Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
another form in art and literature.[39] The scientific imagination
should be controlled by judgment and work in strict subordination to
the facts. In art and literature, on the other hand, the imagination
should be free. Genius and originality are indeed in strict ratio to
this freedom. “In the fairy land of fancy,” says Young, “genius may
wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily
over its own empire of chimeras.” (The empire of chimeras was later to
become the tower of ivory.) This sheer indiscipline of the literary
imagination might seem in contrast with the discipline of the
scientific imagination an inferiority; but such was not the view of the
partisans of original genius. Kant, indeed, who was strongly influenced
in his “Critique of Æsthetic Judgment” by these English theorists,[40]
inclined to deny genius to the man of science for the very reason that
his imagination is so strictly controlled. The fact would seem to be
that a great scientist, a Newton let us say, has as much right to be
accounted a genius as Shakespeare. The inferiority of the genius of a
Newton compared with that of a Shakespeare lies in a certain coldness.
Scientific genius is thus cold because it operates in a region less
relevant to man than poetic genius; it is, in Bagehot’s phrase, more
remote from the “hearth of the soul.”
The scientific and the literary imagination are indeed not quite so
sharply contrasted by most of the theorists as might be inferred
from what I have said; most of them do not admit that the literary
imagination should be entirely free to wander in its own “empire of
chimeras.” Even literary imagination, they maintain, should in some
measure be under the surveillance of judgment or taste. One should
observe, however, that the judgment or taste that is supposed to
control or restrict genius is not associated with the imagination.
On the contrary, imagination is associated entirely with the element
of novelty in things, which means, in the literary domain, with the
expansive eagerness of a man to get his own uniqueness uttered. The
genius for the Greek, let us remind ourselves, was not the man who was
in this sense unique, but the man who perceived the universal; and as
the universal can be perceived only with the aid of the imagination,
it follows that genius may be defined as imaginative perception of the
universal. The universal thus conceived not only gives a centre and
purpose to the activity of the imagination, but sets bounds to the free
expansion of temperament and impulse, to what came to be known in the
eighteenth century as nature.