One of the most delicate of tasks is to determine whether a paradox
occupies a position more or less central than the convention to which
it is opposed. A somewhat similar problem is to determine which of
two differing conventions has the greater degree of centrality. For
one convention may as compared with another seem highly paradoxical.
In 1870, it was announced at Peking that his Majesty the Emperor had
had the good fortune to catch the small-pox. The auspiciousness of
small-pox was part of the Chinese convention at this time, but to
those of us who live under another convention it is a blessing we would
willingly forego. But much in the Chinese convention, so far from being
absurd, reflects the Confucian good sense, and if the Chinese decide to
break with their convention, they should evidently consider long and
carefully in which direction they are going to move--whether towards
something more central, or something more eccentric.
As to the direction in which Rousseau is moving and therefore as
to the quality of his paradoxes there can be little question. His
paradoxes--and he is perhaps the most paradoxical of writers--reduce
themselves on analysis to the notion that man has suffered a loss of
goodness by being civilized, by having had imposed on his unconscious
and instinctive self some humanistic or religious discipline--e.g.,
“The man who reflects is a depraved animal”; “True Christians are meant
to be slaves”; decorum is only the “varnish of vice” or the “mask of
hypocrisy.” Innumerable paradoxes of this kind will immediately occur
to one as characteristic of Rousseau and his followers. These paradoxes
may be termed in opposition to those of humility, the paradoxes of
spontaneity. The man who holds them is plainly moving in an opposite
direction not merely from the Christian but from the Socratic
individualist. He is moving from the more representative to the less
representative and not towards some deeper centre of experience,
as would be the case if he were tending towards either humanism or
religion. Wordsworth has been widely accepted not merely as a poet but
as a religious teacher, and it is therefore important to note that his
paradoxes are prevailingly of the Rousseauistic type. His verse is
never more spontaneous or, as he would say, inevitable, than when it
is celebrating the gospel of spontaneity. I have already pointed out
some of the paradoxes that he opposes to pseudo-classic decorum: e.g.,
his attempt to bestow poetical dignity and importance upon the ass,
and to make of it a model of moral excellence, also to find poetry in
an idiot boy and to associate sublimity with a pedlar in defiance of
the ordinary character of pedlars. In general Wordsworth indulges in
Rousseauistic paradoxes when he urges us to look to peasants for the
true language of poetry and would have us believe that man is taught
by “woods and rills” and not by contact with his fellow men. He pushes