Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
We have seen that as a result of this transformation of conscience,
temperament is emancipated from both inner and outer control and that
this emancipation tends in the real world to the rise of two main
types--the Bohemian and the superman, both unprimitive, inasmuch as
primitive man is governed not by temperament but by convention; and
that what actually tends to prevail in such a temperamental world
in view of the superior “hardness” of the superman, is the law of
cunning and the law of force. So far as the Rousseauists set up the
mere emancipation of temperament as a serious philosophy, they are
to be held responsible for the results of this emancipation whether
displayed in the lust of power or the lust of sensation. But the
lust of power and the lust of sensation, such as they appear, for
example, in the so-called realism of the later nineteenth century, are
not in themselves identical with romanticism. Many of the realists,
like Flaubert, as I have already pointed out, are simply bitter and
disillusioned Rousseauists who are expressing their nausea at the
society that has actually arisen from the emancipation of temperament
in themselves and others. The essence of Rousseauistic as of other
romance, I may repeat, is to be found not in any mere fact, not even
in the fact of sensation, but in a certain quality of the imagination.
Rousseauism is, it is true, an emancipation of impulse, especially of
the impulse of sex. Practically all the examples I have chosen of the
tense and beautiful moment are erotic. But what one has even here, as
the imagination grows increasingly romantic, is less the reality than
the dream of the beautiful moment, an intensity that is achieved only
in the tower of ivory. This point can be made clear only by a fuller
study of the romantic conception of love.
CHAPTER VI
ROMANTIC LOVE
What first strikes one in Rousseau’s attitude towards love is the
separation, even wider here perhaps than elsewhere, between the ideal
and the real. He dilates in the “Confessions” on the difference of
the attachment that he felt when scarcely more than a boy for two
young women of Geneva, Mademoiselle Vulson and Mademoiselle Goton. His
attachment for the latter was real in a sense that Zola would have
understood. His attachment for Mademoiselle Vulson reminds one rather
of that of a mediæval knight for his lady. The same contrast runs
through Rousseau’s life. “Seamstresses, chambermaids, shop-girls,” he
says, “attracted me very little. I had to have fine ladies.”[144] So
much for the ideal; the real was Thérèse Levasseur.