Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
of habitation.” Similar utterances might be multiplied from French,
English, and German romanticists.[115] To be sure, the word “reality”
is perhaps the most slippery of all general terms. Certain recent
votaries of the god Whirl, notably Bergson, have promised us that if
we surrender to the flux we shall have a “vision” not only of unity
but also of reality; and so they have transferred to the cult of their
divinity all the traditional language of religion.
We do not, however, need for the present to enter into a discussion as
to the nature of reality, but simply to stick to strict psychological
observation. From this point of view it is not hard to see that the
primitivist makes his primary appeal not to man’s need for unity and
reality but to a very different need. Byron has told us what this need
is in his tale (“The Island”) of a ship’s crew that overpowered its
officers and then set sail for Otaheite; what impelled these Arcadian
mutineers was not the desire for a genuine return to aboriginal life
with its rigid conventions, but
The wish--which ages have not yet subdued
In man--to have no master save his mood.
Now to have no master save one’s mood is to be wholly temperamental.
In Arcadia--the ideal of romantic morality--those who are wholly
temperamental unite in sympathy and brotherly love. It remains to
consider more fully what this triumph of temperament means in the real
world.
CHAPTER V
ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE REAL
The fundamental thing in Rousseauistic morality is not, as we have
seen, the assertion that man is naturally good, but the denial of
the “civil war in the cave.” Though this denial is not complete in
Rousseau himself, nothing is more certain than that his whole tendency
is away from this form of dualism. The beautiful soul does the right
thing not as a result of effort, but spontaneously, unconsciously and
almost inevitably. In fact the beautiful soul can scarcely be said to
be a voluntary agent at all. “Nature” acts in him and for him. This
minimizing of moral struggle and deliberation and choice, this drift
towards a naturalistic fatalism, as it may be termed, is a far more
significant thing in Rousseau than his optimism. One may as a matter
of fact eliminate dualism in favor of nature and at the same time look
on nature as evil. This is precisely what one is likely to do if one
sees no alternative to temperamental living, while judging those who
live temperamentally not by their “ideal,” that is by their feeling of
their own loveliness, but by what they actually do. One will become
a realist in the sense that came to be attached to this word during
the latter part of the nineteenth century. Rousseau himself is often
realistic in this sense when he interrupts his Arcadian visions to
tell us what actually occurred. In the “Confessions,” as I have said,
passages that recall Lamartine alternate with passages that recall
Zola, and the transition from one type of passage to the other is