Rousseau and Romanticism

Nostalgia, the term that has come to be applied to the infinite indeterminate longing of the romanticist – his never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire – is not, from the point of view of strict etymology, well-chosen. Romantic nostalgia is not “homesickness,” accurately speaking, but desire to get away from home. Odysseus in Homer suffers from true nostalgia. The Ulysses of Tennyson, on the other hand, is nostalgic in the romantic sense when he leaves home “to sail beyond the sunset.” Ovid, as Goethe points out, is highly classical even in his melancholy. The longing from which he suffers in his exile is very determinate: he longs to get back to Rome, the centre of the world. Ovid indeed sums up the classic point of view when he says that one cannot desire the unknown (ignoti nulla cupido).63 The essence of nostalgia is the desire for the unknown. “I was burning with desire,” says Rousseau, “without any definite object.” One is filled with a desire to fly one knows not whither, to be off on a journey into the blue distance.64 Music is exalted by the romanticists above all other arts because it is the most nostalgic, the art that is most suggestive of the hopeless gap between the “ideal” and the “real.” “Music,” in Emerson’s phrase, “pours on mortals its beautiful disdain.” “Away! away!” cries Jean Paul to Music. “Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find.” In musical and other nostalgia, the feelings receive a sort of infinitude from the coöperation of the imagination; and this infinitude, this quest of something that must ever elude one, is at the same time taken to be the measure of one’s idealism. The symmetry and form that the classicist gains from working within bounds are no doubt excellent, but then the willingness to work within bounds betokens a lack of aspiration. If the primitivist is ready, as some one has complained, to turn his back on the bright forms of Olympus and return to the ancient gods of chaos and of night, the explanation is to be sought in this idea of the infinite. It finally becomes a sort of Moloch to which he is prepared to sacrifice most of the values of civilized life. The chief fear of the classicist is to be thought monstrous. The primitivist on the contrary is inclined to see a proof of superior amplitude of spirit in mere grotesqueness and disproportion. The creation of monsters is, as Hugo says, a “satisfaction due to the infinite.”65

The breaking down by the emotional romanticist of the barriers that separate not merely the different literary genres but the different arts is only another aspect of his readiness to follow the lure of the infinite. The title of a recent bit of French decadent verse – “Nostalgia in Blue Minor” – would already have been perfectly intelligible to a Tieck or a Novalis. The Rousseauist – and that from a very early stage in the movement – does not hesitate to pursue his ever receding dream across all frontiers, not merely those that separate art from art, but those that divide flesh from spirit and even good from evil, until finally he arrives like Blake at a sort of “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” When he is not breaking down barriers in the name of the freedom of the imagination he is doing so in the name of what he is pleased to term love.

“The ancient art and poetry,” says A. W. Schlegel, “rigorously separate things which are dissimilar; the romantic delights in indissoluble mixtures. All contrarieties: nature and art, poetry and prose, seriousness and mirth, recollection and anticipation, spirituality and sensuality, terrestrial and celestial, life and death, are by it blended together in the most intimate combination. As the oldest lawgivers delivered their mandatory instructions and prescriptions in measured melodies; as this is fabulously ascribed to Orpheus, the first softener of the yet untamed race of mortals; in like manner the whole of the ancient poetry and art is, as it were a rhythmical nomos (law), an harmonious promulgation of the permanently established legislation of a world submitted to a beautiful order, and reflecting in itself the eternal images of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of the secret attraction to a chaos which lies concealed in the very bosom of the ordered universe, and is perpetually striving after new and marvellous births; the life-giving spirit of primal love broods here anew on the face of the waters. The former is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter, notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe. For Conception can only comprise each object separately, but nothing in truth can ever exist separately and by itself; Feeling perceives all in all at one and the same time.”66

Note the assumption here that the clear-cut distinctions of classicism are merely abstract and intellectual, and that the only true unity is the unity of feeling.

In passages of this kind A. W. Schlegel is little more than the popularizer of the ideas of his brother Friedrich. Perhaps no one in the whole romantic movement showed a greater genius for confusion than Friedrich Schlegel; no one, in Nietzsche’s phrase, had a more intimate knowledge of all the bypaths to chaos. Now it is from the German group of which Friedrich Schlegel was the chief theorist that romanticism as a distinct and separate movement takes its rise. We may therefore pause appropriately at this point to consider briefly how the epithet romantic of which I have already sketched the early history came to be applied to a distinct school. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, it will be remembered, romantic had become a fairly frequent word in English and also (under English influence) a less frequent, though not rare word, in French and German; it was often used favorably in all these countries as applied to nature, and usually indeed in this sense in France and Germany; but in England, when applied to human nature and as the equivalent of the French romanesque, it had ordinarily an unfavorable connotation; it signified the “dangerous prevalence of imagination” over “sober probability,” as may be seen in Foster’s essay “On the Epithet Romantic.” One may best preface a discussion of the next step – the transference of the word to a distinct movement – by a quotation from Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann (21 March, 1830):

“This division of poetry into classic and romantic,” says Goethe, “which is to-day diffused throughout the whole world and has caused so much argument and discord, comes originally from Schiller and me. It was my principle in poetry always to work objectively. Schiller on the contrary wrote nothing that was not subjective; he thought his manner good, and to defend it he wrote his article on naïve and sentimental poetry. … The Schlegels got hold of this idea, developed it and little by little it has spread throughout the whole world. Everybody is talking of romanticism and classicism. Fifty years ago nobody gave the matter a thought.”

One statement in this passage of Goethe’s is perhaps open to question – that concerning the obligation of the Schlegels, or rather Friedrich Schlegel, to Schiller’s treatise. A comparison of the date of publication of the treatise on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” with the date of composition of Schlegel’s early writings would seem to show that some of Schlegel’s distinctions, though closely related to those of Schiller, do not derive from them so immediately as Goethe seems to imply.67 Both sets of views grow rather inevitably out of a primitivistic or Rousseauistic conception of “nature” that had been epidemic in Germany ever since the Age of Genius. We need also to keep in mind certain personal traits of Schlegel if we are to understand the development of his theories about literature and art. He was romantic, not only by his genius for confusion, but also one should add, by his tendency to oscillate violently between extremes. For him as for Rousseau there was “no intermediary term between everything and nothing.” One should note here another meaning that certain romanticists give to the word “ideal” – Hazlitt, for example, when he says that the “ideal is always to be found in extremes.” Every imaginable extreme, the extreme of reaction as well as the extreme of radicalism, goes with romanticism; every genuine mediation between extremes is just as surely unromantic. Schlegel then was very idealistic in the sense I have just defined. Having begun as an extreme partisan of the Greeks, conceived in Schiller’s fashion as a people that was at once harmonious and instinctive, he passes over abruptly to the extreme of revolt against every form of classicism, and then after having posed in works like his “Lucinde” as a heaven-storming Titan who does not shrink at the wildest excess of emotional unrestraint, he passes over no less abruptly to Catholicism and its rigid outer discipline. This last phase of Schlegel has at least this much in common with his phase of revolt, that it carried with it a cult of the Middle Ages. The delicate point to determine about Friedrich Schlegel and many other romanticists is why they finally came to place their land of heart’s desire in the Middle Ages rather than in Greece. In treating this question one needs to take at least a glance at the modification that Herder (whose influence on German romanticism is very great) gave to the primitivism of Rousseau. Cultivate your genius, Rousseau said in substance, your ineffable difference from other men, and look back with longing to the ideal moment of this genius – the age of childhood, when your spontaneous self was not as yet cramped by conventions or “sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” Cultivate your national genius, Herder said in substance, and look back wistfully at the golden beginnings of your nationality when it was still naïve and “natural,” when poetry instead of being concocted painfully by individuals was still the unconscious emanation of the folk. Herder indeed expands primitivism along these lines into a whole philosophy of history. The romantic notion of the origin of the epic springs out of this soil, a notion that is probably at least as remote from the facts as the neo-classical notion – and that is saying a great deal. Any German who followed Herder in the extension that he gave to Rousseau’s views about genius and spontaneity could not only see the folk soul mirrored at least as naïvely in the “Nibelungenlied” as in the “Iliad,” but by becoming a mediæval enthusiast he could have the superadded pleasure of indulging not merely personal but racial and national idiosyncrasy. Primitivistic mediævalism is therefore an important ingredient, especially in the case of Germany, in romantic nationalism – the type that has flourished beyond all measure during the past century. Again, though one might, like Hölderlin, cherish an infinite longing for the Greeks, the Greeks themselves, at least the Greeks of Schiller, did not experience longing; but this fact came to be felt more and more by F. Schlegel and other romanticists as an inferiority, showing as it did that they were content with the finite. As for the neo-classicists who were supposed to be the followers of the Greeks, their case was even worse; they not only lacked aspiration and infinitude, but were sunk in artificiality, and had moreover become so analytical that they must perforce see things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.” The men of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, as F. Schlegel saw them, were superior to the neo-classicists in being naïve; their spontaneity and unity of feeling had not yet suffered from artificiality, or been disintegrated by analysis.68 At the same time they were superior to the Greeks in having aspiration and the sense of the infinite. The very irregularity of their art testified to this infinitude. It is not uncommon in the romantic movement thus to assume that because one has very little form one must therefore have a great deal of “soul.” F. Schlegel so extended his definition of the mediæval spirit as to make it include writers like Shakespeare and Cervantes, who seemed to him to be vital and free from formalism. The new nationalism was also made to turn to the profit of the Middle Ages. Each nation in shaking off the yoke of classical imitation and getting back to its mediæval past, was recovering what was primitive in its own genius, was substituting what was indigenous for what was alien to it.

The person who did more than any one else to give international currency to the views of the Schlegels about classic and romantic and to their primitivistic mediævalism was Madame de Staël in her book on Germany. It was with special reference to Madame de Staël and her influence that Daunou wrote the following passage in his introduction to La Harpe, a passage that gives curious evidence of the early attitude of French literary conservatives towards the new school:

“One of the services that he [La Harpe] should render nowadays is to fortify young people against vain and gothic doctrines which would reduce the fine arts to childhood if they could ever gain credit in the land of Racine and Voltaire. La Harpe uttered a warning against these doctrines when he discovered the first germs of them in the books of Diderot, Mercier and some other innovators. Yet these writers were far from having professed fully the barbaric or childish system which has been taught and developed among us for a few years past; it is of foreign origin; it had no name in our language and the name that has been given to it is susceptible in fact of no precise meaning. Romanticism, for thus it is called, was imported into our midst along with Kantism, with mysticism and other doctrines of the same stamp which collectively might be named obscurantism. These are words which La Harpe was happy enough not to hear. He was accustomed to too much clearness in his ideas and expression to use such words or even to understand them. He did not distinguish two literatures. The literature that nature and society have created for us and which for three thousand years past has been established and preserved and reproduced by masterpieces appeared to him alone worthy of a Frenchman of the eighteenth century. He did not foresee that it would be reduced some day to being only a particular kind of literature, tolerated or reproved under the name of classic, and that its noblest productions would be put on the same level as the formless sketches of uncultivated genius and untried talents. Yet more than once decadence has thus been taken for an advance, and a retrograde movement for progress. Art is so difficult. It is quicker to abandon it and to owe everything to your genius. … Because perfection calls for austere toil you maintain that it is contrary to nature. This is a system that suits at once indolence and vanity. Is anything more needed to make it popular, especially when it has as auxiliary an obscure philosophy which is termed transcendent or transcendental? That is just the way sound literature fell into decline beginning with the end of the first century of the Christian era. It became extinct only to revive after a long period of darkness and barbarism; and that is how it will fall into decline again if great examples and sage lessons should ever lose their authority.”

The general public in England became at least vaguely aware of the new movement with the translation of Madame de Staël’s “Germany” (1813) and A. W. Schlegel’s “Dramatic Art and Literature” (1815). Byron wrote in his reply to Bowles (1821): “Schlegel and Madame de Staël have endeavored to reduce poetry to two systems, classical and romantic. The effect is only beginning.”

The distinction between classic and romantic worked out by the Schlegels and spread abroad by Madame de Staël was, then, largely associated with a certain type of mediævalism. Nevertheless one cannot insist too strongly that the new school deserved to be called romantic, not because it was mediæval, but because it displayed a certain quality of imagination in its mediævalism. The longing for the Middle Ages is merely a very frequent form of nostalgia, and nostalgia I have defined as the pursuit of pure illusion. No doubt a man may be mediæval in his leanings and yet very free from nostalgia. He may, for example, prefer St. Thomas Aquinas to any modern philosopher on grounds that are the very reverse of romantic; and in the attitude of any particular person towards the Middle Ages, romantic and unromantic elements may be mingled in almost any conceivable proportion; and the same may be said of any past epoch that one prefers to the present. Goethe, for instance, as has been remarked, took flight from his own reality, but he did not, like the romanticists, take flight from all reality. The classical world in which Goethe dwelt in imagination during his latter years, in the midst of a very unclassical environment, was to some extent at least real, though one can discern even in the case of Goethe the danger of a classicism that is too aloof from the here and now. But the mediævalist, in so far as he is romantic, does not turn to a mediæval reality from a real but distasteful present. Here as elsewhere his first requirement is not that his “vision” should be true, but that it should be rich and radiant; and the more “ideal” the vision becomes in this sense, the wider the gap that opens between poetry and life.

We are thus brought back to the problem of the romantic imagination or, one may term it, the eccentric imagination. The classical imagination, I have said, is not free thus to fly off at a tangent, to wander wild in some empire of chimeras. It has a centre, it is at work in the service of reality. With reference to this real centre, it is seeking to disengage what is normal and representative from the welter of the actual. It does not evade the actual, but does select from it and seek to impose upon it something of the proportion and symmetry of the model to which it is looking up and which it is imitating. To say that the classicist (and I am speaking of the classicist at his best) gets at his reality with the aid of the imagination is but another way of saying that he perceives his reality only through a veil of illusion. The creator of this type achieves work in which illusion and reality are inseparably blended, work which gives the “illusion of a higher reality.”

Proportionate and decorous in this sense æsthetic romanticism can in no wise be, but it does not follow that the only art of which the Rousseauist is capable is an art of idyllic dreaming. Schiller makes a remark about Rousseau that goes very nearly to the heart of the matter: he is either, says Schiller, dwelling on the delights of nature or else avenging her. He is either, that is, idyllic or satirical. Now Rousseau himself says that he was not inclined to satire and in a sense this is true. He would have been incapable of lampooning Voltaire in the same way that Voltaire lampooned him, though one might indeed wish to be lampooned by Voltaire rather than to be presented as Rousseau has presented certain persons in his “Confessions.” In all that large portion of Rousseau’s writing, however, in which he portrays the polite society of his time and shows how colorless and corrupt it is compared with his pastoral dream (for his “nature,” as I have said, is only a pastoral dream) he is highly satirical. In general, he is not restrained, at least in the “Confessions,” from the trivial and even the ignoble detail by any weak regard for decorum. At best decorum seems to him a hollow convention, at worst the “varnish of vice” and the “mask of hypocrisy.” Every reader of the “Confessions” must be struck by the presence, occasionally on the same page, of passages that look forward to Lamartine, and of other passages that seem an anticipation rather of Zola. The passage in which Rousseau relates how he was abruptly brought to earth from his “angelic loves”69 is typical. In short Rousseau oscillates between an Arcadian vision that is radiant but unreal, and a photographic and literal and often sordid reality. He does not so use his imagination as to disengage the real from the welter of the actual and so achieve something that strikes one still as nature but a selected and ennobled nature.70 “It is a very odd circumstance,” says Rousseau, “that my imagination is never more agreeably active than when my outer conditions are the least agreeable, and that, on the contrary, it is less cheerful when everything is cheerful about me. My poor head cannot subordinate itself to things. It cannot embellish, it wishes to create. Real objects are reflected in it at best such as they are; it can adorn only imaginary objects. If I wish to paint the springtime I must be in winter,” etc.

This passage may be said to foreshadow the two types of art and literature that have been prevalent since Rousseau – romantic art and the so-called realistic art that tended to supplant it towards the middle of the nineteenth century.71 This so-called realism does not represent any fundamental change of direction as compared with the earlier romanticism; it is simply, as some one has put it, romanticism going on all fours. The extreme of romantic unreality has always tended to produce a sharp recoil. As the result of the wandering of the imagination in its own realm of chimeras, one finally comes to feel the need of refreshing one’s sense of fact; and the more trivial the fact, the more certain one is that one’s feet are once more planted on terra firma. Don Quixote is working for the triumph of Sancho Panza. Besides this tendency of one extreme to produce the other, there are special reasons that I shall point out more fully later for the close relationship of the romanticism and the so-called realism of the nineteenth century. They are both merely different aspects of naturalism. What binds together realism and romanticism is their common repudiation of decorum as something external and artificial. Once get rid of decorum, or what amounts to the same thing, the whole body of “artificial” conventions, and what will result is, according to the romanticist, Arcadia. But what actually emerges with the progressive weakening of the principle of restraint is la bête humaine. The Rousseauist begins by walking through the world as though it were an enchanted garden, and then with the inevitable clash between his ideal and the real he becomes morose and embittered. Since men have turned out not to be indiscriminately good he inclines to look upon them as indiscriminately bad and to portray them as such. At the bottom of much so-called realism therefore is a special type of satire, a satire that is the product of violent emotional disillusion. The collapse of the Revolution of 1848 produced a plentiful crop of disillusion of this kind. No men had ever been more convinced of the loftiness of their idealism than the Utopists of this period, or failed more ignominiously when put to the test. All that remained, many argued, was to turn from an ideal that had proved so disappointing to the real, and instead of dreaming about human nature to observe men as coolly, in Flaubert’s phrase, as though they were mastodons or crocodiles. But what lurks most often behind this pretence to a cold scientific impassiveness in observing human nature is a soured and cynical emotionalism and a distinctly romantic type of imagination. The imagination is still idealistic, still straining, that is, away from the real, only its idealism has undergone a strange inversion; instead of exaggerating the loveliness it exaggerates the ugliness of human nature; it finds a sort of morose satisfaction in building for itself not castles but dungeons in Spain. What I am saying applies especially to the French realists who are more logical in their disillusion than the men of other nations. They often establish the material environment of their heroes with photographic literalness, but in their dealings with what should be the specifically human side of these characters they often resemble Rousseau at his worst: they put pure logic into the service of pure emotion, and this is a way of achieving, not the real, but a maximum of unreality. The so-called realistic writers abound in extreme examples of the romantic imagination. The peasants of Zola are not real, they are an hallucination. If a man is thus to let his imagination run riot, he might, as Lemaître complains, have imagined something more agreeable.

The same kinship between realism and romanticism might be brought out in a writer whom Zola claimed as his master – Balzac. I do not refer to the side of Balzac that is related to what the French call le bas romantisme– his lapses into the weird and the melodramatic, his occasional suggestions of the claptrap of Anne Radcliffe and the Gothic romance – but to his general thesis and his handling of it. Balzac’s attitude towards the society of his time is, like the attitude of Rousseau towards the society of his time, satirical, but on entirely different grounds: he would show the havoc wrought in this society by its revolutionary emancipation from central control of the kind that had been provided traditionally by the monarchy and the Catholic Church, and the consequent disruption of the family by the violent and egoistic expansion of the individual along the lines of his ruling passion. But Balzac’s imagination is not on the side of his thesis; not, that is, on the side of the principle of control; on the contrary, it revels in its vision of a world in which men are overstepping all ethical bounds in their quest of power and pleasure, of a purely naturalistic world that is governed solely by the law of cunning and the law of force. His imagination is so fascinated by this vision that, like the imagination of Rousseau, though in an entirely different way, he simply parts company with reality. Judged by the ultimate quality of his imagination, and this, let me repeat, is always the chief thing to consider in a creative artist, Balzac is a sort of inverted idealist. Compared with the black fictions he conjures up in his painting of Paris, the actual Paris seems pale and insipid. His Paris is not real in short, but an hallucination – a lurid land of heart’s desire. As Leslie Stephen puts it, for Balzac Paris is hell, but then hell is the only place worth living in. The empire of chimeras over which he holds sway is about as far on one side of reality as George Sand’s kingdom of dreams is on the other. George Sand, more perhaps than any other writer of her time, continues Rousseau in his purely idyllic manner. Her idealized peasants are not any further from the truth and are certainly more agreeable than the peasants of Balzac, who foreshadow the peasants of Zola.