Rousseau and Romanticism

by Irving Babbitt

A terrible danger thus lurks in the whole modern programme: it is a programme that makes for a formidable mechanical efficiency and so tends to bring into an ever closer material contact men who remain ethically centrifugal. The reason why the humanitarian and other schemes of communion that have been set up during the last century have failed is that they do not, like the traditional schemes, set any bounds to mere expansiveness, or, if one prefers, they do not involve any conversion. And so it is not surprising that the feeling of emptiness[267] or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral solitude”;[268] but strictly speaking his solitude is the reverse of moral. Only by cultivating his human self and by the unceasing effort that this cultivation involves does a man escape from his nightmare of separateness and so move in some measure towards happiness. But the happiness of which René dreams is unethical—something very private and personal and egoistic. Nothing is easier than to draw the line from René to Baudelaire and later decadents—for instance to Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s novel “A Rebours,”[269] who is typical of the last exaggerations of the movement. Des Esseintes cuts himself off as completely as possible from other men and in the artificial paradise he has devised gives himself up to the quest of strange and violent sensation; but his dream of happiness along egoistic lines turns into a nightmare,[270] his palace of art becomes a hell. Lemaître is quite justified in saying of Des Esseintes that he is only René or Werther brought up to date—“a played-out and broken-down Werther who has a malady of the nerves, a deranged stomach and eighty years more of literature to the bad.”[271]

Emotional romanticism was headed from the start towards this bankruptcy because of its substitution for ethical effort of a mere lazy floating on the stream of mood and temperament. I have said that Buddhism saw in this ethical indolence the root of all evil. Christianity in its great days was preoccupied with the same problem. To make this point clear it will be necessary to add to what I have said about classical and romantic melancholy a few words about melancholy in the Middle Ages. In a celebrated chapter of his “Genius of Christianity” (Le Vague des passions) Chateaubriand seeks to give to the malady of the age Christian and mediæval origins. This was his pretext, indeed, for introducing René into an apology for Christianity and so, as Sainte-Beuve complained, administering poison in a sacred wafer. Chateaubriand begins by saying that the modern man is melancholy because, without having had experience himself, he is at the same time overwhelmed by the second-hand experience that has been heaped up in the books and other records of an advanced civilization; and so he suffers from a precocious disillusion; he has the sense of having exhausted life before he has enjoyed it. There is nothing specifically Christian in this disillusion and above all nothing mediæval. But Chateaubriand goes on to say that from the decay of the pagan world and the barbarian invasions the human spirit received an impression of sadness and possibly a tinge of misanthropy which has never been completely effaced. Those that were thus wounded and estranged from their fellow-men took refuge formerly in monasteries, but now that this resource has failed them, they are left in the world without being of it and so they “become the prey of a thousand chimeras.” Then is seen the rise of that guilty melancholy which the passions engender when, left without definite object, they prey upon themselves in a solitary heart.[272]

The vague des passions, the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire, that Chateaubriand here describes may very well be related to certain sides of Christianity—especially to what may be termed its neo-Platonic side. Yet Christianity at its best has shown itself a genuine religion, in other words, it has dealt sternly and veraciously with the facts of human nature. It has perceived clearly how a man may move towards happiness and how on the other hand he tends to sink into despair; or what amounts to the same thing, it has seen the supreme importance of spiritual effort and the supreme danger of spiritual sloth. The man who looked on himself as cut off from God and so ceased to strive was according to the mediæval Christian the victim of acedia. This sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting and abdication of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime against the Holy Ghost itself. It would in fact not be hard to show that what was taken by the Rousseauist to be the badge of spiritual distinction was held by the mediæval Christian to be the chief of all the deadly sins.

The victim of acedia often looked upon himself, like the victim of the malady of the age, as foredoomed. But though the idea of fate enters at times into mediæval melancholy, the man of the Middle Ages could scarcely so detach himself from the community as to suffer from that sense of loneliness which is the main symptom of romantic melancholy. This forlornness was due not merely to the abrupt disappearance of the older forms of communion, but to the failure of the new attempts at communion. When one gets beneath the surface of the nineteenth century one finds that it was above all a period of violent disillusions, and it is especially after violent disillusion that a man feels himself solitary and forlorn. I have said that the special mark of the half-educated man is his harboring of incompatible desires. The new religions or unifications of life that appeared during the nineteenth century made an especially strong appeal to the half-educated man because it seemed to him that by accepting some one of these he could enjoy the benefits of communion and at the same time not have to take on the yoke of any serious discipline; that he could, in the language of religion, achieve salvation without conversion. When a communion on these lines turns out to be not a reality, but a sham, and its disillusioned votary feels solitary and forlorn, he is ready to blame everybody and everything except himself.

A few specific illustrations will help us to understand how romantic solitude, which was created by the weakening of the traditional communions, was enhanced by the collapse of various sham communions. Let us return for a moment to that eminent example of romantic melancholy and disillusion, Alfred de Vigny. His “Chatterton” deals with the fatal misunderstanding of the original genius by other men. “Moïse” deals more specifically with the problem of his solitude. The genius is so eminent and unique, says Vigny, speaking for himself from behind the mask of the Hebrew prophet, that he is quite cut off from ordinary folk who feel that they have nothing in common with him.[273] This forlornness of the genius is not the sign of some capital error in his philosophy. On the contrary it is the sign of his divine election, and so Moses blames God for his failure to find happiness.[274] If the genius is cut off from communion with men he cannot hope for companionship with God because he has grown too sceptical. Heaven is empty and in any case dumb; and so in the poem to which I have already referred (Le Mont des Oliviers) Vigny assumes the mask of Jesus himself to express this desolateness, and concludes that the just man will oppose a haughty and Stoic disdain to the divine silence.[275]

All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower—a phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny.[276] In the ivory tower he can at least commune with nature and the ideal woman. But Vigny came at a time when the Arcadian glamour was being dissipated from nature. Partly under scientific influence she was coming to seem not a benign but a cold and impassive power, a collection of cruel and inexorable laws. I have already mentioned this mood that might be further illustrated from Taine and so many others towards the middle of the nineteenth century.[277] “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.”[278] (“La Maison du Berger”); and so in the Maison roulante, or sort of Arcadia on wheels that he has imagined, he must seek his chief solace with the ideal feminine companion. But woman herself turns out to be treacherous; and, assuming the mask of Samson (“La Colère de Samson”), Vigny utters a solemn malediction upon the eternal Delilah (Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila). Such is the disillusion that comes from having sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress.[279]

Now that every form of communion has failed, all that is left it would seem is to die in silence and solitude like the wolf (“La Mort du Loup”). Vigny continues to hold, however, like the author of the “City of Dreadful Night,” that though men may not meet in their joys, they may commune after a fashion in their woe. He opposes to heartless nature and her “vain splendors” the religion of pity, “the majesty of human sufferings.”[280] Towards the end when Vigny feels the growing prestige of science, he holds out the hope that a man may to a certain extent escape from the solitude of his own ego into some larger whole by contributing his mite to “progress.” But the symbol of this communion[281] that he has chosen—that of the shipwrecked and sinking mariner who consigns his geographical discoveries to a bottle in the hope that it may be washed up on some civilized shore—is itself of a singular forlornness.

Vigny has a concentration and power of philosophical reflection that is rare among the romanticists. George Sand is inferior to him in this respect but she had a richer and more generous nature, and is perhaps even more instructive in her life and writings for the student of romantic melancholy. After the loss of the religious faith of her childhood she became an avowed Rousseauist. She attacks a society that seems to her to stand in the way of the happiness of which she dreams—the supreme emotional intensity to be achieved in an ideal love. In celebrating passion and the rights of passion she is lyrical in the two main modes of the Rousseauist—she is either tender and elegiac, or else stormy and Titanic. But when she attempts to practice with Musset this religion of love, the result is violent disillusion. In the forlornness that follows upon the collapse of her sham communion she meditates suicide. “Ten years ago,” she wrote in 1845 to Mazzini, “I was in Switzerland; I was still in the age of tempests; I made up my mind even then to meet you, if I should resist the temptation to suicide which pursued me upon the glaciers.” And then gradually a new faith dawned upon her; she substituted for the religion of love the religion of human brotherhood. She set up as an object of worship humanity in its future progress; and then, like so many other dreamers, she suffered a violent disillusion in the Revolution of 1848. The radiant abstraction she had been worshipping had been put to the test and she discovered that there entered into the actual make-up of the humanity she had so idealized “a large number of knaves, a very large number of lunatics, and an immense number of fools.” What is noteworthy in George Sand is that she not only saved the precious principle of faith from these repeated shipwrecks but towards the end of her life began to put it on a firmer footing. Like Goethe she worked out to some extent, in opposition to romanticism, a genuinely ethical point of view.

This latter development can best be studied in her correspondence with Flaubert. She urges him to exercise his will, and he replies that he is as “fatalistic as a Turk.” His fatalism, however, was not oriental but scientific or pseudo-scientific. I have already cited his demand that man be studied “objectively” just as one would study “a mastodon or a crocodile.” Flaubert refused to see any connection between this determinism and his own gloom or between George Sand’s assertion of will and her cheerfulness. It was simply, he held, a matter of temperament, and there is no doubt some truth in this contention. “You at the first leap mount to heaven,” he says, “while I, poor devil, am glued to the earth as though by leaden soles.” And again: “In spite of your great sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist,” whereas “I am constantly dissecting; and when I have finally discovered the corruption in anything that is supposed to be pure, the gangrene in its fairest parts, then I raise my head and laugh.” Yet George Sand’s cheerfulness is also related to her perception of a power in man to work upon himself—a power that sets him apart from other animals. To enter into this region of ethical effort is to escape from the whole fatal circle of naturalism, and at the same time to show some capacity to mature—a rare achievement among the romanticists. The contrast is striking here between George Sand and Hugo, who, as the ripe fruit of his meditations, yields nothing better than the apotheosis of Robespierre and Marat. “I wish to see man as he is,” she writes to Flaubert. “He is not good or bad: he is good and bad. But he is something else besides: being good and bad he has an inner force which leads him to be very bad and a little good, or very good and a little bad. I have often wondered,” she adds, “why your ‘Education Sentimentale’ was so ill received by the public, and the reason, as it seems to me, is that its characters are passive—that they do not act upon themselves.” But the Titaness of the period of “Lélia” can scarcely be said to have acted upon herself, so that she is justified in writing: “I cannot forget that my personal victory over despair is the work of my will, and of a new way of understanding life which is the exact opposite of the one I held formerly.” How different is the weary cry of Flaubert: “I am like a piece of clock work, what I am doing to-day I shall be doing to-morrow; I did exactly the same thing yesterday; I was exactly the same man ten years ago.”

The correspondence of Flaubert and George Sand bears interestingly on another of the sham religions of the nineteenth century—the religion of art. Art is for Flaubert not merely a religion but a fanaticism. He preaches abstinence, renunciation and mortification of the flesh in the name of art. He excommunicates those who depart from artistic orthodoxy and speaks of heretics and disbelievers in art with a ferocity worthy of a Spanish inquisitor. Ethical beauty such as one finds in the Greeks at their best resides in order and proportion; it is not a thing apart but the outcome of some harmonious whole. Beauty in the purely æsthetic and unethical sense that Flaubert gives to the word is little more than the pursuit of illusion. The man who thus treats beauty as a thing apart, who does not refer back his quest of the exquisite to some ethical centre will spend his life Ixion-like embracing phantoms. “O Art, Art,” exclaims Flaubert, “bitter deception, nameless phantom, which gleams and lures us to our ruin!” He speaks elsewhere of “the chimera of style which is wearing him out soul and body.” Attaching as he did an almost religious importance to his quest of the exquisite he became like so many other Rousseauists not merely æsthetic but hyperæsthetic. He complains in his old age: “My sensibility is sharper than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois, an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.” Hardly anywhere else, indeed, will one find such accents of bitterness, such melancholy welling up unbidden from the very depths of the heart, as in the devotees of art for art’s sake—Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Théophile Gautier.