Rousseau and Romanticism

A sensible member of Edwards’s congregation at Northampton might conceivably have voted with the majority to dismiss him, not only because he objected to this spiritual terrorism in itself, but also because he saw the opposite extreme that it would help to precipitate – the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering.

The effusiveness, then, that began to appear in the eighteenth century is one sign of the progress of naturalism, which is itself due to the new confidence inspired in man by scientific discovery coupled with a revulsion from the austerity of Christian dogma. This new effusiveness is also no less palpably a revulsion from the excess of artificial decorum and this revulsion was in turn greatly promoted by the rapid increase in power and influence at this time of the middle class. Reserve is traditionally aristocratic. The plebeian is no less traditionally expansive. It cannot be said that the decorous reserve of the French aristocracy that had been more or less imitated by other European aristocracies was in all respects commendable. According to this decorum a man should not love his wife, or if he did, should be careful not to betray the fact in public. It was also good “form” to live apart from one’s children and bad form to display one’s affection for them. The protest against a decorum that repressed even the domestic emotions may perhaps best be followed in the rise of the middle class drama. According to strict neo-classic decorum only the aristocracy had the right to appear in tragedy, whereas the man of the middle class was relegated to comedy and the man of the people to farce. The intermediate types of play that multiply in the eighteenth century (drame bourgeois, comédie larmoyante, etc.) are the reply of the plebeian to this classification. He is beginning to insist that his emotions too shall be taken seriously. But at the same time he is, under the influence of the new naturalistic philosophy, so bent on affirming his own goodness that in getting rid of artificial decorum he gets rid of true decorum likewise and so strikes at the very root of the drama. For true drama in contradistinction to mere melodrama requires in the background a scale of ethical values, or what amounts to the same thing, a sense of what is normal and representative and decorous, and the quality of the characters is revealed by their responsible choices good or bad with reference to some ethical scale, choices that the characters reveal by their actions and not by any explicit moralizing. But in the middle class drama there is little action in this sense: no one wills either his goodness or badness, but appears more or less as the creature of accident or fate (in a very un-Greek sense), or of a defective social order; and so instead of true dramatic conflict and proper motivation one tends to get domestic tableaux in which the characters weep in unison. For it is understood not only that man (especially the bourgeois) is good but that the orthodox way for this goodness to manifest itself is to overflow through the eyes. Perhaps never before or since have tears been shed with such a strange facility. At no other time have there been so many persons who, with streaming eyes, called upon heaven and earth to bear witness to their innate excellence. A man would be ashamed, says La Bruyère, speaking from the point of view of l’honnête homme and his decorum, to display his emotions at the theatre. By the time of Diderot he would have been ashamed not to display them. It had become almost a requirement of good manners to weep and sob in public. At the performance of the “Père de Famille” in 1769 we are told that every handkerchief was in use. The Revolution seems to have raised doubts as to the necessary connection between tearfulness and goodness. The “Père de Famille” was hissed from the stage in 1811. Geoffroy commented in his feuilleton: “We have learned by a fatal experience that forty years of declamation and fustian about sensibility, humanity and benevolence, have served only to prepare men’s hearts for the last excesses of barbarism.”

The romanticist indulged in the luxury of grief and was not incapable of striking an attitude. But as a rule he disdained the facile lachrymosity of the man of feeling as still too imitative and conventional. For his part, he has that within which passes show. To estimate a play solely by its power to draw tears is, as Coleridge observes, to measure it by a virtue that it possesses in common with the onion; and Chateaubriand makes a similar observation. Yet one should not forget that the romantic emotionalist derives directly from the man of feeling. One may indeed study the transition from the one to the other in Chateaubriand himself. For example, in his early work the “Natchez” he introduces a tribe of Sioux Indians who are still governed by the natural pity of Rousseau, as they prove by weeping on the slightest occasion. Lamartine again is close to Rousseau when he expatiates on the “genius” that is to be found in a tear; and Musset is not far from Diderot when he exclaims, “Long live the melodrama at which Margot wept” (Vive le mélodrame où Margot a pleuré).

Though it is usual to associate this effusiveness with Rousseau it should be clear from my brief sketch of the rise of the forces that were destined to overthrow the two great traditions – the Christian tradition with its prime emphasis on humility and the classical with its prime emphasis on decorum – that Rousseau had many forerunners. It would be easy enough, for example, to cite from English literature of the early eighteenth-century domestic tableaux74 that look forward equally to the middle class drama and to Rousseau’s picture of the virtues of Julie as wife and mother. Yet Rousseau, after all, deserves his preëminent position as the arch-sentimentalist by the very audacity of his revolt in the name of feeling from both humility and decorum. Never before and probably never since has a man of such undoubted genius shown himself so lacking in humility and decency (to use the old-fashioned synonym for decorum) as Rousseau in the “Confessions.” Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready as he declares to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the last judgment, with the book of his “Confessions” in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race: “Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: I am better than that man.” As Horace Walpole complains he meditates a gasconade for the end of the world. It is possible to maintain with M. Lemaître that Rousseau’s character underwent a certain purification as he grew older, but never at any time, either at the beginning or at the end, is it possible, as M. Lemaître admits, to detect an atom of humility – an essential lack that had already been noted by Burke.

The affront then that Rousseau puts upon humility at the very opening of his “Confessions” has like so much else in his life and writings a symbolical value. He also declares war in the same passage in the name of what he conceives to be his true self – that is his emotional self – against decorum or decency. I have already spoken of one of the main objections to decorum: it keeps one tame and conventional and interferes with the explosion of original genius. Another and closely allied grievance against decorum is implied in Rousseau’s opening assertion in the Confessions that his aim is to show a man in all the truth of his nature, and human nature can be known in its truth only, it should seem, when stripped of its last shred of reticence. Rousseau therefore already goes on the principle recently proclaimed by the Irish Bohemian George Moore, that the only thing a man should be ashamed of is of being ashamed. If the first objection to decorum – that it represses original genius – was urged especially by the romanticists, the second objection – that decorum interferes with truth to nature – was urged especially by the so-called realists of the later nineteenth century (and realism of this type is, as has been said, only romanticism going on all fours). Between the Rousseauistic conception of nature and that of the humanist the gap is especially wide. The humanist maintains that man attains to the truth of his nature only by imposing decorum upon his ordinary self. The Rousseauist maintains that man attains to this truth only by the free expansion of his ordinary self. The humanist fears to let his ordinary self unfold freely at the expense of decorum lest he merit some such comment as that made on the “Confessions” by Madame de Boufflers who had been infatuated with Rousseau during his lifetime: that it was the work not of a man but of an unclean animal.75

The passages of the “Confessions” that deserve this verdict do not, it is hardly necessary to add, reflect directly Rousseau’s moral ideal. In his dealings with morality as elsewhere he is, to come back to Schiller’s distinction, partly idyllic and partly satirical. He is satiric in his attitude towards the existing forms – forms based upon the Christian tradition that man is naturally sinful and that he needs therefore the discipline of fear and humility, or else forms based upon the classical tradition that man is naturally one-sided and that he needs therefore to be disciplined into decorum and proportionateness. He is idyllic in the substitutes that he would offer for these traditional forms. The substitutes are particularly striking in their refusal to allow any place for fear. Fear, according to Ovid, created the first Gods, and religion has been defined by an old English poet as the “mother of form and fear.” Rousseau would put in the place of form a fluid emotionalism, and as for fear, he would simply cast it out entirely, a revulsion, as I have pointed out, from the excessive emphasis on fear in the more austere forms of Christianity. Be “natural,” Rousseau says, and eschew priests and doctors, and you will be emancipated from fear.

Rousseau’s expedient for getting rid of man’s sense of his own sinfulness on which fear and humility ultimately rest is well known. Evil, says Rousseau, foreign to man’s constitution, is introduced into it from without. The burden of guilt is thus conveniently shifted upon society. Instead of the old dualism between good and evil in the breast of the individual, a new dualism is thus set up between an artificial and corrupt society and “nature.” For man, let me repeat, has, according to Rousseau, fallen from nature in somewhat the same way as in the old theology he fell from God, and it is here that the idyllic element comes in, for, let us remind ourselves once more, Rousseau’s nature from which man has fallen is only an Arcadian dream.

The assertion of man’s natural goodness is plainly something very fundamental in Rousseau, but there is something still more fundamental, and that is the shifting of dualism itself, the virtual denial of a struggle between good and evil in the breast of the individual. That deep inner cleft in man’s being on which religion has always put so much emphasis is not genuine. Only get away from an artificial society and back to nature and the inner conflict which is but a part of the artificiality will give way to beauty and harmony. In a passage in his “Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,” Diderot puts the underlying thesis of the new morality almost more clearly than Rousseau: “Do you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts throughout life.”

The denial of the reality of the “civil war in the cave” involves an entire transformation of the conscience. The conscience ceases to be a power that sits in judgment on the ordinary self and inhibits its impulses. It tends so far as it is recognized at all, to become itself an instinct and an emotion. Students of the history of ethics scarcely need to be told that this transformation of the conscience was led up to by the English deists, especially by Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson.76 Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are already æsthetic in all senses of the word; æsthetic in that they tend to base conduct upon feeling, and æsthetic in that they incline to identify the good and the beautiful. Conscience is ceasing for both of them to be an inner check on the impulses of the individual and becoming a moral sense, a sort of expansive instinct for doing good to others. Altruism, as thus conceived, is opposed by them to the egoism of Hobbes and his followers.

But for the full implications of this transformation of conscience and for æsthetic morality in general one needs to turn to Rousseau. Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there are a few in whom the voice of “nature” is still strong and who, to be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century an almost technical meaning, are the “beautiful souls.” The belle âme is practically indistinguishable from the âme sensible and has many points in common with the original genius. Those whose souls are beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of less exquisite sensibility. “There are unfortunates too privileged to follow the common pathway.”77 The beautiful soul is unintelligible to those of coarser feelings. His very superiority, his preternatural fineness of sensation, thus predestines him to suffering. We are here at the root of romantic melancholy as will appear more fully later.

The most important aspect of the whole conception is, however, the strictly ethical – the notion that the beautiful soul has only to be instinctive and temperamental to merit the praise that has in the past been awarded only to the purest spirituality. “As for Julie,” says Rousseau, “who never had any other guide but her heart and could have no surer guide, she gives herself up to it without scruple, and to do right, has only to do all that it asks of her.”78 Virtue indeed, according to Rousseau, is not merely an instinct but a passion and even a voluptuous passion, moving in the same direction as other passions, only superior to them in vehemence. “Cold reason has never done anything illustrious; and you can triumph over the passions only by opposing them to one another. When the passion of virtue arises, it dominates everything and holds everything in equipoise.”79

This notion of the soul that is spontaneously beautiful and therefore good made an especial appeal to the Germans and indeed is often associated with Germany more than with any other land.80 But examples of moral æstheticism are scarcely less frequent elsewhere from Rousseau to the present. No one, for example, was ever more convinced of the beauty of his own soul than Renan. “Morality,” says Renan, “has been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit, as obedience to a law, as an inner struggle between opposite laws. As for me, I declare that when I do good I obey no one, I fight no battle and win no victory. The cultivated man has only to follow the delicious incline of his inner impulses.”81 Therefore, as he says elsewhere, “Be beautiful and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do. This is the whole of morality.”82

The doctrine of the beautiful soul is at once a denial and a parody of the doctrine of grace; a denial because it rejects original sin; a parody because it holds that the beautiful soul acts aright, not through any effort of its own but because nature acts in it and through it even as a man in a state of grace acts aright not through any merit of his own but because God acts in him and through him. The man who saw everything from the angle of grace was, like the beautiful soul or the original genius, inclined to look upon himself as exceptional and superlative. Bunyan entitles the story of his own inner life “Grace abounding to the chief of sinners.” But Bunyan flatters himself. It is not easy to be chief in such a lively competition. Humility and pride were evidently in a sort of grapple with one another in the breast of the Jansenist who declared that God had killed three men in order to compass his salvation. In the case of the beautiful soul the humility disappears, but the pride remains. He still looks upon himself as superlative but superlative in goodness. If all men were like himself, Renan declares, it would be appropriate to say of them: Ye are Gods and sons of the most high.83 The partisan of grace holds that works are of no avail compared with the gratuitous and unmerited illumination from above. The beautiful soul clings to his belief in his own innate excellence, no matter how flagrant the contradiction may be between this belief and his deeds. One should not fail to note some approximation to the point of view of the beautiful soul in those forms of Christianity in which the sense of sin is somewhat relaxed and the inner light very much emphasized – for example among the German pietists and the quietists of Catholic countries.84 We even hear of persons claiming to be Christians who as the result of debauchery have experienced a spiritual awakening (Dans la brute assoupie, un ange se réveille). But such doctrines are mere excrescences and eccentricities in the total history of Christianity. Even in its extreme insistence on grace, Christianity has always tended to supplement rather than contradict the supreme maxim of humanistic morality as enunciated by Cicero: “The whole praise of virtue is in action.” The usual result of the doctrine of grace when sincerely held is to make a man feel desperately sinful at the same time that he is less open to reproach than other men in his actual behavior. The beautiful soul on the other hand can always take refuge in his feelings from his real delinquencies. According to Joubert, Chateaubriand was not disturbed by actual lapses in his conduct because of his persuasion of his own innate rectitude.85 “Her conduct was reprehensible,” says Rousseau of Madame de Warens, “but her heart was pure.” It does not matter what you do if only through it all you preserve the sense of your own loveliness. Indeed the more dubious the act the more copious would seem to be the overflow of fine sentiments to which it stimulates the beautiful soul. Rousseau dilates on his “warmth of heart,” his “keenness of sensibility,” his “innate benevolence for his fellow creatures,” his “ardent love for the great, the true, the beautiful, the just,” on the “melting feeling, the lively and sweet emotion that he experiences at the sight of everything that is virtuous, generous and lovely,” and concludes: “And so my third child was put into the foundling hospital.”

If we wish to see the psychology of Rousseau writ large we should turn to the French Revolution. That period abounds in persons whose goodness is in theory so superlative that it overflows in a love for all men, but who in practice are filled like Rousseau in his later years with universal suspicion. There was indeed a moment in the Revolution when the madness of Rousseau became epidemic, when suspicion was pushed to such a point that men became “suspect of being suspect.” One of the last persons to see Rousseau alive at Ermenonville was Maximilien Robespierre. He was probably a more thoroughgoing Rousseauist than any other of the Revolutionary leaders. Perhaps no passage that could be cited illustrates with more terrible clearness the tendency of the new morality to convert righteousness into self-righteousness than the following from his last speech before the Convention at the very height of the Reign of Terror. Himself devoured by suspicion, he is repelling the suspicion that he wishes to erect his own power on the ruins of the monarchy. The idea, he says, that “he can descend to the infamy of the throne will appear probable only to those perverse beings who have not even the right to believe in virtue. But why speak of virtue? Doubtless virtue is a natural passion. But how could they be familiar with it, these venal spirits who never yielded access to aught save cowardly and ferocious passions? … Yet virtue exists as you can testify, feeling and pure souls; it exists, that tender, irresistible, imperious passion, torment and delight of magnanimous hearts, that profound horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for one’s country, that still more sublime and sacred love for humanity, without which a great revolution is only a glittering crime that destroys another crime; it exists, that generous ambition to found on earth the first Republic of the world; that egoism of undegenerate men who find a celestial voluptuousness in the calm of a pure conscience and the ravishing spectacle of public happiness(!). You feel it at this moment burning in your souls. I feel it in mine. But how could our vile calumniators have any notion of it?” etc.

In Robespierre and other revolutionary leaders one may study the implications of the new morality – the attempt to transform virtue into a natural passion – not merely for the individual but for society. M. Rod entitled his play on Rousseau “The Reformer.” Both Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense, – that is they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men. Inasmuch as there is no conflict between good and evil in the breast of the beautiful soul he is free to devote all his efforts to the improvement of mankind, and he proposes to achieve this great end by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood. All the traditional forms that stand in the way of this free emotional expansion he denounces as mere “prejudices,” and inclines to look on those who administer these forms as a gang of conspirators who are imposing an arbitrary and artificial restraint on the natural goodness of man and so keeping it from manifesting itself. With the final disappearance of the prejudices of the past and those who base their usurped authority upon them, the Golden Age will be ushered in at last; everybody will be boundlessly self-assertive and at the same time temper this self-assertion by an equally boundless sympathy for others, whose sympathy and self-assertion likewise know no bounds. The world of Walt Whitman will be realized, a world in which there is neither inferior nor superior but only comrades. This vision (such for example as appears at the end of Shelley’s “Prometheus”) of a humanity released from all evil artificially imposed from without, a humanity “where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea” and “whose nature is its own divine control,” is the true religion of the Rousseauist. It is this image of a humanity glorified through love that he sets up for worship in the sanctuary left vacant by “the great absence of God.”

This transformation of the Arcadian dreamer into the Utopist is due in part, as I have already suggested, to the intoxication produced in the human spirit by the conquests of science. One can discern the coöperation of Baconian and Rousseauist from a very early stage of the great humanitarian movement in the midst of which we are still living. Both Baconian and Rousseauist are interested not in the struggle between good and evil in the breast of the individual, but in the progress of mankind as a whole. If the Rousseauist hopes to promote the progress of society by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood the Baconian or utilitarian hopes to achieve the same end by perfecting its machinery. It is scarcely necessary to add that these two main types of humanitarianism may be contained in almost any proportion in any particular person. By his worship of man in his future material advance, the Baconian betrays no less surely than the Rousseauist his faith in man’s natural goodness. This lack of humility is especially conspicuous in those who have sought to develop the positive observations of science into a closed system with the aid of logic and pure mathematics. Pascal already remarked sarcastically of Descartes that he had no need of God except to give an initial fillip to his mechanism. Later the mechanist no longer grants the need of the initial fillip. According to the familiar anecdote, La Place when asked by Napoleon in the course of an explanation of his “Celestial Mechanics” where God came in, replied that he had no need of a God in his system. As illustrating the extreme of humanitarian arrogance one may take the following from the physicist and mathematician, W. K. Clifford: “The dim and shadowy outlines of the superhuman deity fade slowly from before us; and as the mist of his presence floats aside, we perceive with greater and greater clearness the shape of a yet grander and nobler figure – of Him who made all gods and shall unmake them. From the dim dawn of history and from the inmost depths of every soul the face of our father Man looks out upon us with the fire of eternal youth in his eyes and says, ‘Before Jehovah was, I am.’” The fire, one is tempted to say, of eternal lust! Clifford is reported to have once hung by his toes from the cross-bar of a weathercock on a church-tower. As a bit of intellectual acrobatics the passage I have just quoted has some analogy with this posture. Further than this, man’s intoxication with himself is not likely to go. The attitude of Clifford is even more extreme in its way than that of Jonathan Edwards in his. However, there are already signs that the man of science is becoming, if not humble, at least a trifle less arrogant.