In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than
in the original struggle between Taoists and Confucians. The total
impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation
of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese
individualism ended like that of Greece at about the same time in
disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the
“Fighting States”), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the
most barbaric of these states and “put the lid” on everybody. Shi
Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and
issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian
writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved
like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of
ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian
Ssŭ-ma Ch’ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist
influence.
It is proper to add that though Lao-tzŭ proclaims that the soft is
superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental
sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the
equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist.
There are passages, especially in Lao-tzŭ, that in their emphasis on
concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the
East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the
emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding
movement in the West.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
My only justification for these very unsystematic bibliographical notes
is that, bringing together as they do under one cover material somewhat
scattered and inaccessible to most readers, they may help to add to
the number, now unfortunately very small, of those who have earned
the right to have an opinion about romanticism as an international
movement. A list of this kind is a fragment of a fragment. I have
given, for example, only a fraction of the books on Rousseau and
scarcely any of the books, thousands in numbers, which without being
chiefly on Rousseau, contain important passages on him. I may cite
almost at random as instances of this latter class, the comparison
between Burke and Rousseau in the fifth volume of Lecky’s _History of
the Eighteenth Century_; the stanzas on Rousseau in the third canto
of _Childe Harold_; the passage on Rousseau in Hazlitt’s essay on the
_Past and Future_ (_Table Talk_).
The only period that I have covered with any attempt at fullness is
that from about 1795 to 1840. Books that seem to me to possess literary
distinction or to deal authoritatively with some aspect of the subject
I have marked with a star. I make no claim, however, to have read
all the books I have listed, and my rating will no doubt often be
questioned in the case of those I have read.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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