Rousseau and Romanticism

FOOTNOTES

[1] See, for example, in vol. IX of the Annales de la SociÉtÉ Jean-Jacques Rousseau the bibliography (pp. 87-276) for 1912—the year of the bicentenary.

[2] Literature and the American College (1908); The New Laokoon (1910); The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912).

[3] See his Oxford address On the Modern Element in Literature.

[4] These two tendencies in Occidental thought go back respectively at least as far as Parmenides and Heraclitus.

[5] In his World as Imagination (1916) E. D. Fawcett, though ultra-romantic and unoriental in his point of view, deals with a problem that has always been the special preoccupation of the Hindu. A Hindu, however, would have entitled a similar volume The World as Illusion (maya). Aristotle has much to say of fiction in his Poetics but does not even use the word imagination (fa?tas?a). In the Psychology, where he discusses the imagination, he assigns not to it, but to mind or reason the active and creative rÔle (???? p???t????). It is especially the notion of the creative imagination that is recent. The earliest example of the phrase that I have noted in French is in Rousseau’s description of his erotic reveries at the Hermitage (Confessions, Livre IX).

[6] Essay on Flaubert in Essais de Psychologie contemporaine.

[7] Le Romantisme et les moeurs (1910).

[8] Annales de la SociÉtÉ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, VIII, 30-31.

[9] I should perhaps say that in the case of Buddha I have been able to consult the original Pali documents. In the case of Confucius and the Chinese I have had to depend on translations.

[10] See appendix on Chinese primitivism.

[11] See, for example, Majjhima (Pali Text Society), I, 265. Later Buddhism, especially Mahayana Buddhism, fell away from the positive and critical spirit of the founder into mythology and metaphysics.

[12] Buddha expressed on many occasions his disdain for the Vedas, the great traditional authority of the Hindus.

[13] I have explained the reasons for giving this place to Bacon in chapter II of Literature and the American College.

[14] Eth. Nic., 1179 a.

[15] I scarcely need remind the reader that the extant Aristotelian writings which have repelled so many by their form were almost certainly not meant for publication. For the problems raised by these writings as well as for the mystery in the method of their early transmission see R. Shute, History of the Aristotelian Writings (1888). The writings which Aristotle prepared for publication and which Cicero describes as a “golden stream of speech” (Acad. II, 38, 119) have, with the possible exception of the recently recovered Constitution of Athens, been lost.

[16] See his Essai sur le genre dramatique sÉrieux.

[17] Quoted in Grimm’s Dictionary.

[18] Ex lectione quorundam romanticorum, i.e. librorum compositorum in gallico poeticorum de gestis militaribus, in quibus maxima pars fabulosa est.

[19] Perhaps the most romantic lines in English are found in one of Camillo’s speeches in The Winter’s Tale (IV, 4):

a wild dedication of yourselves

To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores.

This “wild dedication” is, it should be noted, looked upon by Camillo with disfavor.

[20] Pepys’s Diary, 13 June, 1666.

[21] Thomas Shadwell, Preface to the Sullen Lovers, 1668.

[22] Spectator, 142, by Steele.

[23] Pope, 2d Epistle, Of the Character of Women.

[24] Cf. Revue d’hist. litt., XVIII, 440. For the Early French history of the word, see also the article Romantique by A. FranÇois in Annales de la Soc. J.-J. Rousseau, V, 199-236.

[25] First edition, 1698; second edition, 1732.

[26] Cf. his ElÉgie À une dame.

Mon Âme, imaginant, n’a point la patience

De bien polir les vers et ranger la science.

La rÈgle me dÉplaÎt, j’Écris confusÉment:

Jamais un bon esprit ne fait rien qu’aisÉment.

…

Je veux faire des vers qui ne soient pas contraints

…

Chercher des lieux secrets oÙ rein ne me dÉplaise,

MÉditer À loisir, rÊver tout À mon aise,

Employer toute une heure À me mirer dans l’eau,

OuÏr, comme en songeant, la course d’un ruisseau.

Ecrire dans un bois, m’interrompre, me taire,

Composer un quatrain sans songer À le faire.

[27] CaractÈres, ch. V.

[28] His psychology of the memory and imagination is still Aristotelian. Cf. E. Wallace, Aristotle’s Psychology, Intr., lxxxvi-cvii.

[29] An Essay upon Poetry (1682).

[30] The French Academy discriminates in its Sentiments sur le Cid between two types of probability, “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” Probability in general is more especially reserved for action. In the domain of action “ordinary” probability and decorum run very close together. It is, for example, both indecorous and improbable that ChimÈne in the Cid should marry her father’s murderer.

[31] In his Preface to Shakespeare.

[32] For a similar distinction in Aristotle see Eth. Nic., 1143 b.

[33] The Platonic and Aristotelian reason or mind (????) contains an element of intuition.

[34] In his Lettre À d’Alembert sur les spectacles.

[35] Rousseau contre MoliÈre, 238.

[36] Letters on Chivalry and Romance.

[37] See verses prefixed to Congreve’s Double-Dealer.

[38]

Change l’État douteux dans lequel tu nous ranges,

Nature ÉlÈve-nous À la clartÉ des anges,

Ou nous abaisse au sens des simples animaux.

Sonnet (1657?).

[39] See, for example, A. Gerard’s Essay on Genius (1774), passim.

[40] The English translation of this part of the Critique of Judgment, edited by J. C. Meredith, is useful for its numerous illustrative passages from these theorists (Young, Gerard, Duff, etc.).

[41] Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould has dealt interestingly with this point in an article in the Unpopular Review (October, 1914) entitled Tabu and Temperament.

[42] See Biographia literaria, ch. XXII.

[43] This message came to him in any case straight from German romanticism. See Walzel, Deutsche Romantik, 22, 151.

[44] “De tous les corps et esprits, on n’en saurait tirer un mouvement de vraie charitÉ; cela est impossible, et d’un autre ordre, surnaturel.” PenseÉs, Article XVII. “CharitÉ,” one should recollect, here has its traditional meaning—the love, not of man, but of God.

[45] See poem, Ce siÈcle avait deux ans in the Feuilles d’Automne.

[46] For amusing details, see L. Maigron, Le Romantisme et la mode (1911), ch. V.

[47] For Disraeli see Wilfrid Ward, Men and Matters, 54 ff. Of Bulwer-Lytton at Nice about 1850 Princess von Racowitza writes as follows in her Autobiography (p. 46): “His fame was at its zenith. He seemed to me antediluvian, with his long dyed curls and his old-fashioned dress … with long coats reaching to the ankles, knee-breeches, and long colored waistcoats. Also, he appeared always with a young lady who adored him, and who was followed by a man servant carrying a harp. She sat at his feet and appeared as he did in the costume of 1830, with long flowing curls called Anglaises. … In society, however, people ran after him tremendously, and spoilt him in every possible way. He read aloud from his own works, and, in especially poetic passages, his ‘Alice’ accompanied him with arpeggios on the harp.”

[48] See essay by Kenyon Cox on The Illusion of Progress, in his Artist and Public.

[49] See Creative Criticism by J. E. Spingarn, and my article on Genius and Taste, reviewing this book, in the Nation (New York), 7 Feb., 1918.

[50] One should note here as elsewhere points of contact between scientific and emotional naturalism. Take, for example, the educational theory that has led to the setting up of the elective system. The general human discipline embodied in the fixed curriculum is to be discarded in order that the individual may be free to work along the lines of his bent or “genius.” In a somewhat similar way scientific naturalism encourages the individual to sacrifice the general human discipline to a specialty.

[51] See his poem L’Art in Emaux et CamÉes.

[52]

Quel esprit ne bat la campagne?

Qui ne fait chÂteaux en Espagne?

Picrochole, Pyrrhus, la laitiÈre, enfin tous,

Autant les sages que les fous

Chacun songe en veillant; il n’est rien de plus doux.

Une flatteuse erreur emporte alors nos Âmes;

Tout le bien du monde est À nous,

Tous les honneurs, toutes les femmes.

Quand je suis seul, je fais au plus brave un dÉfi,

Je m’Écarte, je vais dÉtrÔner le sophi;

On m’Élit roi, mon peuple m’aime;

Les diadÈmes vont sur ma tÊte pleuvant:

Quelque accident fait-il que je rentre en moi-mÊme,

Je suis gros Jean comme devant.

[53] Rasselas, ch. XLIV.

[54] Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. II, Lettre XVII.

[55] Rostand has hit off this change in the Balcony Scene of his Cyrano de Bergerac.

[56] Essay on Simple and Sentimental Poetry.

[57] The life of Rousseau by Gerhard Gran is written from this point of view.

[58]

The world’s great age begins anew,

The golden years return, etc.

Hellas, vv. 1060 ff.

[59] For an excellent analysis of Shelley’s idealism see Leslie Stephen’s Godwin and Shelley in his Hours in a Library.

[60] Letters, II, 292.

[61] See his letter to Wordsworth, 30 January, 1801.

[62] Dramatic Art and Literature, ch. I.

[63] Cf. Voltaire: On ne peut dÉsirer ce qu’on ne connaÎt pas. (ZaÏre.)

[64] Cf. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi. XV, 371: “Le romantique a la nostalgie, comme Hamlet; il cherche ce qu’il n’a pas, et jusque par delÀ les nuages; il rÊve, il vit dans les songes. Au dix-neuviÈme siÈcle, il adore le moyen Âge; au dix-huitiÈme, il est dÉjÀ rÉvolutionnaire avec Rousseau,” etc. Cf. also T. Gautier as quoted in the Journal des Goncourt, II, 51: “Nous ne sommes pas FranÇais, nous autres, nous tenons À d’autres races. Nous sommes pleins de nostalgies. Et puis quand À la nostalgie d’un pays se joint la nostalgie d’un temps … comme vous par exemple du dix-huitiÈme siÈcle … comme moi de la Venise de Casanova, avec embranchement sur Chypre, oh! alors, c’est complet.”

[65] See article GoÛt in Postscriptum de ma vie.

[66] Schlegel’s Dramatic Art and Literature, Lecture XXII.

[67] For a discussion of this point see I. Rouge: F. Schlegel et la GenÈse du romantisme allemand, 48 ff.

[68] For a development of this point of view see the essay of Novalis: Christianity or Europe.

[69] Confessions, Livre IX (1756).

[70] This is Goethe’s very classical definition of genius: Du nur, Genius, mehrst in der Natur die Natur.

[71] Greek literature, after it had lost the secret of selection and the grand manner, as was the case during the Alexandrian period, also tended to oscillate from the pole of romance to the pole of so-called realism—from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, let us say, to the Mimes of Herondas.

[72] Emile, Livre II.

[73] Etudes de la nature.

[74] See, for example, Tatler, 17 November, 31 December, 1709 (by Steele).

[75] See her letter to Gustavus III, King of Sweden, cited in Gustave III et la cour de France, II, 402, par A. Geffroy.

[76] See Hastings Rashdall: Is Conscience an Emotion? (1914), especially ch. I. Cf. Nouvelle HÉloÏse. (Pt. VI, Lettre VII): “Saint-Preux fait de la conscience morale un sentiment, et non pas un jugement.”

[77] Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. V, Lettre II.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid., Pt. IV, Lettre XII.

[80] Schiller’s definition is well known: “A beautiful soul we call a state where the moral sentiment has taken possession of all the emotions to such a degree that it may unhesitatingly commit the guidance of life to instinct,” etc. (On Grace and Dignity.) Cf. Madame de StaËl: “La vertu devient alors une impulsion involontaire, un mouvement qui passe dans le sang, et vous entraÎne irrÉsistiblement comme les passions les plus impÉrieuses.” (De la LittÉrature: Discours prÉliminÀire.)

[81] Avenir de la Science, 354.

[82] Ibid., 179-180.

[83] Avenir de la Science, 476.

[84] Madame de Warens felt the influence of German pietism in her youth. See La Jeunesse de J.-J. Rousseau par E. Ritter; ch. XIII.

[85] Lettre À M. MolÉ (21 October, 1803).

[86] Le romantisme franÇais, 215.

[87] See Les Amours de Milord Bomston at the end of La Nouvelle HÉloÏse.

[88] Sultan Mourad in La LÉgende des SiÈcles.

[89] Correspondence, III, 213 (June, 1791). The date of this letter should be noted. Several of the worst terrorists of the French Revolution began by introducing bills for the abolition of capital punishment.

[90] See Burton’s Hume, II, 309 (note 2).

This sentimental trait did not escape the authors of the Anti-Jacobin:

Sweet child of sickly Fancy—Her of yore

From her lov’d France Rousseau to exile bore;

And while midst lakes and mountains wild he ran

Full of himself and shunn’d the haunts of man,

Taught her o’er each lone vale and Alpine steep

To lisp the stories of his wrongs and weep;

Taught her to cherish still in either eye

Of tender tears a plentiful supply,

And pour them in the brooks that babbled by—

Taught her to mete by rule her feelings strong,

False by degrees and delicately wrong,

For the crush’d Beetle, first—the widow’d Dove,

And all the warbled sorrows of the grove,

Next for poor suff’ring Guilt—and last of all,

For Parents, Friends, or King and Country’s fall.

[91]

Shepherds, dwellers in the valleys, men

Whom I already loved;—not verily

For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills

Where was their occupation and abode.

Michael

[92]

Once more the Ass, with motion dull,

Upon the pivot of his skull

Turned round his long left ear.

“The bard who soars to elegize an ass” and the “laureate of the long-eared kind” (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers) is, however, not Wordsworth but Coleridge. See his poem To a Young Ass, its mother being tethered near it.

[93] See the poem Acte d’accusation in Les Contemplations.

[94] Le Crapaud in La LÉgende des SiÈcles.

[95] See Apology 31D.

[96] His Language and Wisdom of the Hindus appeared in 1808.

[97] See Jugendschriften, ed. by J. Minor, II, 362.

[98] Dhammapada.

[99] Sutta-Nipata, v. 149 (Metta-sutta).

[100] Second Dialogue.

[101] Letters, II, 298. For Ruskin and Rousseau see Ibid. I, 360: “[Ruskin] said that great parts of Les Confessions were so true to himself that he felt as if Rousseau must have transmigrated into his body.”

[102] “If a poet wishes an atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style. … Women, such as we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate unreality to a true or firm art.” Essay on Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry (1864).

[103] “Die Romanze auf einem Pferde” utters the following lines in the Prologue to Tieck’s Kaiser Octavianus:

MondbeglÄnzte Zaubernacht,

Die den Sinn gefangen hÄlt,

Wundervolle MÄrchenwelt

Steig’ auf in der alten Pracht.

A special study might be made of the rÔle of the moon in Chateaubriand and Coleridge—even if one is not prepared like Carlyle to dismiss Coleridge’s philosophy as “bottled moonshine.”

[104] O. Walzel points out that as soon as the women in H. von Kleist’s plays become conscious they fall into error (Deutsche Romantik, 3. Auflage, 147).

[105] Byron, Sardanapalus, IV, 5. Cf. Rousseau, NeuviÈme Promenade: “DominÉ par mes sens, quoi que je puisse faire, je n’ai jamais pu rÉsister À leurs impressions, et, tant que l’objet agit sur eux, mon coeur ne cesse d’en Être affectÉ.” Cf. also Musset, Rolla:

Ce n’Était pas Rolla qui gouvernait sa vie,

C’Étaient ses passions; il les laissait aller

Comme un pÂtre assoupi regarde l’eau couler.

[106] Modern Painters, Part V, ch. XX.

[107] Confessions, Pt. II, Livre IX (1756).

[108]

With nature never do they wage

A foolish strife; they see

A happy youth and their old age

Is beautiful and free.

Wordsworth: The Fountain.

[109] The phrase imaginative insight is, I believe, true to the spirit of Plato at his best, but it is certainly not true to his terminology. Plato puts the imagination (fa?tas?a) not only below intuitive reason (????) and discursive reason or understanding (d?????a), but even below outer perception (p?st??). He recognizes indeed that it may reflect the operations of the understanding and even the higher reason as well as the impressions of sense. This notion of a superior intellectual imagination was carried much further by Plotinus and the neo-Platonists. Even the intellectual imagination is, however, conceived of as passive. Perhaps no Greek thinker, not even Plato, makes as clear as he might that reason gets its intuition of reality and the One with the aid of the imagination and, as it were, through a veil of illusion, that, in Joubert’s phrase, “l’illusion est une partie intÉ, grante de la rÉalitÉ” (PensÉes, Titre XI, XXXIX). Joubert again distinguishes (ibid., Titre III, XLVII, LI) between “l’imaginative” which is passive and “l’imagination” which is active and creative (“l’oeil de l’Âme”). In its failure to bring out with sufficient explicitness this creative rÔle of the imagination and in the stubborn intellectualism that this failure implies is to be found, if anywhere, the weak point in the cuirass of Greek philosophy.

[110] See Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 16, 3.

[111] S?f??s???.

[112] See his Lettre À d’Alembert.

[113] Varieties of Religious Experience, 387.

[114] BlÜtezeit der Romantik, 126.

[115] “Parfaite illusion, rÉalitÉ parfaite” (Alfred de Vigny). “Die Welt wird Traum, der Traum wird Welt” (Novalis). “This sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated disappointments and vain regrets” (Hazlitt).

[116] Lit. Ang., IV, 130.

[117] About 1885.

[118] Le ThÉÂtre en France, 304.

[119]

Je suis une force qui va!

Agent aveugle et sourd de mystÈres funÈbres.

[120] E.g., Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) had a marked influence on the rise of the German fate tragedy.

[121]

Wo ist der, der sagen dÜrfe,

So will ich’s, so sei’s gemacht,

Unser Taten sind nur WÜrfe

In des Zufalls blinde Nacht.

Die Ahnfrau.

[122] “So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.” Leviathan, Part I, ch. XI.

[123] See Unpopular Review, October, 1915.

[124] E. SeilliÈre has been tracing, in Le Mal romantique and other volumes, the relation between Rousseauism and what he terms an “irrational imperialism.” His point of view is on the constructive side very different from mine.

[125] The best account of Rousseau’s German influence is still that of H. Hettner in his Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Compared with Rousseau’s German influence, says Professor Paul Hensel in his Rousseau (1907), “his influence in France seems almost trifling.” In Germany “Rousseau became the basis not of a guillotine but of a new culture (Kultur). … We have drawn his spirit over to us, we have made it our own.” (121.) See also Professor Eugen KÜhnemann, Vom Weltreich des deutschen Geistes (1914), 54-62, and passim. German idealism is, according to KÜhnemann, the monument that does the greatest honor to Rousseau.

[126]

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all Heaven in a rage.

…

He who shall hurt the little wren

Shall never be belov’d by men.

He who the ox to wrath has mov’d

Shall never be by woman lov’d.

…

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.

Auguries of Innocence.

[127] See Hart-Leap Well.

[128] Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.

[129] “Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived. … Let this love be your new nobility,—the undiscovered in the remotest seas,” etc. (Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, 240, 248.)

[130] “On trouverait, en rÉtablissant les anneaux intermÉdiaires de la chaÎne, qu’À Pascal se rattachent les doctrines modernes qui font passer en premiÈre ligne la connaissance immÉdiate, l’intuition, la vie intÉrieure, comme À Descartes … se rattachent plus particuliÈrement les philosophies de la raison pure.” La Science franÇaise (1915), I, 17.

[131] Cf. Tennyson:

Fantastic beauty, such as lurks

In some wild poet when he works

Without a conscience or an aim—

[132] Addison writes:

’Twas then great Marlbro’s mighty soul was proved,

That, in the shock of changing hosts unmoved,

Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,

Examin’d all the dreadful scenes of war;

In peaceful thought the field of death survey’d.

So far as Marlborough deserved this praise he was a general in the grand manner.

[133] “Beauty resides in due proportion and order,” says Aristotle (Poetics, ch. VII).

[134] A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (1912), II, 191.

[135] Confucius and the Chinese sages were if anything even more concerned than Plato or Aristotle with the ethical quality of music.

[136] Like Bishop Blougram’s his “interest’s on the dangerous edge of things.”

[137]

Does he take inspiration from the church,

Directly make her rule his law of life?

Not he: his own mere impulse guides the man.

…

Such is, for the Augustine that was once,

This Canon Caponsacchi we see now.

X, 1911-28.

[138] See X, 1367-68.

[139] Letter to Joseph d’Ortigue, January 19, 1833.

[140] Here is an extreme example from Maigron’s manuscript collection (Le Romantisme et les moeurs, 153). A youth forced to be absent three weeks from the woman he loves writes to her as follows: “Trois semaines, mon amour, trois semaines loin de toi! … Oh! Dieu m’a maudit! … Hier j’ai errÉ toute l’aprÈs-midi comme une bÊte fauve, une bÊte traquÉe. … Dans la forÊt, j’ai hurlÉ, hurlÉ comme un dÉmon … je me suis roulÉ par terre … j’ai broyÉ sous mes dents des branches que mes mains avaient arrachÉes. … Alors, de rage, j’ai pris ma main entre mes dents; j’ai serrÉ, serrÉ convulsivement; le sang a jailli et j’ai crachÉ au ciel le morceau de chair vive … j’aurais voulu lui cracher mon coeur.”

[141] Maxime Du Camp asserts in his Souvenirs littÉraires (I, 118) that this anÆmia was due in part to the copious blood-letting to which the physicians of the time, disciples of Broussais, were addicted.

[142] This perversion was not unknown to classical antiquity. Cf. Seneca, To Lucilius, XCIX: “Quid turpius quam captare in ipso luctu voluptatem; et inter lacrymas quoque, quod juvet, quÆrere?”

[143] Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. III, Lettre VI.

[144] Confessions, Livre IV.

[145] The New Laokoon, ch. V.

[146] Franciscae meÆ laudes, in Les Fleurs du mal.

[147] Architecture and Painting, Lecture II. This diatribe may have been suggested by Byron’s Don Juan, Canto XIII, IX-XI:

Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away:

A single laugh demolished the right arm

Of his own country, etc.

[148] “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quÆrebam quid amarem, amans amare.”

[149] Cf. Shelley’s Alastor:

Two eyes,

Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought

And seemed with their serene and azure smiles

To beckon.

[150] “Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie.” Shelley to John Gisborne, October 22, 1821.

[151] Confessions, Livre XI (1761).

[152] MÉmoires d’Outre-Tombe, November, 1817.

[153] “Je me faisais une fÉlicitÉ de rÉaliser avec ma sylphide mes courses fantastiques dans les forÊts du Nouveau Monde.”

MÉmoires d’Outre-Tombe, December, 1821.

[154] Peacock has in mind Childe Harold, canto IV, CXXI ff.

[155] Rousseau plans to make a nympholept of his ideal pupil, Emile: “Il faut que je sois le plus maladroit des hommes si je ne le rends d’avance passionnÉ sans savoir de quoi”, etc. Emile, Liv. IV.

[156] Cf. RenÉ’s letter to CÉluta in Les Natchez: “Je vous ai tenue sur ma poitrine au milieu du dÉsert, dans les vents de l’orage, lorsque, aprÈs vous avoir portÉe de l’autre cÔtÉ d’un torrent, j’aurais voulu vous poignarder pour fixer le bonheur dans votre sein, et pour me punir de vous avoir donnÉ ce bonheur.”

[157] The romantic lover, it should be observed, creates his dream companion even less that he may adore her than that she may adore him.

[158] Walter Bagehot has made an interesting study of the romantic imagination in his essay on a figure who reminds one in some respects of GÉrard de Nerval—Hartley Coleridge.

[159] Don Juan bids his servant give a coin to the beggar not for the love of God but for the love of humanity.

[160]

Demandant aux forÊts, À la mer, À la plaine,

Aux brises du matin, À toute heure, À tout lieu,

La femme de son Âme et de son premier voeu!

Prenant pour fiancÉe un rÊve, une ombre vaine,

Et fouillant dans le coeur d’une hÉcatombe humaine,

PrÊtre dÉsespÉrÉ, pour y trouver son Dieu.

A. de Musset, Namouna.

“Don Juan avait en lui cet amour pour la femme idÉale; il a couru le monde serrant et brisant de dÉpit dans ses bras toutes les imparfaites images qu’il croyait un moment aimer; et il est mort ÉpuisÉ de fatigue, consumÉ de son insatiable amour.” PrÉvost-Paradol, Lettres, 149.

[161] See Scott’s (2d) edition of Swift, XIII, 310.

[162]

Aimer c’est le grand point. Qu’importe la maÎtresse?

Qu’importe le flacon pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse?

[163] It has been said that in the novels of George Sand when a lady wishes to change her lover God is always there to facilitate the transfer.

[164] “Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards, hypocrites, orgueilleux ou lÂches, mÉprisables et sensuels; toutes les femmes sont perfides, artificieuses, vaniteuses, curieuses et dÉpravÉes; le monde n’est qu’un Égout sans fond oÙ les phoques les plus informes rampent et se tordent sur des montagnes de fange; mais il y a au monde une chose sainte et sublime, c’est l’union de deux de ces Êtres si imparfaits et si affreux. On est souvent trompÉ en amour; souvent blessÉ et souvent malheureux; mais on aime et quand on est sur le bord de sa tombe, on se retourne pour regarder en arriÈre, et on se dit: J’ai souffert souvent, je me suis trompÉ quelquefois, mais j’ai aimÉ. C’est moi qui ai vÉcu, et non pas un Être factice crÉÉ par mon orgueil et mon ennui.” (The last sentence is taken from a letter of George Sand to Musset.) On ne badine pas avec l’Amour, II, 5.

[165] Table-Talk. On the Past and Future.

[166] The Plain Speaker. On Reading Old Books.

[167] The Round Table. On the Character of Rousseau.

[168] “Aujourd’hui, jour de PÂques fleuries, il y a prÉcisÉment cinquante ans de ma premiÈre connaissance avec Madame de Warens.”

[169] Even on his death-bed the hero of Browning’s Confessions gives himself up to impassionated recollection:

How sad and bad and mad it was—

But then, how it was sweet.

In his Stances À Madame Lullin Voltaire is at least as poetical and nearer to normal experience:

Quel mortel s’est jamais flattÉ

D’un rendez-vous À l’agonie?

[170] See especially Lyceum fragment, no. 108.

[171] A well-known example of the extreme to which the romanticists pushed their Fichtean solipsism is the following from the William Lovell of the youthful Tieck: “Having gladly escaped from anxious fetters, I now advance boldly through life, absolved from those irksome duties which were the inventions of cowardly fools. Virtue is, only because I am; it is but a reflection of my inner self. What care I for forms whose dim lustre I have myself brought forth? Let vice and virtue wed. They are only shadows in the mist,” etc.

[172] Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.

[173] On Contemporary Literature, 206. The whole passage is excellent.

[174] M. Legouis makes a similar remark in the Cambridge History of English Literature XI, 108.

[175] I scarcely need say that Wordsworth is at times genuinely ethical, but he is even more frequently only didactic. The Excursion, as M. Legouis says, is a “long sermon against pessimism.”

[176] “Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.”

[177] Eth. Nic., 1177 b.

[178] Cf. the chapter on William Law and the Mystics in Cambridge History of English Literature, IX, 341-67; also the bibliography of Boehme, ibid., 560-74.

[179] See Excursion, I, VV. 943 ff.

[180] In his attitude towards sin Novalis continues Rousseau and anticipates the main positions of the Christian Scientist.

[181]

Prune thou thy words,

The thoughts control

That o’er thee swell and throng.

They will condense within the soul

And change to purpose strong.

But he who lets his feelings run

In soft, luxurious flow,

Shrinks when hard service must be done

And faints at every foe.

[182] Wesley had no liking for Boehme and cut out from Brooke’s book the theosophy that had this origin.

[183] Writing was often associated with magic formulÆ. Hence ???a also gave Fr. “grimoire.”

[184] Thus Spake Zarathustra, LXIX (The Shadow to Zarathustra).

[185] Katha-Upanishad. The passage is paraphrased as follows by P. E. More in his Century of Indian Epigrams:

Seated within this body’s car

The silent Self is driven afar,

And the five senses at the pole

Like steeds are tugging restive of control.

And if the driver lose his way,

Or the reins sunder, who can say

In what blind paths, what pits of fear

Will plunge the chargers in their mad career?

Drive well, O mind, use all thy art,

Thou charioteer!—O feeling Heart,

Be thou a bridle firm and strong!

For the Lord rideth and the way is long.

[186] See Brandes: The Romantic School in Germany, ch. XI.

[187] Alfred de Musset saw his double in the stress of his affair with George Sand (see Nuit de DÉcembre), Jean Valjean (Les MisÉrables) sees his double in the stress of his conversion. Peter Bell also sees his double at the emotional crisis in Wordsworth’s poem of that name.

[188] Thus Spake Zarathustra, LXIX.

[189] F. Schlegel: Lyceumfragment, no. 42.

[190] E.g., canto III, CVII-CXI.

[191] Confessions, Livre XII (1765).

[192] Cf. Th. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, I, 402.

[193] Wordsworth: Miscellaneous Sonnets, XII.

[194] In much the same spirit the Japanese hermit, Kamo Chomei (thirteenth century), expresses the fear that he may forget Buddha because of his fondness for the mountains and the moon.—See article on nature in Japan by M. Revon in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.

[195] Confessions, Bk. X, ch. IX.

[196] Cf. Cicero: “Urbem, urbem, mi Rufe, cole et in ista luce vive.” (Ad Fam., II, 22.)

[197] March 23, 1646.

[198] It was especially easy for the poets to go for their landscapes to the painters because according to the current theory poetry was itself a form of painting (ut pictura poesis). Thus Thomson writes in The Castle of Indolence:

Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls,

Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise,

Or autumn’s varied shades embrown the walls:

Now the black tempest strikes the astonish’d eyes;

Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;

The trembling sun now plays o’er ocean blue,

And now rude mountains frown amid the skies;

Whate’er Lorrain light touch’d with softening hue,

Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.

(C. I, st. 38.)

[199]

Disparaissez, monuments du gÉnie,

Pares, jardins immortels, que Le NÔtre a plantÉs;

De vos dehors pompeux l’exacte symmÉtrie,

Etonne vainement mes regards attristÉs.

J’aime bien mieux ce dÉsordre bizarre,

Et la variÉtÉ de ces riches tableaux

Que disperse l’Anglais d’une main moins avare.

Bertin, 19^e ElÉgie of Les Amours.

[200] Pt. IV, Lettre XI.

[201] Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. IV, Lettre XI.

[202] Ibid.

[203] Ibid., Pt. IV, Lettre XVII.

[204] Confessions, Livre V (1732).

[205] See especially Childe Harold, canto II, XXV ff.

[206] Ibid., canto II, XXXVII.

[207] Ibid., canto III, LXXII.

[208] Ibid., canto IV, CLXXVII.

[209] See La Perception du changement, 30.

[210]

ASIA

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside a helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.

It seems to float ever, for ever

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses,

A paradise of wildernesses!

…

Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions

In music’s most serene dominions;

Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

And we sail on away, afar,

Without a course, without a star,

But by the instinct of sweet music driven;

Till through Elysian garden islets

By thee, most beautiful of pilots,

Where never mortal pinnace glided

The boat of my desire is guided;

Realms where the air we breathe is love—

Prometheus Unbound, Act II, Sc. V.

[211] “Si tu souffres plus qu’un autre des choses de la vie, il ne faut pas t’en Étonner; une grande Âme doit contenir plus de douleurs qu’une petite.”

[212] Cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo:

I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

[213] Cf. for example, the passage of Rousseau in the seventh Promenade (“Je sens des extases, des ravissements inexprimables À me fondre pour ainsi dire dans le systÈme des Êtres,” etc.) with the revery described by Wordsworth in The Excursion, I, 200-218.

[214] O belles, craignez le fond des bois, et leur vaste silence.

[215] Faust (Miss Swanwick’s translation).

[216] Artist and Public, 134 ff.

[217]

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves, etc.

Cf. Lamartine:

Quand la feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie,

Le vent du soir s’ÉlÈve et l’arrache aux vallons;

Et moi, je suis semblable À la feuille flÉtrie;

Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons.

L’Isolement.

[218] Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156.

[219] See appendix on Chinese primitivism.

[220] G. Duval has written a Dictionnaire des mÉtaphores de Victor Hugo, and G. Lucchetti a work on Les Images dans les oeuvres de Victor Hugo. So far as the ethical values are concerned, the latter title is alone justified. Hugo is, next to Chateaubriand, the great imagist.

[221] The French like to think of the symbolists as having rendered certain services to their versification. Let us hope that they did, though few things are more perilous than this transfer of the idea of progress to the literary and artistic domain. Decadent Rome, as we learn from the younger Pliny and others, simply swarmed with poets who also no doubt indulged in many strange experiments. All this poetical activity, as we can see only too plainly at this distance, led nowhere.

[222] Grant Allen writes of the laws of nature in Magdalen Tower:

They care not any whit for pain or pleasure,

That seems to us the sum and end of all,

Dumb force and barren number are their measure,

What shall be shall be, tho’ the great earth fall,

They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,

Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,

Work out their fatal will unswerv’d, unswerving,

And know not that they are!

[223] Fragment de l’Art de jouir, quoted by P.-M. Masson in La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau, II, 228.

[224] If nature merely reflects back to a man his own image, it follows that Coleridge’s celebrated distinction between fancy and imagination has little value, inasmuch as he rests his proof of the unifying power of the imagination, in itself a sound idea, on the union the imagination effects between man and outer nature—and this union is on his own showing fanciful.

[225] If I had had this consecration Wordsworth says, addressing Peele Castle,

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,

Amid a world how different from this!

Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

…

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,

Elysian quiet, without toil or strife, etc.

Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm.

[226] Cf. Doudan, Lettres, IV, 216: “J’ai parcouru le Saint-Paul de Renan. Je n’ai jamais vu dans un thÉologien une si grande connaissance de la flore orientale. C’est un paysagiste bien supÉrieur À Saint-Augustin et À Bossuet. Il sÈme des rÉsÉdas, des anÉmones, des pÂquerettes pour recueillir l’incrÉdulitÉ.”

[227] In his Mal romantique (1908) E. SeilliÈre labels the generations that have elapsed since the rise of Rousseauism as follows:

1. Sensibility (Nouvelle HÉloÏse, 1761).

2. Weltschmerz (Schiller’s Æsthetic Letters, 1795).

3. Mal du siÈcle (Hugo’s Hernani, 1830).

4. Pessimism (vogue of Schopenhauer and Stendhal, 1865).

5. Neurasthenia (culmination of fin de siÈcle movement, 1900).

[228] Eckermann, September 24, 1827.

[229] See La Nuit de Mai.

[230] These lines are inscribed on the statue of Musset in front of the ThÉÂtre FranÇais. Cf. Shelley:

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

[231] Translation by J. E. Sandys of fragment cited in StobÆus, Flor. CIX, I.

[232] Pythian Odes, III, 20 ff.

[233] Pythian Odes, III, 81-82.

[234] Song of the Banjo, in the Seven Seas.

[235] XVII, 446-47.

[236] A brief survey of melancholy among the Greeks will be found in Professor S. H. Butcher’s Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.

[237] The exasperated quest of novelty is one of the main traits both of the ancient and the modern victim of ennui. See Seneca, De Tranquillitate animi: “Fastidio illis esse coepit vita, et ipse mundus; et subit illud rabidorum deliciarum: quousque eadem?” (Cf. La Fontaine: Il me faut du nouveau, n’en fÛt-il plus au monde.)

[238] “A quoi bon m’avoir fait naÎtre avec des facultÉs exquises pour les laisser jusqu’À la fin sans emploi? Le sentiment de mon prix interne en me donnant celui de cette injustice m’en dÉdommageait en quelque sorte, et me faisait verser des larmes que j’aimais a laisser couler.” Confessions. Livre IX (1756).

[239] Nouvelle HÉloise, Pt. VI, Lettre VIII.

[240] “Encore enfant par la tÊte, vous Êtes dÉjÀ vieux par le coeur.” Ibid.

[241] See the examples quoted in Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 305-06.

[242] This is the thought of Keats’s Ode to Melancholy:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.

Cf. Chateaubriand: Essai sur les RÉvolutions, Pt. II, ch. LVIII: “Ces jouissances sont trop poignantes: telle est notre faiblesse, que les plaisirs exquis deviennent des douleurs,” etc.

[243] See his sonnet Les Montreurs. This type of Rousseauist is anticipated by “Milord” Bomston in La Nouvelle HÉloÏse. Rousseau directed the engraver to depict him with “un maintien grave et stoÏque sous lequel il cache avec peine une extrÊme sensibilitÉ.”

[244] “Qui es-tu? À coup sÛr tu n’es pas un Être pÉtri du mÊme limon et animÉ de la mÊme vie que nous! Tu es un ange ou un dÉmon mais tu n’es pas une crÉature humaine. … Pourquoi habiter parmi nous, qui ne pouvons te suffire ni te comprendre?” G. Sand, LÉlia, I, 11.

[245] See p. 51.

[246] See Lara, XVIII, XIX, perhaps the best passage that can be quoted for the Byronic hero.

[247] Cf. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme: “Il Était de mode alors dans l’École romantique d’Être pÂle, livide, verdÂtre, un peu cadavÉreux, s’il Était possible. Cela donnait l’air fatal, byronien, giaour, dÉvorÉ par les passions et les remords.”

[248] Hugo, Hernani.

[249]

Lorsque, par un dÉcret des puissances suprÊmes,

Le PoÈte apparaÎt dans ce monde ennuyÉ,

Sa mÈre ÉpouvantÉe et pleine de blasphÈmes

Crispe ses poings vers Dieu, qui la prend en pitiÉ.

Fleurs du mal: BÉnÉdiction.

Cf. Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. III, Lettre XXVI:

“Ciel inexorable! … O ma mÈre, pourquoi vous donna-t-il un fils dans sa colÈre?”

[250] Coleridge has a side that relates him to the author of Les Fleurs du mal. In his Pains of Sleep he describes a dream in which he felt

Desire with loathing strangely mix’d,

On wild or hateful objects fix’d.

[251] Keats according to Shelley was an example of the poÈte maudit. “The poor fellow” he says “was literally hooted from the stage of life.” Keats was as a matter of fact too sturdy to be snuffed out by an article and had less of the quivering Rousseauistic sensibility than Shelley himself. Cf. letter of Shelley to Mrs. Shelley (Aug. 7, 1820): “Imagine my despair of good, imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men.”

[252] Euripides speaks of the ????? ???? in his ???t?de? (Latin, “dolendi voluptas”; German, “die Wonne der Wehmut”).

[253] Chesterton is anticipated in this paradox by Wordsworth:

In youth we love the darksome lawn

Brushed by the owlet’s wing.

Then Twilight is preferred to Dawn

And autumn to the spring.

Sad fancies do we then affect

In luxury of disrespect

To our own prodigal excess

Of too familiar happiness.

Ode to Lycoris.

[254] Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 329-30.

[255] “[Villiers] Était de cette famille des nÉo-catholiques littÉraires dont Chateaubriand est le pÈre commun, et qui a produit Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire et plus rÉcemment M. JosÉphin Peladan. Ceux-lÀ ont goÛtÉ par-dessus tout dans la religion les charmes du pÉchÉ, la grandeur du sacrilÈge, et leur sensualisme a caressÉ les dogmes qui ajoutaient aux voluptÉs la suprÊme voluptÉ de se perdre.” A. France, Vie LittÉraire, III, 121.

[256] PremiÈre Promenade.

[257] Ibid.

[258] E.g., HÖlderlin and Jean Polonius.

[259] A striking passage on solitude will be found in the Laws of Manu, IV, 240-42. (“Alone a being is born: alone he goes down to death.” His kin forsake him at the grave; his only hope then is in the companionship of the Law of righteousness [Dharma]. “With the Law as his companion he crosses the darkness difficult to cross.”)

[260] “Be good and you will be lonely.”

[261] In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow’s poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron!

Et Byron … disparaÎt aux yeux du pÂtre ÉpouvantÉ.

(See E. EstÈve, Byron en France, 147).

[262] In the MÉmoires d’Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. “Mon coeur se refuse aux joies communes comme À la douleur ordinaire.” He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait À rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au dÉsert de sa vie.”

[263] The solitude of the “genius” is already marked in Blake:

O! why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;

Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.

[264] Froude’s Carlyle, II, 377.

[265] No finer lines on solitude are found in English than those in which Wordsworth relates how from his room at Cambridge he could look out on

The antechapel where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

(Prelude III, 61-63.)

Cf. also the line in the Sonnet on Milton:

His soul was like a star and dwelt apart.

[266] Eth. Nic., 1109 b.

[267] James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night says that he would have entered hell

gratified to gain

That positive eternity of pain

Instead of this insufferable inane.

[268] R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.

[269] Decadent Rome had the equivalent of Des Esseintes. Seneca (To Lucilius, CXXII) speaks of those who seek to affirm their originality and attract attention to themselves by doing everything differently from other people and, “ut ita dicam, retro vivunt.”

[270] Tennyson has traced this change of the Æsthetic dream into a nightmare in his Palace of Art.

[271] Contemporains, I, 332.

[272] GÉnie du Christianisme, Pt. II, Livre III, ch. IX.

[273]

L’orage est dans ma voix, l’Éclair est sur ma bouche;

Aussi, loin de m’aimer, voilÀ qu’ils tremblent tous,

Et quand j’ouvre les bras, on tombe À mes genoux.

[274]

Que vous ai-je donc fait pour Être votre Élu?

…

HÉlas! je suis, Seigneur, puissant et solitaire,

Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre!

[275]

Le juste opposera le dÉdain À l’absence

Et ne rÉpondra plus que par un froid silence

Au silence Éternel de la DivinitÉ.

[276] See Sainte-Beuve’s poetical epistle A. M. Villemain (PensÉes d’AoÛt 1837).

[277] See Masters of Modern French Criticism, 233, 238.

[278] Wordsworth writes

A piteous lot it were to flee from man

Yet not rejoice in Nature.

(Excursion, IV, 514.)

This lot was Vigny’s:

Ne me laisse jamais seul avec la Nature

Car je la connais trop pour n’en avoir pas peur.

[279] Madame Dorval.

[280] La Maison du Berger. Note that in Wordsworth the “still sad music of humanity” is very closely associated with nature.

[281] La Bouteille À la Mer.

[282] See Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics.

[283] “All salutary conditions have their root in strenuousness” (appamada), says Buddha.

[284] See Masters of Modern French Criticism, Essay on Taine, passim. Paul Bourget in his Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (2 vols.) has followed out during this period the survivals of the older romantic melancholy and their reinforcement by scientific determinism.

[285] “Le pauvre M. Arago, revenant un jour de l’HÔtel de Ville en 1848 aprÈs une Épouvantable Émeute, disait tristement À l’un de ses aides de camp au ministÈre de la marine: ‘En vÉritÉ ces gens-lÀ ne sont pas raisonnables.’” Doudan, Lettres, IV, 338.

[286] See Preface (pp. viii-ix) to his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse and my comment in The New Laokoon, 207-08.

[287] Most of the political implications of the point of view I am developing I am reserving for a volume I have in preparation to be entitled Democracy and Imperialism. Some of my conclusions will be found in two articles in the (New York) Nation: The Breakdown of Internationalism (June 17 and 24, 1915), and The Political Influence of Rousseau (Jan. 18, 1917).

[288] Reden an die deutsche Nation, XII.

[289] I should perhaps allow for the happiness that may be experienced in moments of supernormal consciousness—something quite distinct from emotional or other intoxication. Fairly consistent testimony as to moments of this kind is found in the records of the past from the early Buddhists down to Tennyson.

[290] I scarcely need say that I am speaking of the man of science only in so far as he is purely naturalistic in his point of view. There may enter into the total personality of Edison or any particular man of science other and very different elements.

[291] M. RenÉ Berthelot has written a book on pragmatism and similar tendencies in contemporary philosophy entitled Un Romantisme utilitaire. I have not read it but the title alone is worth more than most books on the subject I have read.

[292] Dedication of the Æneis (1697).

[293] Adventure of one Hans Pfaal.

[294] His attempt to rewrite Hyperion from a humanitarian point of view is a dismal failure.

[295] There is also a strong idyllic element in Paradise Lost as Rousseau (Emile, V) and Schiller (Essay on NaÏve and Sentimental Poetry) were among the first to point out. Critics may be found even to-day who, like Tennyson, prefer the passages which show a richly pastoral imagination to the passages where the ethical imagination is required but where it does not seem to prevail sufficiently over theology.

[296] XII, 74.

[297] Three Philosophical Poets, 188.

[298] After telling of the days when “il n’y avait pour moi ni passÉ ni avenir et je goÛtais À la fois les dÉlices de mille siÈcles,” Saint-Preux concludes: “HÉlas! vous avez disparu comme un Éclair. Cette ÉternitÉ de bonheur ne fut qu’un instant de ma vie. Le temps a repris sa lenteur dans les moments de mon dÉsespoir, et l’ennui mesure par longues annÉes le reste infortunÉ de mes jours” (Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Pt. III, Lettre VI).

[299] The Church, so far as it has become humanitarian, has itself succumbed to naturalism.

[300] Sutta of the Great Decease.

[301] If a man recognizes the supreme rÔle of fiction or illusion in life while proceeding in other respects on Kantian principles, he will reach results similar to the “As-if Philosophy” (Philosophie des Als Ob) of Vaihinger, a leading authority on Kant and co-editor of the Kantstudien. This work, though not published until 1911, was composed, the author tells us in his preface, as early as 1875-78. It will be found to anticipate very strikingly pragmatism and various other isms in which philosophy has been proclaiming so loudly of late its own bankruptcy.

[302] “C’est en vain qu’on voudrait assigner À la vie un but, au sens humain du mot.” L’Evolution crÉatrice, 55.

[303] Metaphysics, 1078 b.

[304] In the beginning was the Word! To seek to substitute, like Faust, the Deed for the Word is to throw discrimination to the winds. The failure to discriminate as to the quality of the deed is responsible for the central sophistry of Faust (see p. 331) and perhaps of our modern life in general.

[305] “J’adore la libertÉ; j’abhorre la gÊne, la peine, l’assujettissement.” Confessions, Livre I.

[306] Analects, XI, CXI. Cf. ibid., VI, CXX: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” Much that has passed current as religion in all ages has made its chief appeal, not to awe but to wonder; and like many humanists Confucius was somewhat indifferent to the marvellous. “The subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings” (ibid., VII, CXX).

[307] One of the last Chinese, I am told, to measure up to the Confucian standard was TsÊng Kuo-fan (1811-1872) who issued forth from poverty, trained a peasant soldiery and, more than any other one person, put down the Taiping Rebellion.

[308] See J. BarthÉlemy Saint-Hilaire’s Introduction to his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, p. cxlix.

[309] Eth. Nic., 1122-25.

[310] I have in mind such passages as P., VIII, 76-78, 92-96; N., VI, 1-4; N., XI, 13-16.

[311] “II n’y eut jamais pour moi d’intermÉdiaire entre tout et rien.” Confessions, Livre VII.

[312] Some wag, it will be remembered, suggested as an alternative title for this work: Wild Religions I have known.

[313] Letters, II, 298; cf. ibid., 291: “I have never known a life less wisely controlled or less helped by the wisdom of others than his. The whole retrospect of it is pathetic; waste, confusion, ruin of one of the most gifted and sweetest natures the world ever knew.”

[314] Nic. Eth., 1145 b. The opposition between Socrates or Plato and Aristotle, when put thus baldly, is a bit misleading. Socrates emphasized the importance of practice (e??t?) in the acquisition of virtue, and Plato has made much of habit in the Laws.

[315] Analects, II, CIV.

[316] This belief the Oriental has embodied in the doctrine of Karma.

[317] “La seule habitude qu’on doit laisser prendre À l’enfant est de n’en contractor aucune.” Emile, Livre I.

[318] Emile was to be trained to be a cabinet-maker.

[319] Eth. Nic., 1172 b.

[320] Doctrine of the Mean (c. XXXIII, v. 2).

[321] See his poem Ibo in Les Contemplations.

[322] La. 55, p. 51. (In my references La. stands for Lao-tzu, Li. for Lieh-tzu, Ch. for Chuang-tzu. The first number gives the chapter; the second number the page in Wieger’s edition.)

[323] Ch. 22 C, p. 391.

[324] Ch. 12 n, p. 305.

[325] Ch. 11 D, p. 291. Ibid. 15, p. 331. See also Li. 31, p. 113.

[326] Ch. 19 B, p. 357.

[327] Ch. 19 L, p. 365.

[328] Ch. 10, pp. 279-80.

[329] Ch. 9, pp. 274-75.

[330] Ch. 29, pp. 467 ff.

[331] Ch. 2, p. 223.

[332] La. 27, p. 37.

[333] Ch. 8 A, p. 271.

[334] Li. 5, p. 143.

[335] Ch. 14 C, p. 321.

[336] For an extreme form of Epicureanism see the ideas of Yang-chu, Li. 7, pp. 165 ff. For stoical apathy see Ch. 6 C., p. 253. For fate see Li. 6, p. 165, Ch. 6 K, p. 263.

[337] Ch. 33, pp. 499 ff.

[338] Ch. 33 C, p. 503.

[339] Bk. III, Part 2, ch. 9.

[340] Li. 3, p. 111. Ch. 24, pp. 225-27.

[341] Ch. 6 E, p. 255.

[342] See The Religion of the Samurai: a Study of Zen Philosophy (1913) by Kaiten Nukariya (himself a Zenist), p. 23.

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