Irving Babbitt

“ Virtue indeed, according to Rousseau, is not merely an instinct but a passion and even a voluptuous passion, moving in the same direction as other passions, only superior to them in vehemence. “Cold reason has never done anything illustrious; and you can triumph over the passions only by opposing them to one another. When the passion of virtue arises, it dominates everything and holds everything in equipoise.” ”

“ With such a vision of nature as this it is not surprising that every constraint is unendurable to Rousseau, that he likes, as Berlioz was to say of himself later, to “make all barriers crack.” He is ready to shatter all the forms of civilized life in favor of something that never existed, of a state of nature that is only the projection of his own temperament and its dominant desires upon the void. His programme amounts in practice to the indulgence of infinite indeterminate desire, to an endless and aimless vagabondage of the emotions with the imagination as their free accomplice. ”

“ Since the imagination by itself gives unity but does not give reality, it is possible to discover whether a unification of life has reality only by subjecting it to the keenest analysis. Otherwise what we take to be wisdom may turn out to be only an empty dream. To take as wise something that is unreal is to fall into sophistry. For a man like Rousseau whose imagination was in its ultimate quality not ethical at all but overwhelmingly idyllic to set up as an inspired teacher was to become an arch-sophist. ”

“ One finds indeed figures in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom. ”

“ The essence of Rousseauistic as of other romance, I may repeat, is to be found not in any mere fact, not even in the fact of sensation, but in a certain quality of the imagination. Rousseauism is, it is true, an emancipation of impulse, especially of the impulse of sex. Practically all the examples I have chosen of the tense and beautiful moment are erotic. But what one has even here, as the imagination grows increasingly romantic, is less the reality than the dream of the beautiful moment, an intensity that is achieved only in the tower of ivory. ”

“ The doctrine of the beautiful soul is at once a denial and a parody of the doctrine of grace; a denial because it rejects original sin; a parody because it holds that the beautiful soul acts aright, not through any effort of its own but because nature acts in it and through it even as a man in a state of grace acts aright not through any merit of his own but because God acts in him and through him. The man who saw everything from the angle of grace was, like the beautiful soul or the original genius, inclined to look upon himself as exceptional and superlative. ”

“ Though both neo-classicists and romanticists achieved much admirable work, work which is likely to have a permanent appeal, it is surely no small matter that they both failed on the whole to deal adequately with the imagination and its rôle whether in literature or life. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Æneid to its being “a well-weighed judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polished, the more lustre they receive.” ”

“ The nature that Hölderlin worships and which is, like the nature of Rousseau, only an Arcadian intoxication of the imagination, he associates with a Greece which is, like the Greece of Schiller, a dreamland of pure beauty. He longs to escape into this dreamland from an actual world that seems to him intolerably artificial. The contrast between his “ideal” Greece and reality is so acute as to make all attempt at adjustment out of the question. ”

“ If a man attends solely to this side of life he will finally come, like Leconte de Lisle, to look upon it as a “torrent of mobile chimeras,” as an “endless whirl of vain appearances.” To admit that the oneness of life and the change are inseparable is therefore to admit that such reality as man can know positively is inextricably mixed up with illusion. Moreover man does not observe the oneness that is always changing from the outside; he is a part of the process, he is himself a oneness that is always changing. ”

“ What Musset saw in George Sand was not the real woman but only his own dream. But George Sand was not content thus to reflect back passively to Musset his ideal. She was rather a Galatea whose ambition it was to create her own Pygmalion. “Your chimera is between us,” Musset [233] exclaims; but his chimera was between them too. The more Titan and Titaness try to meet, the more each is driven back into the solitude of his own ego. They were in love with love rather than with one another: and to be thus in love with love means on the last analysis to be in love with one’s own emotions. ”

“ The serious moments of life are moments of tension, of concentration on either the natural or the human law. But Apollo cannot always be bending the bow. Man needs at times to relax, and one way of relaxing is to take refuge for a time in some land of chimeras, to follow the Arcadian gleam. He may then come back to the real world, the world of active effort, solaced and refreshed. But it is only with reference to some ethical centre that we may determine what art is soundly recreative, in what forms of adventure the imagination may innocently indulge. ”

“ Like all the great Greeks Aristotle recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure. This insistence on restraint and proportion is rightly taken to be of the essence not merely of the Greek spirit but of the classical spirit in general. ”

“ Hardly anywhere else, indeed, will one find such accents of bitterness, such melancholy welling up unbidden from the very depths of the heart, as in the devotees of art for art’s sake—Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier.
George Sand takes Flaubert to task with admirable tact for his failure to subordinate art to something higher than itself. “Talent imposes duties; and art for art’s sake is an empty word.” As she grew older she says she came more and more to put truth above beauty, and goodness before strength. ”

“ The doctrines of the universal and the imitation of the universal go deeper indeed than decorum, so much deeper that they are shared by classicism with religion. The man who aspires to live religiously must no less than the humanist look to some model set above his ordinary self and imitate it. But though the classicist at his best meditates, he does not, like the seeker after religious perfection, see in meditation an end in itself but rather a support for the mediatory virtues, the virtues of the man who would live to the best advantage in this world rather than renounce it ”

“ Certain late neo-classicists lacked imagination and were at the same time always harping on good sense. It was therefore assumed that to insist on good sense was necessarily proof of a lack of imagination. Because the attempt to achieve the universal had led to a stale and lifeless imitation it was assumed that a man’s genius consists in his uniqueness, in his unlikeness to other men. Now nothing is more private and distinctive in a man than his feelings, so that to be unique meant practically for Rousseau and his followers to be unique in feeling. ”

“ The neo-classicist to be sure might so employ his “fiction” as to inculcate a moral; in that case he is only too likely to give us instead of the living symbol, dead allegory; instead of high seriousness, its caricature, didacticism. The traditional stock of fiction became at last so intolerably trite as to be rejected even by some of the late neo-classicists. “The rejection and contempt of fiction,” said Dr. Johnson (who indulged in it himself on occasion) “is rational and manly.” But to reject fiction in the larger sense is to miss the true driving power in human nature—the imagination. ”

“ Yet virtue exists as you can testify, feeling and pure souls; it exists, that tender, irresistible, imperious passion, torment and delight of magnanimous hearts, that profound horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for one’s country, that still more sublime and sacred love for humanity, without which a great revolution is only a glittering crime that destroys another crime ”

“ For beauty to be complete must have not only æsthetic perceptiveness but order and proportion; and this brings us back again to the problem of the ethical imagination and the permanent model or pattern with reference to which it seeks to impose measure and proportion upon sensuous perception and expansive desire. We should not hesitate to say that beauty loses most of its meaning when divorced from ethics even though every æsthete in the world should arise and denounce us as philistines. To rest beauty upon feeling as the very name æsthetics implies, is to rest it upon what is ever shifting. ”

“ To assert that the creativeness of the imagination is incompatible with centrality or, what amounts to the same thing, with purpose, is to assert that the creativeness of the imagination is incompatible with reality or at least such reality as man may attain. Life is at best a series of illusions; the whole office of philosophy is to keep it from degenerating into a series of delusions. ”

“ There were moments when the dualism of the spirit came home to him, moments when he perceived that the conscience is not itself an expansive emotion but rather a judgment and a check upon expansive emotion. Yet his general readiness to subordinate his ethical self to his sensibility is indubitable. Hence the absence in his personality and writing of the note of masculinity. There is indeed much in his make-up that reminds one less of a man than of a high-strung impressionable woman. Woman, most observers would agree, is more natural in Rousseau’s sense, that is, more temperamental, than man. ”

“ The literature that nature and society have created for us and which for three thousand years past has been established and preserved and reproduced by masterpieces appeared to him alone worthy of a Frenchman of the eighteenth century. He did not foresee that it would be reduced some day to being only a particular kind of literature, tolerated or reproved under the name of classic, and that its noblest productions would be put on the same level as the formless sketches of uncultivated genius and untried talents. ”

“ It was no doubt natural enough that the champions of the modern spirit should have rejected Aristotle along with the traditional order of which he had been made a support. Yet if they had been more modern they might have seen in him rather a chief precursor. They might have learned from him how to have standards and at the same time not be immured in dogma. As it is, those who call themselves modern have come to adopt a purely exploratory attitude towards life. “On desperate seas long wont to roam,” they have lost more and more the sense of what is normal and central in human experience. ”

“ In reading these realistic passages of Rousseau we are led to reflect that his “nature” is not, in practice, so remote from Taine’s nature as might at first appear. “What we call nature,” says Taine, “is this brood of secret passions, often maleficent, generally vulgar, always blind, which tremble and fret within us, ill-covered by the cloak of decency and reason under which we try to disguise them; we think we lead them and they lead us; we think our actions our own, they are theirs.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Science was kindling man’s imagination and opening up before him what he really craves, the vista of an endless advance. Why should not literature likewise do something new and original instead of sticking forever in the same rut of imitation? In its Greek form the doctrine of imitation was, as I have tried to show, not only flexible and progressive, but in its own way, positive and experimental. But in modern times the two main forms of imitation, the classical and the Christian, have worked within the limits imposed by tradition and traditional models. ”

“ There one passes from rules to principles. The only rule, if we are to achieve art that has an ethical soul, is to view life with some degree of imaginative wholeness. Art that has technique without soul in either the classical or romantic sense, and so fails [204] either to inspire elevation or awaken wonder, is likely to be felt as a barren virtuosity. The pseudo-classicist was often unduly minute in the rules he laid down for technique or outer form, as one may say, and then ignored the ethical imagination or inner form entirely, or else set up as a substitute mere didacticism. ”

“ A man may consent to adjust a mere dream to the requirements of the real, but when his dream is promoted to the dignity of an ideal it is plain that he will be less ready to make the sacrifice. Schiller’s Greece is very ideal in the sense I have just defined. It hovers before the imagination as a sort of Golden Age of pure beauty, a land of chimeras that is alone worthy of the æsthete’s habitation. As an extreme type of the romantic Hellenist, one may take Hölderlin, who was a disciple at once of Schiller and of Rousseau. ”

“ Now the man of science at his best is like the humanist at his best, at once highly imaginative and highly critical. By this coöperation of imagination and intellect they are both enabled to concentrate effectively on the facts, though on facts of a very different order. The imagination reaches out and perceives likenesses and analogies whereas the power in man that separates and discriminates and traces causes and effects tests in turn these likenesses and analogies as to their reality: for we can scarcely repeat too often that though the imagination gives unity it does not give reality. ”

“ One whole side of Rousseau’s religion can be understood only as a protest against the type of Christianity that is found in a Pascal or a Jonathan Edwards. The legend of the abyss that Pascal saw always yawning at his side has at least a symbolical value. It is the wont of man to oscillate violently between extremes, and each extreme is not only bad in itself but even worse by the opposite extreme that it engenders. From a God who is altogether fearful, men are ready to flee to a God who is altogether loving, or it might be more correct to say altogether lovely. ”

“ The Rousseauist—and that from a very early stage in the movement—does not hesitate to pursue his ever receding dream across all frontiers, not merely those that separate art from art, but those that divide flesh from spirit and even good from evil, until finally he arrives like Blake at a sort of “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” When he is not breaking down barriers in the name of the freedom of the imagination he is doing so in the name of what he is pleased to term love. ”

“ Genius is indispensable, and not merely genius in general but genius for the special kind of poetry in which he is to excel. Yet granting all this, he says to the poetical aspirant, bestir yourself! The mystery of grace will always be recognized in any view of life that gets at all beneath the surface. Yet it is still the better part to turn to the feasibility of works. The view of genius as merely a temperamental overflow is as a matter of fact only a caricature of the doctrine of grace. ”

“ However, the revolt from poetic diction and decorum in general is not the central aspect of the great movement that resulted in the eclipse of the wit and man of the world and in the emergence of the original genius. What the genius wanted was spontaneity, and spontaneity, as he understood it, involves a denial, not merely of decorum, but of something that, as I have said, goes deeper than decorum—namely the doctrine of imitation. According to Voltaire genius is only judicious imitation. According to Rousseau the prime mark of genius is refusal to imitate. ”

“ It is clear from what has already been said that Rousseau’s imagination was in a general way Arcadian, and this, if not the highest, is perhaps the most prevalent type of imagination. In surveying the literature of the world one is struck not only by the universality of the pastoral or idyllic element, but by the number of forms it has assumed—forms ranging from the extreme of artificiality and conventionalism to the purest poetry. The very society against the artificiality of which Rousseau’s whole work is a protest is itself in no small degree a pastoral creation. ”

“ 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.” ”