[118] Le Théâtre en France, 304.
[120] E.g., Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1736) had a marked influence on the rise of the German fate tragedy.
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.
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:
[132] Addison writes:
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.”
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 mœurs, 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 cœur.”
[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:
[148] “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quærebam quid amarem, amans amare.”
[149] Cf. Shelley’s Alastor:
[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.
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.
[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:
In his Stances à Madame Lullin Voltaire is at least as poetical and nearer to normal experience:
[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.
[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 γράμμα 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:
[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 Chōmei (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:
(C. I, st. 38.)
Bertin, 19e 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.
ASIA
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:
[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.
Cf. Lamartine:
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 œuvres 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: