Rousseau and Romanticism

by Irving Babbitt

Is then the Rousseauist totally unable to regulate his impressions? It is plain that he cannot control them from within because the whole idea of a vital control of this kind is, as we have seen, foreign to the psychology of the beautiful soul. Yet it is, according to Rousseau, possible to base morality on the senses—on outer perception that is—and at the same time get the equivalent of a free-will based on inner perception. He was so much interested in this subject that he had planned to devote to it a whole treatise to be entitled “Sensitive morality or the materialism of the sage.” A man cannot resist an outer impression but he may at least get out of its way and put himself in the way of another impression that will impel him to the desired course of conduct. “The soul may then be put or maintained in the state most favorable to virtue.” “Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, rest, everything, acts on our physical frame.” By a proper adjustment of all these outer elements we may govern in their origins the feelings by which we allow ourselves to be dominated.[107]

Rousseau’s ideas about sensitive morality are at once highly chimerical and highly significant. Here as elsewhere one may say with Amiel that nothing of Rousseau has been lost. His point of view has an inner kinship with that of the man of science who asserts that man is necessarily the product of natural forces, but that one may at least modify the natural forces. For example, moral effort on the part of the individual cannot overcome heredity. It is possible, however, by schemes of eugenics to regulate heredity. The uneasy burden of moral responsibility is thus lifted from the individual, and the moralist in the old-fashioned sense is invited to abdicate in favor of the biologist. It would be easy enough to trace similar assumptions in the various forms of socialism and other “isms” almost innumerable of the present hour.

Perhaps the problem to which I have already alluded may as well be faced here. How does it happen that Rousseau who attacked both science and literature as the chief sources of human degeneracy should be an arch-æsthete, the authentic ancestor of the school of art for art’s sake and at the same time by his sensitive (or æsthetic) morality play into the hands of the scientific determinist? If one is to enter deeply into the modern movement one needs to consider both wherein scientific and emotional naturalists clash and wherein they agree. The two types of naturalists agree in their virtual denial of a superrational realm. They clash above all in their attitude towards what is on the rational level. The scientific naturalist is assiduously analytical. Rousseau, on the other hand, or rather one whole side of Rousseau, is hostile to analysis. The arts and sciences are attacked because they are the product of reflection. “The man who reflects is a depraved animal,” because he has fallen away from the primitive spontaneous unity of his being. Rousseau is the first of the great anti-intellectualists. By assailing both rationalism and pseudo-classic decorum in the name of instinct and emotion he appealed to men’s longing to get away from the secondary and the derivative to the immediate. True decorum satisfies the craving for immediacy because it contains within itself an element of superrational perception. The “reason” of a Plato or an Aristotle also satisfies the craving for immediacy because it likewise contains within itself an element of superrational perception. A reason or a decorum of this kind ministers to another deep need of human nature—the need to lose itself in a larger whole. Once eliminate the superrational perception and reason sinks to the level of rationalism, consciousness becomes mere self-consciousness. It is difficult, as St. Evremond said, for man to remain in the long run in this doubtful middle state. Having lost the unity of insight, he will long for the unity of instinct. Hence the paradox that this most self-conscious of all movements is filled with the praise of the unconscious. It abounds in persons who, like Walt Whitman, would turn and live with the animals, or who, like Novalis, would fain strike root into the earth with the plant. Animals[108] and plants are not engaged in any moral struggle, they are not inwardly divided against themselves.

Here is the source of the opposition between the abstract and analytical head, deadly to the sense of unity, and the warm immediate heart that unifies life with the aid of the imagination—an opposition that assumes so many forms from Rousseau to Bergson. The Rousseauist always betrays himself by arraigning in some form or other, “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” One should indeed remember that there were obscurantists before Rousseau. Pascal also arrays the heart against the head; but his heart is at the farthest remove from that of Rousseau; it stands for a superrational perception. Christians like Pascal may indulge with comparative impunity in a certain amount of obscurantism. For they have submitted to a tradition that supplies them with distinctions between good and evil and at the same time controls their imagination. But for the individualist who has broken with tradition to deny his head in the name of his heart is a deadly peril. He above all persons should insist that the power by which we multiply distinctions, though secondary, is not false—that the intellect, of however little avail in itself, is invaluable when working in coöperation with the imagination in the service of either inner or outer perception. It is only through the analytical head and its keen discriminations that the individualist can determine whether the unity and infinitude towards which his imagination is reaching (and it is only through the imagination that one can have the sense of unity and infinitude) is real or merely chimerical. Need I add that in making these distinctions between imagination, intellect, feeling, etc., I am not attempting to divide man up into more or less watertight compartments, into hard and fast “faculties,” but merely to express, however imperfectly, certain obscure and profound facts of experience?

The varieties of what one may term the rationalistic error, of the endeavor of the intellect to emancipate itself from perception and set up as an independent power, are numerous. The variety that was perhaps formerly most familiar was that of the theologian who sought to formulate intellectually what must ever transcend formulation. The forms of the rationalistic error that concern our present subject can be traced back for the most part to Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, and are indeed implicit in his famous identification of thought and being (Je pense, donc je suis). The dogmatic and arrogant rationalism that denies both what is above and what is below itself, both the realm of awe and the realm of wonder, which prevailed among the Cartesians of the Enlightenment, combined, as I have said, with pseudo-classic decorum to produce that sense of confinement and smugness against which the original genius protested. Man will always crave a view of life to which perception lends immediacy and the imagination infinitude. A view of life like that of the eighteenth century that reduces unduly the rôle of both imagination and perception will always seem to him unvital and mechanical. “The Bounded,” says Blake, “is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a Universe would soon become a Mill with complicated wheels.”

The mechanizing of life against which the romanticist protested may as I said be largely associated with the influence of Descartes. It is not however the whole truth about Descartes to say that he forgot the purely instrumental rôle of the intellect and encouraged it to set up as an independent power. As a matter of fact he also used the intellect as an instrument in the service of outer perception. Taking as his point of departure the precise observations that science was accumulating, he sought to formulate mathematically the natural law. Now the more one reduces nature to a problem of space and movement, the more one is enabled to measure nature; and the method of exact measurement may be justified, if not on metaphysical, at least on practical grounds. It helps one, if not to understand natural forces, at least to control them. It thereby increases man’s power and ministers to utility. In a word, the intellect when thus pressed into the service of outer perception makes for material efficiency. In a sense science becomes scientific only in proportion as it neglects the qualitative differences between phenomena, e.g. between light and sound, and treats them solely from the point of view of quantity. But the penalty that science pays for this quantitative method is a heavy one. The farther it gets away from the warm immediacy of perception the less real it becomes; for that only is real to a man that he immediately perceives. Perfectly pure science tends to become a series of abstract mathematical formulæ without any real content. By his resort to such a method, the man of science is in constant danger of becoming a mere rationalist. At bottom he is ignorant of the reality that lies behind natural phenomena; he must even be ignorant of it, for it lays hold upon the infinite, and so must elude a finite being like man. But the desire to conceal his own ignorance from himself and others, the secret push for power and prestige that lies deep down in the breast of the man of science as in that of every other man, impels him to attach an independent value to the operations of the intellect that have only an instrumental value in the service of outer perception and to conceive that he has locked up physical nature in his formulæ. The man of science thus falls victim to a special form of metaphysical illusion. The gravity of the error of the scientific intellectualist is multiplied tenfold when he conceives that his formulæ cover not merely the natural law but the human law as well, when he strives, like Taine, to convert man himself into a “walking theorem,” a “living geometry.” This denial of every form of spontaneity was rightly felt by the romanticists to be intolerable.

Goethe contrasts the smug satisfaction of Wagner in his dead formulæ that give only what is external and secondary, with Faust’s fierce craving for immediacy and therefore his impatience with an analysis that gives only the dry bones from which the vital breath has departed. Wagner is a philistine because he is not tormented by the thirst for the infinite. Faust, on the other hand, reaches out beyond the mere intellect towards the spirit that is behind the shows of nature, but this spirit appears to him and reduces him to despair by declaring that he is trying to grasp something that is not only infinite but alien to him. Instead of turning from this alien spirit to the spirit that is relevant to man, a spirit that sets bounds to every inordinate craving, including the inordinate craving for knowledge (libido sciendi), Faust gives himself to the devil in what was, in the time of the youthful Goethe, the newest fashion: he becomes a Rousseauist. Instead of striking into the ascending path of insight, he descends to the level of impulse. Seen from this level the power by which we multiply distinctions seems to him, as it was to seem later to Wordsworth, not merely secondary but false, and so definition yields to indiscriminate feeling (Gefühl ist alles). In general the Rousseauistic reply to the Cartesian attempt to identify thought and being is the identification of being with emotion (je sens donc je suis).

The Mephistopheles of Goethe has often been taken as a symbol of the iconoclastic and Voltairian side of the eighteenth century. The rationalists assailed the traditional forms that imply a superrational realm as mere “prejudice,” and, failing to find in insight a substitute for these discarded forms, they succumbed in turn to the emotionalists. A “reason” that is not grounded in insight will always seem to men intolerably cold and negative and will prove unable to withstand the assault of the primary passions. The reason of a Plato or an Aristotle is on a different footing altogether because, as I have said, it includes an element of inner perception. One may note here that the difficulties of the present subject arise in no small degree from the ambiguities that cluster about the word reason. It may not only mean the imaginative insight[109] of a Plato and the abstract reasoning of a Descartes but is often employed by the classicist himself as a synonym of good sense. Good sense may be defined as a correct perception of the ordinary facts of life and of their relation to one another. It may be of very many grades, corresponding to the infinite diversity of the facts to be perceived. A man may evidently have good sense in dealing with one order of facts, and quite lack it in dealing with some different order of facts. As the result of long observation and experience of a multitude of minute relationships, of the facts that ordinarily follow one another or coexist in some particular field, a man’s knowledge of this field becomes at last, as it were, automatic and unconscious. A sea captain for example acquires at last an intuitive knowledge of the weather, the broker, an intuitive knowledge of stocks. The good sense or practical judgment of the sea captain in his particular calling and of the broker in his is likely to be greater than that of less experienced persons. One cannot, however, assert that a man’s good sense is always in strict ratio to his experience. Some persons seem to have an innate gift for seeing things as they are, others a gift equally innate for seeing things as they are not.

Again the field in which one displays one’s good sense or practical judgment may fall primarily under either the human law or the natural law, may belong in Aristotelian phrase to the domain either of the probable or of the necessary. To take a homely illustration, a man is free to choose the temperature of his bath, but only within the limits of natural necessity—in this case the temperature at which water freezes and that at which water boils. He will show his practical judgment by choosing water that is neither too hot nor too cold and this so far as he is concerned will be the golden mean. Here as elsewhere the golden mean is nothing mechanical, but may vary not only from individual to individual but in the same individual according to his age, the state of his health, etc. In determining what conforms to the golden mean or law of measure there must always be a mediation between the particular instance and the general principle, and it is here that intuition is indispensable. But even so there is a centre of normal human experience, and the person who is too far removed from it ceases to be probable. Aged persons may exist who find bathing in ice-water beneficial, but they are not representative. Now creative art, in distinct ratio to its dignity, deals not with what may happen in isolated cases but with what happens according to probability or necessity. It is this preoccupation with the universal that as Aristotle says makes poetry a more serious and philosophical thing than history. There enters indeed into true art an element of vital novelty and surprise. But the more cultivated the audience to which the creator addresses himself the more will it insist that the surprise be not won at the expense of motivation. It will demand that characters and incidents be not freakish, not too remote from the facts that normally follow one another or coexist, whether in nature or human nature. One needs, in short, to deal with both art and life from some ethical centre. The centre with reference to which one has good sense may be only the ethos of one’s time and country, but if one’s good sense has, as in the case of the great poets, the support of the imagination, it may pass beyond to something more abiding. “Of Pope’s intellectual character,” says Dr. Johnson, “the constituent and fundamental principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception of consonance and propriety. He saw immediately of his own conceptions what was to be chosen, and what to be rejected.” One may grant all this and at the same time feel the difference between the “reason” of a Pope and the reason of a Sophocles.

Good sense of the kind Dr. Johnson describes and decorum are not strictly speaking synonymous. To be decorous not only must one have a correct perception of what to do, but one must actually be able to do it; and this often requires a long and difficult training. We have seen that Rousseau’s spite against eighteenth-century Paris was largely due to the fact that he had not acquired young enough the habits that would have made it possible for him to conform to its convention. “I affected,” says Rousseau with singular candor, “to despise the politeness I did not know how to practice.” As a matter of fact he had never adjusted himself to the decorum and good sense of any community. His attitude towards life was fundamentally Bohemian. But a person who was sensible and decorous according to the standards of some other country might have emphasized the differences between his good sense and decorum and the good sense and decorum of eighteenth-century Paris. The opponents of the traditional order in the eighteenth century were fond of introducing some Persian or Chinese to whom this order seemed no true order at all but only “prejudice” or “abuse.” The conclusion would seem to be that because the good sense and decorum of one time and country do not coincide exactly with those of another time and country, therefore good sense and decorum themselves have in them no universal element, and are entirely implicated in the shifting circumstances of time and place. But behind the ethos of any particular country, that of Greece, for instance, there are, as Antigone perceived, the “unwritten laws of heaven,” and something of this permanent order is sure to shine through even the most imperfect convention. Though no convention is final, though man and all he establishes are subject to the law of change, it is therefore an infinitely delicate and perilous task to break with convention. One can make this break only in favor of insight; which is much as if one should say that the only thing that may safely be opposed to common sense is a commoner sense, or if one prefers, a common sense that is becoming more and more imaginative. Even so, the wiser the man, one may surmise, the less likely he will be to indulge in a violent and theatrical rupture with his age, after the fashion of Rousseau. He will like Socrates remember the counsel of the Delphian oracle to follow the “usage of the city,”[110] and while striving to gain a firmer hold upon the human law and to impose a more strenuous discipline upon his ordinary self, he will so far as possible conform to what he finds established. A student of the past cannot help being struck by the fact that men are found scattered through different times and countries and living under very different conventions who are nevertheless in virtue of their insight plainly moving towards a common centre. So much so that the best books of the world seem to have been written, as Emerson puts it, by one all-wise, all-seeing gentleman. A curious circumstance is that the writers who are most universal in virtue of their imaginative reason or inspired good sense, are likewise as a rule the writers who realized most intensely the life of their own age. No other Spanish writer, for example, has so much human appeal as Cervantes, and at the same time no other brings us so close to the heart of sixteenth-century Spain. In the writings attributed to Confucius one encounters, mixed up with much that is almost inconceivably remote from us, maxims that have not lost their validity to-day; maxims that are sure to be reaffirmed wherever and whenever men attain to the level of humanistic insight. In the oldest Buddhist documents again one finds along with a great deal that is very expressive of ancient India, and thus quite foreign to our idiosyncrasy, a good sense which is even more imaginative and inspired, and therefore more universal, than that of Confucius, and which is manifested, moreover, on the religious rather than on the humanistic level. We are dealing here with indubitable facts, and should plant ourselves firmly upon them as against those who would exaggerate either the constant or the variable elements in human nature.