The misanthropist of the Rousseauistic or Byronic type has a resource that was denied to Swift. Having failed to find companionship among men he can flee to nature. Rousseau relates how when he had taken refuge on St. Peter’s Island he “exclaimed at times with deep emotion: Oh nature, oh my mother, here I am under your protection alone. Here is no adroit and rascally man to interpose between you and me.”[191] Few aspects of romanticism are more important than this attempt to find companionship and consolation in nature. CHAPTER VIII ROMANTICISM AND NATURE 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: I love not man the less, but nature more.