'Mistake Emotion for Conviction, Velleity for Resolve'

Only rarely can I recall where I first heard a word. My handful of such discoveries date mostly from Latin class in junior high school. That’s where I learned celerity, among other words. More recently I happened on velleity in Richard Wilbur’s “Lying,” and now I’ve encountered it again. The author is James Russell Lowell in his essay “Rousseau and the Sentimentalists” (Among My Books, 1870):

“Rousseau showed through life a singular proneness for being convinced by his own eloquence; he was always his own first convert; and this reconciles his power as a writer with his weakness as a man. He and all like him mistake emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve, the brief eddy of sentiment for the midcurrent of ever-gathering faith in duty that draws to itself all the affluents of conscience and will, and gives continuity of purpose to life. They are like men who love the stimulus of being under conviction, as it is called, who, forever getting religion, never get capital enough to retire upon and spend for their own need and the common service.”

I read Lowell after reading what one of his contemporaries, George Eliot, wrote in a letter after reading Confessions: “Rousseau’s genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame.” This surprised me. I think of Rousseau as one of literature’s most influential frauds (a judgment shared by Flann O’Brien), and of Eliot as a grownup immune to such silliness. Lowell diagnoses not only Rousseau’s failings but those cherished by many of contemporaries, who “mistake emotion for conviction, velleity for resolve.”

The OED defines velleity as “the fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization.” In modern parlance we call such people slackers, deadbeats, potheads. Lowell has another name for them:

“The sentimentalist is the spiritual hypochondriac, with whom fancies become facts, while facts are a discomfort because they will not be evaporated into fancy. In his eyes, Theory is too fine a dame to confess even a country-cousinship with coarse handed Practice, whose homely ways would disconcert her artificial world. The very susceptibility that makes him quick to feel, makes him also incapable of deep and durable feeling."