Rousseau and Romanticism

by Irving Babbitt

Enough has been said to show the ambiguities involved in the word reason. Reason may mean the abstract and geometrical reason of a Descartes, it may mean simply good sense, which may itself exist in very many grades ranging from an intuitive mastery of some particular field to the intuitive mastery of the ethos of a whole age, like the reason of a Pope. Finally reason may be imaginative and be thereby enabled to go beyond the convention of a particular time and country, and lay hold in varying degrees on “the unwritten laws of heaven.” I have already traced in some measure the process by which reason in the eighteenth century had come to mean abstract and geometrical (or as one may say Cartesian) reason or else unimaginative good sense. Cartesian reason was on the one hand being pressed into the service of science and its special order of perceptions; on the other hand it was being used frequently in coöperation with an unimaginative good sense to attack the traditional forms that imply a realm of insight which is above both abstract reason and ordinary good sense. Men were emboldened to use reason in this way because they were flushed not only by the increasing mastery of man over nature through science, but by the positive and anti-traditional method through which this mastery had been won. Both those who proclaimed and those who denied a superrational realm were at least agreed in holding that the faith in any such realm was inseparable from certain traditional forms. Pascal, for example, held not only that insight in religion is annexed to the acceptance of certain dogmas—and this offended the new critical spirit—but furthermore that insight could exist even in the orthodox only by a special divine gift or grace, and this offended man’s reviving confidence in himself. People were ready to applaud when a Voltaire declared it was time to “take the side of human nature against this sublime misanthropist.” The insight into the law of decorum on which classicism must ultimately rest was in much the same way held to be inseparable from the Græco-Roman tradition; and so the nature of classical insight as a thing apart from any tradition tended to be obscured in the endless bickerings of ancients and moderns. The classical traditionalists, however, were less prone than the Christian traditionalists (Jansenists, Jesuits and Protestants) to weaken their cause still further by wrangling among themselves.

Inasmuch as both Christians and humanists failed to plant themselves on the fact of insight, the insight came more and more to be rejected along with the special forms from which it was deemed to be inseparable. As a result of this rejection “reason” was left to cope unaided with man’s impulses and expansive desires. Now Pascal saw rightly that the balance of power in such a conflict between reason and impulse was held by the imagination, and that if reason lacked the support of insight the imagination would side with the expansive desires and reason would succumb. Moreover the superrational insight, or “heart” as Pascal calls it, that can alone keep man from being thus overwhelmed, comes, as he holds, not through reason but through grace and is at times actually opposed to reason. (“The heart,” he says, “has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.”) Instead of protesting against the asceticism of this view as the true positivist would do, instead of insisting that reason and imagination may pull together harmoniously in the service of insight, the romantic moralist opposed to the superrational “heart” of the austere Christian a subrational “heart,” and this involved an attempt to base morality on the very element in human nature it is designed to restrain. The positivist will plant himself first of all on the fact of insight and will define it as the immediate perception of a something anterior to both thought and feeling, that is known practically as a power of control over both. The beautiful soul, as we have seen, has no place for any such power in his scheme of things, but hopes to satisfy all ethical elements simply by letting himself go. Rousseau (following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson) transforms conscience itself from an inner check into an expansive emotion. While thus corrupting conscience in its very essence he does not deny conscience. On the contrary he grows positively rhapsodic over conscience and other similar words. “Rousseau took wisdom from men’s souls,” says Joubert, “by talking to them of virtue.” In short, Rousseau displays the usual dexterity of the sophist in juggling with ill-defined general terms. If one calls for sharp definition one is at once dismissed as a mere rationalist who is retreating into a false secondary power from a warm immediacy. The traditional distinctions regarding good and bad were thus discarded at the same time that discredit was cast on the keen analysis with which it would have been possible to build up new distinctions—all in favor of an indiscriminate emotionalism. This discomfiture of both tradition and analysis in the field of the human law would not have been so easy if at the same time man’s active attention and effort had not been concentrated more and more on the field of the natural law. In that field imagination and the analytical intellect were actually pulling together in the service of perception with the result that man was constantly gaining in power and utility. Emotional romanticists and scientific utilitarians have thus, in spite of their surface clashes, cooperated during the past century in the dehumanizing of man.

It is not enough to say of the representatives of both sides of this great naturalistic movement that they eliminate the veto power from human nature while continuing to use the old words, like virtue and conscience, that imply a veto power. We have seen that they actually attack the veto power as synonymous with evil. The devil is conceived as the spirit that always says no. A purely affirmative morality is almost necessarily an emotional morality. If there is no region of insight above the reason which is felt by the natural man as an element of vital control, and if cold reason, reason unsupported by insight, never has done anything illustrious, as Rousseau truly says, it follows that the only way to put driving power behind reason is to turn virtue into a passion,—a passion that differs from other passions merely in its greater imperiousness. For the beautiful soul virtue, as we have seen in the case of Robespierre, is not only a tender, imperious and voluptuous passion but even an intoxication. “I was, if not virtuous,” says Rousseau, “at least intoxicated with virtue.” In its extreme manifestations romantic morality is indeed only one aspect, and surely the most singular aspect, of the romantic cult of intoxication. No student of romanticism can fail to be struck by its pursuit of delirium, vertigo and intoxication for their own sake. It is important to see how all these things are closely related to one another and how they all derive from the attempt to put life on an emotional basis. To rest conscience, for example, on emotion is to rest it on what is always changing, not only from man to man but from moment to moment in the same man. “If,” as Shelley says, “nought is, but that it feels itself to be,” it will feel itself to be very different things at different times. No part of man is exempt from the region of flux and change. There is, as James himself points out, a kinship between such a philosophy of pure motion and vertigo. Faust after all is only consistent when having identified the spirit that says no, which is the true voice of conscience, with the devil, he proceeds to dedicate himself to vertigo (dem Taumel weih’ ich mich). Rousseau also, as readers of the “Confessions” will remember, deliberately courted giddiness by gazing down on a waterfall from the brink of a precipice (making sure first that the railing on which he leaned was good and strong). This naturalistic dizziness became epidemic among the Greeks at the critical moment of their break with traditional standards. “Whirl is King,” cried Aristophanes, “having driven out Zeus.” The modern sophist is even more a votary of the god Whirl than the Greek, for he has added to the mobility of an intellect that has no support in either tradition or insight the mobility of feeling. Many Rousseauists were, like Hazlitt, attracted to the French Revolution by its “grand whirling movements.”

Even more significant than the cult of vertigo is the closely allied cult of intoxication. “Man being reasonable,” says Byron, with true Rousseauistic logic, “must therefore get drunk. The best of life is but intoxication.” The subrational and impulsive self of the man who has got drunk is not only released from the surveillance of reason in any sense of the word, but his imagination is at the same tune set free from the limitations of the real. If many Rousseauists have been rightly accused of being “lovers of delirium,” that is because in delirium the fancy is especially free to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras. To compose a poem, as Coleridge is supposed to have composed “Kubla Khan,” in an opium dream without any participation of his rational self is a triumph of romantic art. “I should have taken more opium when I wrote it,” said Friedrich Schlegel in explanation of the failure of his play “Alarcos.” What more specially concerns our present topic is the carrying over of this subrational “enthusiasm” into the field of ethical values, and this calls for certain careful distinctions. Genuine religion—whether genuine Christianity or genuine Buddhism—is plainly unfriendly in the highest degree to every form of intoxication. Buddhism, for example, not only prohibits the actual use of intoxicants but it pursues implacably all the subtler intoxications of the spirit. The attitude of the humanist towards intoxication is somewhat more complex. He recognizes how deep in man’s nature is the craving for some blunting of the sharp edge of his consciousness and at least a partial escape from reason and reality; and so he often makes a place on the recreative side of life for such moments of escape even if attained with the aid of wine. Dulce est desipere in loco. Pindar, who displays so often in his verse the high seriousness of the ethical imagination, is simply observing the decorum of the occasion when he celebrates in a song for the end of a feast “the time when the wearisome cares of men have vanished from their reasons and on a wide sea of golden wealth we are all alike voyaging to some visionary shore. He that is penniless is then rich, and even they that are wealthy find their hearts expanding, when they are smitten by the arrows of the vine.” The true Greek, one scarcely needs add, put his final emphasis, as befitted a child of Apollo, not on intoxication but on the law of measure and sobriety—on preserving the integrity of his mind, to render literally the Greek word for the virtue that he perhaps prized the most.[111] One must indeed remember that alongside the Apollonian element in Greek life is the orgiastic or Dyonisiac element. But when Euripides sides imaginatively with the frenzy of Dionysus, as he does in his “Bacchae,” though ostensibly preaching moderation, we may affirm that he is falling away from what is best in the spirit of Hellas and revealing a kinship with the votaries of the god Whirl. The cult of intoxication has as a matter of fact appeared in all times and places where men have sought to get the equivalent of religious vision and the sense of oneness that it brings without rising above the naturalistic level. True religious vision is a process of concentration, the result of the imposition of the veto power upon the expansive desires of the ordinary self. The various naturalistic simulations of this vision are, on the contrary, expansive, the result of a more or less complete escape from the veto power, whether won with the aid of intoxicants or not. The emotional romanticists from Rousseau down have left no doubt as to the type of vision they represented. Rousseau dilates with a sort of fellow feeling on the deep potations that went on in the taverns of patriarchal Geneva.[112] Renan looks with disfavor on those who are trying to diminish drunkenness among the common people. He merely asks that this drunkenness “be gentle, amiable, accompanied by moral sentiments.” Perhaps this side of the movement is best summed up in the following passage of William James: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth.”[113]

The American distiller who named one of his brands “Golden Dream Whiskey” was evidently too modest. If an adept in the new psychology he might have set up as a pure idealist, as the opener up of an especially radiant pathway to the “truth.”

The primitivist then attacks sober discrimination as an obstacle both to warm immediacy of feeling and to unity. He tends to associate the emotional unity that he gains through intoxication with the unity of instinct which he so admires in the world of the subrational. “The romantic character,” says Ricarda Huch, “is more exposed to waste itself in debaucheries than any other; for only in intoxication, whether of love or wine, when the one half of its being, consciousness, is lulled to sleep, can it enjoy the bliss for which it envies every beast—the bliss of feeling itself one.”[114] The desires of the animal, however, work within certain definite limits. They are not, like those of the primitivist, inordinate, the explanation being that they are less stimulated than the desires of the primitivist by the imagination. Even if he gets rid of intellect and moral effort, the primitivist cannot attain the unity of instinct because he remains too imaginative; at the same time he proclaims and proclaims rightly that the imagination is the great unifying power—the power that can alone save us from viewing things in “disconnection dead and spiritless.” We should attend carefully at this point for we are coming to the heart of the great romantic sophism. The Rousseauist does not attain to the unity of the man whose impulses and desires are controlled and disciplined to some ethical centre. He does not, in spite of all his praise of the unconscious and of the “sublime animals,” attain to the unity of instinct. In what sense then may he be said to attain unity? The obvious reply is that he attains unity only in dreamland. For the nature to which he would return, one cannot repeat too often, is nothing real, but a mere nostalgic straining of the imagination away from the real. It is only in dreamland that one can rest unity on the expansive forces of personality that actually divide not only one individual from another but the same individual from himself. It is only in dreamland that, in the absence of both inner and outer control, “all things” will “flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” Such a unity will be no more than a dream unity, even though one term it the ideal and sophisticate in its favor all the traditional terms of religion and morality. A question that forces itself at every stage upon the student of this movement is: What is the value of unity without reality? For two things are equally indubitable: first, that romanticism on the philosophical side, is a protest in the name of unity against the disintegrating analysis of the eighteenth-century rationalist; second, that what the primitivist wants in exchange for analysis is not reality but illusion. Rousseau who inclines like other æsthetes to identify the true with the beautiful was, we are told, wont to exclaim: “There is nothing beautiful save that which is not”; a saying to be matched with that of “La Nouvelle Héloïse”: “The land of chimeras is alone worthy of habitation.” Similar utterances might be multiplied from French, English, and German romanticists.[115] To be sure, the word “reality” is perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain recent votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have promised us that if we surrender to the flux we shall have a “vision” not only of unity but also of reality; and so they have transferred to the cult of their divinity all the traditional language of religion.

We do not, however, need for the present to enter into a discussion as to the nature of reality, but simply to stick to strict psychological observation. From this point of view it is not hard to see that the primitivist makes his primary appeal not to man’s need for unity and reality but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this need is in his tale (“The Island”) of a ship’s crew that overpowered its officers and then set sail for Otaheite; what impelled these Arcadian mutineers was not the desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life with its rigid conventions, but

The wish—which ages have not yet subdued

In man—to have no master save his mood.

Now to have no master save one’s mood is to be wholly temperamental. In Arcadia—the ideal of romantic morality—those who are wholly temperamental unite in sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to consider more fully what this triumph of temperament means in the real world.