In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than in the original struggle between Taoists and Confucians. The total impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese individualism ended like that of Greece at about the same time in disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the “Fighting States”), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the most barbaric of these states and “put the lid” on everybody. Shi Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist influence.
It is proper to add that though Lao-tzŭ proclaims that the soft is superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist. There are passages, especially in Lao-tzŭ, that in their emphasis on concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding movement in the West.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
My only justification for these very unsystematic bibliographical notes is that, bringing together as they do under one cover material somewhat scattered and inaccessible to most readers, they may help to add to the number, now unfortunately very small, of those who have earned the right to have an opinion about romanticism as an international movement. A list of this kind is a fragment of a fragment. I have given, for example, only a fraction of the books on Rousseau and scarcely any of the books, thousands in numbers, which without being chiefly on Rousseau, contain important passages on him. I may cite almost at random as instances of this latter class, the comparison between Burke and Rousseau in the fifth volume of Lecky’s History of the Eighteenth Century; the stanzas on Rousseau in the third canto of Childe Harold; the passage on Rousseau in Hazlitt’s essay on the Past and Future (Table Talk).
The only period that I have covered with any attempt at fullness is that from about 1795 to 1840. Books that seem to me to possess literary distinction or to deal authoritatively with some aspect of the subject I have marked with a star. I make no claim, however, to have read all the books I have listed, and my rating will no doubt often be questioned in the case of those I have read.
I have not as a rule mentioned articles in periodicals. The files of the following special publications may often be consulted with profit. Those that have current bibliographies I have marked with a dagger.
† Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France.—† Annales romantiques.—† Revue germanique (Eng. and German).