Rousseau and Romanticism

239

Nouvelle Héloise, Pt. VI, Lettre VIII.

240

“Encore enfant par la tête, vous êtes déjà vieux par le cœur.” Ibid.

241

See the examples quoted in Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 305-06.

242

This is the thought of Keats’s Ode to Melancholy:

Ay, in the very temple of DelightVeil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.

Cf. Chateaubriand: Essai sur les Révolutions, Pt. II, ch. LVIII: “Ces jouissances sont trop poignantes: telle est notre faiblesse, que les plaisirs exquis deviennent des douleurs,” etc.

243

See his sonnet Les Montreurs. This type of Rousseauist is anticipated by “Milord” Bomston in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau directed the engraver to depict him with “un maintien grave et stoïque sous lequel il cache avec peine une extrême sensibilité.”

244

“Qui es-tu? À coup sûr tu n’es pas un être pétri du même limon et animé de la même vie que nous! Tu es un ange ou un démon mais tu n’es pas une créature humaine. … Pourquoi habiter parmi nous, qui ne pouvons te suffire ni te comprendre?” G. Sand, Lélia, I, 11.

245

See p. 51.

246

See Lara, XVIII, XIX, perhaps the best passage that can be quoted for the Byronic hero.

247

Cf. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme: “Il était de mode alors dans l’école romantique d’être pâle, livide, verdâtre, un peu cadavéreux, s’il était possible. Cela donnait l’air fatal, byronien, giaour, dévoré par les passions et les remords.”

248

Hugo, Hernani.

249

Lorsque, par un décret des puissances suprêmes,Le Poète apparaît dans ce monde ennuyé,Sa mère épouvantée et pleine de blasphèmesCrispe ses poings vers Dieu, qui la prend en pitié.Fleurs du mal: Bénédiction.

Cf. Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. III, Lettre XXVI:

“Ciel inexorable! … O ma mère, pourquoi vous donna-t-il un fils dans sa colère?”

250

Coleridge has a side that relates him to the author of Les Fleurs du mal. In his Pains of Sleep he describes a dream in which he felt

Desire with loathing strangely mix’d,On wild or hateful objects fix’d.

251

Keats according to Shelley was an example of the poète maudit. “The poor fellow” he says “was literally hooted from the stage of life.” Keats was as a matter of fact too sturdy to be snuffed out by an article and had less of the quivering Rousseauistic sensibility than Shelley himself. Cf. letter of Shelley to Mrs. Shelley (Aug. 7, 1820): “Imagine my despair of good, imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men.”

252

Euripides speaks of the Χάρις γόων in his Ἱκέτιδες (Latin, “dolendi voluptas”; German, “die Wonne der Wehmut”).

253

Chesterton is anticipated in this paradox by Wordsworth:

In youth we love the darksome lawnBrushed by the owlet’s wing.Then Twilight is preferred to DawnAnd autumn to the spring.Sad fancies do we then affectIn luxury of disrespectTo our own prodigal excessOf too familiar happiness.Ode to Lycoris.

254

Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 329-30.

255

“[Villiers] était de cette famille des néo-catholiques littéraires dont Chateaubriand est le père commun, et qui a produit Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire et plus récemment M. Joséphin Peladan. Ceux-là ont goûté par-dessus tout dans la religion les charmes du péché, la grandeur du sacrilège, et leur sensualisme a caressé les dogmes qui ajoutaient aux voluptés la suprême volupté de se perdre.” A. France, Vie Littéraire, III, 121.

256

Première Promenade.

257

Ibid.

258

E.g., Hölderlin and Jean Polonius.

259

A striking passage on solitude will be found in the Laws of Manu, IV, 240-42. (“Alone a being is born: alone he goes down to death.” His kin forsake him at the grave; his only hope then is in the companionship of the Law of righteousness [Dharma]. “With the Law as his companion he crosses the darkness difficult to cross.”)

260

“Be good and you will be lonely.”

261

In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow’s poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron!

Et Byron … disparaît aux yeux du pâtre épouvanté.

(See E. Estève, Byron en France, 147).

262

In the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. “Mon cœur se refuse aux joies communes comme à la douleur ordinaire.” He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait à rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au désert de sa vie.”

263

The solitude of the “genius” is already marked in Blake:

O! why was I born with a different face?Why was I not born like the rest of my race?When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.

264

Froude’s Carlyle, II, 377.

265

No finer lines on solitude are found in English than those in which Wordsworth relates how from his room at Cambridge he could look out on

The antechapel where the statue stoodOf Newton with his prism and silent face,The marble index of a mind for everVoyaging through strange seas of thought alone.(Prelude III, 61-63.)

Cf. also the line in the Sonnet on Milton:

His soul was like a star and dwelt apart.

266

Eth. Nic., 1109 b.

267

James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night says that he would have entered hell

gratified to gain

That positive eternity of pain

Instead of this insufferable inane.

268

R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.

269

Decadent Rome had the equivalent of Des Esseintes. Seneca (To Lucilius, CXXII) speaks of those who seek to affirm their originality and attract attention to themselves by doing everything differently from other people and, “ut ita dicam, retro vivunt.”

270

Tennyson has traced this change of the æsthetic dream into a nightmare in his Palace of Art.

271

Contemporains, I, 332.

272

Génie du Christianisme, Pt. II, Livre III, ch. IX.

273

L’orage est dans ma voix, l’éclair est sur ma bouche;Aussi, loin de m’aimer, voilà qu’ils tremblent tous,Et quand j’ouvre les bras, on tombe à mes genoux.

274

Que vous ai-je donc fait pour être votre élu?…Hélas! je suis, Seigneur, puissant et solitaire,Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre!

275

Le juste opposera le dédain à l’absenceEt ne répondra plus que par un froid silenceAu silence éternel de la Divinité.

276

See Sainte-Beuve’s poetical epistle A. M. Villemain (Pensées d’Août 1837).

277

See Masters of Modern French Criticism, 233, 238.

278

Wordsworth writes

A piteous lot it were to flee from manYet not rejoice in Nature.(Excursion, IV, 514.)

This lot was Vigny’s:

Ne me laisse jamais seul avec la NatureCar je la connais trop pour n’en avoir pas peur.

279

Madame Dorval.

280

La Maison du Berger. Note that in Wordsworth the “still sad music of humanity” is very closely associated with nature.

281

La Bouteille à la Mer.

282

See Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics.

283

“All salutary conditions have their root in strenuousness” (appamāda), says Buddha.

284

See Masters of Modern French Criticism, Essay on Taine, passim. Paul Bourget in his Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (2 vols.) has followed out during this period the survivals of the older romantic melancholy and their reinforcement by scientific determinism.

285

“Le pauvre M. Arago, revenant un jour de l’Hôtel de Ville en 1848 après une épouvantable émeute, disait tristement à l’un de ses aides de camp au ministère de la marine: ‘En vérité ces gens-là ne sont pas raisonnables.’” Doudan, Lettres, IV, 338.

286

See Preface (pp. viii-ix) to his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse and my comment in The New Laokoon, 207-08.

287

Most of the political implications of the point of view I am developing I am reserving for a volume I have in preparation to be entitled Democracy and Imperialism. Some of my conclusions will be found in two articles in the (New York) Nation: The Breakdown of Internationalism (June 17 and 24, 1915), and The Political Influence of Rousseau (Jan. 18, 1917).

288

Reden an die deutsche Nation, XII.

289

I should perhaps allow for the happiness that may be experienced in moments of supernormal consciousness – something quite distinct from emotional or other intoxication. Fairly consistent testimony as to moments of this kind is found in the records of the past from the early Buddhists down to Tennyson.

290

I scarcely need say that I am speaking of the man of science only in so far as he is purely naturalistic in his point of view. There may enter into the total personality of Edison or any particular man of science other and very different elements.

291

M. René Berthelot has written a book on pragmatism and similar tendencies in contemporary philosophy entitled Un Romantisme utilitaire. I have not read it but the title alone is worth more than most books on the subject I have read.

292

Dedication of the Æneis (1697).

293

Adventure of one Hans Pfaal.

294

His attempt to rewrite Hyperion from a humanitarian point of view is a dismal failure.

295

There is also a strong idyllic element in Paradise Lost as Rousseau (Emile, V) and Schiller (Essay on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) were among the first to point out. Critics may be found even to-day who, like Tennyson, prefer the passages which show a richly pastoral imagination to the passages where the ethical imagination is required but where it does not seem to prevail sufficiently over theology.

296

XII, 74.

297

Three Philosophical Poets, 188.

298

After telling of the days when “il n’y avait pour moi ni passé ni avenir et je goûtais à la fois les délices de mille siècles,” Saint-Preux concludes: “Hélas! vous avez disparu comme un éclair. Cette éternité de bonheur ne fut qu’un instant de ma vie. Le temps a repris sa lenteur dans les moments de mon désespoir, et l’ennui mesure par longues années le reste infortuné de mes jours” (Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. III, Lettre VI).

299

The Church, so far as it has become humanitarian, has itself succumbed to naturalism.

300

Sutta of the Great Decease.

301

If a man recognizes the supreme rôle of fiction or illusion in life while proceeding in other respects on Kantian principles, he will reach results similar to the “As-if Philosophy” (Philosophie des Als Ob) of Vaihinger, a leading authority on Kant and co-editor of the Kantstudien. This work, though not published until 1911, was composed, the author tells us in his preface, as early as 1875-78. It will be found to anticipate very strikingly pragmatism and various other isms in which philosophy has been proclaiming so loudly of late its own bankruptcy.

302

“C’est en vain qu’on voudrait assigner à la vie un but, au sens humain du mot.” L’Evolution créatrice, 55.

303

Metaphysics, 1078 b.

304

In the beginning was the Word! To seek to substitute, like Faust, the Deed for the Word is to throw discrimination to the winds. The failure to discriminate as to the quality of the deed is responsible for the central sophistry of Faust (see p. 331) and perhaps of our modern life in general.

305

“J’adore la liberté; j’abhorre la gêne, la peine, l’assujettissement.” Confessions, Livre I.

306

Analects, XI, CXI. Cf. ibid., VI, CXX: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” Much that has passed current as religion in all ages has made its chief appeal, not to awe but to wonder; and like many humanists Confucius was somewhat indifferent to the marvellous. “The subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings” (ibid., VII, CXX).

307

One of the last Chinese, I am told, to measure up to the Confucian standard was Tsêng Kuo-fan (1811-1872) who issued forth from poverty, trained a peasant soldiery and, more than any other one person, put down the Taiping Rebellion.

308

See J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s Introduction to his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, p. cxlix.

309

Eth. Nic., 1122-25.

310

I have in mind such passages as P., VIII, 76-78, 92-96; N., VI, 1-4; N., XI, 13-16.

311

“II n’y eut jamais pour moi d’intermédiaire entre tout et rien.” Confessions, Livre VII.

312

Some wag, it will be remembered, suggested as an alternative title for this work: Wild Religions I have known.

313

Letters, II, 298; cf. ibid., 291: “I have never known a life less wisely controlled or less helped by the wisdom of others than his. The whole retrospect of it is pathetic; waste, confusion, ruin of one of the most gifted and sweetest natures the world ever knew.”

314

Nic. Eth., 1145 b. The opposition between Socrates or Plato and Aristotle, when put thus baldly, is a bit misleading. Socrates emphasized the importance of practice (μελέτη) in the acquisition of virtue, and Plato has made much of habit in the Laws.

315

Analects, II, CIV.

316

This belief the Oriental has embodied in the doctrine of Karma.

317

“La seule habitude qu’on doit laisser prendre à l’enfant est de n’en contractor aucune.” Emile, Livre I.

318

Emile was to be trained to be a cabinet-maker.

319

Eth. Nic., 1172 b.

320

Doctrine of the Mean (c. XXXIII, v. 2).

321

See his poem Ibo in Les Contemplations.

322

La. 55, p. 51. (In my references La. stands for Lao-tzŭ, Li. for Lieh-tzŭ, Ch. for Chuang-tzŭ. The first number gives the chapter; the second number the page in Wieger’s edition.)

323

Ch. 22 C, p. 391.

324

Ch. 12 n, p. 305.

325

Ch. 11 D, p. 291. Ibid. 15, p. 331. See also Li. 31, p. 113.

326

Ch. 19 B, p. 357.

327

Ch. 19 L, p. 365.

328

Ch. 10, pp. 279-80.

329

Ch. 9, pp. 274-75.

330

Ch. 29, pp. 467 ff.

331

Ch. 2, p. 223.

332

La. 27, p. 37.

333

Ch. 8 A, p. 271.

334

Li. 5, p. 143.

335

Ch. 14 C, p. 321.

336

For an extreme form of Epicureanism see the ideas of Yang-chu, Li. 7, pp. 165 ff. For stoical apathy see Ch. 6 C., p. 253. For fate see Li. 6, p. 165, Ch. 6 K, p. 263.

337

Ch. 33, pp. 499 ff.

338

Ch. 33 C, p. 503.

339

Bk. III, Part 2, ch. 9.

340

Li. 3, p. 111. Ch. 24, pp. 225-27.

341

Ch. 6 E, p. 255.

342

See The Religion of the Samurai: a Study of Zen Philosophy (1913) by Kaiten Nukariya (himself a Zenist), p. 23.