Chateaubriand’s relation to Rousseauism in this matter calls for special comment. He encouraged, and to some extent held, the belief that to show genius and originality one must be irregular and tempestuous in all things, even in the arrangement of one’s hair. At the same time he preached reason. His heart, in short, was romantic, his head classical. Both as a classicist and a romanticist he was ready to repudiate on the one hand his master Rousseau, and on the other his own disciples. As a romantic genius he wished to regard himself as unique and so unrelated to Rousseau. At the same time he also looked upon it as a sort of insolence for any of his own followers to aspire to such a lonely preëminence in grief as René. As a classicist he saw that great art aims at the normal and the representative, and that it is therefore absurd for people to pattern themselves on such morbid and exceptional characters as René and Childe Harold. Most of the romanticists indeed showed themselves very imitative even in their attempts at uniqueness, and the result was a second or third hand, or as one is tempted to say, a stale eccentricity. In their mere following of the mode many of the French romanticists of 1830 were ready to impose a painful discipline upon themselves[46] in order to appear abnormal, in order, for instance, to acquire a livid Byronic complexion. Some of those who wished to seem elegiac like Lamartine rather than to emulate the violent and histrionic revolt of the Conrads and Laras actually succeeded, we are told, in giving themselves consumption (hence the epithet école poitrinaire).
In outer and visible freakishness the French romanticists of 1830 probably bore away the palm, though in inner and spiritual remoteness from normal human experience they can scarcely vie with the early German romanticists. And this is doubtless due to the fact that in France there was a more definite outer standard from which to advertise their departure, and also to the fact that the revolt against this standard was so largely participated in by the painters and by writers like Gautier who were also interested in painting. Chateaubriand writes of the romantic painters (and the passage will also serve to illustrate his attitude towards his own disciples): “[These artists] rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear frightful mustaches, one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world—their brushes are halberds, their paint-scratchers sabres; others have enormous beards and hair that puffs out or hangs down their shoulders; they smoke a cigar volcanically. These cousins of the rainbow, to use a phrase of our old Régnier, have their heads filled with deluges, seas, rivers, forests, cataracts, tempests, or it may be with slaughters, tortures and scaffolds. One finds among them human skulls, foils, mandolins, helmets and dolmans. … They aim to form a separate species between the ape and the satyr; they give you to understand that the secrecy of the studio has its dangers and that there is no safety for the models.”
These purely personal eccentricities that so marked the early stages in the warfare between the Bohemian and the philistine have as a matter of fact diminished in our own time. Nowadays a man of the distinction of Disraeli or even of Bulwer-Lytton[47] would scarcely affect, as they did, the flamboyant style in dress. But the underlying failure to discriminate between the odd and the original has persisted and has worked out into even extremer consequences. One may note, as I have said, even in the early figures in the movement a tendency to play to the gallery, a something that suggests the approach of the era of the lime-light and the big headline. Rousseau himself has been called the father of yellow journalists. There is an unbroken development from the early exponents of original genius down to cubists, futurists and post-impressionists and the corresponding schools in literature. The partisans of expression as opposed to form in the eighteenth century led to the fanatics of expression in the nineteenth and these have led to the maniacs of expression of the twentieth. The extremists in painting have got so far beyond Cézanne, who was regarded not long ago as one of the wildest of innovators, that Cézanne is, we are told, “in a fair way to achieve the unhappy fate of becoming a classic.” Poe was fond of quoting a saying of Bacon’s that “there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” This saying became known in France through Baudelaire’s rendering of Poe and was often ascribed to Poe himself. It was taken to mean that the stranger one became the nearer one was getting to perfect beauty. And if we grant this view of beauty we must admit that some of the decadents succeeded in becoming very beautiful indeed. But the more the element of proportion in beauty is sacrificed to strangeness the more the result will seem to the normal man to be, not beauty at all, but rather an esoteric cult of ugliness. The romantic genius therefore denounces the normal man as a philistine and at the same time, since he cannot please him, seeks at least to shock him and so capture his attention by the very violence of eccentricity.
The saying I have quoted from Bacon is perhaps an early example of the inner alliance between things that superficially often seem remote—the scientific spirit and the spirit of romance. Scientific discovery has given a tremendous stimulus to wonder and curiosity, has encouraged a purely exploratory attitude towards life and raised an overwhelming prepossession in favor of the new as compared with the old. Baconian and Rousseauist evidently come together by their primary emphasis on novelty. The movement towards a more and more eccentric conception of art and literature has been closely allied in practice with the doctrine of progress—and that from the very dawn of the so-called Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the havoc that has been wrought by the transfer of the belief that the latest thing is the best—a belief that is approximately true of automobiles—from the material order to an entirely different realm.[48] The very heart of the classical message, one cannot repeat too often, is that one should aim first of all not to be original, but to be human, and that to be human one needs to look up to a sound model and imitate it. The imposition of form and proportion upon one’s expansive impulses which results from this process of imitation is, in the true sense of that much abused word, culture. Genuine culture is difficult and disciplinary. The mediation that it involves between the conflicting claims of form and expression requires the utmost contention of spirit. We have here a clue to the boundless success of the Rousseauistic doctrine of spontaneity, of the assertion that genius resides in the region of the primitive and unconscious and is hindered rather than helped by culture. It is easier to be a genius on Rousseauistic lines than to be a man on the terms imposed by the classicist. There is a fatal facility about creation when its quality is not tested by some standard set above the creator’s temperament; and the same fatal facility appears in criticism when the critic does not test creation by some standard set above both his own temperament and that of the creator. The romantic critic as a matter of fact confines his ambition to receiving so keen an impression from genius, conceived as something purely temperamental, that when this creative expression is passed through his temperament it will issue forth as a fresh expression. Taste, he holds, will thus tend to become one with genius, and criticism, instead of being cold and negative like that of the neo-classicist, will itself grow creative.[49] But the critic who does not get beyond this stage will have gusto, zest, relish, what you will, he will not have taste. For taste involves a difficult mediation between the element of uniqueness in both critic and creator and that which is representative and human. Once eliminate this human standard that is set above the temperament of the creator and make of the critic in turn a mere pander to “genius” and it is hard to see what measure of a man’s excellence is left save his intoxication with himself; and this measure