Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter III (Part 4)

(Transcendentalism: Looking Up the Yosemite Valley by A. Bierstadt) I am happy to present the fourth post of Chapter III of Irving Babbitt’s great work Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), in which the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing, as you will see, is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

Incidentally, I am glad to report that in the“Designer Awards 2018,” of the English magazine LUX , Tradition Restored has been named “Best Literature Blog 2018 – New York.”

CHAPTER III

ROMANTIC IMAGINATION (Part 4)

If the artist has become more and more eccentric, it must be confessed that the good sense of the public against which he has protested has been too flatly utilitarian. The poet who reduces poetry to the imaginative quest of strange emotional adventure, and the plain citizen who does not aspire beyond a reality that is too literal and prosaic, both suffer; but the aesthete suffers the more severely—so much so that I shall need to revert to this conception of poetry in my treatment of romantic melancholy. It leads at last to a contrast between the ideal and the real such as is described by Anatole France in his account of Villiers de I’lsle Adam. “For thirty years,’’ says M. France, “Villiers wandered around in cafés at night, fading away like a shadow at the first glimmer of dawn. . . . His poverty, the frightful poverty of cities, had so put its stamp on him and fashioned him so thoroughly that he resembled those vagabonds, who, dressed in black, sleep on park benches. He had the livid complexion with red blotches, the glassy eye, the bowed back of the poor; and yet I am not sure we should call him unhappy, for he lived in a perpetual dream and that dream was radiantly golden. . . . His dull eyes contemplated within himself dazzling spectacles. He passed through the world like a somnambulist seeing nothing of what we see and seeing things that it is not given us to behold. Out of the commonplace spectacle of life he succeeded in creating an ever fresh ecstasy. On those ignoble café tables in the midst of the odor of beer and tobacco, he poured forth floods of purple and gold.’’

This notion that literal failure is ideal success, and conversely, has been developed in a somewhat different form by Rostand in his “Cyrano de Bergerac.” By his refusal to compromise or adjust himself to things as they are, Cyrano’s real life has become a series of defeats. He is finally forced from life by a league of all the mediocrities whom his idealism affronts. His discomfiture is taken to show, not that he is a Quixotic extremist, but that he is the superior of the successful Guise, the man who has stooped to compromise, the French equivalent of the Antonio whom Goethe finally came to prefer to Tasso. Rostand’s “Chanticleer” is also an interesting study of romantic idealism and of the two main stages through which it passes—the first stage when one relates one’s ideal to the real; the second, when one discovers that the ideal and the real are more or less hopelessly dissevered. Chanticleer still maintains his idealistic pose even after he has discovered that the sun is not actually made to arise by his crowing. In this hugging of his illusion in defiance of reality Chanticleer is at the opposite pole from Johnson’s astronomer in “Rasselas” who thinks that he has control of the weather, but when disillusioned is humbly thankful at having escaped from this ‘‘dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and entered once more into the domain of “sober probability.”

The problem, then, of the genius or the artist versus the Philistine has persisted without essential modification from the eighteenth century to the present day—from the suicide of Chatterton, let us say, to the suicide of John Davidson. The man of imagination spurns in the name of his “ideal” the limits imposed upon it by a dull respectability, and then his ideal turns out only too often to lack positive content and to amount in practice to the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire. What the idealist opposes to the real is not only something that does not exist, but something that never can exist. The Arcadian revery which should be allowed at most as an occasional solace from the serious business of living is set up as a substitute for living. The imaginative and emotional dalliance of the Rousseauistic romanticist may assume a bewildering variety of forms. We have already seen in the case of Hölderlin how easily Rousseau’s dream of a state of nature passes over—and that in spite of Rousseau’s attacks on the arts—into the dream of a paradise of pure beauty. The momentous matter is not that a man’s imagination and emotions go out towards this or that particular haven of refuge in the future or in the past, in the East or in the West, but that his primary demand on life is for some haven of refuge; that he longs to be away from the here and now and their positive demands on his character and will. Poe may sing of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,” but he is not therefore a classicist. With the same wistfulness innumerable romanticists have looked towards the Middle Ages. So C. E. Norton says that Ruskin was a white-winged anachronism, (1) that he should have been born in the thirteenth century. But one may surmise that a man with Ruskin’s special quality of imagination would have failed to adjust himself to the actual life of the thirteenth or any other century. Those who put their Arcadia in the Middle Ages or some other period of the past have at least this advantage over those who put it in the present, they are better protected against disillusion. The man whose Arcadia is distant from him merely in space may decide to go and see for himself, and the results of this overtaking of one’s dream are somewhat uncertain. The Austrian poet Lenau, for example, actually took a trip to his primitive paradise that he had imagined somewhere in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Perhaps it is not surprising that he finally died mad. The disenchantment of Chateaubriand in his quest for a Rousseauistic Arcadia in America and for Arcadian savages I describe later. In his journey into the wilderness Chateaubriand reveals himself as a spiritual lotos-eater no less surely than the man who takes flight into what is superficially most remote from the virgin forest—into some palace of art. His attitude towards America does not differ psychically from that of many early romanticists towards Italy. Italy was their land of heart’s desire, the land that filled them with ineffable longing (Sehnsucht nach Italien), a palace of art that, like the Latin Quarter of later Bohemians, had some points of contact with Mohammed’s paradise. A man may even develop a romantic longing for the very period against which romanticism was originally a protest and be ready to “fling his cap for polish and for Pope.” One should add that the romantic Eldorado is not necessarily rural. Lamb’s attitude towards London is almost as romantic as that of Wordsworth towards the country. Dr. Johnson cherished urban life because of its centrality. Lamb’s imaginative dalliance, on the other hand, is stimulated by the sheer variety and wonder of the London streets as another’s might be by the mountains or the sea. (2) Lamb could also find an Elysium of unmixed esthetic solace in the literature of the past—especially in Restoration Comedy.

The essence of the mood is always the straining of the imagination away from the here and now, from an actuality that seems paltry and faded compared to the radiant hues of one’s dream. The classicist, according to A. W. Schlegel, (3) is for making the most of the present, whereas the romanticist hovers between recollection and hope. In Shelleyan phrase he “looks before and after and pines for what is not.” He inclines like the Byronic dandy, Barbey d’Aurevilly, to take for his mottoes the words “Too late” and “Nevermore.”

Nostalgia, the term that has come to be applied to the infinite indeterminate longing of the romanticist—his never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire—is not, from the point of view of strict etymology, well-chosen. Romantic nostalgia is not “homesickness,” accurately speaking, but desire to get away from home. Odysseus in Homer suffers from true nostalgia. The Ulysses of Tennyson, on the other hand, is nostalgic in the romantic sense when he leaves home “to sail beyond the sunset.” Ovid, as Goethe points out, is highly classical even in his melancholy. The longing from which he suffers in his exile is very determinate: he longs to get back to Rome, the centre of the world. Ovid indeed sums up the classic point of view when he says that one cannot desire the unknown (ignoti nulla cupido). The essence of nostalgia is the desire for the unknown. “I was burning with desire,” says Rousseau, “without any definite object.” One is filled with a desire to fly one knows not whither, to be off on a journey into the blue distance. Music is exalted by the romanticists above all other arts because it is the most nostalgic, the art that is most suggestive of the hopeless gap between the “ideal” and the “real.” “Music,” in Emerson’s phrase, “pours on mortals its beautiful disdain.” “Away! away!” cries Jean Paul to Music. “Thou speakest of things which throughout my endless life I have found not, and shall not find.” In musical and other nostalgia, the feelings receive a sort of infinitude from the cooperation of the imagination; and this infinitude, this quest of something that must ever elude one, is at the same time taken to be the measure of one’s idealism. The symmetry and form that the classicist gains from working within bounds are no doubt excellent, but then the willingness to work within bounds betokens a lack of inspiration. If the primitivist is ready, as some one has complained, to turn his back on the bright forms of Olympus and return to the ancient gods of chaos and of night, the explanation is to be sought in this idea of the infinite. It finally becomes a sort of Moloch to which he is prepared to sacrifice most of the values of civilized life. The chief fear of the classicist is to be thought monstrous. The primitivist on the contrary is inclined to see a proof of superior amplitude of spirit in mere grotesqueness and disproportion. The creation of monsters is, as Hugo says, a “satisfaction due to the infinite.” (5)
(To be continued.)

(1) Lettres, II, 292.
(2) See his letter to Wordsworth, 30 January, 1801.
(3) Dramatic Art and Literature, ch. 1.
(4) Cf. Voltaire: On ne peut désirer ce qu’on ne connaît pas. (Zaïre.)
(5) See article Goût in Postscriptum de ma vie.