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PARTISAN REVIEW
realistic; to
his
material-especially when it is his own life-he brings
such
.a
strongly apologetic and ethico-critical interest, his judgment
of events is so influenced by his principles of natural law, that the
reality of the social world does not become for him an immediate
subject; yet the example of the
Confessions,
which attempts to
represent his own existence in its true relation to contemporary life,
is important as a stylistic model for writers who had more sense of
reality as given than he. Perhaps even more important in its in–
direct influence upon serious realism is his politicizing of the idyllic
concept of Nature. This created a wish-image for the design of life
which, as we know, exercised an immense power of suggestion and
which, it was believed, could be immediately realized by a revolution;
the wish-image soon showed itself to be in absolute opposition to the
established historical reality, and the contrast grew stronger and
more tragic the more apparent it became that the realization of the
wish-image was miscarrying. Thus practical historical reality became
a problem in a way hitherto unknown-far more concretely and far
more immediately.
In the first decades after Rousseau's death, in French pre–
Romanticism, the effect of that immense disillusionment was, to be
sure, quite the opposite: it showed itself, among the most important
writers, in a tendency to flee from contemporary reality. The Revolu–
tion, the Empire, and even the Restoration are poor in realistic literary
works. The heroes of pre-Romantic novels betray a sometimes al–
most morbid aversion to entering into contemporary life. The con–
tradiction between the natural, which he desired, and the historically
based reality which he encountered, had already become tragic for
Rousseau; but the very contradiction had roused him to do battle
for the natural. He was no longer alive when the Revolution and
Napoleon created a situation which, though new, was, in his sense
of the word, no more "natural" but instead again entangled
his–
torically. The next generation, deeply influenced by his ideas and
hopes, experienced the victorious resistance of the real and the
historical, and it was especially those who had fallen most deeply
under Rousseau's fascination, who found themselves not at home in
the world which had utterly destroyed their hopes. They entered into
opposition to it or they turned away from it. Of Rousseau they
carried on only the inward rift, the tendency to flee from society,
