Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter IV (Part 2)

(Pictured: Denis Diderot.) I am happy to present the second post of Chapter IV 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.

CHAPTER IV

ROMANTIC MORALITY: THE IDEAL  (Part 2)

According to strict neo-classic decorum only the aristocracy had the right to appear in tragedy, whereas the man of the middle class was relegated to comedy and the man of the people to farce. The intermediate types of play that multiply in the eighteenth century (drame bourgeois, comédie larmoyante, etc.) are the reply of the plebeian to this classification. He is beginning to insist that his emotions too shall be taken seriously. But at the same time he is, under the influence of the new naturalistic philosophy, so bent on affirming his own goodness that in getting rid of artificial decorum he gets rid of true decorum likewise and so strikes at the very root of the drama. For true drama in contradistinction to mere melodrama requires in the background a scale of ethical values or, what amounts to the same thing, a sense of what is normal and representative and decorous, and the quality of the characters is revealed by their responsible choices good or bad with reference to some ethical scale, choices that the characters reveal by their actions and not by any explicit moralizing. But in the middle class drama there is little action in this sense: no one wills either his goodness or badness, but appears more or less as the creature of accident or fate (in a very un-Greek sense), or of a defective social order; and so instead of true dramatic conflict and proper motivation one tends to get domestic tableaux in which the characters weep in unison. For it is understood not only that man (especially the bourgeois) is good but that the orthodox way for this goodness to manifest itself is to overflow through the eyes. Perhaps never before or since have tears been shed with such a strange facility. At no other time have there been so many persons who, with streaming eyes, called upon heaven and earth to bear witness to their innate excellence. A man would be ashamed, says La Bruyère, speaking from the point of view of l’honnête homme and his decorum, to display his emotions at the theatre. By the time of Diderot he would have been ashamed not to display them. It had become almost a requirement of good manners to weep and sob in public. At the performance of the “Père de Famille” in 1769 we are told that every handkerchief was in use. The Revolution seems to have raised doubts as to the necessary connection between tearfulness and goodness. The “Père de Famille” was hissed from the stage in 1811. Geoffrey commented in his feuilleton: “We have learned by a fatal experience that forty years of declamation and fustian about sensibility, humanity and benevolence have served only to prepare men’s hearts for the last excesses of barbarism.”

The romanticist indulged in the luxury of grief and was not incapable of striking an attitude. But as a rule he disdained the facile lachrymosity of the man of feeling as still too imitative and conventional. For his part, he has that within which passes show. To estimate a play solely by its power to draw tears is, as Coleridge observes, to measure it by a virtue that it possesses in common with the onion; and Chateaubriand makes a similar observation. Yet one should not forget that the romantic emotionalist derives directly from the man of feeling. One may indeed study the transition from the one to the other in Chateaubriand himself. For example, in his early work the “Natchez” he introduces a tribe of Sioux Indians who are still governed by the natural pity of Rousseau, as they prove by weeping on the slightest occasion. Lamartine again is close to Rousseau when he expatiates on the “genius” that is to be found in a tear; and Musset is not far from Diderot when he exclaims, “Long live the melodrama at which Margot wept” (Vive le mélodrame où Margot a pleuré).

Though it is usual to associate this effusiveness with Rousseau it should be clear from my brief sketch of the rise of the forces that were destined to overthrow the two great traditions—the Christian tradition with its prime emphasis on humility and the classical with its prime emphasis on decorum—that Rousseau had many forerunners. It would be easy enough, for example, to cite from English literature of the early eighteenth-century domestic tableaux (1) that look forward equally to the middle class drama and to Rousseau’s picture of the virtues of Julie as wife and mother. Yet Rousseau, after all, deserves his preëminent position as the arch-sentimentalist by the very audacity of his revolt in the name of feeling from both humility and decorum. Never before and probably never since has a man of such undoubted genius shown himself so lacking in humility and decency (to use the old-fashioned synonym for decorum) as Rousseau in the “Confessions.” Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready as he declares to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the last judgment, with the book of his “Confessions” in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race: “Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: I am better than that man.” As Horace Walpole complains he meditates a gasconade for the end of the world. It is possible to maintain with M. Lemaître that Rousseau’s character underwent a certain purification as he grew older, but never at any time, either at the beginning or at the end, is it possible, as M. Lemaître admits, to detect an atom of humility—an essential lack that had already been noted by Burke.

The affront then that Rousseau puts upon humility at the very opening of his “Confessions” has like so much else in his life and writings a symbolical value. He also declares war in the same passage in the name of what he conceives to be his true self—that is his emotional self—against decorum or decency I have already spoken of one of the main objections to decorum: it keeps one tame and conventional and interferes with the explosion of original genius. Another and closely allied grievance against decorum is implied in Rousseau’s opening assertion in the Confessions that his aim is to show a man in all the truth of his nature, and human nature can be known in its truth only, it should seem, when stripped of its last shred of reticence. Rousseau therefore already goes on the principle recently proclaimed by the Irish Bohemian George Moore, that the only thing a man should be ashamed of is of being ashamed. If the first objection to decorum—that it represses original genius—was urged especially by the romanticists, the second objection—that decorum interferes with truth to nature—was urged especially by the so-called realists of the later nineteenth century (and realism of this type is, as has been said, only romanticism going on all fours). Between the Rousseauistic conception of nature and that of the humanist the gap is especially wide if the humanist maintains that man attains to the truth of his nature only by imposing decorum upon his ordinary self. The Rousseauist maintains that man attains to this truth only by the free expansion of his ordinary self. The humanist fears to let his ordinary self unfold freely at the expense of decorum lest he merit some such comment as that made on the “Confessions” by Madame de Boufflers who had been infatuated with Rousseau during his lifetime: that it was the work not of a man but of an unclean animal. (2)

The passages of the “Confessions” that deserve this verdict do not, it is hardly necessary to add, reflect directly Rousseau’s moral ideal. In his dealings with morality as elsewhere he is, to come back to Schiller’s distinction, partly idyllic and partly satirical. He is satiric in his attitude towards the existing forms—forms based upon the Christian tradition that man is naturally sinful and that he needs therefore the discipline of fear and humility, or else forms based upon the classical tradition that man is naturally one-sided and that he needs therefore to be disciplined into decorum and proportionateness. He is idyllic in the substitutes that he would offer for these traditional forms. The substitutes are particularly striking in their refusal to allow any place for fear. Fear, according to Ovid, created the first Gods, and religion has been defined by an old English poet as the “mother of form and fear.” Rousseau would put in the place of form a fluid emotionalism, and as for fear, he would simply cast it out entirely, a revulsion, as I have pointed out, from the excessive emphasis on fear in the more austere forms of Christianity. Be “natural,” Rousseau says, and eschew priests and doctors, and you will be emancipated from fear.

Rousseau’s expedient for getting rid of man’s sense of his own sinfulness on which fear and humility ultimately rest is well known. Evil, says Rousseau, foreign to man’s constitution, is introduced into it from without. The burden of guilt is thus conveniently shifted upon society. Instead of the old dualism between good and evil in the breast of the individual, a new dualism is thus set up between an artificial and corrupt society and “nature.” For man, let me repeat, has, according to Rousseau, fallen from nature in somewhat the same way as in the old theology he fell from God, and it is here that the idyllic element comes in, for, let us remind ourselves once more, Rousseau’s nature from which man has fallen is only an Arcadian dream.

The assertion of man’s natural goodness is plainly something very fundamental in Rousseau, but there is something still more fundamental, and that is the shifting of dualism itself, the virtual denial of a struggle between good and evil in the breast of the individual. That deep inner cleft in man’s being on which religion has always put so much emphasis is not genuine. Only get away from an artificial society and back to nature and the inner conflict which is but a part of the artificiality will give way to beauty and harmony. In a passage in his“Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,” Diderot puts the underlying thesis of the new morality almost more clearly than Rousseau: “Do you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts throughout life.”
[To be continued.]

See, for example, Tatler, 17 November, 31 December, 1709 (by Steele).

(2) See her letter to Gustavus III, King of Sweden, cited in Gustave III et la cour de France, ii, 402, par A. Geoffroy.