Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter IV (Part 5)

(Pictured: Head of an Ass.) I am happy to present the fifth 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 5)

This subordination of all the other values of life to sympathy is achieved only at the expense of the great humanistic virtue—decorum or a sense of proportion. Now not to possess a sense of proportion is, however this lack may be manifested, to be a pedant; and, if there is ever a humanistic reaction, Hugo, one of the chief products of the age of original genius, will scarcely escape the charge of pedantry. But true religion also insists on a hierarchy of the virtues. Burke speaks at least as much from a religious as from a humanistic point of view when he writes:

“The greatest crimes do not arise so much from a want of feeling for others as from an over-sensibility for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires. . . . They [the ‘philosophes’] explode or render odious or contemptible that class of virtues which restrain the appetite. These are at least nine out of ten of the virtues. In the place of all this they substitute a virtue which they call humanity or benevolence. By these means their morality has no idea in it of restraint or indeed of a distinct and settled principle of any kind. When their disciples are thus left free and guided only by present feeling, they are no longer to be depended on for good and evil. The men who to-day snatch the worst criminal from justice will murder the most innocent persons to-morrow.” (1)

The person who seeks to get rid of ninety per cent of the virtues in favor of an indiscriminate sympathy does not simply lose his scale of values. He arrives at an inverted scale of values. For the higher the object for which one feels sympathy the more the idea of obligation is likely to intrude—the very thing the Rousseauist is seeking to escape. One is more irresponsible and therefore more spontaneous in the Rousseauistic sense in lavishing one’s pity on a dying pig. Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this “psychosis.” He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had we are told an unspeakable affection for his dog. (2)

Rousseau’s contemporary, Sterne, is supposed to have lavished a somewhat disproportionate emotion upon an ass. But the ass does not really come into his own until a later stage of the movement. Nietzsche has depicted the leaders of the nineteenth century as engaged in a veritable onolatry or ass-worship. The opposition between neo-classicist and Rousseauist is indeed symbolized in a fashion by their respective attitude towards the ass. Neo-classical decorum was, it should be remembered, an all-pervading principle. It imposed a severe hierarchy, not only upon objects, but upon the words that express these objects. The first concern of the decorous person was to avoid lowness, and the ass he looked upon as hopelessly low—so low as to be incapable of ennoblement even by a resort to periphrasis. Homer therefore was deemed by Vida to have been guilty of outrageous indecorum in comparing Ajax to an ass. The partisans of Homer sought indeed to prove that the ass was in the time of Homer a “noble” animal or at least that the word ass was “noble.” But the stigma put upon Homer by Vida—reinforced as it was by the similar attacks of Scaliger and others —remained.

The rehabilitation of the ass by the Rousseanist is at once a protest against an unduly squeamish decorum, and a way of proclaiming the new principle of unbounded expansive sympathy. In dealing with both words and what they express, one should show a democratic inclusiveness. Something has already been said of the war the romanticist waged in the name of local color against the impoverishment of vocabulary by the neo-classicists. But the romantic warfare against the aristocratic squeamishness of the neo-classic vocabulary goes perhaps even deeper. Take, for instance, Wordsworth’s view as to the proper language of poetry. Poetical decorum had become by the end of the eighteenth century a mere varnish of conventional elegance. Why should mere polite prejudice, so Wordsworth reasoned, and the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” in which it resulted be allowed to interfere with the “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion”? And so he proceeds to set up a view of poetry that is only the neo-classical view turned upside down. For the proper subjects and speech of poetry he would turn from the highest class of society to the lowest, from the aristocrat to the peasant. The peasant is more poetical than the aristocrat because he is closer to nature, for Wordsworth as he himself avows, is less interested in the peasant for his own sake than because he sees in him a sort of emanation of the landscape. (3)

One needs to keep all this background in mind if one wishes to understand the full significance of a poem like “Peter Bell.” Scaliger blames Homer because he stoops to mention in his description of Zeus something so trivial as the eyebrows. Wordsworth seeks to bestow poetical dignity and seriousness on the “long left ear” of an ass. (4) The ass is thus exalted one scarcely need add, because of his compassionateness. The hard heart of Peter Bell is at last melted by the sight of so much goodness. He aspires to be like the ass and finally achieves his wish.

The French romanticists, Hugo, for instance, make an attack on decorum somewhat similar to that of Wordsworth. Words formerly lived, says Hugo, divided up into castes. Some had the privilege of mounting into the king’s coaches at Versailles, whereas others were relegated to the rabble. I came along and clapped a red liberty cap on the old dictionary. I brought about a literary ’93, (5) etc. Hugo’s attack on decorum is also combined with an even more violent assertion than Wordsworth’s of the ideal of romantic morality—the supremacy of pity. He declares in the “Legend of the Ages” that an ass that takes a step aside to avoid crushing a toad is “holier than Socrates and greater than Plato.” (6) For this and similar utterances Hugo deserves to be placed very nearly if not quite at the head of romantic onolaters.

We have said that the tremendous burden put upon sympathy in romantic morality is a result of the assumption that the “civil war in the cave” is artificial and that therefore the restraining virtues (according to Burke ninety per cent of the virtues) which imply this warfare are likewise artificial. If the civil war in the cave should turn out to be not artificial but a fact of the gravest import, the whole spiritual landscape would change immediately. Romantic morality would in that case be not a reality but a mirage. We need at all events to grasp the central issue firmly. Humanism and religion have always asserted in some form or other the dualism of the human spirit. A man’s spirituality is in inverse ratio to his immersion in temperament. The whole movement from Rousseau to Bergson is, on the other hand, filled with the glorification of instinct. To become spiritual the beautiful soul needs only to expand along the lines of temperament and with this process the cult of pity or sympathy does not interfere. The romantic moralist tends to favor expansion on the ground that it is vital, creative, infinite, and to dismiss whatever seems to set bounds to expansion as something inert, mechanical, finite. In its onslaughts on the veto power whether within or without the breast of the individual it is plain that no age has ever approached the age of original genius in the midst of which we are still living. Goethe defines the devil as the spirit that always says no, and Carlyle celebrates his passage from darkness to light as an escape from the Everlasting Nay to the Everlasting Yea. We rarely pause to consider what a reversal of traditional wisdom is implied in such conceptions. In the past, the spirit that says no has been associated rather with the divine. Socrates tells us that the counsels of his “voice” were always negative, never positive. (7) According to the ancient Hindu again the divine is the “inner check.” God, according to Aristotle, is pure Form. In opposition to all this emphasis on the restricting and limiting power, the naturalist, whether scientific or emotional, sets up a program of formless, fearless expansion; which means in practice that he recognizes no bounds either to intellectual or emotional curiosity.

I have said that it is a part of the psychology of the original genius to offer the element of wonder and surprise awakened by the perpetual novelty, the infinite otherwiseness of things, as a substitute for the awe that is associated with their infinite oneness; or rather to refuse to discriminate between these two infinitudes and so to confound the two main directions of the human spirit, its religious East, as one may say, with its West of wonder and romance. This confusion may be illustrated by the romantic attitude towards what is perhaps the most Eastern of all Eastern lands,—India. The materials for the study of India in the Occident were accumulated by Englishmen towards the end of the eighteenth century, but the actual interpretation of this material is due largely to German romanticists, notably to Friedrich Schlegel. (8) Alongside the romantic Hellenist and the romantic mediaevalist we find the romantic Indianist. It is to India even more than to Spain that one needs to turn, says Friedrich Schlegel, for the supremely romantic (9)—that is, the wildest and most unrestrained luxuriance of imagination. [To be continued.]

(1) Correspondence, III, 213 (June, 1791). The date of this letter should be noted. Several of the worst terrorists of the French Revolution began by introducing bills for the abolition of capital punishment.

(2) See Burton’s Hume, II, 309 (note 2).
This sentimental trait did not escape the authors of the Anti-Jacobin:
Sweet child of sickly Fancy—Her of yore
From her loved France Rousseau to exile bore;
And while midst lakes and mountains wild he ran
Full of himself and shunn’d the haunts of man,
Taught her o’er each lone vale and Alpine steep
To lisp the stones of his wrongs and weep;
Taught her to cherish still in either eye
Of tender tears a plentiful supply,
And pour them in the brooks that babbled by-—
Taught her to mete by rule her feelings strong,
False by degrees and delicately wrong,
For the crushed Beetle, first—the widow’d Dove
And all the warbled sorrows of the grove,
Next for poor suff’ring Guilt—last of all.
For Parents, Friends, or King and Country’s fall.

(3) Shepherds, dwellers in the valleys, men
Whom I already loved;—not verily
For their own sakes, but for the fields and hills
Where was their occupation and abode.
—Michael

(4) Once more the Ass, with motion dull,
Upon the pivot of his skull
Turned round his long left ear.
“The bard who soars to elegize an ass” and the “laureate of the long-eared kind” (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers [Lord Byron, 1809]) is, however, not Wordsworth but Coleridge. See his poem To a Young Ass, his mother being tethered near it.

(5) See the poem Acte d’accusation in Les Contemplations.

(6) Le Crapaud in La Légende des Siècles.

(7) See Apology 31D.

(8) His Language and Wisdom of the Hindus appeared in 1808.

(9) See Jugendschriften, ed. by J. Minor, II, 362.