ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY
Rousseau and his early followers--especially perhaps his early French
followers--were very much preoccupied with the problem of happiness.
Now in a sense all men--even those who renounce the world and mortify
the flesh--aim at happiness. The important point to determine is what
any particular person means by happiness and how he hopes to attain it.
It should be plain from all that has been said that the Rousseauist
seeks happiness in the free play of the emotions. The “Influence of
the Passions on Happiness” is the significant title of one of Madame
de Staël’s early treatises. The happiness that the Rousseauist seeks
involves not merely a free play of feeling but--what is even more
important--a free play of the imagination. Feeling acquires a sort
of infinitude as a result of this coöperation of the imagination,
and so the romanticist goes, as we have seen, in quest of the thrill
superlative, as appears so clearly in his nympholepsy, his pursuit of
the “impossible she.” But the more imaginative this quest for emotional
happiness grows the more it tends to become a mere nostalgia. Happiness
is achieved so far as it is achieved at all in dreamland. Rousseau says
of himself: _Mon plus constant bonheur fut en songe_. Every finite
satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves him unsatisfied.
René says that he had exhausted solitude as he had exhausted society:
they had both failed to satisfy his insatiable desires. René plainly
takes his insatiableness to be the badge of his spiritual distinction.
To submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that
one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the
philistine.
But does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperæsthetic, by
burning with infinite indeterminate desire? We have here perhaps the
chief irony and contradiction in the whole movement. The Rousseauist
seeks happiness and yet on his own showing, his mode of seeking it
results, not in happiness but in wretchedness. One finds indeed figures
in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life
first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure
through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm
nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness
of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest
literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps
been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it
from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut
of gloom.[227]
Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair.
According to a somewhat doubtful authority, Ninon de Lenclos, “the
joy of the spirit measures its force.” When the romanticist on the
other hand discovers that his ideal of happiness works put into actual
unhappiness he does not blame his ideal. He simply assumes that the
world is unworthy of a being so exquisitely organized as himself, and
so shrinks back from it and enfolds himself in his sorrow as he would
in a mantle. Since the superlative bliss that he craves eludes him
he will at least be superlative in woe. So far from being a mark of
failure this woe measures his spiritual grandeur. “A great soul,” as
René says, “must contain more grief than a small one.” The romantic
poets enter into a veritable competition with one another as to who
shall be accounted the most forlorn. The victor in this competition
is awarded the palm not merely for poetry but wisdom. In the words of
Arnold:
Amongst us one
Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days.
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
This for our wisest! and we others pine,
And wish the long unhappy dream would end,
And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear;
With close-lipped patience for our only friend,
Sad patience, too near neighbor to despair.
Though Arnold may in this poem, as some one has complained, reduce the
muse to the rôle of hospital nurse, he is, like his master Senancour,
free from the taint of theatricality. He does not as he said of Byron
make “a pageant of his bleeding heart”; and the Byronic pose has a
close parallel in the pose of Chateaubriand. An Irish girl at London
once told Chateaubriand that “he carried his heart in a sling.” He
himself said that he had a soul of the kind “the ancients called a
sacred malady.”
Chateaubriand, to be sure, had his cheerful moments and many of them.
His sorrows he bestowed upon the public. Herein he was a true child
of Jean-Jacques. We are told by eye-witnesses how heartily Rousseau
enjoyed many aspects of his life at Motiers-Travers. On his own
showing, he was plunged during this period in almost unalloyed misery.
Froude writes of Carlyle: “It was his peculiarity that if matters were
well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going
ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable,
he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.” We can
follow clear down to Gissing the assumption in some form or other that
“art must be the mouthpiece of misery.” This whole question as to the
proper function of art goes to the root of the debate between the
classicist and the Rousseauist. “All these poets,” Goethe complains to
Eckermann of the romanticists of 1830, “write as though they were ill,
and as though the whole world were a hospital. … Every one of them in
writing tries to be more desolate than all the others. This is really
an abuse of poetry which has been given to make man satisfied with the
world and with his lot. But the present generation is afraid of all
solid energy; its mind is at ease and sees poetry only in weakness. I
have found a good expression to vex these gentlemen. I am going to call
their poetry hospital poetry.”[228]
Now Goethe is here, like Chateaubriand, mocking to some degree his own
followers. When he suffered from a spiritual ailment of any kind he got
rid of it by inoculating others with it; and it was in this way, as we
learn from his Autobiography, that he got relief from the _Weltschmerz_
of “Werther.” But later in life Goethe was classical not merely in
precept like Chateaubriand, but to some extent in practice. The best of
the poetry of his maturity tends like that of the ancients to elevate
and console.
The contrast between classic and romantic poetry in this matter of
melancholy is closely bound up with the larger contrast between
imitation and spontaneity. Homer is the greatest of poets, according
to Aristotle, because he does not entertain us with his own person but
is more than any other poet an imitator. The romantic poet writes, on
the other hand, as Lamartine says he wrote, solely for the “relief of
his heart.” He pours forth himself--his most intimate and private self;
above all, his anguish and his tears. In his relation to his reader, as
Musset tells us in a celebrated image,[229] he is like the pelican who
rends and lacerates his own flesh to provide nourishment for his young
(_Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur_):
_Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,_
_Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots._[230]
To make of poetry a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, usually
of sorrowful emotion, is what the French understand by lyricism (_le
lyrisme_); and it may be objected that it is not fair to compare an
epic poet like Homer with a lyricist like Musset. Let us then take for
our comparison the poet whom the ancients themselves looked upon as
the supreme type of the lyricist--Pindar. He is superbly imaginative,
“sailing,” as Gray tells us, “with supreme dominion through the azure
deep of air,” but his imagination is not like that of Musset in the
service of sensibility. He does not bestow his own emotions upon us
but is rather in the Aristotelian sense an imitator. He is indeed at
the very opposite pole from Rousseau and the “apostles of affliction.”
“Let a man,” he says, “not darken delight in his life.” “Disclose not
to strangers our burden of care; this at least shall I advise thee.
Therefore is it fitting to show openly to all the folk the fair and
pleasant things allotted us; but if any baneful misfortune sent of
heaven befalleth man, it is seemly to shroud this in darkness.”[231]
And one should also note Pindar’s hostility towards that other great
source of romantic lyricism--nostalgia (“The desire of the moth for
the star”), and the closely allied pursuit of the strange and the
exotic. He tells of the condign punishment visited by Apollo upon the
girl Coronis who became enamoured of “a strange man from Arcadia,” and
adds: “She was in love with things remote--that passion which many ere
now have felt. For among men, there is a foolish company of those who,
putting shame on what they have at home, cast their glances afar, and
pursue idle dreams in hopes that shall not be fulfilled.”[232]
We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and
superficial of all types--the professional optimist who insists on
inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion
to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.”[233] In general the
Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller--the
Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the
everlasting wondersong of youth”[234]--is a romantic myth. We read
in the Iliad:[235] “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon
the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life
unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks
and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do
not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more
concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and
private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s
line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry:
Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.[236]
One should indeed not fail to distinguish between the note of
melancholy in a Homer or a Virgil and the melancholy of the ancients,
whether Stoic or Epicurean, who had experienced the hopelessness and
helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ultimate problems.
The melancholy of the Stoic is the melancholy of the man who associates
with the natural order a “virtue” that the natural order does not give,
and so is tempted to exclaim at last with Brutus, that he had thought
virtue a thing and had found that it was only a word. The melancholy of
the Epicurean is that of the man who has tasted the bitter sediment
(_amari aliquid_) in the cup of pleasure. It is not difficult to
discover modern equivalents of both Stoic and Epicurean melancholy.
“One should seek,” says Sainte-Beuve, “in the pleasures of René the
secret of his _ennuis_,” and so far as this is true Chateaubriand is
on much the same level as some Roman voluptuary who suffered from
the _tædium vitæ_ in the time of Tiberius or Nero.[237] But though
the Roman decadent gave himself up to the pursuit of sensation and
often of violent and abnormal sensation he was less prone than a
Chateaubriand to associate this pursuit with the “infinite”; and so he
was less nostalgic and hyperæsthetic. His Epicureanism was therefore
less poetical no doubt, but on the other hand he did not set up mere
romantic restlessness as a sort of substitute for religion. It was
probably easier therefore for him to feel the divine discontent and
so turn to real religion than it would have been if he had, like the
Rousseauist, complicated his Epicureanism with sham spirituality.
To say that the melancholy even of the decadent ancient is less
nostalgic is perhaps only another way of saying what I have said about
the melancholy of the ancients in general--that it is not so purely
personal. It derives less from his very private and personal illusions
and still less from his very private and personal disillusions. In
its purely personal quality romantic melancholy is indeed inseparable
from the whole conception of original genius. The genius sets out not
merely to be unique but unique in feeling, and the sense uniqueness in
feeling speedily passes over into that of uniqueness in suffering--on
the principle no doubt laid down by Horace Walpole that life, which is
a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. To be
a beautiful soul, to preserve one’s native goodness of feeling among
men who have been perverted by society, is to be the elect of nature
and yet this election turns out as Rousseau tells us to be a “fatal
gift of heaven.” It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however,
who assumes this elegiac tone. We need to consider what he means by
happiness while he still seeks for it in the actual world and not in
the _pays des chimères_. Rousseau tells us that he based the sense
of his own worth on the fineness of his powers of perception. Why
should nature have endowed him with such exquisite faculties[238] if
he was not to have a satisfaction commensurate with them, if he was
“to die without having lived”? We have here the psychological origins
of the right to happiness that the romanticists were to proclaim.
“We spend on the passions,” says Joubert, “the stuff that has been
given us for happiness.” The Rousseauist hopes to find his happiness
in the passions themselves. Romantic happiness does not involve any
moral effort and has been defined in its extreme forms as a “monstrous
dream of passive enjoyment.” Flaubert has made a study of the right to
happiness thus understood in his “Madame Bovary.” Madame Bovary, who
is very commonplace in other respects, feels exquisitely; and inasmuch
as her husband had no such fineness the right to happiness meant for
her, as it did for so many other “misunderstood” women, the right
to extra-marital adventure. One should note the germs of melancholy
that lurk in the quest of the superlative moment even if the quest is
relatively successful. Suppose Saint-Preux had succeeded in compressing
into a single instant “the delights of a thousand centuries”; and so
far as outer circumstances are concerned had had to pay no penalty. The
nearer the approach to a superhuman intensity of feeling the greater is
likely to be the ensuing languor. The ordinary round of life seems pale
and insipid compared with the exquisite and fugitive moment. One seems
to one’s self to have drained the cup of life at a draught and save
perhaps for impassioned recollection of the perfect moment to have no
reason for continuing to live. One’s heart is “empty and swollen”[239]
and one is haunted by thoughts of suicide.
This sense of having exhausted life[240] and the accompanying
temptation to suicide that are such striking features of the malady
of the age are not necessarily associated with any outer enjoyment at
all. One may devour life in revery and then the melancholy arises from
the disproportion between the dream and the fact. The revery that thus
consumes life in advance is not necessarily erotic. What may be termed
the cosmic revery of a Senancour or an Amiel[241] has very much the
same effect.
The atony and aridity of which the sufferer from romantic melancholy
complains may have other sources besides the depression that follows
upon the achieving of emotional intensity whether in revery or in fact;
it may also be an incident in the warfare between head and heart that
assumes so many forms among the spiritual posterity of Jean-Jacques.
The Rousseauist seeks happiness in emotional spontaneity and this
spontaneity seems to be killed by the head which stands aloof and
dissects and analyzes. Perhaps the best picture of the emotionalist
who is thus incapacitated for a frank surrender to his own emotions
is the “Adolphe” of Benjamin Constant (a book largely reminiscent of
Constant’s actual affair with Madame de Staël).
Whether the victim of romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he
is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude
buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The
romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded
action and at the same time become highly sensitive and highly
self-conscious. The man who thrills more exquisitely to pleasure than
another will also thrill more exquisitely to pain; nay, pleasure itself
in its extreme is allied to pain;[242] so that to be hyperæsthetic is
not an unmixed advantage especially if it be true, as Pindar says,
that the Gods bestow two trials on a man for every boon. Perhaps the
deepest bitterness is found, not in those who make a pageant of their
bleeding hearts, but in those who, like Leconte de Lisle[243] and
others (_les impassibles_), disdain to make a show of themselves to the
mob, and so dissimulate their quivering sensibility under an appearance
of impassibility; or, like Stendhal, under a mask of irony that “is
imperceptible to the vulgar.”
Stendhal aims not at emotional intensity only, but also glorifies the
lust for power. He did as much as any one in his time to promote the
ideal of the superman. Yet even if the superman has nerves of steel,
as seems to have been the case with Stendhal’s favorite, Napoleon, and
acts on the outer world with a force of which the man in search of a
sensation is quite incapable, he does not act upon himself, he remains
ethically passive. This ethical passivity is the trait common to all
those who incline to live purely on the naturalistic level--whether
they sacrifice the human law and its demands for measure to the lust
of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power. The man
who neglects his ethical self and withdraws into his temperamental or
private self, must almost necessarily have the sense of isolation,
of remoteness from other men. We return here to the psychology of
the original genius to whom it was a tame and uninteresting thing
to be simply human and who, disdaining to seem to others a being of
the same clay as themselves, wished to be in their eyes either an
angel or a demon--above all a demon.[244] René does not, as I have
said,[245] want even the woman who loves him to feel at one with him,
but rather to be at once astonished and appalled. He exercises upon
those who approach him a malign fascination; for he not only lives
in misery himself as in his natural element, but communicates this
misery to those who approach him. He is like one of those fair trees
under which one cannot sit without perishing. Moreover René disavows
all responsibility for thus being a human Upas-tree. Moral effort is
unavailing, for it was all written in the book of fate. The victim of
romantic melancholy is at times tender and elegiac, at other times he
sets up as a heaven-defying Titan. This latter pose became especially
common in France around 1830 when the influence of Byron had been added
to that of Chateaubriand. Under the influence of these two writers a
whole generation of youth became “things of dark imaginings,”[246]
predestined to a blight that was at the same time the badge of their
superiority. One wished like René to have an “immense, solitary and
stormy soul,” and also, like a Byronic hero, to have a diabolical glint
in the eye and a corpse-like complexion,[247] and so seem the “blind
and deaf agent of funereal mysteries.”[248] “It was possible to believe
everything about René except the truth.” The person who delights in
being as mysterious as this easily falls into mystification. Byron
himself we are told was rather flattered by the rumor that he had
committed at least one murder. Baudelaire, it has been said, displayed
his moral gangrene as a warrior might display honorable wounds. This
flaunting of his own perversity was part of the literary attitude he
had inherited from the “Satanic School.”
When the romanticist is not posing as the victim of fate he poses
as the victim of society. Both ways of dodging moral responsibility
enter into the romantic legend of the _poète maudit_. Nobody loves
a poet. His own mother according to Baudelaire utters a malediction
upon him.[249] That is because the poet feels so exquisitely that he
is at once odious and unintelligible to the ordinary human pachyderm.
Inasmuch as the philistine is not too sensitive to act he has a great
advantage over the poet in the real world and often succeeds in driving
him from it and indeed from life itself. This inferiority in action is
a proof of the poet’s ideality. “His gigantic wings,” as Baudelaire
says, “keep him from walking.” He has, in Coleridgean phrase, fed on
“honey dew and drunk the milk of paradise,”[250] and so can scarcely
be expected to submit to a diet of plain prose. It is hardly necessary
to say that great poets of the past have not been at war with their
public in this way. The reason is that they were less taken up with
the uttering of their own uniqueness; they were, without ceasing to be
themselves, servants of the general sense.
Chatterton became for the romanticists a favorite type of the _poète
maudit_, and his suicide a symbol of the inevitable defeat of the
“ideal” by the “real.” The first performance of Vigny’s Chatterton
(1835) with its picture of the implacable hatred of the philistine
for the artist was received by the romantic youth of Paris with
something akin to delirium. As Gautier says in his well-known account
of this performance one could almost hear in the night the crack of
the solitary pistols. The ordinary man of letters, says Vigny in
his preface to this play, is sure of success, even the great writer
may get a hearing, but the poet, a being who is on a far higher
level than either, can look forward only to “perpetual martyrdom and
immolation.” He comes into the world to be a burden to others; his
native sensibility is so intimate and profound that it “has plunged
him from childhood into involuntary ecstasies, interminable reveries,
infinite inventions. Imagination possesses him above all … it sweeps
his faculties heavenward as irresistibly as the balloon carries up
its car.” From that time forth he is more or less cut off from normal
contact with his fellow-men. “His sensibility has become too keen;
what only grazes other men wounds him until he bleeds.” He is thrown
back more and more upon himself and becomes a sort of living volcano,
“consumed by secret ardors and inexplicable languors,” and incapable
of self-guidance. Such is the poet. From his first appearance he is
an outlaw. Let all your tears and all your pity be for him. If he is
finally forced to suicide not he but society is to blame. He is like
the scorpion that cruel boys surround with live coals and that is
finally forced to turn his sting upon himself. Society therefore owes
it to itself to see that this exquisite being is properly pensioned and
protected by government, to the end that idealism may not perish from
the earth. M. Thiers who was prime minister at that time is said to
have received a number of letters from young poets, the general tenor
of which was: “A position or I’ll kill myself.”[251]
A circumstance that should interest Americans is that Poe as
interpreted by Baudelaire came to hold for a later generation of
romanticists the place that Chatterton had held for the romanticists
of 1830. Poe was actually murdered, says Baudelaire--and there is an
element of truth in the assertion along with much exaggeration--by
this great gas-lighted barbarity (i.e., America). All his inner and
spiritual life whether drunkard’s or poet’s, was one constant effort to
escape from this antipathetic atmosphere “in which,” Baudelaire goes on
to say, “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny,
the tyranny of the beasts, a zoöcracy”; and in this human zoo a being
with such a superhuman fineness of sensibility as Poe was of course at
a hopeless disadvantage. In general our elation at Poe’s recognition in
Europe should be tempered by the reflection that this recognition is
usually taken as a point of departure for insulting America. Poe is
about the only hyperæsthetic romanticist we have had, and he therefore
fell in with the main European tendency that comes down from the
eighteenth century. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom I have already cited
as an extreme example of romantic idealism, was one of Poe’s avowed
followers; but Villiers is also related by his æsthetic and “diabolic”
Catholicism to Chateaubriand; and the religiosity of Chateaubriand
itself derives from the religiosity of Rousseau.
Hitherto I have been studying for the most part only one main type of
modern melancholy. This type even in a Chateaubriand or a Byron and
still more in their innumerable followers may seem at once superficial
and theatrical. It often does not get beyond that Epicurean toying with
sorrow, that luxury of grief, which was not unknown even to classical
antiquity.[252] The despair of Chateaubriand is frequently only a
disguise of his love of literary glory, and Chesterton is inclined to
see in the Byronic gloom an incident of youth and high spirits.[253]
But this is not the whole story even in Byron and Chateaubriand. To
find what is both genuine and distinctive in romantic melancholy we
need to enlarge a little further on the underlying difference between
the classicist and the Rousseauist. The Rousseauist, as indeed the
modern man in general, is more preoccupied with his separate and
private self than the classicist. Modern melancholy has practically
always this touch of isolation not merely because of the proneness
of the “genius” to dwell on his own uniqueness, but also because of
the undermining of the traditional communions by critical analysis.
The noblest form of the “malady of the age” is surely that which
supervened upon the loss of religious faith. This is what distinguishes
the sadness of an Arnold or a Senancour from that of a Gray. The
“Elegy” belongs to the modern movement by the humanitarian note, the
sympathetic interest in the lowly, but in its melancholy it does
not go much beyond the milder forms of classical meditation on the
inevitable sadness of life--what one may term pensiveness. Like the
other productions of the so-called graveyard school, it bears a direct
relation to Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” It is well to retain Gray’s own
distinction. “Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the
most part,” he wrote to Richard West in 1742, “but there is another
sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt.” Gray did not
experience the more poignant sadness, one may suspect, without some
loss of the “trembling hope” that is the final note of the “Elegy.” No
forlornness is greater than that of the man who has known faith and
then lost it. Renan writes of his own break with the Church:
The fish of Lake Baikal, we are told, have spent thousands
of years in becoming fresh-water fish after being salt-water
fish. I had to go through my transition in a few weeks. Like an
enchanted circle Catholicism embraces the whole of life with so
much strength that when one is deprived of it everything seems
insipid. I was terribly lost. The universe produced upon me
the impression of a cold and arid desert. For the moment that
Christianity was not the truth, all the rest appeared to me
indifferent, frivolous, barely worthy of interest. The collapse
of my life upon itself left in me a feeling of emptiness
like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy
love-affair.[254]
The forlornness at the loss of faith is curiously combined in many of
the romanticists with the mood of revolt. This type of romanticist
heaps reproaches on a God in whose existence he no longer believes
(as in Leconte de Lisle’s “Quaïn,” itself related to Byron’s “Cain”).
He shakes his fist at an empty heaven, or like Alfred de Vigny (in
his _Jardin des Oliviers_) assumes towards this emptiness an attitude
of proud disdain. He is loath to give up this grandiose defiance of
divinity if only because it helps to save him from subsiding into
platitude. A somewhat similar mood appears in the “Satanic” Catholics
who continue to cling to religion simply because it adds to the gusto
of sinning.[255] A Barbey succeeded in combining the rôle of Byronic
Titan with that of champion of the Church. But in general the romantic
Prometheus spurns the traditional forms of communion whether classical
or Christian. He is so far as everything established is concerned
enormously centrifugal, but he hopes to erect on the ruins of the past
the new religion of human brotherhood. Everything in this movement from
Shaftesbury down hinges on the rôle that is thus assigned to sympathy:
if it can really unite men who are at the same time indulging each to
the utmost his own “genius” or idiosyncrasy there is no reason why one
should not accept romanticism as a philosophy of life.
But nowhere else perhaps is the clash more violent between the theory
and the fact. No movement is so profuse in professions of brotherhood
and none is so filled with the aching sense of solitude. “Behold me
then alone upon the earth,” is the sentence with which Rousseau begins
his last book;[256] and he goes on to marvel that he, the “most loving
of men,” had been forced more and more into solitude. “I am in the
world as though in a strange planet upon which I have fallen from the
one that I inhabited.”[257] When no longer subordinated to something
higher than themselves both the head and the heart (in the romantic
sense) not only tend to be opposed to one another, but also, each in
its own way, to isolate. Empedocles was used not only by Arnold but by
other victims[258] of romantic melancholy, as a symbol of intellectual
isolation: by his indulgence in the “imperious lonely thinking power”
Empedocles has broken the warm bonds of sympathy with his fellows:
thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,--
But a naked eternally restless mind!
His leaping into Ætna typifies his attempt to escape from his
loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself.
According to religion one should seek to unite with a something that
is set above both man and nature, whether this something is called
God as in Christianity or simply the Law as in various philosophies
of the Far East.[259] The most severe penalty visited on the man who
transgresses is that he tends to fall away from this union. This is
the element of truth in the sentence of Diderot that Rousseau took as
a personal affront: “Only the wicked man is alone.” Rousseau asserted
in reply, anticipating Mark Twain,[260] that “on the contrary only
the good man is alone.” Now in a sense Rousseau is right. “Most men
are bad,” as one of the seven sages of Greece remarked, and any one
who sets out to follow a very strenuous virtue is likely to have few
companions on the way. Rousseau is also right in a sense when he says
that the wicked man needs to live in society so that he may have
opportunity to practice his wickedness. Yet Rousseau fails to face the
main issue: solitude is above all a psychic thing. A man may frequent
his fellows and suffer none the less acutely, like Poe’s “Man of the
Crowd,” from a ghastly isolation. And conversely one may be like the
ancient who said that he was never less alone than when he was alone.
Hawthorne, who was himself a victim of solitude, brooded a great deal
on this whole problem, especially, as may be seen in the “Scarlet
Letter” and elsewhere, on the isolating effects of sin. He perceived
the relation of the problem to the whole trend of religious life in
New England. The older Puritans had a sense of intimacy with God and
craved no other companionship. With the weakening of their faith the
later Puritans lost the sense of a divine companionship, but retained
their aloofness from men. Hawthorne’s own solution of the problem
of solitude, so far as he offers any, is humanitarian. Quicken your
sympathies. Let the man who has taken as his motto _Excelsior_[261]
be warned. Nothing will console him on the bleak heights either of
knowledge or of power for the warm contact with the dwellers in the
valley. Faust, who is a symbol of the solitude of knowledge, seeks to
escape from his forlornness by recovering this warm contact. That the
inordinate quest of power also leads to solitude is beyond question.
Napoleon, the very type of the superman, must in the nature of the case
have been very solitary.[262] His admirer Nietzsche wrote one day: “I
have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child.”
Carlyle, whose “hero” derives like the superman from the original
genius[263] of the eighteenth century, makes the following entry in his
diary: “My isolation, my feeling of loneliness, unlimitedness (much
meant by this) what tongue shall say? Alone, alone!”[264]
It cannot be granted, however, that one may escape by love, as the
Rousseauist understands the word, from the loneliness that arises from
the unlimited quest either of knowledge or power. For Rousseauistic
love is also unlimited whether one understands by love either passion
or a diffusive sympathy for mankind at large. “What solitudes are these
human bodies,” Musset exclaimed when fresh from his affair with George
Sand. Wordsworth cultivated a love for the lowly that quite overflowed
the bounds of neo-classic selection. It is a well-known fact that the
lowly did not altogether reciprocate. “A desolate-minded man, ye kna,”
said an old inn-keeper of the Lakes to Canon Rawnsley, “’Twas potry as
did it.” If Wordsworth writes so poignantly of solitude one may infer
that it is because he himself had experienced it.[265] Nor would it be
difficult to show that the very philanthropic Ruskin was at least as
solitary as Carlyle with his tirades against philanthropy.
I have spoken of the isolating effects of sin, but sin is scarcely the
right word to apply to most of the romanticists. The solitude of which
so many of them complain does, however, imply a good deal of spiritual
inertia. Now to be spiritually inert, as I have said elsewhere, is
to be temperamental, to indulge unduly the lust for knowledge or
sensation or power without imposing on these lusts some centre or
principle of control set above the ordinary self. The man who wishes
to fly off on the tangent of his own temperament and at the same time
enjoy communion on any except the purely material level is harboring
incompatible desires. For temperament is what separates. A sense of
unlimitedness (“much meant by this” as Carlyle says) and of solitude
are simply the penalties visited upon the eccentric individualist. If
we are to unite on the higher levels with other men we must look in
another direction than the expansive outward striving of temperament:
we must in either the humanistic or religious sense undergo conversion.
We must pull back our temperaments with reference to the model that
we are imitating, just as, in Aristotle’s phrase, one might pull
back and straighten out a crooked stick.[266] Usually the brake on
temperament is supplied by the ethos, the convention of one’s age and
country. I have tried to show elsewhere that the whole programme of
the eccentric individualist is to get rid of this convention, whatever
it may be, without developing some new principle of control. The
eccentric individualist argues that to accept control, to defer to some
centre as the classicist demands, is to cease to be himself. But are
restrictions upon temperament so fatal to a man’s being himself? The
reply hinges upon the definition of the word self, inasmuch as man is
a dual being. If a man is to escape from his isolation he must, I have
said, aim at some goal set above his ordinary self which is at the
same time his unique and separate self. But because this goal is set
above his ordinary self, it is not therefore necessarily set above his
total personality. The limitations that he imposes on his ordinary
self may be the necessary condition of his entering into possession of
his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men.
Aristotle says that if a man wishes to achieve happiness he must be a
true lover of himself. It goes without saying that he means the ethical
self. The author of a recent book on Ibsen says that Ibsen’s message to
the world is summed up in the line:
This above all,--to thine own self be true.
It is abundantly plain from the context, however, that Polonius is a
decayed Aristotelian and not a precursor of Ibsen. The self to which
Aristotle would have a man be true is at the opposite pole from the
self that Ibsen and the original geniuses are so eager to get uttered.
To impose the yoke of one’s human self upon one’s temperamental
self is, in the Aristotelian sense, to work. Aristotle conceives of
happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists, on the
other hand, are from the human point of view, passive. The happiness
that they crave is a passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the
energy of a Napoleon and yet remain ethically passive. He may absorb
whole encyclopædias and remain ethically passive. He may expand his
sympathies until, like Schiller, he is ready to “bestow a kiss upon
the whole world” and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to
be ethically passive only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian
sense, that is when he begins to put the brake on temperament and
impulse, and in the same degree he tends to become ethically efficient.
By his denial of the dualism of the spirit, Rousseau discredited this
inner working, so that inwardness has come to seem synonymous with mere
subjectivity; and to be subjective in the Rousseauistic sense is to be
diffusive, to lack purpose and concentration, to lose one’s self in a
shoreless sea of revery.
The utilitarian intervenes at this point and urges the romanticist,
since he has failed to work inwardly, at least to work outwardly.
Having missed the happiness of ethical efficiency he may in this way
find the happiness of material efficiency, and at the same time serve
the world. This is the solution of the problem of happiness that Goethe
offers at the end of the Second Faust, and we may affirm without
hesitation that it is a sham solution. To work outwardly and in the
utilitarian sense, without the inner working that can alone save from
ethical anarchy is to stimulate rather than repress the most urgent
of all the lusts--the lust of power. It is only too plain that the
unselective sympathy or joy in service with which Goethe would complete
Faust’s utilitarian activity is not in itself a sufficient counterpoise
to the will to power, unless indeed we assume with Rousseau that one
may control expansive impulses by opposing them to one another.
A terrible danger thus lurks in the whole modern programme: it is a
programme that makes for a formidable mechanical efficiency and so
tends to bring into an ever closer material contact men who remain
ethically centrifugal. The reason why the humanitarian and other
schemes of communion that have been set up during the last century
have failed is that they do not, like the traditional schemes, set
any bounds to mere expansiveness, or, if one prefers, they do not
involve any conversion. And so it is not surprising that the feeling
of emptiness[267] or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special
mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral
solitude”;[268] but strictly speaking his solitude is the reverse of
moral. Only by cultivating his human self and by the unceasing effort
that this cultivation involves does a man escape from his nightmare of
separateness and so move in some measure towards happiness. But the
happiness of which René dreams is unethical--something very private and
personal and egoistic. Nothing is easier than to draw the line from
René to Baudelaire and later decadents--for instance to Des Esseintes,
the hero of Huysmans’s novel “A Rebours,”[269] who is typical of the
last exaggerations of the movement. Des Esseintes cuts himself off as
completely as possible from other men and in the artificial paradise
he has devised gives himself up to the quest of strange and violent
sensation; but his dream of happiness along egoistic lines turns into
a nightmare,[270] his palace of art becomes a hell. Lemaître is quite
justified in saying of Des Esseintes that he is only René or Werther
brought up to date--“a played-out and broken-down Werther who has
a malady of the nerves, a deranged stomach and eighty years more of
literature to the bad.”[271]
Emotional romanticism was headed from the start towards this bankruptcy
because of its substitution for ethical effort of a mere lazy floating
on the stream of mood and temperament. I have said that Buddhism
saw in this ethical indolence the root of all evil. Christianity in
its great days was preoccupied with the same problem. To make this
point clear it will be necessary to add to what I have said about
classical and romantic melancholy a few words about melancholy in the
Middle Ages. In a celebrated chapter of his “Genius of Christianity”
(_Le Vague des passions_) Chateaubriand seeks to give to the malady
of the age Christian and mediæval origins. This was his pretext,
indeed, for introducing René into an apology for Christianity and so,
as Sainte-Beuve complained, administering poison in a sacred wafer.
Chateaubriand begins by saying that the modern man is melancholy
because, without having had experience himself, he is at the same
time overwhelmed by the second-hand experience that has been heaped
up in the books and other records of an advanced civilization; and so
he suffers from a precocious disillusion; he has the sense of having
exhausted life before he has enjoyed it. There is nothing specifically
Christian in this disillusion and above all nothing mediæval. But
Chateaubriand goes on to say that from the decay of the pagan world
and the barbarian invasions the human spirit received an impression
of sadness and possibly a tinge of misanthropy which has never been
completely effaced. Those that were thus wounded and estranged from
their fellow-men took refuge formerly in monasteries, but now that
this resource has failed them, they are left in the world without being
of it and so they “become the prey of a thousand chimeras.” Then is
seen the rise of that guilty melancholy which the passions engender
when, left without definite object, they prey upon themselves in a
solitary heart.[272]
The _vague des passions_, the expansion of infinite indeterminate
desire, that Chateaubriand here describes may very well be related to
certain sides of Christianity--especially to what may be termed its
neo-Platonic side. Yet Christianity at its best has shown itself a
genuine religion, in other words, it has dealt sternly and veraciously
with the facts of human nature. It has perceived clearly how a man may
move towards happiness and how on the other hand he tends to sink into
despair; or what amounts to the same thing, it has seen the supreme
importance of spiritual effort and the supreme danger of spiritual
sloth. The man who looked on himself as cut off from God and so ceased
to strive was according to the mediæval Christian the victim of
_acedia_. This sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting
and abdication of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime
against the Holy Ghost itself. It would in fact not be hard to show
that what was taken by the Rousseauist to be the badge of spiritual
distinction was held by the mediæval Christian to be the chief of all
the deadly sins.
The victim of _acedia_ often looked upon himself, like the victim of
the malady of the age, as foredoomed. But though the idea of fate
enters at times into mediæval melancholy, the man of the Middle Ages
could scarcely so detach himself from the community as to suffer
from that sense of loneliness which is the main symptom of romantic
melancholy. This forlornness was due not merely to the abrupt
disappearance of the older forms of communion, but to the failure of
the new attempts at communion. When one gets beneath the surface of
the nineteenth century one finds that it was above all a period of
violent disillusions, and it is especially after violent disillusion
that a man feels himself solitary and forlorn. I have said that the
special mark of the half-educated man is his harboring of incompatible
desires. The new religions or unifications of life that appeared
during the nineteenth century made an especially strong appeal to the
half-educated man because it seemed to him that by accepting some one
of these he could enjoy the benefits of communion and at the same time
not have to take on the yoke of any serious discipline; that he could,
in the language of religion, achieve salvation without conversion. When
a communion on these lines turns out to be not a reality, but a sham,
and its disillusioned votary feels solitary and forlorn, he is ready to
blame everybody and everything except himself.
A few specific illustrations will help us to understand how romantic
solitude, which was created by the weakening of the traditional
communions, was enhanced by the collapse of various sham communions.
Let us return for a moment to that eminent example of romantic
melancholy and disillusion, Alfred de Vigny. His “Chatterton” deals
with the fatal misunderstanding of the original genius by other men.
“Moïse” deals more specifically with the problem of his solitude. The
genius is so eminent and unique, says Vigny, speaking for himself from
behind the mask of the Hebrew prophet, that he is quite cut off from
ordinary folk who feel that they have nothing in common with him.[273]
This forlornness of the genius is not the sign of some capital error in
his philosophy. On the contrary it is the sign of his divine election,
and so Moses blames God for his failure to find happiness.[274] If
the genius is cut off from communion with men he cannot hope for
companionship with God because he has grown too sceptical. Heaven is
empty and in any case dumb; and so in the poem to which I have already
referred (_Le Mont des Oliviers_) Vigny assumes the mask of Jesus
himself to express this desolateness, and concludes that the just man
will oppose a haughty and Stoic disdain to the divine silence.[275]
All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower--a
phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny.[276] In the
ivory tower he can at least commune with nature and the ideal woman.
But Vigny came at a time when the Arcadian glamour was being dissipated
from nature. Partly under scientific influence she was coming to seem
not a benign but a cold and impassive power, a collection of cruel
and inexorable laws. I have already mentioned this mood that might
be further illustrated from Taine and so many others towards the
middle of the nineteenth century.[277] “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny
makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.”[278] (“La Maison du Berger”);
and so in the _Maison roulante_, or sort of Arcadia on wheels that he
has imagined, he must seek his chief solace with the ideal feminine
companion. But woman herself turns out to be treacherous; and, assuming
the mask of Samson (“La Colère de Samson”), Vigny utters a solemn
malediction upon the eternal Delilah (_Et, plus ou moins, la Femme
est toujours Dalila_). Such is the disillusion that comes from having
sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress.[279]
Now that every form of communion has failed, all that is left it
would seem is to die in silence and solitude like the wolf (“La Mort
du Loup”). Vigny continues to hold, however, like the author of the
“City of Dreadful Night,” that though men may not meet in their joys,
they may commune after a fashion in their woe. He opposes to heartless
nature and her “vain splendors” the religion of pity, “the majesty of
human sufferings.”[280] Towards the end when Vigny feels the growing
prestige of science, he holds out the hope that a man may to a certain
extent escape from the solitude of his own ego into some larger whole
by contributing his mite to “progress.” But the symbol of this
communion[281] that he has chosen--that of the shipwrecked and sinking
mariner who consigns his geographical discoveries to a bottle in the
hope that it may be washed up on some civilized shore--is itself of a
singular forlornness.
Vigny has a concentration and power of philosophical reflection that
is rare among the romanticists. George Sand is inferior to him in
this respect but she had a richer and more generous nature, and is
perhaps even more instructive in her life and writings for the student
of romantic melancholy. After the loss of the religious faith of her
childhood she became an avowed Rousseauist. She attacks a society
that seems to her to stand in the way of the happiness of which she
dreams--the supreme emotional intensity to be achieved in an ideal
love. In celebrating passion and the rights of passion she is lyrical
in the two main modes of the Rousseauist--she is either tender and
elegiac, or else stormy and Titanic. But when she attempts to practice
with Musset this religion of love, the result is violent disillusion.
In the forlornness that follows upon the collapse of her sham communion
she meditates suicide. “Ten years ago,” she wrote in 1845 to Mazzini,
“I was in Switzerland; I was still in the age of tempests; I made up
my mind even then to meet you, if I should resist the temptation to
suicide which pursued me upon the glaciers.” And then gradually a new
faith dawned upon her; she substituted for the religion of love the
religion of human brotherhood. She set up as an object of worship
humanity in its future progress; and then, like so many other dreamers,
she suffered a violent disillusion in the Revolution of 1848. The
radiant abstraction she had been worshipping had been put to the test
and she discovered that there entered into the actual make-up of the
humanity she had so idealized “a large number of knaves, a very large
number of lunatics, and an immense number of fools.” What is noteworthy
in George Sand is that she not only saved the precious principle of
faith from these repeated shipwrecks but towards the end of her life
began to put it on a firmer footing. Like Goethe she worked out to some
extent, in opposition to romanticism, a genuinely ethical point of view.
This latter development can best be studied in her correspondence with
Flaubert. She urges him to exercise his will, and he replies that he
is as “fatalistic as a Turk.” His fatalism, however, was not oriental
but scientific or pseudo-scientific. I have already cited his demand
that man be studied “objectively” just as one would study “a mastodon
or a crocodile.” Flaubert refused to see any connection between this
determinism and his own gloom or between George Sand’s assertion
of will and her cheerfulness. It was simply, he held, a matter of
temperament, and there is no doubt some truth in this contention.
“You at the first leap mount to heaven,” he says, “while I, poor
devil, am glued to the earth as though by leaden soles.” And again:
“In spite of your great sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as
through a golden mist,” whereas “I am constantly dissecting; and when
I have finally discovered the corruption in anything that is supposed
to be pure, the gangrene in its fairest parts, then I raise my head
and laugh.” Yet George Sand’s cheerfulness is also related to her
perception of a power in man to work upon himself--a power that sets
him apart from other animals. To enter into this region of ethical
effort is to escape from the whole fatal circle of naturalism, and at
the same time to show some capacity to mature--a rare achievement among
the romanticists. The contrast is striking here between George Sand
and Hugo, who, as the ripe fruit of his meditations, yields nothing
better than the apotheosis of Robespierre and Marat. “I wish to see
man as he is,” she writes to Flaubert. “He is not good or bad: he is
good and bad. But he is something else besides: being good and bad he
has an inner force which leads him to be very bad and a little good,
or very good and a little bad. I have often wondered,” she adds, “why
your ‘Education Sentimentale’ was so ill received by the public, and
the reason, as it seems to me, is that its characters are passive--that
they do not act upon themselves.” But the Titaness of the period of
“Lélia” can scarcely be said to have acted upon herself, so that she is
justified in writing: “I cannot forget that my personal victory over
despair is the work of my will, and of a new way of understanding life
which is the exact opposite of the one I held formerly.” How different
is the weary cry of Flaubert: “I am like a piece of clock work, what
I am doing to-day I shall be doing to-morrow; I did exactly the same
thing yesterday; I was exactly the same man ten years ago.”
The correspondence of Flaubert and George Sand bears interestingly on
another of the sham religions of the nineteenth century--the religion
of art. Art is for Flaubert not merely a religion but a fanaticism. He
preaches abstinence, renunciation and mortification of the flesh in the
name of art. He excommunicates those who depart from artistic orthodoxy
and speaks of heretics and disbelievers in art with a ferocity worthy
of a Spanish inquisitor. Ethical beauty such as one finds in the
Greeks at their best resides in order and proportion; it is not a thing
apart but the outcome of some harmonious whole. Beauty in the purely
æsthetic and unethical sense that Flaubert gives to the word is little
more than the pursuit of illusion. The man who thus treats beauty as
a thing apart, who does not refer back his quest of the exquisite to
some ethical centre will spend his life Ixion-like embracing phantoms.
“O Art, Art,” exclaims Flaubert, “bitter deception, nameless phantom,
which gleams and lures us to our ruin!” He speaks elsewhere of “the
chimera of style which is wearing him out soul and body.” Attaching as
he did an almost religious importance to his quest of the exquisite
he became like so many other Rousseauists not merely æsthetic but
hyperæsthetic. He complains in his old age: “My sensibility is sharper
than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois,
an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.”
Hardly anywhere else, indeed, will one find such accents of bitterness,
such melancholy welling up unbidden from the very depths of the heart,
as in the devotees of art for art’s sake--Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle,
Théophile Gautier.
George Sand takes Flaubert to task with admirable tact for his failure
to subordinate art to something higher than itself. “Talent imposes
duties; and art for art’s sake is an empty word.” As she grew older she
says she came more and more to put truth above beauty, and goodness
before strength. “I have reflected a great deal on what is _true_,
and in this search for truth, the sentiment of my ego has gradually
disappeared.” The truth on which she had reflected was what she herself
calls total truth (_le vrai total_), not merely truth according to
the natural law, which received such exclusive emphasis towards the
middle of the nineteenth century as to lead to the rise of another
sham religion--the religion of science. “You have a better sense for
total truth,” she tells one of her correspondents “than Sainte-Beuve,
Renan and Littré. They have fallen into the German rut: therein lies
their weakness.” And Flaubert writes to George Sand: “What amazes and
delights me is the strength of your whole personality, not that of the
brain alone.”
Furthermore the holding of the human law that made possible this
rounded development, this growth towards total truth, was a matter not
of tradition but of immediate perception. George Sand had succeeded,
as Taine says, in making the difficult transition from an hereditary
faith to a personal conviction. Now this perception of the human law is
something very different from the pantheistic revery in which George
Sand was also an adept. To look on revery as the equivalent of vision
in the Aristotelian sense, as Rousseau and so many of his followers
have done, is to fall into sham spirituality. Maurice de Guérin falls
into sham spirituality when he exclaims “Oh! this contact of nature
and the soul would engender an ineffable voluptuousness, a prodigious
love of heaven and of God.” I am not asserting that George Sand herself
discriminated sharply between ethical and æsthetic perception or that
she is to be rated as a very great sage at any time. Yet she owes her
recovery of serenity after suffering shock upon shock of disillusion to
her having exercised in some degree what she terms “the contemplative
sense wherein resides invincible faith” (_le sens contemplatif où
réside la foi invincible_), and the passages that bear witness to her
use of this well-nigh obsolete sense are found in her correspondence.
Wordsworth lauds in true Rousseauistic fashion a “wise passiveness.”
But to be truly contemplative is not to be passive at all, but to be
“energetic” in Aristotle’s sense, or strenuous in Buddha’s sense. It
is a matter of no small import that the master analyst of the East and
the master analyst of the West are at one in their solution of the
supreme problem of ethics--the problem of happiness. For there can
be no doubt that the energy[282] in which the doctrine of Aristotle
culminates is the same as the “strenuousness”[283] on which Buddha puts
his final emphasis. The highest good they both agree is a contemplative
_working_. It is by thus working according to the human law that one
rises above the naturalistic level. The scientific rationalists of
the nineteenth century left no place for this true human spontaneity
when they sought to subject man entirely to the “law for thing.” This
scientific determinism was responsible for a great deal of spiritual
depression and _acedia_, especially in France during the second half
of the nineteenth century.[284] But even if science is less dogmatic
and absolute one needs to consider why it does not deserve to be given
the supreme and central place in life, why it cannot in short take the
place of humanism and religion, and the working according to the human
law that they both enjoin.
A man may indeed effect through science a certain escape from himself,
and this is very salutary so far as it goes; he has to discipline
himself to an order that is quite independent of his own fancies and
emotions. He becomes objective in short, but objective according to
the natural and not according to the human law. Objectivity of this
kind gives control over natural forces but it does not supply the
purpose for which these forces are to be used. It gives the airship,
for instance, but does not determine whether the airship is to go on
some beneficent errand or is to scatter bombs on women and children.
Science does not even set right limits to the faculty that it chiefly
exercises--the intellect. In itself it stimulates rather than curbs one
of the three main lusts to which human nature is subject--the lust of
knowledge. Renan, who makes a religion of science, speaks of “sacred
curiosity.” But this is even more dangerous than the opposite excess
of the ascetic Christian who denounces all curiosity as vain. The man
of science avers indeed that he does subordinate his knowledge to an
adequate aim, namely the progress of humanity. But the humanity of the
Baconian is only an intellectual abstraction just as the humanity of
the Rousseauist is only an emotional dream. George Sand found, as we
have seen, that the passage from one’s dream of humanity to humanity
in the concrete involved a certain disillusion. The scientific or
rationalistic humanitarian is subject to similar disillusions.[285]
Science not only fails to set proper limits to the activity of the
intellect, but one must also note a curious paradox in its relation
to the second of the main lusts to which man is subject, the lust
for emotion (_libido sentiendi_). The prime virtue of science is to
be unemotional and at the same time keenly analytical. Now protracted
and unemotional analysis finally creates a desire, as Renan says, for
the opposite pole, “the kisses of the naïve being,” and in general
for a frank surrender to the emotions. Science thus actually prepares
clients for the Rousseauist.[286] The man of science is also flattered
by the Rousseauistic notion that conscience and virtue are themselves
only forms of emotion. He is thus saved from anything so distasteful as
having to subordinate his own scientific discipline to some superior
religious or humanistic discipline. He often oscillates between the
rationalistic and the emotional pole not only in other things but also
in his cult of humanity. But if conscience is merely an emotion there
is a cult that makes a more potent appeal to conscience than the cult
of humanity itself and that is the cult of country. One is here at the
root of the most dangerous of all the sham religions of the modern
age--the religion of country, the frenzied nationalism that is now
threatening to make an end of civilization itself.
Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go
back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional
nationalist;[287] and that is because he saw that patriotic “virtue” is
a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration
came in the French Revolution which began as a great international
movement on emotional lines and ended in imperialism and Napoleon
Bonaparte. It is here that the terrible peril of a science that is
pursued as an end in itself becomes manifest. It disciplines man and
makes him efficient on the naturalistic level, but leaves him ethically
undisciplined. Now in the absence of ethical discipline the lust
for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least
practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature--the
lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types,
the efficient megalomaniac. The final use of a science that has thus
become a tool of the lust for power is in Burke’s phrase to “improve
the mystery of murder.”
This union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint, though
in a way the upshot of the whole movement we have been studying, is
especially marked in the modern German. Goethe as I have pointed
out is ready to pardon Faust for grave violations of the moral law
because of work which, so far from being ethical, is, in view of the
ruin in which it involves the rustic pair, Baucis and Philemon, under
suspicion of being positively unethical. Yet Goethe was far from being
a pure utilitarian and he had reacted more than most Germans of his
time from Rousseauism. Rousseau is glorified by Germans as a chief
source of their _Kultur_, as I have already pointed out. Now _Kultur_
when analyzed breaks up into two very different things--scientific
efficiency and emotionalism or what the Germans (and unfortunately not
the Germans alone) term “idealism.” There is no question about the
relation of this idealism to the stream of tendency of which Rousseau
is the chief representative. By his corruption of conscience Rousseau
made it possible to identify character with temperament. It was easy
for Fichte and others to take the next step and identify national
character with national temperament. The Germans according to Fichte
are all beautiful souls, the elect of nature. If they have no special
word for character it is because to be a German and have character are
synonymous. Character is something that gushes up from the primordial
depths of the German’s being without any conscious effort on his
part.[288] The members of a whole national group may thus flatter one
another and inbreed their national “genius” in the romantic sense, and
feel all the while that they are ecstatic “idealists”; yet as a result
of the failure to refer their genius back to some ethical centre, to
work, in other words, according to the human law, they may, so far as
the members of other national groups are concerned, remain in a state
of moral solitude.
Everything thus hinges on the meaning of the word work. In the abstract
and metaphysical sense man can know nothing of unity. He may, however,
by working in the human sense, by imposing, that is, due limits on his
expansive desires, close up in some measure the gap in his own nature
(the “civil war in the cave”) and so tend to become inwardly one. He
may hope in the same way to escape from the solitude of his own ego,
for the inner unity that he achieves through work is only an entering
into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in
common with other men. Thus to work ethically is not only to become
more unified and happy but also to move away from what is less
permanent towards what is more permanent and therefore more peaceful
in his total nature; so that the problem of happiness and the problem
of peace turn out at last to be inseparable.
Souls, says Emerson, never meet; and it is true that a man never quite
escapes from his solitude. That does not make the choice of direction
any the less important. An infinite beckons to him on either hand. The
one inspires the divine discontent, the other romantic restlessness.
If instead of following the romantic lure he heeds the call from the
opposite direction, he will not indeed attain to any perfect communion
but he will be less solitary. Strictly speaking a man is never happy in
the sense of being completely satisfied with the passing moment,[289]
or never, Dr. Johnson would add, except when he is drunk. The happiness
of the sober and waking man resides, it may be, not in his content with
the present moment but in the very effort that marks his passage from a
lower to a higher ethical level.
The happiness of which Rousseau dreamed, it has been made plain, was
not this active and ethical happiness, but rather the passive enjoyment
of the beautiful moment--the moment that he would like to have last
forever. After seeking for the beautiful moment in the intoxication of
love, he turned as we have seen to pantheistic revery. “As long as it
lasts,” he says of a moment of this kind, “one is self-sufficing like
God.” Yes, but it does not last, and when he wakes from his dream of
communion with nature, he is still solitary, still the prisoner of
his ego. The pantheistic dreamer is passive in every sense. He is not
working either according to the human or according to the natural law,
and so is not gaining either in material or in ethical efficiency.
In a world such as that in which we live this seems too much like
picnicking on a battlefield. Rousseau could on occasion speak shrewdly
on this point. He wrote to a youthful enthusiast who wished to come
and live with him at Montmorency: “The first bit of advice I should
like to give you is not to indulge in the taste you say you have for
the contemplative life and which is only an indolence of the spirit
reprehensible at every age and especially at yours. Man is not made to
meditate but to act.”
The contemplative life is then, according to Rousseau, the opposite
of action. But to contemplate is according to an Aristotle or a
Buddha to engage in the most important form of action, the form that
leads to happiness. To identify leisure and the contemplative life
with pantheistic revery, as Rousseau does, is to fall into one of
the most vicious of confusions. Perhaps indeed the most important
contrast one can reach in a subject of this kind is that between a
wise strenuousness and a more or less wise passiveness, between the
spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer, between a Saint Paul, let us
say, and a Walt Whitman.
The spiritual idling and drifting of the Rousseauist would be less
sinister if it did not coexist in the world of to-day with an intense
material activity. The man who seeks happiness by work according to the
natural law is to be rated higher than the man who seeks happiness in
some form of emotional intoxication (including pantheistic revery).
He is not left unarmed, a helpless dreamer in the battle of life. The
type of efficiency he is acquiring also helps him to keep at bay man’s
great enemy, ennui. An Edison, we may suppose, who is drawn ever onward
by the lure of wonder and curiosity and power, has little time to be
bored. It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the
fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire.[290]
I have already pointed out, however, the peril in a one-sided working
of this kind. It makes man efficient without making him ethical. It
stimulates rather than corrects a fearless, formless expansion on the
human level. This inordinate reaching out beyond bounds is, as the
great Greek poets saw with such clearness, an invitation to Nemesis.
The misery that results from unrestraint, from failure to work
according to the human law, is something different from mere pain and
far more to be dreaded; just as the happiness that results from a right
working according to the human law is something different from mere
pleasure and far more worthy of pursuit.
The present alliance between emotional romanticists and
utilitarians[291] is a veritable menace to civilization itself. It
does not follow, as I said in a previous chapter, because revery or
“intuition of the creative flux” cannot take the place of leisure or
meditation, that one must therefore condemn it utterly. It may like
other forms of romanticism have a place on the recreative side of
life. What finally counts is work according to either the human or
the natural law, but man cannot always be working. He needs moments
of relief from tension and concentration and even, it should seem, of
semi-oblivion of his conscious self. As one of the ways of winning such
moments of relaxation and partial forgetfulness much may be said for
revery. In general one must grant the solace and rich source of poetry
that is found in communion with nature even though the final emphasis
be put on communion with man. It is no small thing to be, as Arnold
says Wordsworth was, a “priest of the wonder and bloom of the world.”
One cannot however grant the Wordsworthian that to be a priest of
wonder is necessarily to be also a priest of wisdom. Thus to promote to
the supreme and central place something that is legitimate in its own
degree, but secondary, is to risk starting a sham religion.
Those who have sought to set up a cult of love or beauty or science or
humanity or country are open to the same objections as the votaries
of nature. However important each of these things may be in its own
place, it cannot properly be put in the supreme and central place for
the simple reason that it does not involve any adequate conversion
or discipline of man’s ordinary self to some ethical centre. I have
tried to show that the sense of solitude or forlornness that is so
striking a feature of romantic melancholy arises not only from a loss
of hold on the traditional centres, but also from the failure of
these new attempts at communion to keep their promises. The number of
discomfitures of this kind in the period that has elapsed since the
late eighteenth century, suggests that this period was even more than
most periods an age of sophistry. Every age has had its false teachers,
but possibly no age ever had so many dubious moralists as this, an
incomparable series of false prophets from Rousseau himself down to
Nietzsche and Tolstoy. It remains to sum up in a closing chapter the
results of my whole inquiry and at the same time to discuss somewhat
more specifically the bearing of my whole point of view, especially the
idea of work according to the human law, upon the present situation.