Free as a god.
Here we have, with all Klopstock's pathos, a love for the wild and grandiose in Nature, almost unique in Germany, in this time of idyllic sentimentality. But the discovery of the beauty of romantic mountain scenery had been made by Rousseau some time before, for Rousseau, too, was a typical forerunner, and his romances fell like a bomb-shell among all the idyllic pastoral fiction of the day.
[CHAPTER XI]
THE AWAKENING OF FEELING FOR THE ROMANTIC
Rousseau was one of those rare men who bring about a complete change in the culture of their time by their revolutionary originality. In such beings the world's history, so to speak, begins again. Out of touch with their own day, and opposed to its ruling taste and mode of thought, they are a law unto themselves, and naturally tend to measure all things by themselves, while their too great subjectivity is apt to be increased by a morbid sophistry of passion and the conviction of the prophet.
Of this type, unchecked by a broad sense of humanity, full of subversive wilfulness, and not only untrained in moderation, but degenerating into crass exaggeration, Rousseau was the first example.
Hellenism, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, had only produced forerunners. What in Petrarch was a tendency, became an established condition in Rousseau: the acedia reached its climax. All that went on in his mind was so much grit for his own mill, subject-matter for his observation, and therefore of the greatest value to him. He lived in introspection, a spectator of his own struggles, his own waverings between an ideal of simple duty and the imperious demands of a selfish and sensuous ego. His passion for Nature partially atoned for his unamiable and doubtful character; he was false in many ways; but that feeling rang true--it was the best part of him, and of that 'idealism of the heart' whose right of rule he asserted in an age of artificiality and petty formalism. Those were no empty words in his third letter to Malesherbes:
'Which time of my life do you suppose I recall most often and most willingly in my dreams? Not the pleasures of youth; they were too few, too much mixed with bitterness, and they are too far away now. It is the time of my retreat, of my solitary walks--those fast-flying delicious days that I passed all alone by myself, with my good and simple Thérèse, my beloved dog, my old cat, with the wild birds and the roes of the forest, with all Nature and her inconceivable Maker.
'When I got up early to go and watch the sunrise from my garden, when I saw a fine day begin, my first wish was that neither letters nor visitors might come to break its charm....
'Then I would seek out some wild place in the forest, some desert spot where there was nothing to shew the hand of man, and so tell of servitude and rule--some refuge which I could fancy I was the first to discover, and where no importunate third party came between Nature and me....