ROMANTICISM AND NATURE
One of the most disquieting features of the modern movement is
the vagueness and ambiguity of its use of the word nature and the
innumerable sophistries that have resulted. One can sympathize at
times with Sir Leslie Stephen’s wish that the word might be suppressed
entirely. This looseness of definition may be said to begin with
the very rise of naturalism in the Renaissance, and indeed to go
back to the naturalists of Greek and Roman antiquity.[192] Even
writers like Rabelais and Molière are not free from the suspicion
of juggling dangerously on occasion with the different meanings of
the word nature. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
not merely naturalistic, they were also humanistic, and what they
usually meant by nature, as I have pointed out, was the conception
of normal, representative human nature that they had worked out with
the aid of the ancients. There is undeniably an element of narrowness
and artificiality in this conception of nature, and a resulting
unfriendliness, as appears in Pope’s definition of wit, towards
originality and invention. In his “Art of Poetry” Boileau says, “Let
nature be your sole study.” What he means by nature appears a few lines
later: “Study the court and become familiar with the town.” To this
somewhat conventionalized human nature the original genius opposed,
as we have seen, the cult of primitive nature. A whole revolution is
implied in Byron’s line:
I love not man the less, but nature more.
Any study of this topic must evidently turn on the question how far at
different times and by different schools of thought the realm of man
and the realm of nature (as Byron uses the word) have been separated
and in what way, and also how far they have been run together and in
what way. For there may be different ways of running together man
and nature. Ruskin’s phrase the “pathetic fallacy” is unsatisfactory
because it fails to recognize this fact. The man who is guilty of the
pathetic fallacy sees in nature emotions that are not really there but
only in himself. Extreme examples of this confusion abound in Ruskin’s
own writings. Now the ancients also ran man and nature together, but in
an entirely different way. The Greek we are told never saw the oak tree
without at the same time seeing the dryad. There is in this and similar
associations a sort of overflow of the human realm upon the forms of
outer nature whereas the Rousseauist instead of bestowing imaginatively
upon the oak tree a conscious life and an image akin to his own and
so lifting it up to his level, would, if he could, become an oak tree
and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity. The Greek, one
may say, humanized nature; the Rousseauist naturalizes man. Rousseau’s
great discovery was revery; and revery is just this imaginative melting
of man into outer nature. If the ancients failed to develop in a marked
degree this art of revery, it was not because they lacked naturalists.
Both Stoics and Epicureans, the two main varieties of naturalists
with which classical antiquity was familiar, inclined to affirm the
ultimate identity of the human and the natural order. But both Stoics
and Epicureans would have found it hard to understand the indifference
to the intellect and its activities that Rousseauistic revery implies.
The Stoics to be sure employed the intellect on an impossible and
disheartening task--that of founding on the natural order virtues that
the natural order does not give. The Epicureans remind one rather in
much of their intellectual activity of the modern man of science. But
the Epicurean was less prone than the man of science to look on man
as the mere passive creature of environment. The views of the man of
science about the springs of conduct often seem to coincide rather
closely with those of Rousseau about “sensitive morality.” Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire says that when reclining on the banks of the Nile he felt
awakening within himself the instincts of the crocodile. The point of
view is Rousseauistic perhaps rather than genuinely scientific. An
Epicurus or a Lucretius would, we are probably safe in assuming, have
been disquieted by any such surrender to the subrational, by any such
encroachment of the powers of the unconscious upon conscious control.
It is hard as a matter of fact to find in the ancients anything
resembling Rousseauistic revery, even when they yield to the pastoral
mood. Nature interests them as a rule less for its own sake than as
a background for human action; and when they are concerned primarily
with nature, it is a nature that has been acted upon by man. They
have a positive shrinking from wild and uncultivated nature. “The
green pastures and golden slopes of England,” says Lowell, “are
sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye that the hand of man
has immemorially cared for and caressed them.” This is an attitude
towards nature that an ancient would have understood perfectly. One
may indeed call it the Virgilian attitude from the ancient who has
perhaps expressed it most happily. The man who lives in the grand
manner may indeed wish to impose on nature some of the fine proportion
and symmetry of which he is conscious in himself and he may then from
our modern point of view carry the humanizing of nature too far. “Let
us sing of woods,” says Virgil, “but let the woods be worthy of a
consul.” This line has sometimes been taken to be a prophecy of the
Park of Versailles. We may sympathize up to a certain point with the
desire to introduce a human symmetry into nature (such as appears, for
instance, in the Italian garden), but the peril is even greater here
than elsewhere of confounding the requirements of a real with those of
an artificial decorum. I have already mentioned the neo-classicist who
complained that the stars in heaven were not arranged in sufficiently
symmetrical patterns.
What has been said should make clear that though both humanist and
Rousseauist associate man with nature it is in very different ways,
and that there is therefore an ambiguity in the expression “pathetic
fallacy.” It remains to show that men may not only associate themselves
with nature in different ways but that they may likewise differ in
their ways of asserting man’s separateness from nature. The chief
distinction to be made here is that between the humanist and the
supernaturalist. Some sense of the gap between man and the “outworld”
is almost inevitable and forces itself at times even upon those most
naturalistically inclined:
Nor will I praise a cloud however bright,
Disparaging Man’s gifts and proper food--
Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome,
Though clad in colors beautiful and pure,
Find in the heart of man no natural home.[193]
The Wordsworth who speaks here is scarcely the Wordsworth of Tintern
Abbey or the Wordsworth whose “daily teachers had been woods and
rills.” He reminds us rather of Socrates who gave as his reason for
going so rarely into the country, delightful as he found it when once
there, that he did not learn from woods and rills but from the “men
in the cities.” This sense of the separateness of the human and the
natural realm may be carried much further--to a point where an ascetic
distrust of nature begins to appear. Something of this ascetic distrust
is seen for example in the following lines from Cardinal Newman:
There strayed awhile amid the woods of Dart
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne’er to give his heart
To streamlet bright or soft secluded grove.[194]
The origins of this latter attitude towards nature are to be sought in
mediæval Christianity rather than in classical antiquity. No man who
knows the facts would assert for a moment that the man of the Middle
Ages was incapable of looking on nature with other feelings than
those of ascetic distrust. It is none the less true that the man of
the Middle Ages often saw in nature not merely something alien but a
positive temptation and peril of the spirit. In his attitude towards
nature as in other respects Petrarch is usually accounted the first
modern. He did what no man of the mediæval period is supposed to have
done before him, or indeed what scarcely any man of classical antiquity
did: he ascended a mountain out of sheer curiosity and simply to enjoy
the prospect. But those who tell of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux sometimes
forget to add that the passage of Saint Augustine[195] that occurred
to him at the top reflects the distrust of the more austere Christian
towards the whole natural order. Petrarch is at once more ascetic and
more romantic in his attitude towards nature than the Greek or Roman.
Traces of Petrarch’s taste for solitary and even for wild nature are
to be found throughout the Renaissance and the seventeenth century.
But the recoil from supernaturalism that took place at this time led
rather, as I have remarked, to a revival of the Græco-Roman humanism
with something more of artifice and convention, and to an even more
marked preference[196] of the town to the country. An age that aims
first of all at urbanity must necessarily be more urban than rural in
its predilections. It was a sort of condescension for the neo-classical
humanist to turn from the central model he was imitating to mere
unadorned nature, and even then he felt that he must be careful not
to condescend too far. Even when writing pastorals he was warned by
Scaliger to avoid details that are too redolent of the real country;
he should indulge at most in an “urbane rusticity.” Wild nature the
neo-classicist finds simply repellent. Mountains he looks upon as
“earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The Alps were regarded as
the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear
the plains of Lombardy. “At last,” says a German traveller of the
seventeenth century, “we left the horrible and wearisome mountains and
the beautiful flat landscape was joyfully welcomed.” The taste for
mountain scenery is associated no doubt to some extent, as has been
suggested, with the increasing ease and comfort of travel that has come
with the progress of the utilitarian movement. It is scarcely necessary
to point the contrast between the Switzerland of which Evelyn tells in
his diary[197] and the Switzerland in which one may go by funicular to
the top of the Jungfrau.
Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less
trimness in nature and human nature were not it is true entirely
without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting--as
the very word picturesque testifies--for the encouragement they failed
to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed
like a picture[198] and it might be not merely irregular but savage
if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. This
association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of
eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that
curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation
of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment
when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be
conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s
influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the
happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in
Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels
canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him
the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for
artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the
increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as
compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the
style of Le Nôtre.[199] As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry,
nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and
unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany
were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this
method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle Héloïse.”[200]
Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further
aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path,
and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to
be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins
was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in
Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though
it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so
plentifully supplied by the Revolution.
Rousseau himself, it should hardly be necessary to say, stands for far
more than an artificial wildness. Instead of imposing decorum on nature
like the neo-classicist, he preached constantly the elimination of
decorum from man. Man should flee from that “false taste for grandeur
which is not made for him” and which “poisons his pleasures,”[201]
to nature. Now “it is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of
forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent
charms.”[202] The man of feeling finds the savage and deserted nook
filled with beauties that seem horrible to the mere worldling.[203]
Rousseau indeed did not crave the ultimate degree of wildness even
in the Alps. He did not get beyond what one may term the middle zone
of Alpine scenery--scenery that may be found around the shores of
Lake Leman. He was inclined to find the most appropriate setting for
the earthly paradise in the neighborhood of Vevey. Moreover, others
about the same time and more or less independently of his influence
were opposing an even more primitive nature to the artificialities of
civilization. The mountains of “Ossian” are, as has been said, mere
blurs, yet the new delight in mountains is due in no small measure
throughout Europe to the Ossianic influence.
The instinct for getting away from the beaten track, for exploration
and discovery, has of course been highly developed at other epochs,
notably at the Renaissance. Much of the romantic interest in the wild
and waste places of the earth did not go much beyond what might have
been felt in Elizabethan England. Many of the Rousseauists, Wordsworth
and Chateaubriand for example, not only read eagerly the older books
of travel but often the same books. The fascination of penetrating to
regions “where foot of man hath ne’er or rarely been,” is perennial.
It was my privilege a few years ago to listen to Sir Ernest Shackleton
speak of his expedition across the Antarctic continent and of the
thrill that he and the members of his party felt when they saw rising
before them day after day mountain peaks that no human eye had ever
gazed upon. The emotion was no doubt very similar to that of “stout
Cortez” when he first “stared at the Pacific.” Chateaubriand must
have looked forward to similar emotions when he planned his trip to
North America in search of the North West Passage. But the passion for
actual exploration which is a form of the romanticism of action is very
subordinate in the case of Chateaubriand to emotional romanticism. He
went into the wilderness first of all not to make actual discoveries
but to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint, and at the same
time to practice the new art of revery. His sentiments on getting
into what was then the virgin forest to the west of Albany were very
different we may assume from those of the early pioneers of America.
“When,” he says, “after passing the Mohawk I entered woods which
had never felt the axe, I was seized by a sort of intoxication of
independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to
myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic
or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was
restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made
my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad.” The disillusion
that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some
difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he
was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature
he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his
first savages--a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman
named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat,
drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket
fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon
Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure
from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American
Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He
was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to
them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not
a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand
concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the
ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very
much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”
In America, as elsewhere, Chateaubriand’s chief concern is not
with any outer fact or activity, but with his own emotions and the
enhancement of these emotions by his imagination. In him as in many
other romanticists the different elements of Rousseauism--Arcadian
longing, the pursuit of the dream woman, the aspiration towards the
“infinite” (often identified with God)--appear at times more or less
separately and then again almost inextricably blended with one another
and with the cult of nature. It may be well to consider more in detail
these various elements of Rousseauism and their relation to nature in
about the order I have mentioned. The association of Arcadian longing
with nature is in part an outcome of the conflict between the ideal and
the real. The romantic idealist finds that men do not understand him:
his “vision” is mocked and his “genius” is unrecognized. The result
is the type of sentimental misanthropy of which I spoke at the end of
the last chapter. He feels, as Lamartine says, that there is nothing
in common between the world and him. Lamartine adds, however, “But
nature is there who invites you and loves you.” You will find in her
the comprehension and companionship that you have failed to find in
society. And nature will seem a perfect companion to the Rousseauist
in direct proportion as she is uncontaminated by the presence of man.
Wordsworth has described the misanthropy that supervened in many people
on the collapse of the revolutionary idealism. He himself overcame
it, though there is more than a suggestion in the manner of his own
retirement into the hills of a man who retreats into an Arcadian dream
from actual defeat. The suggestion of defeat is much stronger in
Ruskin’s similar retirement. Ruskin doubtless felt in later life, like
Rousseau, that if he had failed to get on with men “it was less his
fault than theirs.”[204] Perhaps emotional misanthropy and the worship
of wild nature are nowhere more fully combined than in Byron. He
gives magnificent expression to the most untenable of paradoxes--that
one escapes from solitude by eschewing human haunts in favor of some
wilderness.[205] In these haunts, he says, he became like a “falcon
with clipped wing,” but found in nature the kindest of mothers.
Oh! she is fairest in her features wild,
Where nothing polished dare pollute her path:
To me by day or night she ever smiled
Though I have marked her when none other hath
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath.[206]
He not only finds companionship in nature but at the same time partakes
of her infinitude--an infinitude, one should note, of feeling:
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.[207]
In his less misanthropic moods the Rousseauist sees in wild nature
not only a refuge from society, but also a suitable setting for his
companionship with the ideal mate, for what the French term _la
solitude à deux_.
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race
And, hating no one, love but only her![208]
The almost innumerable passages in the romantic movement that celebrate
this Arcadian companionship in the wilderness merely continue in a
sense the pastoral mood that must be as old as human nature itself.
But in the past the pastoral mood has been comparatively placid.
It has not been associated in any such degree with misanthropy and
wildness, with nympholeptic longing and the thirst for the infinite.
The scene that Chateaubriand has imagined between Chactas and Atala in
the primeval forest, is surely the stormiest of Arcadias; so stormy
indeed that it would have been unintelligible to Theocritus. It is
not certain that it would have been intelligible to Shakespeare, who
like the other Elizabethans felt at times that he too had been born
in Arcadia. The Arcadian of the past was much less inclined to sink
down to the subrational and to merge his personality in the landscape.
Rousseau describes with a charm that has scarcely been surpassed by
any of his disciples, the reveries in which he thus descends below
the level of his rational self. Time, no longer broken up by the
importunate intellect and its analysis, is then felt by him in its
unbroken flow; the result is a sort of “eternal present that leaves
no sense of emptiness.” Of such a moment of revery Rousseau says,
anticipating Faust, that he “would like it to last forever.” Bergson
in his conception of the _summum bonum_ as a state in which time is
no longer cut up into artificial segments but is perceived in its
continuous stream as a “present that endures,”[209] has done little
more than repeat Rousseau. The sight and sound of water seem to have
been a special aid to revery in Rousseau’s case. His accounts of the
semi-dissolution of his conscious self that he enjoyed while drifting
idly on the Lake of Bienne are justly celebrated. Lamartine’s soul was,
like that of Rousseau, lulled by “the murmur of waters.” Nothing again
is more Rousseauistic than the desire Arnold attributes to Maurice de
Guérin--the desire “to be borne on forever down an enchanted stream.”
That too is why certain passages of Shelley are so near in spirit to
Rousseau--for example, the boat revery in “Prometheus Unbound” in which
an Arcadian nature and the dream companion mingle to the strains of
music in a way that is supremely romantic.[210]
The association of nature with Arcadian longing and the pursuit of
the dream woman is even less significant than its association with
the idea of the infinite. For as a result of this latter association
the nature cult often assumes the aspect of a religion. The various
associations may indeed as I have said be very much blended or else
may run into one another almost insensibly. No better illustration of
this blending can be found perhaps than in Chateaubriand--especially
in that compendium of Rousseauistic psychology, his “René.” The soul
of René, one learns, was too great to adjust itself to the society of
men. He found that he would have to contract his life if he put himself
on their level. Men, for their part, treated him as a dreamer, and so
he is forced more and more by his increasing disgust for them into
solitude. Now René rests the sense of his superiority over other men
on two things: first, on his superlative capacity to feel grief;[211]
secondly, on his thirst for the infinite. “What is finite,” he says,
“has no value for me.” What is thus pushing him beyond all bounds is
“an unknown good of which the instinct pursues me.” “I began to ask
myself what I desired. I did not know but I thought all of a sudden
that the woods would be delicious to me!” What he found in this quest
for the mystical something that was to fill the abyss of his existence
was the dream woman. “I went down into the valley, I strode upon the
mountain, summoning with all the force of my desire the ideal object
of a future flame; I embraced this object in the winds; I thought
that I heard it in the moanings of the river. All was this phantom of
the imagination--both the stars in heaven and the very principle of
life in the universe.” I have already quoted a very similar passage
and pointed out the equivalent in Shelley. No such close equivalent
could be found in Byron, and Wordsworth, it is scarcely necessary to
say, offers no equivalent at all. If one reads on, however, one finds
passages that are Byronic and others that are Wordsworthian. Paganism,
Chateaubriand complains, by seeing in nature only certain definite
forms--fauns and satyrs and nymphs--had banished from it both God and
the infinite. But Christianity expelled these thronging figures in
turn and restored to the grottoes their silence and to the woods their
revery. The true God thus became visible in his works and bestowed
upon them his own immensity. What Chateaubriand understands by God and
the infinite appears in the following description of the region near
Niagara seen by moonlight. The passage is Byronic as a whole with a
Wordsworthian touch at the end. “The grandeur, the amazing melancholy
of this picture cannot be expressed in human language; the fairest
night of Europe can give no conception of it. In vain in our cultivated
fields does the imagination seek to extend itself. It encounters on
every hand the habitations of men; but in these savage regions the soul
takes delight in plunging into an ocean of forests, in hovering over
the gulf of cataracts, in meditating on the shores of lakes and rivers
and, so to speak, in finding itself alone in the presence of God.” The
relation between wild and solitary nature and the romantic idea of the
infinite is here obvious. It is an aid to the spirit in throwing off
its limitations and so in feeling itself “free.”[212]
A greater spiritual elevation it is sometimes asserted is found in
Wordsworth’s communings with nature than in those of Rousseau and
Chateaubriand. The difference perhaps is less one of spirit than
of temperament. In its abdication of the intellectual and critical
faculties, in its semi-dissolution of the conscious self, the
revery of Wordsworth does not differ from that of Rousseau[213] and
Chateaubriand, but the erotic element is absent. In the “Genius of
Christianity” Chateaubriand gives a magnificent description of sunset
at sea and turns the whole picture into a proof of God. Elsewhere he
tells us that it was “not God alone that I contemplated on the waters
in the splendor of his works. I saw an unknown woman and the miracle
of her smile. … I should have sold eternity for one of her caresses.
I imagined that she was palpitating behind that veil of the universe
that hid her from my eyes,” etc. Wordsworth was at least consistently
religious in his attitude towards the landscape: he did not see in it
at one moment God, and at another an unknown woman and the miracle of
her smile. At the same time his idea of spirituality is very remote
from the traditional conception. Formerly spirituality was held to be a
process of recollection, of gathering one’s self in, that is, towards
the centre and not of diffusive emotion; so that when a man wished
to pray he retired into his closet, and did not, like a Wordsworth
or a Rousseau, fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders
of nature. As for the poets of the past, they inclined as a rule to
look on nature as an incentive not to religion but to love. Keble,
following Wordsworth, protests on this ground against Aristophanes, and
Catullus and Horace and Theocritus. He might have lengthened the list
almost indefinitely. Chateaubriand bids us in our devotional moods to
betake ourselves “to the religious forest.” La Fontaine is at least
as near to normal human experience and also at least as poetical when
he warns “fair ones” to “fear the depths of the woods and their vast
silence.”[214]
No one would question that Wordsworth has passages of great ethical
elevation. But in some of these passages he simply renews the error
of the Stoics who also display at times great ethical elevation; he
ascribes to the natural order virtues that the natural order does not
give. This error persists to some extent even when he is turning away,
as in the “Ode to Duty,” from the moral spontaneity of the Rousseauist.
It is not quite clear that the law of duty in the breast of man is the
same law that preserves “the stars from wrong.” His earlier assertion
that the light of setting suns and the mind of man are identical in
their essence is at best highly speculative, at least as speculative
as the counter assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “there is surely a
piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and
owes no homage unto the sun.” Furthermore this latter sense of the gap
between man and nature seems to be more fully justified by its fruits
in life and conduct, and this is after all the only test that counts in
the long run.
One of the reasons why pantheistic revery has been so popular is that
it seems to offer a painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort.
In its extreme exponents, a Rousseau or a Walt Whitman, it amounts to a
sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination. Even
in its milder forms it encourages one to assume a tone of consecration
in speaking of experiences that are æsthetic rather than truly
religious. “’Tis only heaven that’s given away,” sings Lowell; “’Tis
only God may be had for the asking.” God and heaven are accorded by
Lowell with such strange facility because he identifies them with the
luxurious enjoyment of a “day in June.” When pushed to a certain point
the nature cult always tends towards sham spirituality.
Oh World as God has made it
--All is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and
Love is duty.
It seems to follow from these verses of Browning, perhaps the most
flaccid spiritually in the English language, that to go out and mix
one’s self up with the landscape is the same as doing one’s duty. As
a method of salvation this is even easier and more æsthetic than that
of the Ancient Mariner, who, it will be remembered, is relieved of the
burden of his transgression by admiring the color of water-snakes!
The nature cult arose at a time when the traditional religious
symbols were becoming incredible. Instead of working out new and
firm distinctions between good and evil, the Rousseauist seeks to
discredit all precise distinctions whether new or old, in favor of mere
emotional intoxication. The passage to which I have already alluded,
in which Faust breaks down the scruples of Marguerite by proclaiming
the supremacy of feeling, surpasses even the lines I have cited from
Browning as an example of sham spirituality:
_Marguerite_:
Dost thou believe in God?
_Faust_:
My darling, who dares say,
Yes, I in God believe?
Question or priest or sage, and they
Seem, in the answer you receive,
To mock the questioner.
_Marguerite_:
Then thou dost not believe?
_Faust_:
Sweet one! my meaning do not misconceive!
Him who dare name
And who proclaim,
Him I believe?
Who that can feel,
His heart can steel
To say: I believe him not?
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Holds and sustains he not
Thee, me, himself?
Lifts not the Heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us lie?
And beaming tenderly with looks of love
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?
Do I not gaze into thine eyes?
Nature’s impenetrable agencies,
Are they not thronging on thy heart and brain,
Viewless, or visible to mortal ken,
Around thee weaving their mysterious chain?
Fill thence thy heart, how large soe’er it be;
And in the feeling when thou utterly art blest,
Then call it what thou wilt--
Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is all;
Name is but sound and smoke
Shrouding the glow of heaven.[215]
The upshot of this enthusiasm that overflows all boundaries and spurns
definition as mere smoke that veils its heavenly glow is the seduction
of a poor peasant girl. Such is the romantic contrast between the
“ideal” and the “real.”
Those to whom I may seem to be treating the nature cult with
undue severity should remember that I am treating it only in its
pseudo-religious aspect. In its proper place all this refining on
man’s relation to the “outworld” may be legitimate and delightful;
but that place is secondary. My quarrel is only with the æsthete who
assumes an apocalyptic pose and gives forth as a profound philosophy
what is at best only a holiday or week-end view of existence. No
distinction is more important for any one who wishes to maintain a
correct scale of values than that between what is merely recreative and
what ministers to leisure. There are times when we may properly seek
solace and renewal in nature, when we may invite both our souls and our
bodies to loaf. The error is to look on these moments of recreation
and relief from concentration on some definite end as in themselves
the consummation of wisdom. Rousseau indeed assumes that his art of
mixing himself up with the landscape is identical with leisure; like
innumerable disciples he confuses revery with meditation--a confusion
so grave that I shall need to revert to it later. He parodies subtly
what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of what is below it.
He thus brings under suspicion the most necessary of all truths--that
the kingdom of heaven is within us.
The first place always belongs to action and purpose and not to mere
idling, even if it be like that of the Rousseauist transcendental
idling. The man who makes a deliberate choice and then plans his life
with reference to it is less likely than the aimless man to be swayed
by every impulse and impression. The figures of Raphael according to
Hazlitt have always “a set, determined, voluntary character,” they
“want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the
accidents of nature and the changes of the elements.” And Hazlitt
therefore concludes rightly that Raphael has “nothing romantic about
him.” The distinction is so important that it might be made the
basis for a comparison between the painting of the Renaissance and
some of the important schools of the nineteenth century. Here again
no sensible person would maintain that the advantage is all on one
side. Romanticism gave a great impulse to landscape painting and to
the painting of man in the landscape. Few romantic gains are more
indubitable. One may prefer the best work of the Barbizon school for
example to the contemporary product in French literature. But even here
it must be insisted that painting from which man is absent or in which
he is more or less subordinated to the landscape is not the highest
type of painting. Turner, one of the greatest masters of landscape,
was almost incapable of painting the human figure. Ruskin is therefore
indulging in romantic paradox when he puts Turner in the same class
as Shakespeare. Turner’s vision of life as compared with that of
Shakespeare is not central but peripheral.
The revolution that has resulted from the triumph of naturalistic over
humanistic tendencies in painting extends down to the minutest details
of technique; it has meant the subordination of design--the imposition,
that is, on one’s material of a firm central purpose--to light and
color; and this in painting corresponds to the literary pursuit of
glamour and illusion for their own sake. It has meant in general a
tendency to sacrifice all the other elements of painting to the capture
of the vivid and immediate impression. And this corresponds to the
readiness of the writer to forego decorum in favor of intensity. The
choice that is involved, including a choice of technique, according
as one is a naturalist or a humanist, is brought out by Mr. Kenyon Cox
in his comparison of two paintings of hermits,[216] one by Titian and
one by John Sargent: the impressionistic and pantheistic hermit of
Sargent is almost entirely merged in the landscape; he is little more
than a pretext for a study of the accidents of light. The conception
of Titian’s St. Jerome in the Desert is perhaps even more humanistic
than religious. The figure of the saint on which everything converges
is not merely robust, it is even a bit robustious. The picture affirms
in its every detail the superior importance of man and his purposes to
his natural environment. So far as their inner life is concerned the
two hermits are plainly moving in opposite directions. An appropriate
motto for Sargent’s hermit would be the following lines that I take
from a French symbolist, but the equivalent of which can be found in
innumerable other Rousseauists:
_Je voudrais me confondre avec les chases, tordre_
_Mes bras centre la pierre et les fraîches écorces,_
_Etre l’arbre, le mur, le pollen et le sel,_
_Et me dissoudre au fond de l’être universel._
This is to push the reciprocity between man and nature to a point
where the landscape is not only a state of the soul but the soul is
a state of the landscape; just as in Shelley’s Ode, Shelley becomes
the West Wind and the West Wind becomes Shelley.[217] The changes in
the romantic soul are appropriately mirrored in the changes of the
seasons. In Tieck’s “Genoveva,” for example, Golo’s love blossoms in
the springtime, the sultry summer impels him to sinful passion, the
autumn brings grief and repentance, and in winter avenging judgment
overtakes the offender and casts him into the grave.[218] Autumn
is perhaps even more than springtime the favorite season of the
Rousseauist. The movement is filled with souls who like the hero of
Poe’s “Ulalume” have reached the October of their sensations. Some
traces of this sympathetic relation between man and nature may indeed
be found in the literature of the past. The appropriateness of the
setting in the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus would scarcely seem to
be an accident. The storm in “Lear” may also be instanced. But as I
have already said occidental man did not before Rousseau show much
inclination to mingle with the landscape. The parallelism that Pater
establishes in “Marius the Epicurean” between the moods of the hero and
the shifting aspects of nature is felt as a distinct anachronism. If we
wish to find any early approximations to the subtleties and refinements
of the Rousseauist in his dealings with nature we need to turn to the
Far East--especially to the Taoist movement in China.[219] As a result
of the Taoist influence China had from a very early period poets and
painters for whom the landscape is very plainly a state of the soul.
Pantheistic revery of the kind I have been describing leads inevitably
to a special type of symbolism. The Rousseauist reads into nature
unutterable love. He sees shining through its finite forms the light of
the infinite. The Germans especially set out to express symbolically
the relationship between the love and infinitude that they saw in
nature and the kindred elements in themselves. Any one who has
attempted to thread his way through the German theories of the symbol
will feel that he has, like Wordsworth’s shepherd, “been in the heart
of many thousand mists.” But in view of the importance of the subject
it is necessary to venture for a moment into this metaphysical murk.
Schelling’s “Nature Philosophy” is perhaps the most ambitious of all
the German attempts to run together symbolically the human spirit and
phenomenal nature. “What we call nature,” says Schelling, “is a poem
that lies hidden in a secret wondrous writing”; if the riddle could be
revealed we should recognize in nature “the Odyssey of the Spirit.”
“There looks out through sensuous objects as through a half-transparent
mist the world of phantasy for which we long.” “All things are only a
garment of the world of spirit.” “To be romantic,” says Uhland, “is
to have an inkling of the infinite in appearances.” “Beauty,” says
Schelling in similar vein, “is a finite rendering of the infinite.” Now
the infinite and the finite can only be thus brought together through
the medium of the symbol. Therefore, as A. W. Schlegel says, “beauty
is a symbolical representation of the infinite. All poetry is an
everlasting symbolizing.”
This assertion is in an important sense true. Unfortunately there
remains the ambiguity that I have already pointed out in the word
“infinite.” No one would give a high rating to a certain type of
allegory that flourished in neo-classical times as also in a somewhat
different form during the Middle Ages. It is a cold intellectual
contrivance in which the imagination has little part and which
therefore fails to suggest the infinite in any sense. But to
universalize the particular in the classical sense is to give access
imaginatively to the human infinite that is set above nature. Every
successful humanistic creation is more or less symbolical. Othello is
not merely a jealous man; he is also a symbol of jealousy. Some of the
myths of Plato again are imaginative renderings of a supersensuous
realm to which man has no direct access. They are symbolical
representations of an infinite that the romanticist leaves out of
his reckoning. The humanistic and spiritual symbols that abound in
the religion and poetry of the past, are then, it would seem, very
different from the merely æsthetic symbolizing of a Schelling. For
Schelling is one of the chief of those who from Shaftesbury down have
tended to identify beauty and truth and to make both purely æsthetic.
But a symbol that is purely æsthetic, that is in other words purely a
matter of feeling, rests on what is constantly changing not only from
man to man but in the same man. Romantic symbolism, therefore, though
it claims at one moment to be scientific (especially in Germany) and at
another moment to have a religious value, is at bottom the symbolizing
of mood. Both the imagination and the emotion that enter into the
romantic symbol are undisciplined. The results of such a symbolism do
not meet the demand of the genuine man of science for experimental
proof, they do not again satisfy the test of universality imposed by
those who believe in a distinctively human realm that is set above
nature. The nature philosophy of a Schelling leads therefore on the one
hand to sham science and on the other to sham philosophy and religion.
The genuine man of science has as a matter of fact repudiated the
speculations of Schelling and other romantic physicists as fantastic.
He may also be counted on to look with suspicion on the speculations
of a Bergson who, more perhaps than any living Rousseauist, reminds
one of the German romantic philosophers. One idea has however lingered
in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this
romantic theorizing--namely that man has access to the infinite only
through nature. Thus Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn said in a recent
address to the students of Columbia University:
I would not for a moment take advantage of the present
opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of
the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for
a constructive career give me nature. The ground for my
preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain
of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed
it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal;
the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of
abnormality. Nature, studied since Aristotle’s time, is
still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides
is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from
nebulæ to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing and
invigorating. Of the two most creative literary artists of our
time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to
the bee and the flowers and the “blue bird,” with a delicious
renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard.
The romanticists acted from the start, following here in the wake of
the pseudo-classicists, on Professor Osborn’s assumption that normal
human nature is something that may be bottled up once for all and put
by on a shelf, though they would have been pained to learn from him
that even abnormal human nature may also be bottled up and put by in
the same fashion. Sophistries of this kind should perhaps be pardoned
in the man of science when so many men who are supposed to stand for
letters have shown him the way. Great literature is an imaginative and
symbolical interpretation of an infinite that is accessible only to
those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. A writer
like Maeterlinck, whom Professor Osborn takes to be representative of
literature in general, is merely a late exponent of a movement that
from the start turned away from this human infinite towards pantheistic
revery.
The imagination is, as Coleridge says, the great unifying power; it
draws together things that are apparently remote. But its analogies to
be of value should surely have validity apart from the mere shifting
mood of the man who perceives them. Otherwise he simply wrests some
outer object from the chain of cause and effect of which it is actually
a part, and incorporates it arbitrarily into his own private dream.
Wordsworth is not sparing of homely detail in his account of his
leech-gatherer; but at a given moment in this poem the leech-gatherer
undergoes a strange transformation; he loses all verisimilitude as a
leech-gatherer and becomes a romantic symbol, a mere projection, that
is, of the poet’s own broodings. To push this symbolizing of mood
beyond a certain point is incipient hallucination. We are told that
when the asylum at Charenton was shelled in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870, the lunatics saw reflected in the bursting bombs, each in
a different way, his own madness. One took the bombs to be a link in
the plot of his enemies against him, etc. It is hard to consider the
symbolizing and visions of the extreme romanticist, such as those of
William Blake, without thinking at times of Charenton.
What I have said of the romantic symbol is true in some degree of
the romantic metaphor, for the symbol and even the myth are often
only a developed metaphor. The first part of the romantic metaphor,
the image or impression that has been received from the outer world,
is often admirably fresh and vivid.[220] But the second part of the
metaphor when the analogy involved is that between some fact of outer
perception and the inner life of man is often vague and misty; for the
inner life in which the romanticist takes interest is not the life
he possesses in common with other men but what is most unique in his
own emotions--his mood in short. That is why the metaphor and still
more the symbol in so far as they are romantic are always in danger of
becoming unintelligible, since it is not easy for one man to enter into
another’s mood. Men accord a ready welcome to metaphors and symbols
that instead of expressing something more or less individual have a
real relevancy to their common nature. Tribulation, for example, means
literally the beating out of grain on the threshing floor. The man
who first saw the analogy between this process and certain spiritual
experiences established a legitimate link between nature and human
nature, between sense and the supersensuous. Language is filled with
words and expressions of this kind which have become so current that
their metaphorical and symbolical character has been forgotten and
which have at the same time ceased to be vivid and concrete and become
abstract.
The primitivistic fallacies of the German romanticists in their
dealings with the symbol and metaphor appear in various forms in
French romanticism and even more markedly in its continuation known
as the symbolistic movement. What is exasperating in many of the
poets of this school is that they combine the pretence to a vast
illumination with the utmost degree of spiritual and intellectual
emptiness and vagueness. Like the early German romanticists they mix
up flesh and spirit in nympholeptic longing and break down and blur
all the boundaries of being in the name of the infinite. Of this inner
formlessness and anarchy the chaos of the _vers libre_ (in which they
were also anticipated by the Germans) is only an outer symptom.[221]
If the Rousseauistic primitivist recognizes the futility of his
symbolizing, and consents to become a passive register of outer
perception, if for example he proclaims himself an imagist, he at least
has the merit of frankness, but in that case he advertises by the very
name he has assumed the bankruptcy of all that is most worth while in
poetry.
But to return to romanticism and nature. It should be plain from what
has already been said that the romanticist tends to make of nature the
mere plaything of his mood. When Werther’s mood is cheerful, nature
smiles at him benignly. When his mood darkens she becomes for him “a
devouring monster.” When it grows evident to the romanticist that
nature does not alter with his alteration, he chides her at times for
her impassibility; or again he seeks to be impassible like her, even if
he can be so only at the expense of his humanity. This latter attitude
is closely connected with the dehumanizing of man by science that is
reflected in a whole literature during the last half of the nineteenth
century--for instance, in so-called “impassive” writers like Flaubert
and Leconte de Lisle.
The causal sequences that had been observed in the physical realm
were developed more and more during this period with the aid of pure
mathematics and the mathematical reason (_esprit de géométrie_) into an
all-embracing system. For the earlier romanticists nature had at least
been a living presence whether benign or sinister. For the mathematical
determinist she tends to become a soulless, pitiless mechanism against
which man is helpless.[222] This conception of nature is so important
that I shall need to revert to it in my treatment of melancholy.
The man who has accepted the universe of the mechanist or determinist
is not always gloomy. But men in general felt the need of some relief
from the deterministic obsession. Hence the success of the philosophy
of Bergson and similar philosophies. The glorification of impulse
(_élan vital_) that Bergson opposes to the mechanizing of life is in
its main aspects, as I have already indicated, simply a return to
the spontaneity of Rousseau. His plan of escape from deterministic
science is at bottom very much like Rousseau’s plan of escape from
the undue rationalism of the Enlightenment. As a result of these
eighteenth-century influences, nature had, according to Carlyle, become
a mere engine, a system of cogs and pulleys. He therefore hails Novalis
as an “anti-mechanist,” a “deep man,” because of the way of deliverance
that he teaches from this nightmare. “I owe him somewhat.” What Carlyle
owed to Novalis many moderns have owed to Bergson, but it is not yet
clear that either Novalis or Bergson are “deep men.”
The mechanistic view of nature, whether held pessimistically or
optimistically, involving as it does factors that are infinite
and therefore beyond calculation, cannot furnish proofs that will
satisfy the true positivist: he is inclined to dismiss it as a mere
phantasmagoria of the intellect. The Rousseauistic view of nature, on
the other hand, whether held optimistically or pessimistically, is
even less capable of satisfying the standards of the positivist and
must be dismissed as a mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. The fact
is that we do not know and can never know what nature is in herself.
The mysterious mother has shrouded herself from us in an impenetrable
veil of illusion. But though we cannot know nature absolutely we can
pick up a practical and piecemeal knowledge of nature not by dreaming
but by doing. The man of action can within certain limits have his way
with nature. Now the men who have acted during the past century have
been the men of science and the utilitarians who have been turning
to account the discoveries of science. The utilitarians have indeed
derived such potent aid from science that they have been able to stamp
their efforts on the very face of the landscape. The romanticists have
not ceased to protest against this scientific utilizing of nature as
a profanation. But inasmuch as these protests have come from men who
have stood not for work but for revery they have for the most part
been futile. This is not the least of the ironic contrasts that abound
in this movement between the ideal and the real. No age ever grew so
ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century, at the same
time no age ever did so much to deface nature. No age ever so exalted
the country over the town, and no age ever witnessed such a crowding
into urban centres.
A curious study might be made of this ironic contrast as it appears
in the early romantic crusade against railways. One of the romantic
grievances against the railway is that it does not encourage
vagabondage: it has a definite goal and gets to it so far as possible
in a straight line. Yet in spite of Wordsworth’s protesting sonnet the
Windermere railway was built. Ruskin’s wrath at railways was equally
vain. In general, sentiment is not of much avail when pitted against
industrial advance. The papers announced recently that one of the
loveliest cascades in the California Sierras had suddenly disappeared
as a result of the diversion of its water to a neighboring power-plant.
The same fate is overtaking Niagara itself. It is perhaps symbolic
that a quarry has made a hideous gash in the hillside on the shores of
Rydal Mere right opposite Wordsworth’s house.
If the man of science and the utilitarian do not learn what nature
is in herself they learn at least to adjust themselves to forces
outside themselves. The Rousseauist, on the other hand, does not in
his “communion” with nature adjust himself to anything. He is simply
communing with his own mood. Rousseau chose appropriately as title for
the comedy that was his first literary effort “Narcissus or the Lover
of Himself.” The nature over which the Rousseauist is bent in such rapt
contemplation plays the part of the pool in the legend of Narcissus. It
renders back to him his own image. He sees in nature what he himself
has put there. The Rousseauist transfuses himself into nature in much
the same way that Pygmalion transfuses himself into his statue. Nature
is dead, as Rousseau says, unless animated by the fires of love. “Make
no mistake,” says M. Masson, “the nature that Jean-Jacques worships
is only a projection of Jean-Jacques. He has poured himself forth
so complacently upon it that he can always find himself and cherish
himself in it.” And M. Masson goes on and quotes from a curious and
little-known fragment of Rousseau: “Beloved solitude,” Rousseau sighs,
“beloved solitude, where I still pass with pleasure the remains of
a life given over to suffering. Forest with stunted trees, marshes
without water, broom, reeds, melancholy heather, inanimate objects,
you who can neither speak to me nor hear me, what secret charm brings
me back constantly into your midst? Unfeeling and dead things, this
charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which
wishes to refer back everything to itself.”[223] Coleridge plainly only
continues Rousseau when he writes:
O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:[224]
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow’d
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth.
The fair luminous cloud is no other than the Arcadian imagination. “The
light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s
dream” of which Wordsworth speaks, is likewise as appears very plainly
from the context,[225] Arcadian. He should once, Wordsworth writes,
have wished to see Peele Castle bathed in the Arcadian light, but now
that he has escaped by sympathy for his fellow-men from the Arcadian
aloofness, he is willing that it should be painted in storm. Mere
storminess, one should recollect, is not in itself an assurance that
one has turned from the romantic dream to reality. One finds in this
movement, if nowhere else, as I remarked apropos of Chateaubriand, the
stormy Arcadia.
It is not through the Arcadian imagination that one moves towards
reality. This does not much matter if what one seeks in a “return to
nature” is merely recreation. I cannot repeat too often that I have no
quarrel with the nature cult when it remains recreative but only when
it sets up as a substitute for philosophy and religion. This involves
a confusion between the two main directions of the human spirit, a
confusion as I have said in a previous chapter between the realm of
awe and the region of wonder. Pascal exaggerates somewhat when he says
the Bible never seeks to prove religion from the “wonders” of nature.
But this remark is true to the total spirit of the Bible. A knowledge
of the flowers of the Holy Land is less necessary for an understanding
of the gospel narrative than one might suppose from Renan.[226] Renan
is simply seeking to envelop Jesus so far as possible in an Arcadian
atmosphere. In so doing he is following in the footsteps of the great
father of sentimentalists. According to M. Masson, Jesus, as depicted
by Jean-Jacques, becomes “a sort of grand master of the Golden Age.”
Here as elsewhere the Rousseauist is seeking to identify the Arcadian
view of life with wisdom. The result is a series of extraordinarily
subtle disguises for egoism. We think we see the Rousseauist prostrate
before the ideal woman or before nature or before God himself, but
when we look more closely we see that he is only (as Sainte-Beuve said
of Alfred de Vigny) “in perpetual adoration before the holy sacrament
of himself.” The fact that he finds in nature only what he has put
there seems to be for Rousseau himself a source of satisfaction. But
the poem of Coleridge I have just quoted, in which he proclaims that so
far as nature is concerned “we receive but what we give,” is entitled
“Ode to Dejection.” One of man’s deepest needs would seem to be for
genuine communion, for a genuine escape, that is, from his ordinary
self. The hollowness of the Rousseauistic communion with nature as
well as other Rousseauistic substitutes for genuine communion is
indissolubly bound up with the subject of romantic melancholy.