Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter IV (Part 3)

(Pictured: Maximilien Robespierre.) I am happy to present the third 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 3)

The denial of the reality of the “civil war in the cave” involves an entire transformation of the conscience. The conscience ceases to be a power that sits in judgment on the ordinary self and inhibits its impulses. It tends so far as it is recognized at all, to become itself an instinct and an emotion. Students of the history of ethics scarcely need to be told that this transformation of the conscience was led up to by the English deists, especially by Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson.(1) Shaftesbury and Hutcheson are already aesthetic in all senses of the word; aesthetic in that they tend to base conduct upon feeling, and aesthetic in that they incline to identify the good and the beautiful. Conscience is ceasing for both of them to be an inner check on the impulses of the individual and becoming a moral sense, a sort of expansive instinct for doing good to others. Altruism, as thus conceived, is opposed by them to the egoism of Hobbes and his followers.

But for the full implications of this transformation of conscience and for aesthetic morality in general one needs to turn to Rousseau. Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there are a few in whom the voice of “nature” is still strong and who, to be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century an almost technical meaning, are the “beautiful souls.” The belle âme is practically indistinguishable from the âme sensible and has many points in common with the original genius. Those whose souls are beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of less exquisite sensibility. “There are unfortunates too privileged to follow the common pathway.” (2) The beautiful soul is unintelligible to those of coarser feelings. His very superiority, his preternatural fineness of sensation, thus predestines him to suffering. We are here at the root of romantic melancholy as will appear more fully later.

The most important aspect of the whole conception is, however, the strictly ethical—the notion that the beautiful soul has only to be instinctive and temperamental to merit the praise that has in the past been awarded only to the purest spirituality. “As for Julie,” says Rousseau, “who never had any other guide but her heart and could have no surer guide, she gives herself up to it without scruple, and to do right, has only to do all that it asks of her.” (3) Virtue indeed, according to Rousseau, is not merely an instinct but a passion and even a voluptuous passion, moving in the same direction as other passions, only superior to them in vehemence. “Cold reason has never done anything illustrious; and you can triumph over the passions only by opposing them to one another. When the passion of virtue arises, it dominates everything and holds everything in equipoise.” (4)

This notion of the soul that is spontaneously beautiful and therefore good made an especial appeal to the Germans and indeed is often associated with Germany more than with any other land. (5) But examples of moral aestheticism are scarcely less frequent elsewhere from Rousseau to the present. No one, for example, was ever more convinced of the beauty of his own soul than Renan. “Morality,” says Renan, “has been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit, as obedience to a law, as an inner struggle between opposite laws. As for me, I declare that when I do good I obey no one, I fight no battle and win no victory. The cultivated man has only to follow the delicious incline of his inner impulses.” (6) Therefore, as he says elsewhere, “Be beautiful and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do. This is the whole of morality.” (7)

The doctrine of the beautiful soul is at once a denial and a parody of the doctrine of grace; a denial because it rejects original sin; a parody because it holds that the beautiful soul acts aright, not through any effort of its own but because nature acts in it and through it even as a man in a state of grace acts aright not through any merit of his own but because God acts in him and through him. The man who saw everything from the angle of grace was, like the beautiful soul or the original genius, inclined to look upon himself as exceptional and superlative. Bunyan entitles the story of his own inner life “Grace abounding to the chief of sinners.” But Bunyan flatters himself. It is not easy to be chief in such a lively competition. Humility and pride were evidently in a sort of grapple with one another in the breast of the Jansenist who declared that God had killed three men in order to compass his salvation. In the case of the beautiful soul the humility disappears, but the pride remains. He still looks upon himself as superlative but superlative in goodness. If all men were like himself, Renan declares, it would be appropriate to say of them: Ye are Gods and sons of the most high. (8) The partisan of grace [generally meaning early Lutherans, Calvinists, and Jansenists. —Ed.] holds that works are of no avail compared with the gratuitous and unmerited illumination from above. The beautiful soul clings to his belief in his own innate excellence, no matter how flagrant the contradiction may be between this belief and his deeds. One should not fail to note some approximation to the point of view of the beautiful soul in those forms of Christianity in which the sense of sin is somewhat relaxed and the inner light very much emphasized—for example among the German pietists [Protestants adhering to a subjectivist interior religious experience in the form of feeling —Ed.] and the quietists of Catholic countries. (9) [Quietism, a condemned heresy defined in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) as “the doctrine which declares that man’s highest perfection consists in a sort of psychical self-annihilation and a consequent absorption of the soul into the Divine Essence even during the present life.” —Ed.] We even hear of persons claiming to be Christians who as the result of debauchery have experienced a spiritual awakening (Dans la brute assoupie, un ange se réveille [“In the sleeping brute, an angel wakes” —Ed.]). But such doctrines are mere excrescences and eccentricities in the total history of Christianity. Even in its extreme insistence on grace, Christianity has always tended to supplement rather than contradict the supreme maxim of humanistic morality as enunciated by Cicero: “The whole praise of virtue is in action.” The usual result of the doctrine of grace when sincerely held is to make a man feel desperately sinful at the same time that he is less open to reproach than other men in his actual behavior. The beautiful soul on the other hand can always take refuge in his feelings from his real delinquencies. According to Joubert, Chateaubriand was not disturbed by actual lapses in his conduct because of his persuasion of his own innate rectitude. (10) “Her conduct was reprehensible,” say Rousseau of Madame de Warens, “but her heart was pure.” It does not matter what you do if only through it all you preserve the sense of your own loveliness. Indeed the more dubious the act the more copious would seem to be the overflow of fine sentiments to which it stimulates the beautiful soul. Rousseau dilates on his “warmth of heart,” his “keenness of sensibility,” his “innate benevolence for his fellow creatures,” his “ardent love for the great, the true, the beautiful, the just” on the “melting feeling, the lively and sweet emotion that he experiences at the sight of everything that is virtuous, generous and lovely,” and concludes: “And so my third child was put into the foundling hospital.”

If we wish to see the psychology of Rousseau writ large we should turn to the French Revolution. That period abounds in persons whose goodness is in theory so superlative that it overflows in a love for all men, but who in practice are filled like Rousseau in his later years with universal suspicion. There was indeed a moment in the Revolution when the madness of Rousseau became epidemic, when suspicion was pushed to such a point that men became “suspect of being suspect.” One of the last persons to see Rousseau alive at Ermenonville was Maximilien Robespierre. He was probably a more thoroughgoing Rousseauist than any other of the Revolutionary leaders. Perhaps no passage that could be cited illustrates with more terrible clearness the tendency of the new morality to convert righteousness into self-righteousness than the following from his last speech before the Convention at the very height of the Reign of Terror. Himself devoured by suspicion, he is repelling the suspicion that he wishes to erect his own power on the ruins of the monarchy. The idea, he says, that “he can descend to the infamy of the throne will appear probable only to those perverse beings who have not even the right to believe in virtue. But why speak of virtue? Doubtless virtue is a natural passion. But how could they be familiar with it, these venal spirits who never yielded access to aught save cowardly and ferocious passions? . . . Yet virtue exists as you can testify, feeling and pure souls; it exists, that tender, irresistible, imperious passion, torment and delight of magnanimous hearts, that profound horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for one’s country, that still more sublime and sacred love for humanity, without which a great revolution is only a glittering crime that destroys another crime; it exists, that generous ambition to found on earth the first Republic of the world; that egoism of undegenerate men who find a celestial voluptuousness in the calm of a pure conscience and the ravishing spectacle of public happiness (!). You feel it at this moment burning in your souls. I feel it in mine. But how could our vile calumniators have any notion of it?” etc.
[To be continued.]

(1) See Hasting Rashdall: Is Conscience an Emotion? (1914), especially ch. 1. Cf. Nouvelle Héloïse. (Pt. vi, Lettre vii): “Saint-Preux fait de la conscience morale un sentiment, et non pas un jugement.”

(2) Nouvelle Héloïse. (Pt. v, Lettre ii).

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid., Pt. iv, Lettre xii.

(5) Schiller’s definition is well known : “A beautiful soul we call a state where the moral sentiment has taken possession of all the emotions to such a degree that it may unhesitatingly commit the guidance of life to instinct” etc. (On Grace and Dignity.) Cf. Madame de Staël : “La vertu devient alors une impulsion involontaire, un mouvement qui passe dans le sang, et vous entraîne irrésistiblement comme les passions les plus impérieuses.” [“Virtue then becomes an involuntary impulse, a movement that runs through the blood, and irresistibly drives you like the most compelling passions. —Ed.] (De la Littérature: Discours préliminaire.)

(6) Avenir de la Science, 354.

(7) Ibid. 179-180.

(8) Avenir de la Science, 476.

(9) Madame de Warens felt the influence of German pietism in her youth. See La Jeunesse de J.-J. Rousseau par E. Ritter; ch. xiii.

(10) Lettre à M. Molé (21 October, 1803).