Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
Any study of this topic must evidently turn on the question how far at
different times and by different schools of thought the realm of man
and the realm of nature (as Byron uses the word) have been separated
and in what way, and also how far they have been run together and in
what way. For there may be different ways of running together man
and nature. Ruskin’s phrase the “pathetic fallacy” is unsatisfactory
because it fails to recognize this fact. The man who is guilty of the
pathetic fallacy sees in nature emotions that are not really there but
only in himself. Extreme examples of this confusion abound in Ruskin’s
own writings. Now the ancients also ran man and nature together, but in
an entirely different way. The Greek we are told never saw the oak tree
without at the same time seeing the dryad. There is in this and similar
associations a sort of overflow of the human realm upon the forms of
outer nature whereas the Rousseauist instead of bestowing imaginatively
upon the oak tree a conscious life and an image akin to his own and
so lifting it up to his level, would, if he could, become an oak tree
and so enjoy its unconscious and vegetative felicity. The Greek, one
may say, humanized nature; the Rousseauist naturalizes man. Rousseau’s
great discovery was revery; and revery is just this imaginative melting
of man into outer nature. If the ancients failed to develop in a marked
degree this art of revery, it was not because they lacked naturalists.
Both Stoics and Epicureans, the two main varieties of naturalists
with which classical antiquity was familiar, inclined to affirm the
ultimate identity of the human and the natural order. But both Stoics
and Epicureans would have found it hard to understand the indifference
to the intellect and its activities that Rousseauistic revery implies.
The Stoics to be sure employed the intellect on an impossible and
disheartening task--that of founding on the natural order virtues that
the natural order does not give. The Epicureans remind one rather in
much of their intellectual activity of the modern man of science. But
the Epicurean was less prone than the man of science to look on man
as the mere passive creature of environment. The views of the man of
science about the springs of conduct often seem to coincide rather
closely with those of Rousseau about “sensitive morality.” Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire says that when reclining on the banks of the Nile he felt
awakening within himself the instincts of the crocodile. The point of
view is Rousseauistic perhaps rather than genuinely scientific. An
Epicurus or a Lucretius would, we are probably safe in assuming, have
been disquieted by any such surrender to the subrational, by any such
encroachment of the powers of the unconscious upon conscious control.