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we could all enjoy this ecstasy of independence; since we cannot, its delights are only available to madmen and dictators.
Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day. Philosophy, under the influence of German idealism, became solipsistic, and self-development was proclaimed as the fundamental principle of ethics. As regards sentiment, there has to be a distasteful compromise between the search for isolation and the necessities of passion and economics. D. H. Lawrence story, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” has a hero who disdained such compromise to a gradually increasing extent and at last died of hunger and cold, but in the enjoyment of complete isolation; but this degree of consistency has not been achieved by the writers who praise solitude. The comforts of civilized life are not obtainable by a hermit, and a man who wishes to write books or produce works of art must submit to the ministrations of others if he is to survive while he does his work. In order to continue to feel solitary, he must be able to prevent those who serve him from impinging upon his ego, which is best accomplished if they are slaves. Passionate love, however, is a more difficult matter. So long as passionate lovers are regarded as in revolt against social tranunels, they are admired; but in real life the loverelation itself quickly becomes a social trammel, and the partner in love comes to be hated, all the more vehemently if the love is strong enough to make the bond difficult to break. Hence love comes to be conceived as a battle, in which each is attempting to destroy the other by breaking through the protecting walls of his or her ego. This point of view has become familiar through the writing of Strindberg, and, still more, of D. H. Lawrence.
Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of one’s own Self. This is feasible if the others are blood-relations, and the more nearly they are related the more easily it is possible. Hence an emphasis on race, leading, as in the case of the Ptolemys, to endogamy. How this affected Byron, we know; Wagner suggests a similar sentiment in the love of Siegmund and Sieglinde. Nietzsche, though not scandalously, preferred his sister to all other women: “How strongly I feel,” he writes to her, “in all
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that you say and do, that we belong to the same stock. You understand more of me than others do, because we come of the same parentage. This fits in very well with my ‘philosophy.'”
The principle of nationality, of which Byron was a protagonist, is an extension of the same “philosophy.” A nation is assumed to be a race, descended from common ancestors, and sharing some kind of “blood-consciousness.” Mazzini, who constantly found fault with the English for their failure to appreciate Bvron, conceived nations as possessed of a mystical individuality, and attributed to them the kind of anarchic greatness that other romantics sought in heroic men. Liberty, for nations, came to be regarded, not only by Mazzini, but by comparatively sober statesmen, as something absolute, which, in practice, made international cooperation impossible.
Belief in blood and race is naturally associated with anti-Semitism. At the same time, the romantic outlook, partly because it is aristocratic, and partly because it prefers passion to calculation, has a vehement contempt for commerce and finance. It is thus led to proclaim an opposition to capitalism which is quite different from that of the socialist who represents the interest of the proletariat, since it is an opposition based on dislike of economic preoccupations, and strengthened by the suggestion that the capitalist world is governed by Jews. This point of view is expressed by Byron on the rare occasions when he condescends to notice anything so vulgar as economic power:
Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal? Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain? (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.) Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all? The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.
The verse is perhaps not very musical, but the sentiment is quite of our time, and has been re-echoed by all Byron’s followers.
The romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality. In part, these fetters were a mere useless hindrance to desirable forms
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of activity, for every ancient community has developed rules of behaviour for which there is nothing to be said except that they are traditional. But egoistic passions, when once let loose, are not easily brought again into subjection to the needs of society. Christianity had succeeded, to some extent, in taming the Ego, but economic, political, and intellectual causes stimulated revolt against the Churches, and the romantic movement brought the revolt into the sphere of morals. By encouraging a new lawless Ego it made social cooperation impossible, and left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism. Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness; but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred and violence. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.
CHAPTER XIX Rousseau
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU ( 1712-1778), though a philosophe in the eighteenth-century French sense, was not what would now be called a “philosopher.” Nevertheless he had a powerful influence on philosophy, as on literature and taste and manners and politics. Whatever may be our opinion of his merits as a thinker, we must recognize his immense importance as a social force. This importance came mainly from his appeal to the heart, and to what, in his day, was called “sensibility.” He is the father of the romantic movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies. Ever since his time, those who considered themselves reformers have been divided into two groups.
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those who followed him and those who followed Locke. Sometimes they cooperated, and many individuals saw no incompatibility. But gradually the incompatibility has become increasingly evident. At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.
Rousseau’s biography was related by himself in his Confessions in great detail, but without any slavish regard for truth. He enjoyed making himself out a great sinner, and sometimes exaggerated in this respect; but there is abundant external evidence that he was destitute of all the ordinary virtues. This did not trouble him, because he considered that he always had a warm heart, which, however, never hindered him from base actions towards his best friends. I shall relate only so much of his life as is necessary in order to understand his thought and his influence.
He was born in Geneva, and educated as an orthodox Calvinist. His father, who was poor, combined the professions of watch-maker and dancing-master; his mother died when he was an infant, and he was brought up by an aunt. He left school at the age of twelve, and was apprenticed to various trades, but hated them all, and at the age of sixteen fled from Geneva to Savoy. Having no means of subsistence, he went to a Catholic priest and represented himself as wishing to be converted. The formal conversion took place at Turin, in an institution for catechumens; the process lasted nine days. He represents his motives as wholly mercenary: “I could not dissemble from myself that the holy deed I was about to do was at bottom the act of a bandit.” But this was written after he had reverted to Protestantism, and there is reason to think that for some years he was a sincerely believing Catholic. In 1742 he testified that a house in which he was living in 1730 had been miraculously saved from a fire by a bishop’s prayers.
Having been turned out of the institution at Turin with twenty francs in his pocket, he became lackey to a lady named Madame de Vercelli, who died three months later. At her death, he was found to be in possession of a ribbon which had belonged to her, which in fact he had stolen. He asserted that it had been given him by a certain maid, whom he liked; his assertion was believed, and she was punished. His excuse is odd: “Never was wickedness further from me than at this cruel moment; and when I accused the poor girl, it is
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contradictory and yet it is true that my affection for her was the cause of what I did. She was present to my mind, and I threw the blame from myself on the first object that presented itself.” This is a good example of
