This rapid shifting of mood in the romanticist, in response to
inner impulse or outer impression, is almost too familiar to need
illustration. Here is an example that may serve for a thousand from
that life-long devotee of the great god Whim--Hector Berlioz. When at
Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from
the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille’s
marriage to another. “In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry
to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act
of justice done, I too must die.” Accordingly he loads his pistols,
supplies himself with a disguise as a lady’s maid, so as to be able
to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets
“two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum.”
While awaiting the departure of the diligence he “rages up and down
the streets of Florence like a mad dog.” Later, as the diligence is
traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a “‘Ha’! so
hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside
as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller.” But on reaching
Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not
only forgets his errand, but spends there “the twenty happiest days” of
his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to
be temperamental.
In this exaltation of environmental influences one should note
again the coöperation of Rousseauist and Baconian, of emotional and
scientific naturalist. Both are prone to look upon man as being made by
natural forces and not as making himself. To deal with the substitutes
that Rousseauist and Baconian have proposed for traditional morality,
is in fact to make a study of the varieties--and they are numerous--of
naturalistic fatalism. The upshot of the whole movement is to discredit
moral effort on the part of the individual. Why should a man believe
in the efficacy of this effort, why should he struggle to acquire
character if he is convinced that he is being moulded like putty by
influences beyond his control--the influence of climate, for example?
Both science and romanticism have vied with one another in making of
man a mere stop on which Nature may play what tune she will. The Æolian
harp enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a romantic symbol. The man
of science for his part is ready to draw up statistical tables showing
what season of the year is most productive of suicide and what type of
weather impels bank-cashiers most irresistibly to embezzlement. A man
on a mountain top, according to Rousseau, enjoys not only physical but
spiritual elevation, and when he descends to the plain the altitude
of his mind declines with that of his body. Ruskin’s soul, says C. E.
Norton, “was like an Æolian harp, its strings quivering musically in
serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered
and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might