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Page 21
[Footnote 14: _Doctrine of the Mean_, ch. xxxiii, v. 2.]
Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a striking group of
Frenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion.
Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of them
perversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul
Verlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writer
of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a man
who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion
to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in
perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of
the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide,
crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "_Encore l'homme au
rancart_!"--another carcass to the dustheap!
In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated the
same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote _Peter
Bell_, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in
_Tinlern Abbey_, which has passages of incomparable majesty and
beauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:
"... well pleased to recognize
In nature, and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."
Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths to
which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple,
a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe
said that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the
three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort
of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life
was one long strife of "passion with eternal law." He combines both
the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames
with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping
his mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling
with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a
naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadian
fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young
Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson
and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. Poor
Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had
resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do,
parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he did
not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in
Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across
the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not
despise." So there was humility at the last. One remembers rather
grimly what the clown says in _Twelfth Night_,
"Pleasure will be paid some time or other."
This same revolt against the decencies and conventions of our humanist
civilization occupies a great part of present literature. How far
removed from the clean and virile stoicism of George Meredith or the
honest pessimism of Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett's _The Pretty Lady_
or Galsworthy's _The Dark Flower_. Finally, in this country we need
only mention, if we may descend so far, such naturalists in literature
as Jack London, Robert Chambers and Gouverneur Morris. One's only
excuse for referring to them is that they are vastly popular with the
people whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to whom we talk on
religion!
Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accompanying and
interdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretation
and defense. As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I suppose
William James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief
protagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the
world of thought. To the neo-realists "the thing given" is alone
reality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standard
in favor of relativity. In _the Varieties of Religious Experience_,
which Professor Babbitt tells us someone in Cambridge suggested should
have had for a subtitle "Wild Religions I Have Known," he is plainly
more interested in the intensity than in the normality, in the
excesses than in the essence of the religious life. Indeed, Professor
Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,
"mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessential
of a man's attributes."[15] In the same way Bergson, consistently
anti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that
whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis.
He refuses to recognize Plato's _One in the Many_, sees the whole
universe as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties," a universal and
meaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say,
and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his
_elan vital_, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions.
We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitter
English is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification of
impulse. "Time," says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present that
endures."[16] Time apparently is all. "Life can have no purpose in the
human sense of the word."[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson and
Croce appeal from intellect to feeling. They return to primitivism.
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