"Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply... at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation for thousands of years, with a power over the mind and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival." In the poets whom Newman praises the imagination is, as it were, centripetal. The neo-classic proneness to oppose good sense to imagination, and the romantic proneness to oppose imagination to good sense, have at least this justification, that in many persons, perhaps in most persons, the two actually conflict, but surely the point to emphasize is that they may come together, that good sense may be imaginative and imagination sensible. If imagination is not sensible, as is plainly the case in Victor Hugo, for example, we may suspect a lack of the universal and ethical quality. All men, even great poets, are more or less immersed in their personal conceit and in the zones of illusion peculiar to their age. But there is the question of degree. The poets to whom the world has finally accorded its suffrage have not been megalomaniacs; they have not threatened like Hugo to outbellow the thunder or pull comets around by the tail.1 Bossuet's saying that "good sense is the master of human life" 1 See his poem Ibo in Les Contemplations. does not contradict but complete Pascal's saying that "the imagination disposes of everything," provided only due stress be laid on the word human. It would not be easy to live a more imaginative life than Hugo, but his imagination was so unrestrained that we may ask whether he lived a very human life, whether he was not rather, in Tennyson's phrase, a "weird Titan." Man realizes that immensity of his being of which Joubert speaks only in so far as he ceases to be the thrall of his own ego. This human breadth he achieves not by throwing off but by taking on limitations, and what he limits is above all his imagination. The reason why he should strive for a life that is thus increasingly full and complete is simply, as Joubert suggests, that it is more delectable, that it is found practically to make for happiness. THE END APPENDIX CHINESE PRIMITIVISM PERHAPS the closest approach in the past to the movement of which Rousseau is the most important single figure is the early Taoist movement in China. Taoism, especially in its popular aspects, became later something very different, and what I say is meant to apply above all to the period from about 550 to 200 B.C. The material for the Taoism of this period will be found in convenient form in the volume of Léon Wieger (1913) Les Pères du Système taoiste (Chinese texts with French translations of Lao-tzu, Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu). The Tao Tê King of Lao-tzŭ is a somewhat enigmatical document of only a few thousand words, but plainly primitivistic in its general trend. The phrase that best sums up its general spirit is that of Wordsworth -a "wise passiveness." The unity at which it aims is clearly of the pantheistic variety, the unity that is obtained by breaking down discrimination and affirming the "identity of contradictories," and that encourages a reversion to origins, to the state of nature and the simple life. According to the Taoist the Chinese fell from the simple life into artificiality about the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti (27th century B.C.). The individual also should look back to beginnings and seek to be once more like the new-born child or, according to Chuang-tzů, like the new-born calf. It is in Chuang-tzu indeed that the doctrine develops its full naturalistic and primitivistic implications. Few writers in either East or West have set forth more entertainingly what one may term the Bohemian attitude towards life. He heaps ridicule 1 La. 55, p. 51. (In 'my references La. stands for Lao-tzů, Li. for Lieh-tzŭ, Ch. for Chuang-tzů. The first number gives the chapter; the second number the page in Wieger's edition.) 2 Ch. 22 C, p. 391. upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his doctrine of humanistic imitation. He sings the praises of the unconscious, even when obtained through intoxication,3 and extols the morality of the beautiful soul. He traces the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that anticipates very completely both Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and that on the Origin of Inequality." See also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chi, child of nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man's fall from his primitive felicity. Among the things that are contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to Chuang-tzů and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste, but likewise government and statecraft, virtue and moral standards. 10 To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists oppose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental music. See especially Chuang-tzů's programme for a cosmic symphony in three movements 12- the Pipes of Pan as one is tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music ("L'arbre vu du côté des racines") with which Hugo's satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians. The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form. 13 From the references in Chuang-tzǎ 14 1 Ch. 12 n, p. 305. 2 Ch. 11 D, p. 291. Ibid. 15, p. 331. See also Li. 31, p. 113. 5 Ch. 10, pp. 279-80. 7 Ch. 29, pp. 467 ff. La. 27, p. 37. 11 Li. 5, p. 143. 4 Ch. 19 L, p. 365. 13 For an extreme form of Epicureanism see the ideas of Yang-chu, Li. 7, pp. 165 ff. For stoical ataraxy see Ch. 6 C., p. 253. 6 K, p. 263. For fate see Li. 6, p. 155, Ch. 14 Ch. 33, pp. 499 ff. L |