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perfectly sound and this distinction made possible his searching criti–
cism of Rousseau and the Romantic novel in the same lectures:
In other words, Rousseau does not tell us about his loves and
hates, his pleasures and his
ennuis,
but about his magnanimity and his
baseness. "I have shown myself as I am; contemptible and vile when
I was; good, generous, sublime when I was." In this way he initiates,
inaugurates a certain manner of only perceiving feelings when they
are qualified, of only perceiving the qualifications instead of the feel–
ings which seems to me to be most dangerous.
Dangerous in what sense?-In this: when he uses the words con–
temptible or generous, sincere or lying, you no longer have any precise
impression. The specific qualities of the feeling, its form, its movement
which we were admiring a few minutes ago when rendered by Racine,
disappear. There is something vague and infinite which is introduced
into the mind by means of the judgments, whatever they happen to
be, that are passed on it.
I do not mean to say that Rousseau does not succeed in giving us
any idea of his personality. On the contrary, we see it in marvelous
relief, but there remains about it something matt, opaque, "overcast"
in the sense in which we use the word to describe the weather.
Riviere considered that Rousseau was to blame for most of the
excesses of the Romantic novel. "We find," he said, "that the whole
of Romantic fiction is spoilt by a certain moral preconception."
"Where do these beings come from?" he asked of their characters:
They are born of a certain moral image: purity, greatness, inno–
cence, sublime nobility or, on the contrary, infamy, bottomless perfidy,
unspeakable baseness, unadulterated perversity, or again sadness, disgust
with life, magnificent disdain, gloomy disinterestedness. That is what
their authors have in front of them before they have even begun to
outline their characters. That is the scheme from which they are
extracted.
What I mean is this. The Romantic habit of imagining the moral
qualities of a character before the character himself, or rather of ex–
tracting the character from certain pure and abstract qualities, takes
us outside psychology and leads to absolute poetry. Put still more gen–
erally, Rousseau leads to Rimbaud. As soon as values are introduced
into psychology, you get monsters; and as soon as you get monsters,
you are out of touch with life.
According to Riviere, art springs from a conflict between the
