One of the most disquieting features of the modern movement is the vagueness and ambiguity of its use of the word nature and the innumerable sophistries that have resulted. One can sympathize at times with Sir Leslie Stephen’s wish that the word might be suppressed entirely. This looseness of definition may be said to begin with the very rise of naturalism in the Renaissance, and indeed to go back to the naturalists of Greek and Roman antiquity.[192] Even writers like Rabelais and MoliÈre are not free from the suspicion of juggling dangerously on occasion with the different meanings of the word nature. But the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not merely naturalistic, they were also humanistic, and what they usually meant by nature, as I have pointed out, was the conception of normal, representative human nature that they had worked out with the aid of the ancients. There is undeniably an element of narrowness and artificiality in this conception of nature, and a resulting unfriendliness, as appears in Pope’s definition of wit, towards originality and invention. In his “Art of Poetry” Boileau says, “Let nature be your sole study.” What he means by nature appears a few lines later: “Study the court and become familiar with the town.” To this somewhat conventionalized human nature the original genius opposed, as we have seen, the cult of primitive nature. A whole revolution is implied in Byron’s line:

Any study of this topic must evidently turn on the question how far at different times and by different schools of thought the realm of man and the realm of nature (as Byron uses the word) have been separated and in what way, and also how far they have been run together and in what way. For there may be different ways of running together man and nature. Ruskin’s phrase the “pathetic fallacy” is unsatisfactory because it fails to recognize this fact. The man who is guilty of the pathetic fallacy sees in nature emotions that are not really there but only in himself. Extreme examples of this confusion abound in Ruskin’s own writings. Now the ancients also ran man and nature together, but in an entirely different way. The Greek we are told never saw the oak tree without at the same time seeing the dryad. There is in this and similar associations a sort of overflow of the human realm upon the forms of outer nature whereas the Rousseauist instead of bestowing imaginatively upon the oak tree a conscious life and an image akin to his own and so lifting it up to his level, would, if he could, become an oak tree and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity. The Greek, one may say, humanized nature; the Rousseauist naturalizes man. Rousseau’s great discovery was revery; and revery is just this imaginative melting of man into outer nature. If the ancients failed to develop in a marked degree this art of revery, it was not because they lacked naturalists. Both Stoics and Epicureans, the two main varieties of naturalists with which classical antiquity was familiar, inclined to affirm the ultimate identity of the human and the natural order. But both Stoics and Epicureans would have found it hard to understand the indifference to the intellect and its activities that Rousseauistic revery implies. The Stoics to be sure employed the intellect on an impossible and disheartening task—that of founding on the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. The Epicureans remind one rather in much of their intellectual activity of the modern man of science. But the Epicurean was less prone than the man of science to look on man as the mere passive creature of environment. The views of the man of science about the springs of conduct often seem to coincide rather closely with those of Rousseau about “sensitive morality.” Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire says that when reclining on the banks of the Nile he felt awakening within himself the instincts of the crocodile. The point of view is Rousseauistic perhaps rather than genuinely scientific. An Epicurus or a Lucretius would, we are probably safe in assuming, have been disquieted by any such surrender to the subrational, by any such encroachment of the powers of the unconscious upon conscious control.

It is hard as a matter of fact to find in the ancients anything resembling Rousseauistic revery, even when they yield to the pastoral mood. Nature interests them as a rule less for its own sake than as a background for human action; and when they are concerned primarily with nature, it is a nature that has been acted upon by man. They have a positive shrinking from wild and uncultivated nature. “The green pastures and golden slopes of England,” says Lowell, “are sweeter both to the outward and to the inward eye that the hand of man has immemorially cared for and caressed them.” This is an attitude towards nature that an ancient would have understood perfectly. One may indeed call it the Virgilian attitude from the ancient who has perhaps expressed it most happily. The man who lives in the grand manner may indeed wish to impose on nature some of the fine proportion and symmetry of which he is conscious in himself and he may then from our modern point of view carry the humanizing of nature too far. “Let us sing of woods,” says Virgil, “but let the woods be worthy of a consul.” This line has sometimes been taken to be a prophecy of the Park of Versailles. We may sympathize up to a certain point with the desire to introduce a human symmetry into nature (such as appears, for instance, in the Italian garden), but the peril is even greater here than elsewhere of confounding the requirements of a real with those of an artificial decorum. I have already mentioned the neo-classicist who complained that the stars in heaven were not arranged in sufficiently symmetrical patterns.

What has been said should make clear that though both humanist and Rousseauist associate man with nature it is in very different ways, and that there is therefore an ambiguity in the expression “pathetic fallacy.” It remains to show that men may not only associate themselves with nature in different ways but that they may likewise differ in their ways of asserting man’s separateness from nature. The chief distinction to be made here is that between the humanist and the supernaturalist. Some sense of the gap between man and the “outworld” is almost inevitable and forces itself at times even upon those most naturalistically inclined:

The Wordsworth who speaks here is scarcely the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey or the Wordsworth whose “daily teachers had been woods and rills.” He reminds us rather of Socrates who gave as his reason for going so rarely into the country, delightful as he found it when once there, that he did not learn from woods and rills but from the “men in the cities.” This sense of the separateness of the human and the natural realm may be carried much further—to a point where an ascetic distrust of nature begins to appear. Something of this ascetic distrust is seen for example in the following lines from Cardinal Newman:

The origins of this latter attitude towards nature are to be sought in mediÆval Christianity rather than in classical antiquity. No man who knows the facts would assert for a moment that the man of the Middle Ages was incapable of looking on nature with other feelings than those of ascetic distrust. It is none the less true that the man of the Middle Ages often saw in nature not merely something alien but a positive temptation and peril of the spirit. In his attitude towards nature as in other respects Petrarch is usually accounted the first modern. He did what no man of the mediÆval period is supposed to have done before him, or indeed what scarcely any man of classical antiquity did: he ascended a mountain out of sheer curiosity and simply to enjoy the prospect. But those who tell of his ascent of Mt. Ventoux sometimes forget to add that the passage of Saint Augustine[195] that occurred to him at the top reflects the distrust of the more austere Christian towards the whole natural order. Petrarch is at once more ascetic and more romantic in his attitude towards nature than the Greek or Roman.

Traces of Petrarch’s taste for solitary and even for wild nature are to be found throughout the Renaissance and the seventeenth century. But the recoil from supernaturalism that took place at this time led rather, as I have remarked, to a revival of the GrÆco-Roman humanism with something more of artifice and convention, and to an even more marked preference[196] of the town to the country. An age that aims first of all at urbanity must necessarily be more urban than rural in its predilections. It was a sort of condescension for the neo-classical humanist to turn from the central model he was imitating to mere unadorned nature, and even then he felt that he must be careful not to condescend too far. Even when writing pastorals he was warned by Scaliger to avoid details that are too redolent of the real country; he should indulge at most in an “urbane rusticity.” Wild nature the neo-classicist finds simply repellent. Mountains he looks upon as “earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The Alps were regarded as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the plains of Lombardy. “At last,” says a German traveller of the seventeenth century, “we left the horrible and wearisome mountains and the beautiful flat landscape was joyfully welcomed.” The taste for mountain scenery is associated no doubt to some extent, as has been suggested, with the increasing ease and comfort of travel that has come with the progress of the utilitarian movement. It is scarcely necessary to point the contrast between the Switzerland of which Evelyn tells in his diary[197] and the Switzerland in which one may go by funicular to the top of the Jungfrau.

Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less trimness in nature and human nature were not it is true entirely without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting—as the very word picturesque testifies—for the encouragement they failed to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed like a picture[198] and it might be not merely irregular but savage if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. This association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the style of Le NÔtre.[199] As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry, nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle HÉloÏse.”[200] Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path, and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so plentifully supplied by the Revolution.

Rousseau himself, it should hardly be necessary to say, stands for far more than an artificial wildness. Instead of imposing decorum on nature like the neo-classicist, he preached constantly the elimination of decorum from man. Man should flee from that “false taste for grandeur which is not made for him” and which “poisons his pleasures,”[201] to nature. Now “it is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent charms.”[202] The man of feeling finds the savage and deserted nook filled with beauties that seem horrible to the mere worldling.[203] Rousseau indeed did not crave the ultimate degree of wildness even in the Alps. He did not get beyond what one may term the middle zone of Alpine scenery—scenery that may be found around the shores of Lake Leman. He was inclined to find the most appropriate setting for the earthly paradise in the neighborhood of Vevey. Moreover, others about the same time and more or less independently of his influence were opposing an even more primitive nature to the artificialities of civilization. The mountains of “Ossian” are, as has been said, mere blurs, yet the new delight in mountains is due in no small measure throughout Europe to the Ossianic influence.

The instinct for getting away from the beaten track, for exploration and discovery, has of course been highly developed at other epochs, notably at the Renaissance. Much of the romantic interest in the wild and waste places of the earth did not go much beyond what might have been felt in Elizabethan England. Many of the Rousseauists, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand for example, not only read eagerly the older books of travel but often the same books. The fascination of penetrating to regions “where foot of man hath ne’er or rarely been,” is perennial. It was my privilege a few years ago to listen to Sir Ernest Shackleton speak of his expedition across the Antarctic continent and of the thrill that he and the members of his party felt when they saw rising before them day after day mountain peaks that no human eye had ever gazed upon. The emotion was no doubt very similar to that of “stout Cortez” when he first “stared at the Pacific.” Chateaubriand must have looked forward to similar emotions when he planned his trip to North America in search of the North West Passage. But the passion for actual exploration which is a form of the romanticism of action is very subordinate in the case of Chateaubriand to emotional romanticism. He went into the wilderness first of all not to make actual discoveries but to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint, and at the same time to practice the new art of revery. His sentiments on getting into what was then the virgin forest to the west of Albany were very different we may assume from those of the early pioneers of America. “When,” he says, “after passing the Mohawk I entered woods which had never felt the axe, I was seized by a sort of intoxication of independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad.” The disillusion that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his first savages—a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat, drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”

In America, as elsewhere, Chateaubriand’s chief concern is not with any outer fact or activity, but with his own emotions and the enhancement of these emotions by his imagination. In him as in many other romanticists the different elements of Rousseauism—Arcadian longing, the pursuit of the dream woman, the aspiration towards the “infinite” (often identified with God)—appear at times more or less separately and then again almost inextricably blended with one another and with the cult of nature. It may be well to consider more in detail these various elements of Rousseauism and their relation to nature in about the order I have mentioned. The association of Arcadian longing with nature is in part an outcome of the conflict between the ideal and the real. The romantic idealist finds that men do not understand him: his “vision” is mocked and his “genius” is unrecognized. The result is the type of sentimental misanthropy of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter. He feels, as Lamartine says, that there is nothing in common between the world and him. Lamartine adds, however, “But nature is there who invites you and loves you.” You will find in her the comprehension and companionship that you have failed to find in society. And nature will seem a perfect companion to the Rousseauist in direct proportion as she is uncontaminated by the presence of man. Wordsworth has described the misanthropy that supervened in many people on the collapse of the revolutionary idealism. He himself overcame it, though there is more than a suggestion in the manner of his own retirement into the hills of a man who retreats into an Arcadian dream from actual defeat. The suggestion of defeat is much stronger in Ruskin’s similar retirement. Ruskin doubtless felt in later life, like Rousseau, that if he had failed to get on with men “it was less his fault than theirs.”[204] Perhaps emotional misanthropy and the worship of wild nature are nowhere more fully combined than in Byron. He gives magnificent expression to the most untenable of paradoxes—that one escapes from solitude by eschewing human haunts in favor of some wilderness.[205] In these haunts, he says, he became like a “falcon with clipped wing,” but found in nature the kindest of mothers.

He not only finds companionship in nature but at the same time partakes of her infinitude—an infinitude, one should note, of feeling:

In his less misanthropic moods the Rousseauist sees in wild nature not only a refuge from society, but also a suitable setting for his companionship with the ideal mate, for what the French term la solitude À deux.

The almost innumerable passages in the romantic movement that celebrate this Arcadian companionship in the wilderness merely continue in a sense the pastoral mood that must be as old as human nature itself. But in the past the pastoral mood has been comparatively placid. It has not been associated in any such degree with misanthropy and wildness, with nympholeptic longing and the thirst for the infinite. The scene that Chateaubriand has imagined between Chactas and Atala in the primeval forest, is surely the stormiest of Arcadias; so stormy indeed that it would have been unintelligible to Theocritus. It is not certain that it would have been intelligible to Shakespeare, who like the other Elizabethans felt at times that he too had been born in Arcadia. The Arcadian of the past was much less inclined to sink down to the subrational and to merge his personality in the landscape. Rousseau describes with a charm that has scarcely been surpassed by any of his disciples, the reveries in which he thus descends below the level of his rational self. Time, no longer broken up by the importunate intellect and its analysis, is then felt by him in its unbroken flow; the result is a sort of “eternal present that leaves no sense of emptiness.” Of such a moment of revery Rousseau says, anticipating Faust, that he “would like it to last forever.” Bergson in his conception of the summum bonum as a state in which time is no longer cut up into artificial segments but is perceived in its continuous stream as a “present that endures,”[209] has done little more than repeat Rousseau. The sight and sound of water seem to have been a special aid to revery in Rousseau’s case. His accounts of the semi-dissolution of his conscious self that he enjoyed while drifting idly on the Lake of Bienne are justly celebrated. Lamartine’s soul was, like that of Rousseau, lulled by “the murmur of waters.” Nothing again is more Rousseauistic than the desire Arnold attributes to Maurice de GuÉrin—the desire “to be borne on forever down an enchanted stream.” That too is why certain passages of Shelley are so near in spirit to Rousseau—for example, the boat revery in “Prometheus Unbound” in which an Arcadian nature and the dream companion mingle to the strains of music in a way that is supremely romantic.[210]

The association of nature with Arcadian longing and the pursuit of the dream woman is even less significant than its association with the idea of the infinite. For as a result of this latter association the nature cult often assumes the aspect of a religion. The various associations may indeed as I have said be very much blended or else may run into one another almost insensibly. No better illustration of this blending can be found perhaps than in Chateaubriand—especially in that compendium of Rousseauistic psychology, his “RenÉ.” The soul of RenÉ, one learns, was too great to adjust itself to the society of men. He found that he would have to contract his life if he put himself on their level. Men, for their part, treated him as a dreamer, and so he is forced more and more by his increasing disgust for them into solitude. Now RenÉ rests the sense of his superiority over other men on two things: first, on his superlative capacity to feel grief;[211] secondly, on his thirst for the infinite. “What is finite,” he says, “has no value for me.” What is thus pushing him beyond all bounds is “an unknown good of which the instinct pursues me.” “I began to ask myself what I desired. I did not know but I thought all of a sudden that the woods would be delicious to me!” What he found in this quest for the mystical something that was to fill the abyss of his existence was the dream woman. “I went down into the valley, I strode upon the mountain, summoning with all the force of my desire the ideal object of a future flame; I embraced this object in the winds; I thought that I heard it in the moanings of the river. All was this phantom of the imagination—both the stars in heaven and the very principle of life in the universe.” I have already quoted a very similar passage and pointed out the equivalent in Shelley. No such close equivalent could be found in Byron, and Wordsworth, it is scarcely necessary to say, offers no equivalent at all. If one reads on, however, one finds passages that are Byronic and others that are Wordsworthian. Paganism, Chateaubriand complains, by seeing in nature only certain definite forms—fauns and satyrs and nymphs—had banished from it both God and the infinite. But Christianity expelled these thronging figures in turn and restored to the grottoes their silence and to the woods their revery. The true God thus became visible in his works and bestowed upon them his own immensity. What Chateaubriand understands by God and the infinite appears in the following description of the region near Niagara seen by moonlight. The passage is Byronic as a whole with a Wordsworthian touch at the end. “The grandeur, the amazing melancholy of this picture cannot be expressed in human language; the fairest night of Europe can give no conception of it. In vain in our cultivated fields does the imagination seek to extend itself. It encounters on every hand the habitations of men; but in these savage regions the soul takes delight in plunging into an ocean of forests, in hovering over the gulf of cataracts, in meditating on the shores of lakes and rivers and, so to speak, in finding itself alone in the presence of God.” The relation between wild and solitary nature and the romantic idea of the infinite is here obvious. It is an aid to the spirit in throwing off its limitations and so in feeling itself “free.”[212]

A greater spiritual elevation it is sometimes asserted is found in Wordsworth’s communings with nature than in those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. The difference perhaps is less one of spirit than of temperament. In its abdication of the intellectual and critical faculties, in its semi-dissolution of the conscious self, the revery of Wordsworth does not differ from that of Rousseau[213] and Chateaubriand, but the erotic element is absent. In the “Genius of Christianity” Chateaubriand gives a magnificent description of sunset at sea and turns the whole picture into a proof of God. Elsewhere he tells us that it was “not God alone that I contemplated on the waters in the splendor of his works. I saw an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. … I should have sold eternity for one of her caresses. I imagined that she was palpitating behind that veil of the universe that hid her from my eyes,” etc. Wordsworth was at least consistently religious in his attitude towards the landscape: he did not see in it at one moment God, and at another an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. At the same time his idea of spirituality is very remote from the traditional conception. Formerly spirituality was held to be a process of recollection, of gathering one’s self in, that is, towards the centre and not of diffusive emotion; so that when a man wished to pray he retired into his closet, and did not, like a Wordsworth or a Rousseau, fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders of nature. As for the poets of the past, they inclined as a rule to look on nature as an incentive not to religion but to love. Keble, following Wordsworth, protests on this ground against Aristophanes, and Catullus and Horace and Theocritus. He might have lengthened the list almost indefinitely. Chateaubriand bids us in our devotional moods to betake ourselves “to the religious forest.” La Fontaine is at least as near to normal human experience and also at least as poetical when he warns “fair ones” to “fear the depths of the woods and their vast silence.”[214]

No one would question that Wordsworth has passages of great ethical elevation. But in some of these passages he simply renews the error of the Stoics who also display at times great ethical elevation; he ascribes to the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. This error persists to some extent even when he is turning away, as in the “Ode to Duty,” from the moral spontaneity of the Rousseauist. It is not quite clear that the law of duty in the breast of man is the same law that preserves “the stars from wrong.” His earlier assertion that the light of setting suns and the mind of man are identical in their essence is at best highly speculative, at least as speculative as the counter assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “there is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.” Furthermore this latter sense of the gap between man and nature seems to be more fully justified by its fruits in life and conduct, and this is after all the only test that counts in the long run.

One of the reasons why pantheistic revery has been so popular is that it seems to offer a painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort. In its extreme exponents, a Rousseau or a Walt Whitman, it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination. Even in its milder forms it encourages one to assume a tone of consecration in speaking of experiences that are Æsthetic rather than truly religious. “’Tis only heaven that’s given away,” sings Lowell; “’Tis only God may be had for the asking.” God and heaven are accorded by Lowell with such strange facility because he identifies them with the luxurious enjoyment of a “day in June.” When pushed to a certain point the nature cult always tends towards sham spirituality.

It seems to follow from these verses of Browning, perhaps the most flaccid spiritually in the English language, that to go out and mix one’s self up with the landscape is the same as doing one’s duty. As a method of salvation this is even easier and more Æsthetic than that of the Ancient Mariner, who, it will be remembered, is relieved of the burden of his transgression by admiring the color of water-snakes!

The nature cult arose at a time when the traditional religious symbols were becoming incredible. Instead of working out new and firm distinctions between good and evil, the Rousseauist seeks to discredit all precise distinctions whether new or old, in favor of mere emotional intoxication. The passage to which I have already alluded, in which Faust breaks down the scruples of Marguerite by proclaiming the supremacy of feeling, surpasses even the lines I have cited from Browning as an example of sham spirituality:

The upshot of this enthusiasm that overflows all boundaries and spurns definition as mere smoke that veils its heavenly glow is the seduction of a poor peasant girl. Such is the romantic contrast between the “ideal” and the “real.”

Those to whom I may seem to be treating the nature cult with undue severity should remember that I am treating it only in its pseudo-religious aspect. In its proper place all this refining on man’s relation to the “outworld” may be legitimate and delightful; but that place is secondary. My quarrel is only with the Æsthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose and gives forth as a profound philosophy what is at best only a holiday or week-end view of existence. No distinction is more important for any one who wishes to maintain a correct scale of values than that between what is merely recreative and what ministers to leisure. There are times when we may properly seek solace and renewal in nature, when we may invite both our souls and our bodies to loaf. The error is to look on these moments of recreation and relief from concentration on some definite end as in themselves the consummation of wisdom. Rousseau indeed assumes that his art of mixing himself up with the landscape is identical with leisure; like innumerable disciples he confuses revery with meditation—a confusion so grave that I shall need to revert to it later. He parodies subtly what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of what is below it. He thus brings under suspicion the most necessary of all truths—that the kingdom of heaven is within us.

The first place always belongs to action and purpose and not to mere idling, even if it be like that of the Rousseauist transcendental idling. The man who makes a deliberate choice and then plans his life with reference to it is less likely than the aimless man to be swayed by every impulse and impression. The figures of Raphael according to Hazlitt have always “a set, determined, voluntary character,” they “want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements.” And Hazlitt therefore concludes rightly that Raphael has “nothing romantic about him.” The distinction is so important that it might be made the basis for a comparison between the painting of the Renaissance and some of the important schools of the nineteenth century. Here again no sensible person would maintain that the advantage is all on one side. Romanticism gave a great impulse to landscape painting and to the painting of man in the landscape. Few romantic gains are more indubitable. One may prefer the best work of the Barbizon school for example to the contemporary product in French literature. But even here it must be insisted that painting from which man is absent or in which he is more or less subordinated to the landscape is not the highest type of painting. Turner, one of the greatest masters of landscape, was almost incapable of painting the human figure. Ruskin is therefore indulging in romantic paradox when he puts Turner in the same class as Shakespeare. Turner’s vision of life as compared with that of Shakespeare is not central but peripheral.

The revolution that has resulted from the triumph of naturalistic over humanistic tendencies in painting extends down to the minutest details of technique; it has meant the subordination of design—the imposition, that is, on one’s material of a firm central purpose—to light and color; and this in painting corresponds to the literary pursuit of glamour and illusion for their own sake. It has meant in general a tendency to sacrifice all the other elements of painting to the capture of the vivid and immediate impression. And this corresponds to the readiness of the writer to forego decorum in favor of intensity. The choice that is involved, including a choice of technique, according as one is a naturalist or a humanist, is brought out by Mr. Kenyon Cox in his comparison of two paintings of hermits,[216] one by Titian and one by John Sargent: the impressionistic and pantheistic hermit of Sargent is almost entirely merged in the landscape; he is little more than a pretext for a study of the accidents of light. The conception of Titian’s St. Jerome in the Desert is perhaps even more humanistic than religious. The figure of the saint on which everything converges is not merely robust, it is even a bit robustious. The picture affirms in its every detail the superior importance of man and his purposes to his natural environment. So far as their inner life is concerned the two hermits are plainly moving in opposite directions. An appropriate motto for Sargent’s hermit would be the following lines that I take from a French symbolist, but the equivalent of which can be found in innumerable other Rousseauists:

This is to push the reciprocity between man and nature to a point where the landscape is not only a state of the soul but the soul is a state of the landscape; just as in Shelley’s Ode, Shelley becomes the West Wind and the West Wind becomes Shelley.[217] The changes in the romantic soul are appropriately mirrored in the changes of the seasons. In Tieck’s “Genoveva,” for example, Golo’s love blossoms in the springtime, the sultry summer impels him to sinful passion, the autumn brings grief and repentance, and in winter avenging judgment overtakes the offender and casts him into the grave.[218] Autumn is perhaps even more than springtime the favorite season of the Rousseauist. The movement is filled with souls who like the hero of Poe’s “Ulalume” have reached the October of their sensations. Some traces of this sympathetic relation between man and nature may indeed be found in the literature of the past. The appropriateness of the setting in the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus would scarcely seem to be an accident. The storm in “Lear” may also be instanced. But as I have already said occidental man did not before Rousseau show much inclination to mingle with the landscape. The parallelism that Pater establishes in “Marius the Epicurean” between the moods of the hero and the shifting aspects of nature is felt as a distinct anachronism. If we wish to find any early approximations to the subtleties and refinements of the Rousseauist in his dealings with nature we need to turn to the Far East—especially to the Taoist movement in China.[219] As a result of the Taoist influence China had from a very early period poets and painters for whom the landscape is very plainly a state of the soul.

Pantheistic revery of the kind I have been describing leads inevitably to a special type of symbolism. The Rousseauist reads into nature unutterable love. He sees shining through its finite forms the light of the infinite. The Germans especially set out to express symbolically the relationship between the love and infinitude that they saw in nature and the kindred elements in themselves. Any one who has attempted to thread his way through the German theories of the symbol will feel that he has, like Wordsworth’s shepherd, “been in the heart of many thousand mists.” But in view of the importance of the subject it is necessary to venture for a moment into this metaphysical murk. Schelling’s “Nature Philosophy” is perhaps the most ambitious of all the German attempts to run together symbolically the human spirit and phenomenal nature. “What we call nature,” says Schelling, “is a poem that lies hidden in a secret wondrous writing”; if the riddle could be revealed we should recognize in nature “the Odyssey of the Spirit.” “There looks out through sensuous objects as through a half-transparent mist the world of phantasy for which we long.” “All things are only a garment of the world of spirit.” “To be romantic,” says Uhland, “is to have an inkling of the infinite in appearances.” “Beauty,” says Schelling in similar vein, “is a finite rendering of the infinite.” Now the infinite and the finite can only be thus brought together through the medium of the symbol. Therefore, as A. W. Schlegel says, “beauty is a symbolical representation of the infinite. All poetry is an everlasting symbolizing.”

This assertion is in an important sense true. Unfortunately there remains the ambiguity that I have already pointed out in the word “infinite.” No one would give a high rating to a certain type of allegory that flourished in neo-classical times as also in a somewhat different form during the Middle Ages. It is a cold intellectual contrivance in which the imagination has little part and which therefore fails to suggest the infinite in any sense. But to universalize the particular in the classical sense is to give access imaginatively to the human infinite that is set above nature. Every successful humanistic creation is more or less symbolical. Othello is not merely a jealous man; he is also a symbol of jealousy. Some of the myths of Plato again are imaginative renderings of a supersensuous realm to which man has no direct access. They are symbolical representations of an infinite that the romanticist leaves out of his reckoning. The humanistic and spiritual symbols that abound in the religion and poetry of the past, are then, it would seem, very different from the merely Æsthetic symbolizing of a Schelling. For Schelling is one of the chief of those who from Shaftesbury down have tended to identify beauty and truth and to make both purely Æsthetic. But a symbol that is purely Æsthetic, that is in other words purely a matter of feeling, rests on what is constantly changing not only from man to man but in the same man. Romantic symbolism, therefore, though it claims at one moment to be scientific (especially in Germany) and at another moment to have a religious value, is at bottom the symbolizing of mood. Both the imagination and the emotion that enter into the romantic symbol are undisciplined. The results of such a symbolism do not meet the demand of the genuine man of science for experimental proof, they do not again satisfy the test of universality imposed by those who believe in a distinctively human realm that is set above nature. The nature philosophy of a Schelling leads therefore on the one hand to sham science and on the other to sham philosophy and religion.

The genuine man of science has as a matter of fact repudiated the speculations of Schelling and other romantic physicists as fantastic. He may also be counted on to look with suspicion on the speculations of a Bergson who, more perhaps than any living Rousseauist, reminds one of the German romantic philosophers. One idea has however lingered in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this romantic theorizing—namely that man has access to the infinite only through nature. Thus Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn said in a recent address to the students of Columbia University:

The romanticists acted from the start, following here in the wake of the pseudo-classicists, on Professor Osborn’s assumption that normal human nature is something that may be bottled up once for all and put by on a shelf, though they would have been pained to learn from him that even abnormal human nature may also be bottled up and put by in the same fashion. Sophistries of this kind should perhaps be pardoned in the man of science when so many men who are supposed to stand for letters have shown him the way. Great literature is an imaginative and symbolical interpretation of an infinite that is accessible only to those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. A writer like Maeterlinck, whom Professor Osborn takes to be representative of literature in general, is merely a late exponent of a movement that from the start turned away from this human infinite towards pantheistic revery.

The imagination is, as Coleridge says, the great unifying power; it draws together things that are apparently remote. But its analogies to be of value should surely have validity apart from the mere shifting mood of the man who perceives them. Otherwise he simply wrests some outer object from the chain of cause and effect of which it is actually a part, and incorporates it arbitrarily into his own private dream. Wordsworth is not sparing of homely detail in his account of his leech-gatherer; but at a given moment in this poem the leech-gatherer undergoes a strange transformation; he loses all verisimilitude as a leech-gatherer and becomes a romantic symbol, a mere projection, that is, of the poet’s own broodings. To push this symbolizing of mood beyond a certain point is incipient hallucination. We are told that when the asylum at Charenton was shelled in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the lunatics saw reflected in the bursting bombs, each in a different way, his own madness. One took the bombs to be a link in the plot of his enemies against him, etc. It is hard to consider the symbolizing and visions of the extreme romanticist, such as those of William Blake, without thinking at times of Charenton.

What I have said of the romantic symbol is true in some degree of the romantic metaphor, for the symbol and even the myth are often only a developed metaphor. The first part of the romantic metaphor, the image or impression that has been received from the outer world, is often admirably fresh and vivid.[220] But the second part of the metaphor when the analogy involved is that between some fact of outer perception and the inner life of man is often vague and misty; for the inner life in which the romanticist takes interest is not the life he possesses in common with other men but what is most unique in his own emotions—his mood in short. That is why the metaphor and still more the symbol in so far as they are romantic are always in danger of becoming unintelligible, since it is not easy for one man to enter into another’s mood. Men accord a ready welcome to metaphors and symbols that instead of expressing something more or less individual have a real relevancy to their common nature. Tribulation, for example, means literally the beating out of grain on the threshing floor. The man who first saw the analogy between this process and certain spiritual experiences established a legitimate link between nature and human nature, between sense and the supersensuous. Language is filled with words and expressions of this kind which have become so current that their metaphorical and symbolical character has been forgotten and which have at the same time ceased to be vivid and concrete and become abstract.

The primitivistic fallacies of the German romanticists in their dealings with the symbol and metaphor appear in various forms in French romanticism and even more markedly in its continuation known as the symbolistic movement. What is exasperating in many of the poets of this school is that they combine the pretence to a vast illumination with the utmost degree of spiritual and intellectual emptiness and vagueness. Like the early German romanticists they mix up flesh and spirit in nympholeptic longing and break down and blur all the boundaries of being in the name of the infinite. Of this inner formlessness and anarchy the chaos of the vers libre (in which they were also anticipated by the Germans) is only an outer symptom.[221]

If the Rousseauistic primitivist recognizes the futility of his symbolizing, and consents to become a passive register of outer perception, if for example he proclaims himself an imagist, he at least has the merit of frankness, but in that case he advertises by the very name he has assumed the bankruptcy of all that is most worth while in poetry.

But to return to romanticism and nature. It should be plain from what has already been said that the romanticist tends to make of nature the mere plaything of his mood. When Werther’s mood is cheerful, nature smiles at him benignly. When his mood darkens she becomes for him “a devouring monster.” When it grows evident to the romanticist that nature does not alter with his alteration, he chides her at times for her impassibility; or again he seeks to be impassible like her, even if he can be so only at the expense of his humanity. This latter attitude is closely connected with the dehumanizing of man by science that is reflected in a whole literature during the last half of the nineteenth century—for instance, in so-called “impassive” writers like Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle.

The causal sequences that had been observed in the physical realm were developed more and more during this period with the aid of pure mathematics and the mathematical reason (esprit de gÉomÉtrie) into an all-embracing system. For the earlier romanticists nature had at least been a living presence whether benign or sinister. For the mathematical determinist she tends to become a soulless, pitiless mechanism against which man is helpless.[222] This conception of nature is so important that I shall need to revert to it in my treatment of melancholy.

The man who has accepted the universe of the mechanist or determinist is not always gloomy. But men in general felt the need of some relief from the deterministic obsession. Hence the success of the philosophy of Bergson and similar philosophies. The glorification of impulse (Élan vital) that Bergson opposes to the mechanizing of life is in its main aspects, as I have already indicated, simply a return to the spontaneity of Rousseau. His plan of escape from deterministic science is at bottom very much like Rousseau’s plan of escape from the undue rationalism of the Enlightenment. As a result of these eighteenth-century influences, nature had, according to Carlyle, become a mere engine, a system of cogs and pulleys. He therefore hails Novalis as an “anti-mechanist,” a “deep man,” because of the way of deliverance that he teaches from this nightmare. “I owe him somewhat.” What Carlyle owed to Novalis many moderns have owed to Bergson, but it is not yet clear that either Novalis or Bergson are “deep men.”

The mechanistic view of nature, whether held pessimistically or optimistically, involving as it does factors that are infinite and therefore beyond calculation, cannot furnish proofs that will satisfy the true positivist: he is inclined to dismiss it as a mere phantasmagoria of the intellect. The Rousseauistic view of nature, on the other hand, whether held optimistically or pessimistically, is even less capable of satisfying the standards of the positivist and must be dismissed as a mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. The fact is that we do not know and can never know what nature is in herself. The mysterious mother has shrouded herself from us in an impenetrable veil of illusion. But though we cannot know nature absolutely we can pick up a practical and piecemeal knowledge of nature not by dreaming but by doing. The man of action can within certain limits have his way with nature. Now the men who have acted during the past century have been the men of science and the utilitarians who have been turning to account the discoveries of science. The utilitarians have indeed derived such potent aid from science that they have been able to stamp their efforts on the very face of the landscape. The romanticists have not ceased to protest against this scientific utilizing of nature as a profanation. But inasmuch as these protests have come from men who have stood not for work but for revery they have for the most part been futile. This is not the least of the ironic contrasts that abound in this movement between the ideal and the real. No age ever grew so ecstatic over natural beauty as the nineteenth century, at the same time no age ever did so much to deface nature. No age ever so exalted the country over the town, and no age ever witnessed such a crowding into urban centres.

A curious study might be made of this ironic contrast as it appears in the early romantic crusade against railways. One of the romantic grievances against the railway is that it does not encourage vagabondage: it has a definite goal and gets to it so far as possible in a straight line. Yet in spite of Wordsworth’s protesting sonnet the Windermere railway was built. Ruskin’s wrath at railways was equally vain. In general, sentiment is not of much avail when pitted against industrial advance. The papers announced recently that one of the loveliest cascades in the California Sierras had suddenly disappeared as a result of the diversion of its water to a neighboring power-plant. The same fate is overtaking Niagara itself. It is perhaps symbolic that a quarry has made a hideous gash in the hillside on the shores of Rydal Mere right opposite Wordsworth’s house.

If the man of science and the utilitarian do not learn what nature is in herself they learn at least to adjust themselves to forces outside themselves. The Rousseauist, on the other hand, does not in his “communion” with nature adjust himself to anything. He is simply communing with his own mood. Rousseau chose appropriately as title for the comedy that was his first literary effort “Narcissus or the Lover of Himself.” The nature over which the Rousseauist is bent in such rapt contemplation plays the part of the pool in the legend of Narcissus. It renders back to him his own image. He sees in nature what he himself has put there. The Rousseauist transfuses himself into nature in much the same way that Pygmalion transfuses himself into his statue. Nature is dead, as Rousseau says, unless animated by the fires of love. “Make no mistake,” says M. Masson, “the nature that Jean-Jacques worships is only a projection of Jean-Jacques. He has poured himself forth so complacently upon it that he can always find himself and cherish himself in it.” And M. Masson goes on and quotes from a curious and little-known fragment of Rousseau: “Beloved solitude,” Rousseau sighs, “beloved solitude, where I still pass with pleasure the remains of a life given over to suffering. Forest with stunted trees, marshes without water, broom, reeds, melancholy heather, inanimate objects, you who can neither speak to me nor hear me, what secret charm brings me back constantly into your midst? Unfeeling and dead things, this charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which wishes to refer back everything to itself.”[223] Coleridge plainly only continues Rousseau when he writes:

The fair luminous cloud is no other than the Arcadian imagination. “The light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream” of which Wordsworth speaks, is likewise as appears very plainly from the context,[225] Arcadian. He should once, Wordsworth writes, have wished to see Peele Castle bathed in the Arcadian light, but now that he has escaped by sympathy for his fellow-men from the Arcadian aloofness, he is willing that it should be painted in storm. Mere storminess, one should recollect, is not in itself an assurance that one has turned from the romantic dream to reality. One finds in this movement, if nowhere else, as I remarked apropos of Chateaubriand, the stormy Arcadia.

It is not through the Arcadian imagination that one moves towards reality. This does not much matter if what one seeks in a “return to nature” is merely recreation. I cannot repeat too often that I have no quarrel with the nature cult when it remains recreative but only when it sets up as a substitute for philosophy and religion. This involves a confusion between the two main directions of the human spirit, a confusion as I have said in a previous chapter between the realm of awe and the region of wonder. Pascal exaggerates somewhat when he says the Bible never seeks to prove religion from the “wonders” of nature. But this remark is true to the total spirit of the Bible. A knowledge of the flowers of the Holy Land is less necessary for an understanding of the gospel narrative than one might suppose from Renan.[226] Renan is simply seeking to envelop Jesus so far as possible in an Arcadian atmosphere. In so doing he is following in the footsteps of the great father of sentimentalists. According to M. Masson, Jesus, as depicted by Jean-Jacques, becomes “a sort of grand master of the Golden Age.”

Here as elsewhere the Rousseauist is seeking to identify the Arcadian view of life with wisdom. The result is a series of extraordinarily subtle disguises for egoism. We think we see the Rousseauist prostrate before the ideal woman or before nature or before God himself, but when we look more closely we see that he is only (as Sainte-Beuve said of Alfred de Vigny) “in perpetual adoration before the holy sacrament of himself.” The fact that he finds in nature only what he has put there seems to be for Rousseau himself a source of satisfaction. But the poem of Coleridge I have just quoted, in which he proclaims that so far as nature is concerned “we receive but what we give,” is entitled “Ode to Dejection.” One of man’s deepest needs would seem to be for genuine communion, for a genuine escape, that is, from his ordinary self. The hollowness of the Rousseauistic communion with nature as well as other Rousseauistic substitutes for genuine communion is indissolubly bound up with the subject of romantic melancholy.