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.
The writer, however, who shows the conflict between the romantic imagination and the real better than either Balzac or Zola, better than any other writer perhaps of the modern French movement, is Flaubert. The fondness of this founder of realism for reality may be inferred from a passage in one of his letters to George Sand: “I had in my very youth a complete presentiment of life. It was like a sickly kitchen smell escaping from a basement window.” In his attitude towards the society of his time, he is, in the same sense, but in a far greater degree than Rousseau, satirical. The stupidity and mediocrity of the bourgeois are his target, just as Rousseau’s target is the artificiality of the drawing-room. At the same time that he shrinks back with nausea from this reality, Flaubert is like Gautier “full of nostalgias,” even the nostalgia of the Middle Ages. “I am a Catholic,” he exclaims, “I have in my heart something of the green ooze of the Norman Cathedrals.” Yet he cannot acquiesce in a mediæval or any other dream. Even Rousseau says that he was “tormented at times by the nothingness of his chimeras.” Flaubert was tormented far more by the nothingness of his. Perhaps indeed the predominant flavor in Flaubert’s writing as a whole is that of an acrid disillusion. He portrays satirically the real and at the same time mocks at the ideal that he craves emotionally and imaginatively (this is only one of the innumerable forms assumed by the Rousseauistic warfare between the head and the heart). He oscillates rapidly between the pole of realism as he conceives it, and the pole of romance, and so far as any serious philosophy is concerned, is left suspended in the void. Madame Bovary is the very type of the Rousseauistic idealist, misunderstood in virtue of her exquisite faculty of feeling. She aspires to a “love beyond all loves,” an infinite satisfaction that her commonplace husband and environment quite deny her. At bottom Flaubert’s heart is with Madame Bovary. “I am Madame Bovary,” he exclaims. Yet he exposes pitilessly the “nothingness of her chimeras,” and pursues her to the very dregs of her disillusion. I have already mentioned Flaubert’s cult for “Don Quixote.” His intellectual origins were all there, he says; he had known it by heart even when a boy. It has been said that “Madame Bovary” bears the same relationship to æsthetic romanticism that “Don Quixote” does to the romanticism of actual adventure of the Middle Ages. Yet “Don Quixote” is the most genial, “Madame Bovary” the least genial of masterpieces. This difference comes out no less clearly in a comparison of M. Homais with Sancho Panza than in a comparison of Madame Bovary with the Knight, and is so fundamental as to throw doubt on the soundness of the whole analogy.
In M. Homais and like figures Flaubert simply means to symbolize contemporary life and the immeasurable abyss of platitude in which it is losing itself through its lack of imagination and ideal. Yet this same platitude exercises on him a horrid fascination. For his execration of the philistine is the nearest approach in his idealism to a positive content, to an escape from sheer emptiness and unreality. This execration must therefore be cherished if he is to remain convinced of his own superiority. “If it were not for my indignation,” he confesses in one place, “I should fall flat.” Unfortunately we come to resemble what we habitually contemplate. “By dint of railing at idiots,” says Flaubert, “one runs the risk of becoming idiotic one’s self.”
In his discourse on the “Immortality of the Soul” (1659) Henry More speaks of “that imagination which is most free, such as we use in romantic inventions.” The price that the romantic imagination pays for its freedom should by this time be obvious: the freer it becomes the farther it gets away from reality. We have seen that the special form of unreality encouraged by the æsthetic romanticism of Rousseau is the dream of the simple life, the return to a nature that never existed, and that this dream made its special appeal to an age that was suffering from an excess of artificiality and conventionalism. Before entering upon the next stage of our subject it might be well to consider for a moment wherein the facts of primitive life, so far as we can ascertain them, differ from Rousseau’s dream of primitive life; why we are justified in assuming that the noble savage of Rousseau, or the Greek of Schiller, or Hölderlin, or the man of the Middle Ages of Novalis never had any equivalent in reality. More or less primitive men have existed and still exist and have been carefully studied. Some of them actually recall by various traits, their gentleness, for example, Rousseau’s aboriginal man, and the natural pity that is supposed to guide him. Why then will any one familiar with the facts of aboriginal life smile when Rousseau speaks of the savage “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his own will,”[72] and therefore displaying independence and initiative? The answer is of course that genuine savages are, with the possible exception of children, the most conventional and imitative of beings. What one takes to be natural in them is often the result of a long and, in the Rousseauistic sense, artificial discipline. The tendency to take for pure and unspoiled nature what is in fact a highly modified nature is one that assumes many forms. “When you see,” says Rousseau, “in the happiest people in the world bands of peasants regulate the affairs of state under an oak-tree and always behave sensibly, can you keep from despising the refinements of other nations which make themselves illustrious and miserable with so much art and mystery?” Rousseau is viewing these peasants through the Arcadian glamour. In much the same way Emerson saw a proof of the consonance of democracy with human nature in the working of the New England town-meeting. But both Rousseau’s Swiss and Emerson’s New Englanders had been moulded by generations of austere religious discipline and so throw little light on the relation of democracy to human nature in itself.
A somewhat similar illusion is that of the man who journeys into a far country and enjoys in the highest degree the sense of romantic strangeness. He has escaped from the convention of his own society and is inclined to look on the men and women he meets in the foreign land as Arcadian apparitions. But these men and women have not escaped from their convention. On the contrary, what most delights him in them (for example, what most delighted Lafcadio Hearn in the Japanese) may be the result of an extraordinarily minute and tyrannical discipline imposed in the name of the general sense upon the impulses of the individual.
The relation of convention to primitive life is so well understood nowadays that the Rousseauist has reversed his argument. Since primitive folk (let us say the Bushmen of Australia) are more conventional than the Parisian and Londoner we may infer that at some time in the future when the ideal is at last achieved upon earth, conventions will have disappeared entirely. But this is simply to transfer the Golden Age from the past to the future, and also to miss the real problem: for there is a real problem—perhaps indeed the gravest of all problems—involved in the relation of the individual to convention. If we are to grasp the nature of this problem we should perceive first of all that the significant contrast is not that between conditions more or less primitive and civilization, but that between a civilization that does not question its conventions and a civilization that has on the contrary grown self-conscious and critical. Thus the Homeric Greeks, set up by Schiller as exemplars of the simple life, were plainly subject to the conventions of an advanced civilization. The Periclean Greeks were also highly civilized, but unlike the Homeric Greeks, were becoming self-conscious and critical. In the same way the European thirteenth century, in some respects the most civilized that the world has seen, was governed by a great convention that imposed very strict limits upon the liberty of the individual. The critical spirit was already awake and tugging at the leashes of the outer authority that confined it, but it did not actually break them. Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas did not, for example, inquire into the basis of the mediæval convention in the same way that Socrates and the sophists inquired into the traditional opinions of Greece. But in the eighteenth century, especially in France, and from that time down to the present day, the revolt against convention has assumed proportions quite comparable to anything that took place in ancient Greece. Perhaps no other age has witnessed so many individuals who were, like Berlioz, eager to make all traditional barriers crack in the interest of their “genius” and its full expression. The state of nature in the name of which Rousseau himself assailed convention, though in itself only a chimera, a mere Arcadian projection upon the void, did indeed tend in a rationalistic pseudo-classic age, to new forms of imaginative activity. In the form that concerns us especially the imagination is free to give its magic and glamour and infinitude to the emancipated emotions. This type of romanticism did not result in any recovery of the supposed primitive virtues, but it did bring about a revaluation of the received notions of morality that can scarcely be studied too carefully.