Rousseau and Romanticism. Babbitt Irving

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СКАЧАТЬ was also largely of English origin. This was the idea of progress through scientific observation and experiment. As a result of this type of positivism, discovery was being added to discovery. Science was kindling man’s imagination and opening up before him what he really craves, the vista of an endless advance. Why should not literature likewise do something new and original instead of sticking forever in the same rut of imitation? In its Greek form the doctrine of imitation was, as I have tried to show, not only flexible and progressive, but in its own way, positive and experimental. But in modern times the two main forms of imitation, the classical and the Christian, have worked within the limits imposed by tradition and traditional models. The imitation of models, the Christian imitation of Christ, let us say, or the classical imitation of Horace, may indeed be a very vital thing, the imitation of one soul by another soul; but when carried out in this vital way, the two main forms of imitation tend to clash, and the compromise between them, as I have already said, resulted in a good deal of formalism. By its positive and critical method science was undermining every traditional belief. Both the Christian and the classical formalists would have been the first to deny that the truths of imitation for which they stood could be divorced from tradition and likewise put on a positive and critical basis. The fact is indubitable in any case that the discrediting of tradition has resulted in a progressive lapse from the religious and the humanistic to the naturalistic level. An equally indubitable fact is that scientific or rationalistic naturalism tended from the early eighteenth century to produce emotional naturalism, and that both forms of naturalism were hostile to the doctrine of imitation.

      

      The trend away from the doctrine of imitation towards emotional naturalism finds revolutionary expression in the literary field in such a work as Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759). Addison had asserted, as we have seen, the superiority of what is original in a man, of what comes to him spontaneously, over what he acquires by conscious effort and culture. Young, a personal friend of Addison’s, develops this contrast between the “natural” and the “artificial” to its extreme consequences. “Modern writers,” he says, “have a choice to make. … They may soar in the regions of liberty, or move in the soft fetters of easy imitation.” “An original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made; imitations are often a sort of manufacture, wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of preëxistent materials not their own.” “We may as well grow good by another’s virtue, or fat by another’s food, as famous by another’s thought.” One evidence that we are still living in the movement of which Young is one of the initiators is that his treatise will not only seem to most of us a very spirited piece of writing—that it certainly is—but doctrinally sound. And yet it is only one of those documents very frequent in literary history which lack intrinsic soundness, but which can be explained if not justified as a recoil from an opposite extreme. The unsoundness of Young’s work comes out clearly if one compares it with the treatise on the “Sublime” attributed to Longinus which is not a mere protest against a previous excess, but a permanently acceptable treatment of the same problem of genius and inspiration. Longinus exalts genius, but is at the same time regardful of culture and tradition, and even emphasizes the relation between inspiration and the imitation of models. Young insinuates, on the contrary, that one is aided in becoming a genius by being brainless and ignorant. “Some are pupils of nature only, nor go further to school.” “Many a genius probably there has been which could neither write nor read.” It follows almost inevitably from these premises that genius flourishes most in the primitive ages of society before originality has been crushed beneath the superincumbent weight of culture and critics have begun their pernicious activities. Young did not take this step himself, but it was promptly taken by others on the publication of the Ossianic poems (1762). Ossian is at once added to the list of great originals already enumerated by Addison—Homer, Pindar, the patriarchs of the Old Testament and Shakespeare (whom Young like the later romanticists opposes to Pope). “Poetry,” says Diderot, summing up a whole movement, “calls for something enormous, barbaric and savage.”

      This exaltation of the virtues of the primitive ages is simply the projection into a mythical past of a need that the man of the eighteenth century feels in the present—the need to let himself go. This is what he understands by his “return to nature.” A whole revolution is implied in this reinterpretation of the word nature. To follow nature in the classical sense is to imitate what is normal and representative in man and so to become decorous. To be natural in the new sense one must begin by getting rid of imitation and decorum. Moreover, for the classicist, nature and reason are synonymous. The primitivist, on the other hand, means by nature the spontaneous play of impulse and temperament, and inasmuch as this liberty is hindered rather than helped by reason, he inclines to look on reason, not as the equivalent but as the opposite of nature.

      If one is to understand this development, one should note carefully how certain uses of the word reason, not merely by the neo-classicists but by the anti-traditionalists, especially in religion, tended to produce this denial of reason. It is a curious fact that some of those who were attacking the Christian religion in the name of reason, were themselves aware that mere reason, whether one understood by the word abstract reasoning or uninspired good sense, does not satisfy, that in the long run man is driven either to rise higher or to sink lower than reason. St. Evremond, for example, prays nature to deliver man from the doubtful middle state in which she has placed him—either to “lift him up to angelic radiance,” or else to “sink him to the instinct of simple animals.”[38] Since the ascending path, the path that led to angelic radiance, seemed to involve the acceptance of a mass of obsolete dogma, man gradually inclined to sink below the rational level and to seek to recover the “instinct of simple animals.” Another and still more fundamental fact that some of the rationalists perceived and that militated against their own position, is that the dominant element in man is not reason, but imagination, or if one prefers, the element of illusion. “Illusion,” said Voltaire himself, “is the queen of the human heart.” The great achievement of tradition at its best was to be at once a limit and a support to both reason and imagination and so to unite them in a common allegiance. In the new movement, at the same time that reason was being encouraged by scientific method to rise up in revolt against tradition, imagination was being fascinated and drawn to the naturalistic level by scientific discovery and the vista of an endless advance that it opened up. A main problem, therefore, for the student of this movement is to determine what forms of imaginative activity are possible on the naturalistic level. A sort of understanding was reached on this point by different types of naturalists in the course of the eighteenth century. One form of imagination, it was agreed, should be displayed in science, 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, СКАЧАТЬ