Rousseau and Romanticism, Chapter IV (Part 8)

(Pictured: Hector Berlioz.) I am happy to present the eighth 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 8)

The man who makes self-expression and not self-control his primary endeavor becomes subject to every influence, “the very slave of circumstance and impulse borne by every breath.” (1) This is what it means in practice no longer to keep a firm hand on the rudder of one’s personality, but to turn one’s self over to “nature.” The partisan of expression becomes the thrall of his impressions so that the whole Rousseauistic conception may be termed indifferently impressionistic or expressionistic. For the beautiful soul in order to express himself has to indulge his emotions instead of hardening and bracing them against the shock of circumstance. The very refinement of sensibility which constitutes in his own eyes his superiority to the Philistine makes him quiver responsive to every outer influence; he finally becomes subject to changes in the weather, or in Rousseau’s own phrase, the “vile plaything of the atmosphere and seasons.”

This rapid shifting of mood in the romanticist, in response to inner impulse or outer impression, is almost too familiar to need illustration. Here is an example that may serve for a thousand from that life-long devotee of the great god Whim—Hector Berlioz. When at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille’s marriage to another. “In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die.” Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady’s maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets “two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum.” While awaiting the departure of the diligence he “rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog.” Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a “‘Ha’ I so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller.” But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there “the twenty happiest days” of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

In this exaltation of environmental influences one should note again the co-operation of Rousseauist and Baconian, of emotional and scientific naturalist. Both are prone to look upon man as being made by natural forces and not as making himself. To deal with the substitutes that Rousseauist and Baconian have proposed for traditional morality, is in fact to make a study of the varieties—and they are numerous—of naturalistic fatalism. The upshot of the whole movement is to discredit moral effort on the part of the individual. Why should a man believe in the efficacy of this effort, why should he struggle to acquire character if he is convinced that he is being moulded like putty by influences beyond his control—the influence of climate, for example? Both science and romanticism have vied with one another in making of man a mere stop on which Nature may play what tune she will. The Aeolian harp enjoyed an extraordinary popularity as a romantic symbol. The man of science for his part is ready to draw up statistical tables showing what season of the year is most productive of suicide and what type of weather impels bank-cashiers most irresistibly to embezzlement. A man on a mountain top, according to Rousseau, enjoys not only physical but spiritual elevation, and when he descends to the plain the altitude of his mind declines with that of his body. Ruskin’s soul, says C. E. Norton, “was like an Aeolian harp, its strings quivering musically in serene days under the touch of the soft air, but as the clouds gathered and the winds arose, vibrating in the blast with a tension that might break the sounding board itself.” It is not surprising Ruskin makes other men as subject to “skyey influences” as himself. “The mountains of the earth are,” he says; “its natural cathedrals. True religion can scarcely be achieved away from them. The curate or hermit of the field and fen, however simple his life or painful his lodging, does not often attain the spirit of the hill pastor or recluse: we may find in him a decent virtue or a contented ignorance, rarely the prophetic vision or the martyr’s passion.” The corruptions of Romanism “are traceable for the most part to lowland prelacy.” (2)

Is then the Rousseauist totally unable to regulate his impressions? It is plain that he cannot control them from within because the whole idea of a vital control of this kind is, as we have seen, foreign to the psychology of the beautiful soul. Yet it is, according to Rousseau, possible to base morality on the senses—on outer perception that is—and at the same time get the equivalent of a free will based on inner perception. He was so much interested in this subject that he had planned to devote to it a whole treatise to be entitled “Sensitive morality or the materialism of the sage.” A man cannot resist an outer impression but he may at least get out of its way and put himself in the way of another impression that will impel him to the desired course of conduct. “The soul may then be put or maintained in the state most favorable to virtue.” “Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, rest, everything, acts on our physical frame.” By a proper adjustment of all these outer elements we may govern in their origins the feelings by which we allow ourselves to be dominated. (3)

Rousseau’s ideas about sensitive morality are at once highly chimerical and highly significant. Here as elsewhere one may say with Amiel that nothing of Rousseau has been lost. His point of view has an inner kinship with that of the man of science who asserts that man is necessarily the product of natural forces, but that one may at least modify the natural forces. For example, moral effort on the part of the individual cannot overcome heredity. It is possible, however, by schemes of eugenics to regulate heredity. The uneasy burden of moral responsibility is thus lifted from the individual, and the moralist in the old-fashioned sense is invited to abdicate in favor of the biologist. It would be easy enough to trace similar assumptions in the various forms of socialism and other “isms” almost innumerable of the present hour.

Perhaps the problem to which I have already alluded may as well be faced here. How does it happen that Rousseau who attacked both science and literature as the chief sources of human degeneracy should be an arch-aesthete, the authentic ancestor of the school of art for art’s sake and at the same time by his sensitive (or aesthetic) morality play into the hands of the scientific determinist? If one is to enter deeply into the modern movement one needs to consider both wherein scientific and emotional naturalists clash and wherein they agree. The two types of naturalists agree in their virtual denial of a superrational realm. They clash above all in their attitude towards what is on the rational level. The scientific naturalist is assiduously analytical. Rousseau, on the other hand, or rather one whole side of Rousseau, is hostile to analysis. The arts and sciences are attacked because they are the product of reflection. “The man who reflects is a depraved animal,” because he has fallen away from the primitive spontaneous unity of his being. Rousseau is the first of the great anti-intellectualists. By assailing both rationalism and pseudo-classic decorum in the name of instinct and emotion he appealed to men’s longing to get away from the secondary and the derivative to the immediate. True decorum satisfies the craving for immediacy because it contains within itself an element of superrational perception. The “reason” of a Plato or an Aristotle also satisfies the craving for immediacy because it likewise contains within itself an element of superrational perception. A reason or a decorum of this kind ministers to another deep need of human nature—the need to lose itself in a larger whole. Once eliminate the superrational perception and reason sinks to the level of rationalism, consciousness becomes mere self-consciousness. It is difficult, as St. Evremond said, for man to remain in the long run in this doubtful middle state. Having lost the unity of insight, he will long for the unity of instinct. Hence the paradox that this most self-conscious of all movements is filled with the praise of the unconscious. It abounds in persons who, like Walt Whitman, would turn and live with the animals, or who, like Novalis, would fain strike root into the earth with the plant. Animals (4) and plants are not engaged in any moral struggle, they are not inwardly divided against themselves.

Here is the source of the opposition between the abstract and analytical head, deadly to the sense of unity, and the warm immediate heart that unifies life with the aid of the imagination—an opposition that assumes so many forms from Rousseau to Bergson. The Rousseauist always betrays himself by arraigning some form or other, “the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” One should indeed remember that there were obscurantists before Rousseau. Pascal also arrays the heart against the head; but his heart is at the farthest remove from that of Rousseau; it stands for a superrational perception. Christians like Pascal may indulge with comparative impunity in a certain amount of obscurantism. For they have submitted to a tradition that supplies them with distinctions between good and evil and at the same time controls their imagination. But for the individualist who has broken with tradition to deny his head in the name of his heart is a deadly peril. He above all persons should insist that the power by which we multiply distinctions, though secondary, is not false—that the intellect, of however little avail in itself, is invaluable when working in cooperation with the imagination in the service of either inner or outer perception. It is only through the analytical head and its keen discriminations that the individualist can determine whether the unity and infinitude towards which his imagination is reaching (and it is only through the imagination that one can have the sense of unity and infinitude) is real or merely chimerical. Need I add that in making these distinctions between imagination, intellect, feeling, etc., I am not attempting to divide man up into more or less water-tight compartments, into hard and fast “faculties,” but merely to express, however imperfectly, certain obscure and profound facts of experience.

(1) Byron, Sardanapalus, iv, 5.

(2) Modern Painters, Part v, ch. xx.

(3) Confessions, Pt. ii, Livre ix (1756).

(4) With nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth and their old age
Is beautiful and free.
—Wordsworth: The Fountain.