ABSTRACT
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Romanticism Irving Babbitt focuses on diverse forms of romantic love as these depart from the law of measure and consequently reveal a confusion or a perversion of love. Love as an expression of the romantic discloses a lack of restraint. Babbitt condemns the use of "an unduly dalliant imagination" to enhance emotional intoxication, to pursue illusion, or to create "the romantic religion of love. What strikes one in Rousseau's attitude towards love is the separation, even wider here perhaps than elsewhere, between the ideal and the real. The terrestrial and the heavenly loves are not in short run together, whereas the essence of Rousseauistic love is this very blending. The perversion of mediaeval love is equally though not quite so obviously present in many other Rousseauists. For courage and the love of woman—his main interests in life—belong not to the religious but to the secular realm.
