5
The psychological plane of the. second Romantic phase: the complex modern mind of intellectual and imaginative curiosity - the contribution of "dreamers of daring tales" - the seminal significance of Rousseau
Looking at certain elements of the Renascence Romanticism - the curious, the audacious, the subtly sweet, the drive towards the intimately inward and strangely symbolic or at least allegoric and away from the pressure of the rational as well as the dogmatic - we might be disposed to mix up with it the Romanticism which came much later and to consider as almost its revival in a new garb that revolt against a pseudo-Classical Age of Reason by writers of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. But the voices of the new Romanticism are the beginners, as Sri Aurobindo1 says, of "Poetry as the fullness of imaginative self-expression of the entirely modernised mind... They are the free, impetuous but often narrow sources of these wider flowings. We see the initial tendencies which undergo a rapid growth of meaning and changes of form in the subsequent decades, until now all their sense and seeking have reached... a tense straining on many lines to find some last truth and utterance which must end either in a lingering decadence or in a luminous and satisfied self-exceeding. From the beginning this modern movement, in literature as in thought, takes the form of an ever widening and deepening intellectual and imaginative curiosity, a passion for knowledge, a passion for finding, an eye of intelligence awakened to all the multiform possibilities of new truth and discovery. The Renascence was an awakening of the life spirit to wonder and curiosity and reflection and the stirred dis-covery of the things of the life and the mind; but the fullness of the modern age has been a much larger comprehensive awakening of the informed and clarified intellect to a wider
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curiosity, a much more extensive adventure of discovery and an insistent need to know and possess the truth of Nature and man and the universe and whatever may lie hidden behind their first appearances and suggestions.... The soul of the Renascence was a lover of life and an amateur of knowledge; the modem spirit is drawn by the cult of a clear, broad and minute intellectual and practical Truth; knowledge and a power of life founded on the power of knowledge are the dominating necessities of its being. Poetry in this age has followed intellectually and imaginatively the curve of this great impulse."
That the essential note of the new Romanticism was not of the creative Life-force but of the creative Intelligence can easily be marked if, just as we put Shakespeare face to face with Milton or Chaucer or Bacon, we compare certain lines from the supreme Elizabethan to those of the most outstanding later poets. Harken to Shakespeare talking of passing away from the turmoil of human life - a verse already cited in the earlier comparison -
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
Then listen to Keats talking of dying with the nightingale's song a final music falling on deaf ears:
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Again, here is Shakespeare on release from the obstructive tangibilities of earth-existence by body-dissolution:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
See now Shelley utter a thought of reaching safety from life's ravage:
From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
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Or mark the way Shakespeare expresses a sense of oppression and misfortune:
Who would fardels bear.
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?
and compare it to Wordsworth's confrontation of universal mystery:
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
Then note how Shakespeare articulates the peace of death as an end to human fret:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well,
and compare his speech with Shelley's about the transcendence of time's blind passage by Keats's soul:
He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Or take Shakespeare's panegyric to the power of pleasing which Cleopatra's beauty possessed:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women
Cloy the appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies,
and put this praise side by side with that famous general reflection of Keats's:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
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Or try upon your artistic sensibility that Shakespearian "idea":
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we may,
and compare the response to it with what Wordsworth draws
by:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.
In Shakespeare at all times we have a quiver of the Life-force, a passion of the entrails, as it were, an impact on the sensational being, a most vivid vibrant word. In Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats we have a calmer fineness, the more conceptive intensity starting as if from the brain proper in imaginative action.
Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out this difference while dwelling on the sovereign intuitiveness of the Shakespearian Life-force's speech and stressing the need to develop a corresponding intuitiveness in the modem poetic language which cannot quite return to that speech but takes off from where the later Romantics stood. Sri Aurobindo remarks that even the ideas that seem to belong to the region of the thinking intelli-gence have subtly in the Elizabethans a vitalistic inspiration. "It is sufficient," he2 says, "to compare Shakespeare's
Life's but a walking shadow,...
... it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing -
and Shelley's voicing of a kindred idea of transience,
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Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence."
We may continue Sri Aurobindo's comparison by instancing a moment of life-pessimism in even a post-Romantic, a much later Romantic poet of the nineteenth century than Shelley. There Meredith, brooding on a situation of "Modern Love", is speaking not exactly of death but still of life's baffling tragedy that brings vast powers to work out almost a blind and null result:
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! -
In tragic hints see here what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight's ocean force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
We may note that Meredith in these lines has a semi-Shakespearian turn of speech with a crowd of assimilated metaphors or close-pressing similes. The first two lines recall even more directly some of the verses preceding in the same passage those quoted by Sri Aurobindo -
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death...
But the reflective mind proper rather than the Life-force thinking is vocal both in the general posture of Meredith's phrases and in his sound-movement. There is even a touch of
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self-conscious deliberative thought. On the whole, the inner urgency of vision finds tongue through a half-intuitivised intellect excitedly pressing idea and image into a complex pattern and appealing to a poetic stir in our grey cells.
Not that to write from the poetic intelligence as the basic plane is to be unemotional. A Romantic like Shelley appears often one long stream of emotion, and all the Romantics of his period insisted on the free flow of feeling. There is emotion in the Classical poets too. Indeed, without a moved language no poetry can exist, just as no poetry can exist without the wings of the imagination in the word. Both may be controlled, both may be let loose - but they must be present. In the Greeks and Romans, in Dante and Milton, Corneille and Racine, they are controlled, though often very intense - and the controlling actually adds at times to the effect of the intensity. In the Elizabethan Romantics they are mostly let loose, though even in the letting loose there is the Shakespearian way and there is the Chapmanian: the way of the outbreak whose pieces are as it were still held together when they fall and that of the disinte-grating eruption. The later Romantics frequently stand mid-way in this matter. They have often the overbrimming of the Elizabethans, but it is the thought-mind that yields to the cry of the heart and the entrails, and not the heart's or the entrails' cry that seizes on the mind of thought. This leads to a certain change in the emotion which is apparently drowning it, just as, on the contrary, the intelligence proper undergoes a change with the Elizabethans in being gripped by the emotion. The feeling-tone of the later Romantics becomes tinged with the thought-mind leaping into it and tends to be shimmering sentiment rather than the brave colour and surge of the passional nature. Further, into this sentiment enters the stress of a plane beyond either the life-soul or the mind-soul and creates the subtlest, the profoundest shade of the new Roman-ticism. Within a predominantly emotional appearance the final and total result is illustrated to perfection by one of the most beautiful of Shelley's lyrics:
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O World! O Life!O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more - oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
The basic plane here, on which the emotion has played so poignantly but which yet softens the poignancy to a touch of deeply wounded thought and into which steals an indescrib-able unearthliness that is at once an ache and a glow, is the same as the one we find, with the thought unsubdued by the emotion and the unearthliness acting from behind a veil, in that passage from Shelley's own Hymn to what he significantly calls Intellectual Beauty, meaning thereby that the Beauty he worships needs for its apprehension a philosophical intui-tiveness such as makes an important part of the core of his being:
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form - where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown,
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom? ...
To drive home to our critical sensibility the common basis of
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both these excerpts in the creative Intelligence, the one highly charged with feeling, the other more tempered in its heart-cry as well as a little lower in poetic quality, we may take a pair of stanzas from each of two sonnets by Shakespeare. In these stanzas Shakespeare mixes reflection and emotion, but the basic life-plane declares itself in the response which "our nerves of mental sensation" at once return to the word-texture and the rhythm-movement:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
0 how shall summer's honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays? ...
That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest...
The reason why a Romantic like Shelley is not easily recognised as functioning on a basis of the creative Intelligence is well hit off broadly by C. M. Bowra:3 "The Romantics were far from thinking that intelligence is unimportant or that thought is not necessary to poetry, but they insisted that this thought must be imaginative and not abstract and that it must look at all the qualities of things and not at their general natures ... But in their distrust of reason, as the eighteenth century under-stood it, the Romantics found themselves almost forced to concentrate on something which is not indeed irrational but
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might become so in less powerful hands. The result is that their poetry lacks that element of strict prolonged thought which gives an additional strength not merely to the great Greeks but to such writers as Racine and Goethe, whose strictly poetical power owes a great deal to the hard thought which has preceded composition and is indeed transcended in the poetry, but none the less is invisibly present and powerful. The Romantics have their moments of inspiring thought and wonderful insight, but they lack this special strength which comes from uniting sustained mental effort to poetry."
In Romantic poetry, unlike in Classical, thought does not stay for long within its own proper sphere: it either plunges into emotion or draws beyond the Intelligence upward towards spheres which the Classical poet receives influences from but never approaches - at least never with a conscious straining. The Romantic's approach, however, is not sufficiently assured: that is why his thought gets attenuated without his achieving very frequently the directness and clarity native to what is beyond it, and that is also why that directness and clarity are not able in him to keep strong thought going in an intuitive way and without its getting limited by the Intelligence's range of thinking. On the other hand, the plunge into emotion diffuses the thought and, in comparison, the thought of even the Elizabethan poet may seem more precise in spite of being values of the Life-force etched out into idea patterns. Part of the thought-diffusing emotionalism that is at times identified with Romanticism by some critics is due to a deliberate attempt by the intellectual being to undo its intellectuality and res-tore the passion and feeling and sensuous gusto that it has chilled and thinned away into sentiment verging at its extreme on an unreal fineness. "There is then an attempt," says Sri Aurobindo,4 "to get back to the natural fullness of the vital and physical life, but the endeavour fails in sincerity and success because it is impossible; the mind of man having got so far cannot return upon its course, undo what it has made of itself and recover the glad childhood of its early vigorous nature. There is instead of the simplicity of spontaneous life a search
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after things striking, exaggerated, abnormal, violent, new, in the end a morbid fastening on perversities, on all that is ugly, glaring and coarse on the plea of their greater reality, on exaggerations of vital instinct and sensation, on physical wrynesses and crudities and things unhealthily strange. The thought-mind, losing the natural full-blooded power of the vital being, pores on these things, stimulates the failing blood with them and gives itself an illusion of some forceful sensation of living." Much Romanticism on the European Continent took this way and acquired the taint which led Goethe to brand it as "disease", and much in post-Romantic literature, whether avowing itself as Romantic or no, has gone thus "decadent" in various forms. The makers of the English Romantic Revival seldom went far on the road to decadence. But even on that road the accent of the intellectual being is distinguishable from that of the Life-force. And in the English Romantics the true substance and form of thought can be traced more distinctly in the midst of all emotionalism and show these poets to be initial voices of the entirely modernised intellect imaginatively deployed.
Anticipations of the modern intellectual movement's inci-pient tendencies in poetry may be watched in three places. One is in certain post-Elizabethan poets of what has come to be labelled as the Metaphysical School for its fusion of intricate thought with sense-impressions and of far-fetched scholarship with immediate feeling and of supra-physical longing with fanciful sentiment. The chief names here are Donne, Marvell, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan. Mostly they fall between two stools - they have not the Elizabethan verve to carry off their ingenuities nor the real intellectual self-possession which can fulfil their striving beyond the Elizabethan tumult of the Life-force. But now and again, through the twisted nervous labour both sensuous and imaginative of Donne's wit and wisdom and through the at once homely and colourful, idealistic and amatory piquancy of Marvell, we get the anticipation of a later mental subtlety, and more often, through Herbert's simple penetrative fervours and Crashaw's lyrical many-hued reli-
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giosity and Vaughan's intellectual vision's luminous attempt at transcendence of itself, there glimmers out a presage of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats.
A forerunner more immediate in time as well as in several moods is the effort made by poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson, Chatterton and Cowper in the third quarter of the eighteenth century to break away, in Sri Aurobindo's words,5 "from the prison of the formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical cult [Dryden and Pope and Johnson] . ... Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth of language or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the pre-Restoration diction and to modify it to suit the intellectualised treatment of thought and life which was now an indispensable element; for the old rich vital utterance was no longer possible, an intellectualised speech had become a fixed and a well-acquired need of a more developed mentality. Romanticism of the modem type now makes its first appearance in the choice of the subjects of poetic interest and here and there in the treatment, though not yet quite in the grain and the spirit. Especially, there is the beginning of a direct gaze of the poetic intelligence and imagination upon life and Nature and of another and a new power in English speech, the poetry of sentiment as distinguished from the inspired voice of sheer feeling or passion. But all these newer motives are only incipient and unable to get free expression because there is still a heavy weight of the past intellectual tradition... There is no sign of the sudden uplifting that after a few decades was to come as if upon the sudden wings of a splendid moment."
A third precursor of the new Romanticism's general psy-chological source is the poet to whom these singers looked back sometimes in the manner and movement of their verse and who was mainly responsible for the establishment of an authentically intellectualised speech in English poetry: Milton. Particularly in the early Milton of the Nativity Hymn, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and Lycidas we have a richness and
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flexibility and supple penetrativeness which are almost lost in the later Milton's grandiose epic chant:
Oft, on a plat of rising ground,
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar;
Or, if the air will not permit,
Some still removed place will fit,
Where glowing embers through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom...
I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death...
And set to work millions of spinning worms
That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk....
Then sing of secret things that came to pass
When beldam Nature in her cradle was...
Here is a blending of Elizabethan Romanticism and the old Classicism and it looks forward to the nineteenth-century Romantic mind's composite manner. But the poetic intelligence, unlike in most of the Metaphysicals who came before Milton, is already master of the Life-force, though not aloof from that power's characteristic play. Only, this poetic intelligence is still of the old type and not of the modem variety. All the more is its alignment with the Graeco-Roman spirit visible in Paradise Lost where in his own style of packed Latinised English Milton presents us with imaginative structures of the inspired reason and the chastened and enlightened aesthetic sense. To this spirit we can no more return than to the Romanticism born of the impetuous Life-force which cared nothing for thought except as it enriched its own colourful swell. Not that the inspired reason and the enlightened
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aesthetic sense are absent in the new Romantics. In relation to their work Sri Aurobindo6 has written: "English poetry has got away from the Elizabethan outbreak nearer to a kinship with the mind and manner of the Greek and Latin poets and their intellectual descendants, though still, it is to be noted, keeping something, a subtle and intimate turn, a power of fire and ether which has become native to it, a legacy from the Shakespearian speech which was not there in its beginnings. This imagina-tively intellectual basis of speech remains constant down to the end of the Victorian era." Wordsworth's "resort to the straight-forward force of the simplest speech dependent on the weight of the substance and thought for its one sufficient source of power"7 has, at its best, something of true Classicism about it, as also has in its high moments the not infrequent recourse by him to a semi-Miltonic diction without Milton's compactness. Shelley in sections of Adonais and in large tracts of Prometheus Unbound (minus the lyrics), Keats in Hyperion and even Byron in some of his rare forceful sincerities have to a marked degree the same source of inspiration. But there has entered into that source a totally non-Classical afflatus, because of two things. First, the modem intelligence is of another mould than the ancient Classical and is far removed from even the Miltonic mind whether in its initial delicacy and suppleness or in its final Classicism of power and massiveness and sheer intellectual vision. Secondly, as never before in so consistent a shape in occidental literature, there falls upon this poetic mind a higher light which occasions temporarily a speech which is sheerly from above the human mentality.
The modern intelligence, says Sri Aurobindo,8 "sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to all manner of the possibilities of truth and to a crowding stream and mass of interests, a never satisfied minuteness of detail, an endless succession of pregnant generalisations." It is too thronged "with subtle thought-matter, too brooding, sensitive, respon-sive to many things" - often things "not easily expressible" -to be capable of a "new Parthenon... whether in the white marble subdued to the hand or in the pure and lucid spacings
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of the idea and the word" .9 Turned on Nature, this mind, in its functionings outside poetry, "has led to the immeasurable development of the observing and analysing eye of Science."10 Turned on man in his external visible being, it has been the cause of a large and "minute enquiry into the origins and antiquity and history of the race, into the sources of its present development, into all its physical, psychological, sociological being and the many ideal speculations and practical aspira-tions of its future which have arisen from this new knowledge of the human being and his possibilities".11 Turned on man in his internal invisible part, it has been the mainspring of a "growing subjectivity, an intense consciousness of the I, the soul or the self, not in any mystic withdrawal within or inward meditation, or not in that pre-eminently, but in relation to the whole of life and Nature. This characteristic distinguishes modern subjectivism from the natural subjectivity of former times, which either tended towards an intense solitary inward-ness or was superficial and confined to a few common though often strongly emphasised notes. Ancient or mediaeval indivi-duality might return more self-assertive or violent responses to life, but the modern kind is more subtly and pervasively self-conscious and the stronger in thought and feeling to throw its own image on things, because it is more precluded from throwing itself out freely in action and living. This turn was in fact an inevitable result of an increasing force of intellectual-ism; for great intensity of thought, when it does not isolate itself from emotion, reactive sensation and aesthetic response, as in science and in certain kinds of philosophy, must be attended by a quickening and intensity of these other parts of our mentality".12
No doubt, the strong scientific penchant in the age has set up an ideal of objectivity, of an outward-gazing vision and brought about in literature the phenomenon of so-called Realism. But always "the self-conscious thinking of the modern mind which brings into prominent relief the rest of the mental personality and stamps the whole work with it"13 gets into the way of the strictly objective or realistic ideal. And the
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subjective trend betrays itself all the more when the love of close and minute observation that distinguishes the age is channelled into psychologising. For, the moment we begin to psychologise closely and minutely in relation to whatever human situation is held up for objective study and especially the moment we go below the surface "we are at once preparing to go back into ourselves. For it is only through our own psychology, through its power of response to and of identification with the mind and soul in others that we can know their inner psychology; for the most part our psychological account of others is only an account of the psychological impressions of them they produce in our own mentality. This we see even in the realistic writers in the strongly personal and limited way in which they render the psychology of their creatures in one or two always recurring main notes upon which they ring minute variations".14 Also in Realism's main notes there is "an exaggeration and overstressing which betrays its true character, the posthumous child of roman-ticism perverted by a pseudo-scientific preoccupation".15 Even its fondness for the littlenesses, imperfections, uglinesses, morbidities in man's life and psychology as if they were the whole or the greater part of him and as if life "were a psychological and physiological disease, a fungoid growth upon material Nature",16 is not unconnected with Romanti-cism which too "laid a constant stress on the grotesque, diseased, abnormal, but for the sake of artistic effect, to add another tone to its other glaring colours. Realism professes to render the same facts in the proportions of truth and science, but being art and not science, it inevitably seeks for pro-nounced effects by an evocative stress ..."17 The subjective trend is betrayed by this pressing towards a conspicuous vividness as well as by the original choice of one or two main notes for expressing "reality".
In poetry with its deeper founts of creation, objectivism is even more shot with the subjective personality and the work becomes a history of the poet's own soul in the guise of objective expression. The attempt at deliberate impersonal
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presentation shows itself, on a near scrutiny, to be the shaping of everything by a "strong subjective personality... into a mask-reflection of its own characteristic moods".18 And where - not only in poetry but in all imaginative literature - the ideal is not avowedly objective or realistic, the creative mind, conscious with greater acuteness of the self within that really does the whole work everywhere, tends often "to turn to it for a theme or for the mould of its psychological creations, to a conscious intimate subjectivism."19 Then we have a constant sifting of delicate shades of desire and reverie, a pressing towards more and more inward realities, a plunging or rising by the intellect itself towards hidden fountains beyond it in order to bathe its own faculties in a finer light, an emphasising of the desiring, dreaming, aspiring, intuiting individuality and of its rights and ideals against all outer powers, a defence of the personal self's precious uniqueness against social order or traditional authority.
The modern mind's close and minute eye and touch upon outward Nature has led in poetry to an imaginative and sympathetic concentration on her sights, sounds, objects, sensible impressions, a detailed and intimate visualisation of her appearances and an effort to go beyond appearances to a close communion with her soul, as it were. "The older poetry," writes Sri Aurobindo,20"directed an occasional objective eye on Nature, turning a side glance from life or thought to get some colouring or decorative effect or a natural border or background for life or something that illustrated, ministered to or enriched the human thought or mood of the moment at most for a casual indulgence of the imagination and senses in natural beauty. But the intimate subjective treatment of Nature, the penetrated human response to her is mostly absent or comes only in rare and brief touches. On the larger scale her subjective life is realised not with an immediate communion, but through myth and the image of divine personalities that govern her powers.... Nature now lives for the poet as an independent presence, a greater or equal power dwelling side by side with him or embracing and dominating his existence.
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Even the objective vision and interpretation of her has deve-loped, where it continues at all the older poetic method, a much more minute and delicate eye and touch in place of the large, strong and simply beautiful or telling effects which satisfied an earlier imagination." But where modern poetry "goes beyond that fine outwardness, it has brought us a whole world of new vision; working sometimes by a vividly sugges-tive presentation, sometimes by a separation of effects and an imaginative reconstruction which reveals aspects the first outward view had hidden in, sometimes by a penetrating impressionism which in its finest subtleties seems to be coming back by a detour to a sensuously mystical treatment, it goes within through the outward and now not so much presents as recreates physical Nature for us through the imaginative vision" .21
Sri Aurobindo22 continues: "But the direct subjective ap-proach to Nature is the most distinctly striking characteristic turn of the modern mentality. The approach proceeds from two sides which constantly meet each other and create between them a nexus of experience between man and Nature which is the modern way of responding to the universal Spirit. On one side there is the subjective sense of Nature herself as a great life, a being, a Presence, with impressions, moods, emotions of her own expressed in her many symbols of life and stressing her objective manifestations.... On the other side there is a sensitive human response, moved in emotion or thrilling in sensation or stirred by sheer beauty or responsive in mood, a response of satisfaction and possession or of dissatisfied yearning and seeking, in the whole an attempt to relate or harmonise the soul and mind and sensational and vital being of the human individual with the soul and mind and life and body of the visible and sensible universe."
Man's modern outlook on himself, in the warp and weft of Space and Time and in the stress of the universe and in all that is meant by his present, past and future, started poetically by an excited responsive valuing of, as Sri Aurobindo23 recounts, "all that had been ignored and put aside as uncouth and
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barbarous by the older classical or otherwise limited type of mentality. It sought out rather all that was unfamiliar and attractive by its unlikeness to the present, the primitive, the savage, mediaeval man and his vivid life and brilliant setting, the Orient very artificially seen through a heavily coloured glamour, the ruins of the past, the life of the peasant or the solitary, the outlaw, man near to Nature undisguised by conventions and uncorrupted by an artificial culture or man in revolt against conventions, a willed preference for these strange and interesting aspects of humanity, as in Nature for her wild and grand, savage and lonely scenes or her rich and tropical haunts or her retired spots of self-communion. On one side a sentimental or a philosophic naturalism, on the other a flamboyant or many-hued romanticism, superficial mediae-valism, romanticised Hellenism, an interest in the fantastic and the supernatural, tendencies of an intellectual or an ideal transcendentalism, are the salient constituting characters. They make up that brilliant and confusedly complex, but often crude and unfinished literature... which forms a hasty transition from the Renascence and its after-fruits to the modernism of today which is already becoming the modernism of yester-day" - the literature which stretches in France from Rousseau and Chateaubriand to Hugo and takes on its way Goethe, Schiller and Heine in Germany and covers in England Burns and Byron and the five names that stand out in the annals of the second phase of Romanticism and give to it not only, as the others do, its distinction from both Classicism and the post-Renascence Romantic outburst but also a new character pregnant with the promise of an utmost luminosity in future poetic expression.
That luminosity is almost with us in a few poets gifted with an exceptional insight, who seem to be helping the Day of the Spirit to widen out of the dawn-flush spelled by those five names. But the modern mind, turning to look for things beyond Nature and man, met with a long-persistent blankness due to the growth of scepticism and denial in the wake of science. A protracted fight ensued between the old faiths and
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the new sciences, in which often the former could make only a difficult self-defence or keep to past beliefs with "a doubtful and tormented, a merely intellectual or a conventional cling-ing".24 Now, however, the atheistic and materialistic cry does not ring defiantly any more and there has been a revolution in scientific thought itself compelling a plastic, more speculative approach. Outside this thought, "with the return to subjective intuition and a fresh adventuring of knowledge and imagina-tion into the beyond, modern poetry, freed from the sceptical attitude, is beginning in this field too to turn the balance in its favour as against the old classical and mediaeval literature" .25 The spiritual vision it is gaining is nearer, less grossly human, more authentically supernatural; the new "symbols it is beginning to create and its reinterpretation of the old symbols are more adequate."26 The promise is being slowly fulfilled of the time when the ebb of positive faith was to some extent compensated for by a light and force of inspiration that came into the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats and carried again and again the influences then abroad beyond themselves.
The influences thus uplifted were those which had found expression in the vehement idealism of the French Revolution and in German transcendentalism and Romanticism. They too were, in several respects, a help against the growing sceptical bent, but they were intellectual in their idea and substance though not untouched with keener fires than the intellect commands. In the understanding of these influences that underwent in the minds of those five English poets, each a remarkable individuality, a sudden transformation, we must look upon Rousseau as the key figure. Of both the French Revolution and much in German Romanticism and, indirectly, of even the transcendentalist philosophy in Germany he is the original inspirer and he has in him, amidst much miasma, some vague breath of
An ampler ether, a diviner air
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that came into the world of European poetry with Wordsworth.
But before we turn our gaze to this key-figure we may distinguish a trend of mind which ran parallel with Rous-seauism and contributed to the Romantic Movement a nuance sometimes blending with Rousseauism and sometimes stand-ing as an additional ingredient of the post-Rousseau mentality. Wordsworth himself, in a passage of his :Prelude recollecting "the golden store of books" devoured during holidays from Cambridge, has indicated that trend as part of his own being:
The tales that charm away the wakeful night
In Araby, romances; legends penned
For solace by dim light of monkish lamps;
Fictions, for ladies of their love, devised
By youthful squires; adventures endless, spun
By the dismantled warrior in old age,
Out of the bowels of those very schemes
In which his youth did first extravagate;
These spread like day, and something in the shape
Of these will live till man shall be no more.
Dumb yearnings, hidden appetites, are ours
And they must have their food. Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements...
The preparers of the precious food, the servitors of childhood's royalty are blessed by Wordsworth and hailed as "dreamers" and "forgers of daring tales",
Who make our wish, our power, our thought a deed,
An empire, a possession, - ye whom time
And seasons serve; all Faculties to whom
Earth crouches, the elements are potter's clay,
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.
Romanticism as the triumphant magic of bold or tender reverie
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wandering over the past and the remote, relishing even the sombre and the weird, was a slowly growing force independent of Rousseau. But it matured as a world-factor when it entered into the Movement whose originator was that earthquake of a Frenchman.
To pierce to the very centre of Rousseau's significance we must recall the extraordinary experience he had in 1751. He has described it in a letter to M. de Malesherbes eleven years later: "I was going to see Diderot, then a prisoner at Vincennes; I had taken in my pocket a Mercure de France and I glanced at it as I walked. I came on the question set for discussion by the Academy of Dijon which gave occasion for my first essay. If ever anything could resemble a sudden inspiration, it was the movement which took place in me at that moment; all at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of ideas appeared there at the same time with an inexpressible force and confusion; I felt my head seized by giddiness, like that of drunkenness; a violent palpitation oppressed me, my breast heaved. Not being able to breathe while walking, I let myself fall down under one of the trees in the avenue and spent there a half-hour of such agitation that on rising I found the front of my vest bathed with tears I had no idea I had shed. Oh, dear Sir, if I could ever write a quarter of what I saw and felt beneath that tree, how clearly could I present all the contradictions of our social system, with what force I could reveal all the abuses of our institutions, with what simplicity I could show that man is naturally good, and that it is through these institutions alone that men become wicked."
It is extremely curious that the sentence which is the keynote of this strange account - "all at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights" - should be caught up by Wordsworth in a more objective form when, speaking of the "dreamers" and "forgers of daring tales", he refers to the magic "Faculties" that find
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Perhaps he has imaginatively touched the blending-point within himself between the Romanticism he is describing and the Romantic Rousseauism to which he has given a sublimation in his own best work. Perhaps the blending-point is further lit up by those other lines in his passage -
Our childhood sits,
That hath more power than all the elements ...
For, did not Rousseau, when he held that "man is naturally good", imply the state of Nature such as every individual experiences during his unsophisticated childhood? And did not Wordsworth, while sublimating Rousseauistic Romanticism, see childhood come "trailing clouds of glory" from God, possessed of a faculty to which all things appear
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream?
Now to Rousseau's own extraordinary experience. The main points standing out of the episode are: first, the experience is mystical and charged with illumination and intuition, a breaking from some psychological region of direct sight and direct feeling beyond the human into the normal conscious-ness; second, the part which receives the supernormal vision and truth-touch is the thinking mind where immediately the "thousand lights" become a crowd of ideas simultaneously present; third, the complexity and force with which the mystical experience occurs creates a brilliant confusion and a violent stir both emotional and nervous. The thinking mind is the dazzled and disordered recipient of truths that go home to it from above itself and it is the medium of them to the heart and the vitalistic being which at the same time give a most moved response and are quite thrown off their balance. And the truths with which the thinking mind is seized revolve round the seeing and feeling that man holds within him in his
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ultimate nature the essence of goodness and that this essence is covered up by an artificial growth of complicated and iniqui-tous externalities miscalled civilisation and that, if the exter-nalities could be removed and free spontaneous expression allowed to man's core of being, all problems would be solved. The truths may be summed up in the cry which Rousseau subsequently evoked all over Europe: "Back to Nature" - and they may be interpreted to mean a return from the rigidly and intricately patterned outward consciousness to some inward and basic soul-simplicity and from the mazy over-develop-ment of the arts and sciences of civilisation to a poetic primitiveness, a simple and uncorrupted life in imaginative accord with elemental earth, in which there is utter freedom of the individual and yet a collective harmony, a blissful blend of anarchy and order, the establishment of a Golden Age such as the myths and legends of all humanity report to have existed in a pre-history when the human was not divorced from the divine.
A general aspect to note is that here we have an experience which is mystical without falling into the framework of con-ventional Christendom. Rousseau is the first individual in Christian Europe who, according to Havelock Ellis, "presents a typical picture of 'conversion' altogether apart from any conventional religious creeds". By "conversion" Ellis must not be understood to mean anything comparable to what hap-pened to the great spiritual mystics, a new subsequent living in the depths close to the Light revealed to them: Rousseau's "conversion" resembles theirs in only the kindling up of the being, as if by some power beyond it, to its principal life-work, the highly inspired receiving of a "mission" and the unes-capable sense of it ever after.
What happened to Rousseau and the significance of the . happening are in their fundamental form a seed-gleam of English Romanticism at its intensest. This significance, as developed by Rousseau himself and as it took shape in the movement he started, was something much less profound though extremely powerful, a mixed mass which also contri-
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buted several shades to English Romanticism itself no less than to the Romanticism of the Continent. The illumination and intuition from beyond the intellect got confused with the warm chaos their sudden descent had awakened in Rousseau's emotive and instinctive parts. The suprarational did not altogether disappear, but it got inextricably swirled into the infra-rational. The intellect which was meant to be the vehicle of the former put itself at the service of the latter. The soul-simplicity towards which the higher truths were driving was identified with the untutored heart of a love that knows no restraint, an extravagance of impassioned sentiment. The innocent and harmless freedom that is the soul's natural life grew the more dubious fight of the individual ego against all restrictions, social, political, moral, religious. The nostalgic cry of "Back to Nature", instead of bringing up the original unencrusted image of the divine in the human, argued the human itself in its primitiveness to be the divine and conjured up the picture of a "noble savage" happy amidst wild scene-ries. The mystical experience which had stood clear of Chris-tianity and indeed of all established religion changed into an exclusive cult of the private conscience: God and the dwelling by the individual on his own ethico-religious impulse were taken to be the same thing so that ultimately whatever ethico-religious self the individual felt within him replaced the sense of deity and the whole of ethics and religion was summed up in the formula: "Il faut etre soi", which signified that all one's duty lay in being one's self without contradiction, without any other need than to attain one's own happiness. The inner Life which the utilitarian philosophers had scorned and towards which Rousseau directed men's minds came to be intended by him not, as by the Saints, to put men into contact with their supreme origin and their Lord, but rather to halo every person's singularity and to justify every idiosyncratic revolt.
However, through the entire low-pitching, by Rousseau's temperament, of the revelation he had enjoyed ran still a great and glimmering idealism with a democratic sweep, and the vast vague emotions and instincts which pulled that revelation
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down and took hold of his intellect could win almost the whole age to his side by the very force of that intellect and by the sudden flash within it as of an axiomatic verity. His intellect was often the artist of a specious logic, but while the argument might be debated the words carried a ring of sincerity and conviction, a rhythm as of a prophet's passionate directness, and there was an easy perfection of form which added to his persuasiveness, and often round an emotional statement hung the nimbus of an ecstatic vision caught by a mind of thought tending to move with a brooding as well as soaring intricacy. It is the conjunction of all these factors that made him the progenitor of the French Revolution fired, amidst its various excesses, by the grand slogan of Liberty, Equality and Frater-nity which arose from the political formula given by him in his Contrat Social to his Utopian reveries - the inspirer of German transcendentalism in which his insistence on the inner subjective determinant and judge played so decisive a role that Kant, who demonstrated the innate thought-categories and the conscious self as the unifiers of experience into a totality and who argued a God-given moral imperative within each heart, used to hang on the walls of his bare study no picture except the portrait of this Frenchman - the initiator of modem Romanticism and its " solitary thinkings", its " divine discontent", its communion with Nature, its drive towards ineffable depths of sentiment, its semi-philosophical push to exceed the mere Reason, its dreams of an ideal futurity on earth, its apotheosis of individuality on one hand and of universal sympathy on the other. Even the profoundest species of this Romanticism, the English, which escaped much of the violently hectic and bizarre, or else the effusively melancholy, to be found in France and Germany as the offspring of Rousseauism on the debit side, owed many of its poetic ideas and urges . in their germ form to the prose-writer of the Discours sur l'Inegalite, Emile, the Nouvelle Heloise, the Reveries and the Lettres a Malesherbes no less than the Contrat Social and the Confessions.
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References
1.The Future Poetry, pp. 95-96.
2.Ibid, p. 278.
3.The Romantic Imagination (London), 1957, p. 289.
4.The Future Poetry, p. 227.
5.Ibid., pp. 92-93.
6.Ibid., pp. 171-72.
7.Ibid., p. 115.
8.Ibid., p. 191.
9.Ibid., p. 192.
10.Ibid., p. 97.
11.Ibid., p. 98.
12.Ibid., pp. 103-04.
13.Ibid., p. 105.
14.Ibid., pp. 106-07.
15.Ibid., p. 102.
16.Ibid., pp. 101-02.
17.Ibid., p. 102.
18.Ibid., p. 104.
19.Ibid., p. 107.
20.Ibid., p. 97.
21.Ibid.
22.Ibid., pp. 97-98.
23.Ibid., pp. 99-100.
24.Ibid., p. 109.
25.Ibid.
26.Ibid., p. 110.
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