Rousseau and Romanticism — Jean-Jacques Rousseau — John Shaqi
Rousseau and Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · en
I have already spoken of the contrast established by the theorists of
original genius in the eighteenth century between the different types
of imagination--especially between the literary and the scientific
imagination. According to these theorists, it will be remembered, the
scientific imagination should be strictly subordinated to judgment,
whereas the literary imagination, freed from the shackles of imitation,
should be at liberty to wander wild in its own empire of chimeras,
or, at all events, should be far less sharply checked by judgment.
It is easy to follow the extension of these English views of genius
and imagination into the France of Rousseau and Diderot, and then
the elaboration of these same views, under the combined influence of
both France and England, in Germany. I have tried to show that Kant,
especially in his “Critique of Judgment,” and Schiller in his “Æsthetic
Letters” (1795) prepare the way for the conception of the creative
imagination that is at the very heart of the romantic movement.
According to this romantic conception, as we have seen, the imagination
is to be free, not merely from outer formalistic constraint, but from
all constraint whatever. This extreme romantic emancipation of the
imagination was accompanied by an equally extreme emancipation of the
emotions. Both kinds of emancipation are, as I have tried to show,
a recoil partly from neo-classical judgment--a type of judgment
which seemed to oppress all that is creative and spontaneous in man
under a weight of outer convention; partly, from the reason of the
Enlightenment, a type of reason that was so logical and abstract that
it seemed to mechanize the human spirit, and to be a denial of all
that is immediate and intuitive. The neo-classical judgment, with its
undue unfriendliness to the imagination, is itself a recoil, let us
remember, from the imaginative extravagance of the “metaphysicals,” the
intellectual romanticists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and also, if we take a sufficiently wide view, from the Quixotic type
of romanticism, the romanticism of action, that we associate with the
Middle Ages.