagination. To dismiss like the romantic expansionist
everything that limits or restricts the lust of knowledge or of power
or of sensation as arbitrary and artificial is to miss true decorum and
at the same time to sink, as a Greek would say, from ethos to pathos.
If one is to avoid this error one must, as Hamlet counsels, “in the
very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of passion, acquire
and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.” This is probably
the best of all modern definitions of decorum simply because it is the
most experimental. In general all that has been said about the ethical
imagination is not to be taken as a fine-spun theory, but as an attempt
however imperfect to give an account of actual experience.
One may report from observation another trait of truly ethical art, art
which is at once imaginative and decorous. It is not merely intense,
as art that is imaginative at the expense of decorum may very well
be,[131] it has a restrained and humanized intensity--intensity on a
background of calm. The presence of the ethical imagination whether in
art or life[132] is always known as an element of calm.
In art that has the ethical quality, and I am again not setting up a
metaphysical theory but reporting from observation, the calm that comes
from imaginative insight into the universal is inextricably blended
with an element of uniqueness--with a something that belongs to a
particular time and place and individual. The truth to the universal,
as Aristotle would say, gives the work verisimilitude and the truth
to the particular satisfies man’s deep-seated craving for novelty;
so that the best art unites the probable with the wonderful. But
the probable, one cannot insist too often, is won no less than the
wonderful with the aid of the imagination and so is of the very soul
of art. The romanticist who is ready to sacrifice the probable to the
wonderful and to look on the whole demand for verisimilitude as an
academic superstition is prone to assume that he has a monopoly of
soul and imagination. But the word soul is at least in as much need
of Socratic definition as the word intuition. It is possible, for
example, with the aid of the ethical imagination so to partake of the
ultimate element of calm as to rise to the religious level. The man who
has risen to this level has a soul, but it is a soul of peace. Both
soul and imagination are also needed to achieve the fine adjustment
and mediation of the humanist. It is not enough, however, to have a
religious or a humanistic soul if one is to be a creator or even a
fully equipped critic of art. For art rests primarily not on ethical
but æsthetic perception. This perception itself varies widely according
to the art involved. One may, for instance, be musically perceptive and
at the same time lack poetic perception. To be a creator in any art
one must possess furthermore the technique of this art--something that
is more or less separable from its “soul” in any sense of the word. It
is possible to put a wildly romantic soul into art, as has often been
done in the Far East, and at the same time to be highly conventional
or traditional in one’s technique. Writers like Mérimée, Renan, and
Maupassant again are faithful in the main to the technique of French
prose that was worked out during the classical period, but combine with
this technique an utterly unclassical “soul.”
Rules, especially perhaps rules as to what to avoid, may be of aid in
acquiring technique, but are out of place in dealing with the soul of
art. There one passes from rules to principles. The only rule, if we
are to achieve art that has an ethical soul, is to view life with some
degree of imaginative wholeness. Art that has technique without soul
in either the classical or romantic sense, and so fails either to
inspire elevation or awaken wonder, is likely to be felt as a barren
virtuosity. The pseudo-classicist was often unduly minute in the rules
he laid down for technique or outer form, as one may say, and then
ignored the ethical imagination or inner form entirely, or else set up
as a substitute mere didacticism. Since pseudo-classic work of this
type plainly lacked soul and imagination, and since the romanticist
felt and felt rightly that he himself had a soul and imagination, he
concluded wrongly that soul and imagination are romantic monopolies.
Like the pseudo-classicist, he inclines to identify high seriousness
in art, something that can only come from the exercise of the ethical
imagination at its best, with mere preaching, only he differs from
the pseudo-classicist in insisting that preaching should be left to
divines. One should insist, on the contrary, that the mark of genuinely
ethical art, art that is highly serious, is that it is free from
preaching. Sophocles is more ethical than Euripides for the simple
reason that he views life with more imaginative wholeness. At the same
time he is much less given to preaching than Euripides. He does not, as
FitzGerald says, interrupt the action and the exhibition of character
through action in order to “jaw philosophy.”
It is not unusual for the modern artist to seek, like Euripides,
to dissimulate the lack of true ethical purpose in his work by
agitating various problems. But problems come and go, whereas human
nature abides. One may agitate problems without number, and yet
lack imaginative insight into the abiding element in human nature.
Moreover, not being of the soul of art, the problem that one agitates
is in danger of being a clogging intellectualism. Furthermore to seek
in problems an equivalent for the definition and purpose that the
ethical imagination alone can give is to renew, often in an aggravated
form, the neo-classical error. The moralizing of the pseudo-classic
dramatist, even though dull and misplaced, was usually sound enough in
itself; whereas the moralizing of those who seek nowadays to use the
stage as a pulpit, resting as it does on false humanitarian postulates,
is in itself dubious. The problem play succeeds not infrequently in
being at once dull and indecent.
The problem play is often very superior in technique or outer form
to the earlier romantic drama, but it still suffers from the same
lack of inner form, inasmuch as its social purpose cannot take the
place of true human purpose based on imaginative insight into the
universal. The lack of inner form in so much modern drama and art in
general can be traced to the original unsoundness of the break with
pseudo-classic formalism. To a pseudo-classic art that lacked every
kind of perceptiveness the Rousseauist opposed æsthetic perceptiveness,
and it is something, one must admit, thus to have discovered the
senses. But to his æsthetic perceptiveness he failed, as I have
already said, to add ethical perceptiveness because of his inability
to distinguish between ethical perceptiveness and mere didacticism,
and so when asked to put ethical purpose into art he replied that
art should be pursued for its own sake (_l’art pour l’art_) and
that “beauty is its own excuse for being.” One should note here
the transformation that this pure æstheticism brought about in the
meaning of the word beauty itself. For the Greek beauty resided in
proportion,[133] and proportion can be attained only with the aid of
the ethical imagination. With the elimination of the ethical element
from the soul of art the result is an imagination that is free to
wander wild with the emancipated emotions. The result is likely to be
art in which a lively æsthetic perceptiveness is not subordinated to
any whole, art that is unstructural, however it may abound in vivid and
picturesque details; and a one-sided art of this kind the romanticist
does not hesitate to call beautiful. “If we let the reason sleep and
are content to watch a succession of dissolving views,” says Mr. Elton
of Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam,” “the poem is seen at once to overflow
with beauty.”[134] Mere reason is not strictly speaking a sufficient
remedy for this unstructural type of “beauty.” Thus Chateaubriand’s
reason is on the side of proportion and all the classical virtues but
his imagination is not (and we cannot repeat too often that it is what
a man is imaginatively and not what he preaches that really counts).
Instead of siding with his reason and aiding it to ethical perception
Chateaubriand’s imagination is the free playmate of his emotions. “What
did I care for all these futilities” (i.e. his functions as cabinet
minister), he exclaims, “I who never cared for anything except for my
dreams, and even then on condition that they should last only for a
night.” When a man has once spoken in that vein sensible people will
pay little heed to what he preaches; for they will be certain that the
driving power of his work and personality is elsewhere. The imagination
holds the balance of power between the reason and the perceptions
of sense, and Chateaubriand’s imagination is plainly on the side of
sensuous adventure. This vagabondage of the imagination appears
especially in his imagistic trend, in his pursuit of the descriptive
detail for its own sake. To set out like Chateaubriand to restore the
monarchy and the Christian religion and instead to become the founder
of “_l’école des images à tout prix_” is an especially striking form of
the contrast in romantic morality between the ideal and the real.
The attempt that we have been studying to divorce beauty from ethics
led in the latter part of the eighteenth century to the rise of a
nightmare subject,--æsthetics. Shaftesbury indeed, as we have seen
already, anticipates the favorite romantic doctrine that beauty is
truth and truth beauty, which means in practice to rest both truth and
beauty upon a fluid emotionalism. Thus to deal æsthetically with truth
is an error of the first magnitude, but it is also an error, though
a less serious one, to see only the æsthetic element in beauty. For
beauty to be complete must have not only æsthetic perceptiveness but
order and proportion; and this brings us back again to the problem
of the ethical imagination and the permanent model or pattern with
reference to which it seeks to impose measure and proportion upon
sensuous perception and expansive desire. We should not hesitate to
say that beauty loses most of its meaning when divorced from ethics
even though every æsthete in the world should arise and denounce us as
philistines. To rest beauty upon feeling as the very name æsthetics
implies, is to rest it upon what is ever shifting. Nor can we escape
from this endless mobility with the aid of physical science, for
physical science does not itself rise above the naturalistic flux.
After eliminating from beauty the permanent pattern and the ethical
imagination with the aid of which it is perceived, a man will be ready
to term beautiful anything that reflects his ordinary or temperamental
self. Diderot is a sentimentalist and so he sees as much beauty in the
sentimentalist Richardson as in Homer. If a man is psychically restless
he will see beauty only in motion. The Italian futurist Marinetti says
that for him a rushing motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of
Samothrace. A complete sacrifice of the principle of repose in beauty
(which itself arises from the presence of the ethical imagination)
to the suggesting of motion such as has been seen in certain recent
schools, runs practically into a mixture of charlatanism and madness.
“He that is giddy thinks the world goes round,” says Shakespeare,
and the exponents of certain ultra-modern movements in painting are
simply trying to paint their inner giddiness. As a matter of fact the
pretension of the æsthete to have a purely personal vision of beauty
and then treat as a philistine every one who does not accept it, is
intolerable. Either beauty cannot be defined at all or we must say
that only is beautiful which seems so to the right kind of man, and
the right kind of man is plainly he whose total attitude towards life
is correct, who views life with some degree of imaginative wholeness,
which is only another way of saying that the problem of beauty is
inseparable from the ethical problem. In an absolute sense nobody can
see life steadily and see it whole; but we may at least move towards
steadiness and wholeness. The æsthete is plainly moving in an opposite
direction; he is becoming more and more openly a votary of the god
Whirl. His lack of inner form is an error not of æsthetics but of
general philosophy.
The romantic imagination, the imagination that is not drawn back to
any ethical centre and so is free to wander wild in its own empire of
chimeras, has indeed a place in life. To understand what this place
is one needs to emphasize the distinction between art that has high
seriousness and art that is merely recreative. The serious moments of
life are moments of tension, of concentration on either the natural or
the human law. But Apollo cannot always be bending the bow. Man needs
at times to relax, and one way of relaxing is to take refuge for a
time in some land of chimeras, to follow the Arcadian gleam. He may
then come back to the real world, the world of active effort, solaced
and refreshed. But it is only with reference to some ethical centre
that we may determine what art is soundly recreative, in what forms
of adventure the imagination may innocently indulge. The romanticist
should recollect that among other forms of adventure is what Ben Jonson
terms “a bold adventure for hell”; and that a not uncommon nostalgia
is what the French call _la nostalgie de la boue_--man’s nostalgia for
his native mud. Because we are justified at times, as Lamb urges, in
wandering imaginatively beyond “the diocese of strict conscience,” it
does not follow that we may, like him, treat Restoration Comedy as a
sort of fairyland; for Restoration Comedy is a world not of pure but of
impure imagination.
Lamb’s paradox, however, is harmless compared with what we have just
been seeing in Chateaubriand. With a dalliant imagination that entitles
him at best to play a recreative rôle, he sets up as a religious
teacher. Michelet again has been described as an “entertainer who
believes himself a prophet,” and this description fits many other
Rousseauists. The æsthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose is an
especially flagrant instance of the huddling together of incompatible
desires. He wishes to sport with Amaryllis in the shade and at the same
time enjoy the honors that belong only to the man who scorns delights
and lives laborious days. For the exercise of the ethical imagination,
it is hardly necessary to say, involves effort. Perhaps no one has
ever surpassed Rousseau himself in the art of which I have already
spoken,--that of giving to moral indolence a semblance of profound
philosophy.
One cannot indeed always affirm that the Rousseauist is by the quality
of his imagination an entertainer pure and simple. His breaking down of
barriers and running together of the planes of being results at times
in ambiguous mixtures--gleams of insight that actually seem to minister
to fleshliness. One may cite as an example the “voluptuous religiosity”
that certain critics have discovered in Wagner.
The romanticist will at once protest against the application of ethical
standards to Wagner or any other musician. Music, he holds, is the
most soulful of the arts and so the least subject to ethics. For the
same reason it is the chief of arts and also--in view of the fact that
romanticists have a monopoly of soul--the most romantic. One should not
allow to pass unchallenged this notion that because music is filled
with soul it is therefore subject to no ethical centre, but should be
treated as a pure enchantment. The Greeks were as a matter of fact much
concerned with the ethical quality of music. Certain musical modes, the
Doric for example, had as they believed a virile “soul,” other modes
like the Lydian had the contrary (“Lap me in soft Lydian airs”). For
the very reason that music is the most appealing of the arts (song,
says Aristotle, is the sweetest of all things) they were especially
anxious that this art should be guarded from perversion.[135] Without
attempting a full discussion of a difficult subject for which I have
no competency, it will be enough to point out that the plain song that
prevailed in Christian churches for over a thousand years evidently had
a very different “soul,” a soul that inspired to prayer and peace, from
much specifically romantic music that has a soul of restlessness, of
infinite indeterminate desire. The result of the failure to recognize
this distinction is very often a hybrid art. Berlioz showed a rather
peculiar conception of religion when he took pride in the fact that his
Requiem (!) Mass frightened one of the listeners into a fit.
The ethical confusion that arises from the romantic cult of “soul” and
the closely allied tendency towards a hybrid art--art that lacks high
seriousness without being frankly recreative--may also be illustrated
from the field of poetry. Many volumes have been published and are
still being published on Browning as a philosophic and religious
teacher. But Browning can pass as a prophet only with the half-educated
person, the person who has lost traditional standards and has at the
same time failed to work out with the aid of the ethical imagination
some fresh scale of values and in the meanwhile lives impulsively and
glorifies impulse. Like the half-educated person, Browning is capable
of almost any amount of intellectual and emotional subtlety, and like
the half-educated person he is deficient in inner form: that is he
deals with experience impressionistically without reference to any
central pattern or purpose.[136] It is enough that the separate moments
of this experience should each stand forth like
The quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match.
One may take as an illustration of this drift towards the melodramatic
the “Ring and the Book.” The method of this poem is peripheral, that
is, the action is viewed not from any centre but as refracted through
the temperaments of the actors. The twelve monologues of which the
poem is composed illustrate the tendency of romantic writing to run
into some “song of myself” or “tale of my heart.” The “Ring and the
Book” is not only off the centre, but is designed to raise a positive
prejudice against everything that is central. Guido, for example, had
observed decorum, had done all the conventional things and is horrible.
Pompilia, the beautiful soul, had the great advantage of having had
an indecorous start. Being the daughter of a drab, she is not kept
from heeding the voice of nature. Caponsacchi again shows the beauty
of his soul by violating the decorum of the priesthood. This least
representative of priests wins our sympathy, not by his Christianity,
but by his lyrical intensity:
O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire!
Browning here escapes for once from the clogging intellectualism that
makes nearly all the “Ring and the Book” an indeterminate blend of
verse and prose, and achieves true poetry though not of the highest
type. The hybrid character of his art, due partly to a lack of outer
form, to a defective poetical technique, arises even more from a lack
of inner form--from an attempt to give a semblance of seriousness to
what is at bottom unethical. The aged Pope may well meditate on the
revolution that is implied in the substitution of the morality of the
beautiful soul for that of St. Augustine.[137] In seeming to accept
this revolution Browning’s Pope comes near to breaking all records,
even in the romantic movement, for paradox and indecorum.
At bottom the war between humanist and romanticist is so irreconcilable
because the one is a mediator and the other an extremist. Browning
would have us admire his Pompilia because her love knows no limit;[138]
but a secular love like hers must know a limit, must be decorous in
short, if it is to be distinguished from mere emotional intensity.
It is evident that the romantic ideal of art for art’s sake meant in
the real world art for sensation’s sake. The glorification of a love
knowing no limit, that a Browning or a Hugo sets up as a substitute for
philosophy and even for religion, is therefore closely affiliated in
practice with the _libido sentiendi_. “It is hard,” wrote Stendhal, in
1817, “not to see what the nineteenth century desires. A love of strong
emotions is its true character.” The romantic tendency to push every
emotion to an extreme, regardless of decorum, is not much affected by
what the romanticist preaches or by the problems he agitates. Doudan
remarks of a mother who loses her child in Hugo’s “Nôtre Dame de
Paris,” that “her rage after this loss has nothing to equal it in the
roarings of a lioness or tigress who has been robbed of her young. She
becomes vulgar by excess of despair. It is the saturnalia of maternal
grief. You see that this woman belongs to a world in which neither the
instincts nor the passions have that divine aroma which imposes on them
some kind of measure--the dignity or decorum that contains a moral
principle; … When the passions no longer have this check, they should
be relegated to the menagerie along with leopards and rhinoceroses,
and, strange circumstance, when the passions do recognize this check
they produce more effect on the spectators than unregulated outbursts;
they give evidence of more depth.” This superlativeness, as one may
say, that Hugo displays in his picture of maternal grief is not
confined to the emotional romanticist. It appears, for example, among
the intellectual romanticists of the seventeenth century and affected
the very forms of language. Molière and others ridiculed the adjectives
and adverbs with which the _précieuses_ sought to express their special
type of superlativeness and intensity (_extrêmement_, _furieusement_,
_terriblement_, etc.). Alfred de Musset’s assertion that the chief
difference between classicist and romanticist is found in the latter’s
greater proneness to adjectives is not altogether a jest. It has been
said that the pessimist uses few, the optimist many adjectives; but the
use of adjectives and above all of superlatives would rather seem to
grow with one’s expansiveness, and no movement was ever more expansive
than that we are studying. Dante, according to Rivarol, is very sparing
of adjectives. His sentence tends to maintain itself by the verb
and substantive alone. In this as in other respects Dante is at the
opposite pole from the expansionist.
The romantic violence of expression is at once a proof of “soul” and
a protest against the tameness and smugness of the pseudo-classicist.
The human volcano must overflow at times in a lava of molten words.
“Damnation!” cries Berlioz, “I could crush a red-hot iron between my
teeth.”[139] The disproportion between the outer incident and the
emotion that the Rousseauist expends on it is often ludicrous.[140]
The kind of force that the man attains who sees in emotional intensity
a mark of spiritual distinction, and deems moderation identical with
mediocrity, is likely to be the force of delirium or fever. What one
sees in “Werther,” says Goethe himself, is weakness seeking to give
itself the prestige of strength; and this remark goes far. There is in
some of the romanticists a suggestion not merely of spiritual but of
physical anæmia.[141] Still the intensity is often that of a strong
but unbridled spirit. Pleasure is pushed to the point where it runs
over into pain, and pain to the point where it becomes an auxiliary
of pleasure. The _âcre baiser_ of the “Nouvelle Héloïse” that so
scandalized Voltaire presaged even more than a literary revolution. The
poems of A. de Musset in particular contain an extraordinary perversion
of the Christian doctrine of purification through suffering. There
is something repellent to the genuine Christian as well as to the
worldling in what one is tempted to call Musset’s Epicurean cult of
pain.[142]
Moments of superlative intensity whether of pleasure or pain must
in the nature of the case be brief--mere spasms or paroxysms; and
one might apply to the whole school the term paroxyst and spasmodist
assumed by certain minor groups during the past century. The
Rousseauist is in general loath to rein in his emotional vehemence, to
impair the zest with which he responds to the solicitations of sense,
by any reference to the “future and sum of time,” by any reference,
that is, to an ethical purpose. He would enjoy his thrill pure and
unalloyed, and this amounts in practice to the pursuit of the beautiful
or sensation-crowded moment. Saint-Preux says of the days spent with
Julie that a “sweet ecstasy” absorbed “their whole duration and
gathered it together in a point like that of eternity. There was for
me neither past nor future, and I enjoyed at one and the same time the
delights of a thousand centuries.”[143] The superlativist one might
suppose could go no further. But in the deliberate sacrifice of all
ethical values to the beautiful moment Browning has perhaps improved
even on Rousseau:
Truth, that’s brighter than gem,
Trust, that’s purer than pearl,--
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe--all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.
Browning entitles the poem from which I am quoting _Summum Bonum_. The
supreme good it would appear is identical with the supreme thrill.
I have already said enough to make clear that the title of this
chapter and the last is in a way a misnomer. There is no such thing
as romantic morality. The innovations in ethics that are due to
romanticism reduce themselves on close scrutiny to a vast system of
naturalistic camouflage. To understand how this camouflage has been
so successful one needs to connect Rousseauism with the Baconian
movement. Scientific progress had inspired man with a new confidence
in himself at the same time that the positive and critical method
by which it had been achieved detached him from the past and its
traditional standards of good and evil. To break with tradition on
sound lines one needs to apply the utmost keenness of analysis not
merely to the natural but to the human law. But man’s analytical powers
were very much taken up with the new task of mastering the natural
law, so much so that he seemed incapable of further analytical effort,
but longed rather for relaxation from his sustained concentration of
intellect and imagination on the physical order. At the same time
he was so elated by the progress he was making in this order that
he was inclined to assume a similar advance on the moral plane and
to believe that this advance could also be achieved collectively. A
collective salvation of this kind without any need of a concentration
of the intellect and imagination is precisely what was opened up to
him by the Rousseauistic “ideal” of brotherhood. This “ideal,” as I
have tried to show, was only a projection of the Arcadian imagination
on the void. But in the abdication of analysis and critical judgment,
which would have reduced it to a purely recreative rôle, this Arcadian
dreaming was enabled to set up as a serious philosophy, and to expand
into innumerable Utopias. Many who might have taken alarm at the
humanitarian revolution in ethics were reassured by the very fervor
with which its promoters continued to utter the old words--conscience,
virtue, etc. No one puts more stress than Rousseau himself on
conscience, while in the very act of transforming conscience from an
inner check into an expansive emotion.
We have seen that as a result of this transformation of conscience,
temperament is emancipated from both inner and outer control and that
this emancipation tends in the real world to the rise of two main
types--the Bohemian and the superman, both unprimitive, inasmuch as
primitive man is governed not by temperament but by convention; and
that what actually tends to prevail in such a temperamental world
in view of the superior “hardness” of the superman, is the law of
cunning and the law of force. So far as the Rousseauists set up the
mere emancipation of temperament as a serious philosophy, they are
to be held responsible for the results of this emancipation whether
displayed in the lust of power or the lust of sensation. But the
lust of power and the lust of sensation, such as they appear, for
example, in the so-called realism of the later nineteenth century, are
not in themselves identical with romanticism. Many of the realists,
like Flaubert, as I have already pointed out, are simply bitter and
disillusioned Rousseauists who are expressing their nausea at the
society that has actually arisen from the emancipation of temperament
in themselves and others. The essence of Rousseauistic as of other
romance, I may repeat, is to be found not in any mere fact, not even
in the fact of sensation, but in a certain quality of the imagination.
Rousseauism is, it is true, an emancipation of impulse, especially of
the impulse of sex. Practically all the examples I have chosen of the
tense and beautiful moment are erotic. But what one has even here, as
the imagination grows increasingly romantic, is less the reality than
the dream of the beautiful moment, an intensity that is achieved only
in the tower of ivory. This point can be made clear only by a fuller
study of the romantic conception of love.