The fact on which the moral positivist would rest his effort to rehabilitate self-control is, as I have said, the presence in man of a restraining, informing and centralizing power that is anterior to both intellect and emotion. Such a power, it must be freely granted, is not present equally in all persons; in some it seems scarcely to exist at all. When released from outer control, they are simply unchained temperaments; whereas in others this superrational perception seems to be singularly vivid and distinct. This is the psychological fact that underlies what the theologian would term the mystery of grace.
Rousseau himself was not quite so temperamental as might be inferred from what has been said about his evasion of ethical effort. There were moments when the dualism of the spirit came home to him, moments when he perceived that the conscience is not itself an expansive emotion but rather a judgment and a check upon expansive emotion. Yet his general readiness to subordinate his ethical self to his sensibility is indubitable. Hence the absence in his personality and writing of the note of masculinity. There is indeed much in his make-up that reminds one less of a man than of a high-strung impressionable woman. Woman, most observers would agree, is more natural in Rousseau’s sense, that is, more temperamental, than man. One should indeed always temper these perilous comparisons of the sexes with the remark of La Fontaine that in this matter he knew a great many men who were women. Now to be temperamental is to be extreme, and it is in this sense perhaps that the female of the species may be said to be “fiercer than the male.” Rousseau’s failure to find “any intermediary term between everything and nothing” would seem to be a feminine rather than a masculine trait. Decorum in the case of women, even more perhaps than in the case of men, tends to be a mere conformity to what is established rather than the immediate perception of a law of measure and proportion that sets bounds to the expansive desires. “Women believe innocent everything that they dare,” says Joubert, whom no one will accuse of being a misogynist. Those who are thus temperamental have more need than others of outer guidance. “His feminine nature,” says C. E. Norton of Ruskin, “needed support such as it never got.”[101]
If women are more temperamental than men it is only fair to add that they have a greater fineness of temperament. Women, says Joubert again, are richer in native virtues, men in acquired virtues. At times when men are slack in acquiring virtues in the truly ethical sense—and some might maintain that the present is such a time—the women may be not only men’s equals but their superiors. Rousseau had this feminine fineness of temperament. He speaks rightly of his “exquisite faculties.” He also had no inconsiderable amount of feminine charm. The numerous members of the French aristocracy whom he fascinated may be accepted as competent witnesses on this point. The mingling of sense and spirit that pervades Rousseau, his pseudo-Platonism as I have called it elsewhere, is also a feminine rather than a masculine trait.
There is likewise something feminine in Rousseau’s preference for illusion. Illusion is the element in which woman even more than man would seem to live and move and have her being. It is feminine and also romantic to prefer to a world of sharp definition a world of magic and suggestiveness. W. Bagehot (it will be observed that in discussing this delicate topic I am prone to take refuge behind authorities) attributes the triumph of an art of shifting illusion over an art of clear and firm outlines to the growing influence of women.[102] Woman’s being is to that of man, we are told, as is moonlight unto sunlight—and the moon is the romantic orb. The whole of German romance in particular is bathed in moonshine.[103]
The objection of the classicist to the so-called enlightenment of the eighteenth century is that it did not have in it sufficient light. The primitivists on the contrary felt that it had too much light—that the light needed to be tempered by darkness. Even the moon is too effulgent for the author of “Hymns to the Night.” No movement has ever avowed more openly its partiality for the dim and the crepuscular. The German romanticists have been termed “twilight men.” What many of them admire in woman as in children and plants, is her unconsciousness and freedom from analysis—an admiration that is also a tribute in its way to the “night side” of nature.[104]
Discussions of the kind in which I have been indulging regarding the unlikeness of woman and man are very dreary unless one puts at least equal emphasis on their fundamental likeness. Woman, before being woman, is a human being and so subject to the same law as man. So far as men and women both take on the yoke of this law, they move towards a common centre. So far as they throw it off and live temperamentally, there tends to arise the most odious of all forms of warfare—that between the sexes. The dictates of the human law are only too likely to yield in the case of both men and women to the rush of outer impressions and the tumult of the desires within. This is what La Rochefoucauld means when he says that “the head is always the dupe of the heart.” Nevertheless feeling is even more likely to prevail over judgment in woman than it is in man. To be judicial indeed to the point of hardness and sternness has always been held to be unfeminine. It is almost woman’s prerogative to err on the side of sympathy. But even woman cannot be allowed to substitute sympathy for true conscience—that is for the principle of control. In basing conduct on feeling Rousseau may be said to have founded a new sophistry. The ancient sophist at least made man the measure of all things. By subordinating judgment to sensibility Rousseau may be said to have made woman the measure of all things.
The affirmation of a human law must ultimately rest on the perception of a something that is set above the flux upon which the flux itself depends—on what Aristotle terms an unmoved mover. Otherwise conscience becomes a part of the very flux and element of change it is supposed to control. In proportion as he escapes from outer control man must be conscious of some such unmoved mover if he is to oppose a definite aim or purpose to the indefinite expansion of his desires. Having some such firm centre he may hope to carry through to a fortunate conclusion the “civil war in the cave.” He may, as the wise are wont to express it, build himself an island in the midst of the flood. The romantic moralist, on the other hand, instead of building himself an island is simply drifting with the stream. For feeling not only shifts from man to man, it is continually shifting in the same man; so that morality becomes a matter of mood, and romanticism here as elsewhere might be defined as the despotism of mood. At the time of doing anything, says Mrs. Shelley, Shelley deemed himself right; and Rousseau says that in the act of abandoning his own children he felt “like a member of Plato’s republic.”
The man who makes self-expression and not self-control his primary endeavor becomes subject to every influence, “the very slave of circumstance and impulse borne by every breath.”[105] This is what it means in practice no longer to keep a firm hand on the rudder of one’s personality, but to turn one’s self over to “nature.” The partisan of expression becomes the thrall of his impressions so that the whole Rousseauistic conception may be termed indifferently impressionistic or expressionistic. For the beautiful soul in order to express himself has to indulge his emotions instead of hardening and bracing them against the shock of circumstance. The very refinement of sensibility which constitutes in his own eyes his superiority to the philistine makes him quiver responsive to every outer influence; he finally becomes subject to changes in the weather, or in Rousseau’s own phrase, the “vile plaything of the atmosphere and seasons.”
This rapid shifting of mood in the romanticist, in response to inner impulse or outer impression, is almost too familiar to need illustration. Here is an example that may serve for a thousand from that life-long devotee of the great god Whim—Hector Berlioz. When at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille’s marriage to another. “In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die.” Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady’s maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets “two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum.” While awaiting the departure of the diligence he “rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog.” Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a “‘Ha’! so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller.” But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there “the twenty happiest days” of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.
In this exaltation of environmental influences one should note again the coöperation of Rousseauist and Baconian, of emotional and scientific naturalist. Both are prone to look upon man as being made by natural forces and not as making himself. To deal with the substitutes that Rousseauist and Baconian have proposed for traditional morality, is in fact to make a study of the varieties—and they are numerous—of naturalistic fatalism. The upshot of the whole movement is to discredit moral effort on the part of the individual. Why should a man believe in the efficacy of this effort, why should he struggle to acquire character if he is convinced that he is being moulded like putty by influences beyond his control—the influence of climate, for example? Both science and romanticism have vied with one another in making of man a mere stop on which Nature may play what tune she will. The Æolian harp enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a romantic symbol. The man of science for his part is ready to draw up statistical tables showing what season of the year is most productive of suicide and what type of weather impels bank-cashiers most irresistibly to embezzlement. A man on a mountain top, according to Rousseau, enjoys not only physical but spiritual elevation, and when he descends to the plain the altitude of his mind declines with that of his body. Ruskin’s soul, says C. E. Norton, “was like an Æolian harp, its strings quivering musically in serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might break the sounding board itself.” It is not surprising Ruskin makes other men as subject to “skyey influences” as himself. “The mountains of the earth are,” he says, “its natural cathedrals. True religion can scarcely be achieved away from them. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr’s passion.” The corruptions of Romanism “are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy.”[106]