self assailed convention, though in itself only a chimera, a mere Arcadian projection upon the void, did indeed tend in a rationalistic pseudo-classic age, to new forms of imaginative activity. In the form that concerns us especially the imagination is free to give its magic and glamour and infinitude to the emancipated emotions. This type of romanticism did not result in any recovery of the supposed primitive virtues, but it did bring about a revaluation of the received notions of morality that can scarcely be studied too carefully.

CHAPTER IV

ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL

THE period that began in the late eighteenth century and in the midst of which we are still living has witnessed an almost unparalleled triumph, as I have just said, of the sense of the individual (sens propre) over the general sense of mankind (sens commun). Even the collectivistic schemes that have been opposed to individualism during this period are themselves, judged by traditional standards, violently individualistic. Now the word individualism needs as much as any other general term to be treated Socratically: we need in the interests of our present subject to discriminate between different varieties of individualism. Perhaps as good a working classification as any is to distinguish three main varieties: a man may wish to act, or think, or feel, differently from other men, and those who are individualistic in any one of these three main ways may have very little in common with one another. To illustrate concretely, Milton's plea in his "Areopagitica" for freedom of conscience makes above all for individualism of action. (La foi qui n'agit pas est-ce une foi sincère ?) Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, pleads in his Dictionary and elsewhere for tolerance, not so much because he wishes to act or feel in his own way as because he wishes to think his own thoughts. Rousseau is no less obviously ready to subordinate both thought and action to sensibility. His message is summed up once for all in the exclamation of Faust,

"Feeling is all." He urges war on the general sense only because of the restrictions it imposes on the free expansion of his emotions and the enhancing of these emotions by his imagination.

Now the warfare that Rousseau and the individualists of feeling have waged on the general sense has meant in practice a warfare on two great traditions, the classical and the Christian. I have already pointed out that these two traditions, though both holding the idea of imitation, were not entirely in accord with one another, that the imitation of Horace differs widely from the imitation of Christ. Yet their diverging from one another is as nothing compared with their divergence from the individualism of the primitivist. For the man who imitates Christ in any traditional sense this world is not an Arcadian dream but a place of trial and probation. "Take up your cross and follow me." The following of this great exemplar required that the instinctive self, which Rousseau would indulge, should be either sternly rebuked or else mortified utterly. So far from Nature and God being one, the natural man is so corrupt, according to the more austere Christian, that the gap between him and the divine can be traversed only by a miracle of grace. He should therefore live in i fear and trembling as befits a being upon whom rests the weight of the divine displeasure. "It is an humble thing to be a man." Humility indeed is, in the phrase of Jeremy Taylor, the special ornament and jewel of the Christian religion, and one is tempted to add, of all religion in so far as it is genuine. Genuine religion must always have in some form the sense of a deep inner cleft between man's ordinary self and the divine. But some Christians were more inclined from the start, as we can see in the extreme

forms of the doctrine of grace, to push their humility to an utter despair of human nature. The historical explanation of this despair is obvious: it is a sharp rebound from the pagan riot; an excessive immersion in this world led to an excess of otherworldliness. At the same time the conviction as to man's helplessness was instilled into those, who, like St. Augustine, had witnessed in some of its phases the slow disintegration of the Roman Empire. Human nature had gone bankrupt; and for centuries it needed to be administered, if I may continue the metaphor, in receivership. The doctrine of grace was admirably adapted to this end.

The pagan riot from which the church reacted so sharply, was not, however, the whole of the ancient civilization. I have already said that there was at the heart of this civilization at its best a great idea - the idea of proportionateness. The ancients were in short not merely naturalistic but humanistic, and the idea of proportion is just as fundamental in humanism as is humility in religion. Christianity, one scarcely need add, incorporated within itself, however disdainfully, many humanistic elements from Greek and Roman culture. Yet it is none the less true that in his horror at the pagan worldliness the Christian tended to fly into the opposite extreme of unworldliness, and in this clash between naturalism and supernaturalism the purely human virtues of mediation were thrust more or less into the background. Yet by its very defect on the humanistic side the doctrine of grace was perhaps all the better fitted for the administration of human nature in receivership. For thus to make man entirely distrustful of himself and entirely dependent on God, meant in practice to

make him entirely dependent on the Church. Man became ignorant and fanatical in the early Christian centuries, but he also became humble, and in the situation then existing that was after all the main thing. The Church as receiver for human nature was thus enabled to rescue civilization from the wreck of pagan antiquity and the welter of the barbarian invasions. But by the very fact that the bases of life in this world gradually grew more secure man became less otherworldly. He gradually recovered some degree of confidence in himself. He gave increasing attention to that side of himself that the ascetic Christian had repressed. The achievements of the thirteenth century which mark perhaps the culmination of Christian civilization were very splendid not only from a religious but also from a humanistic point of view. But although the critical spirit was already beginning to awake, it did not at that time, as I have already said, actually break away from the tutelage of the Church.

This emancipation of human nature from theological restraint took place in far greater measure at the Renaissance. Human nature showed itself tired of being treated as a bankrupt, of being governed from without and from above. It aspired to become autonomous. There was in so far a strong trend in many quarters towards individualism. This rupture with external authority meant very diverse things in practice. For some who, in Lionardo's phrase, had caught a glimpse of the antique symmetry it meant a revival of genuine humanism; for others it meant rather a revival of the pagan and naturalistic side of antiquity. Thus Rabelais, in his extreme opposition to the monkish ideal, already proclaims, like Rousseau,