Romantic Morality: The Real (Part 2)

(Pictured: Bismarck.) I am happy to present the second post of  Chapter V, “Romantic Morality: The Real,” in which Babbitt addresses the descent of the romantics from altruistic idealism to egoistic realism, both representing a flight from responsibility. In Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Irving 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 is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

CHAPTER V

Romantic Morality: The Real (Part 2)

The ideal of romantic morality, as was seen in the last chapter, is altruism. The real, it should be clear from the examples I have been citing, is always egoism. But egoism may assume very different forms. As to the main forms of egoism in men who have repudiated outer control without acquiring self-control*  we may perhaps revive profitably the old Christian classification of the three lusts—the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. Goethe indeed may be said to have treated these three main ways of being temperamental in three of his early characters—the lust of knowledge in “Faust,” the lust of sensation in “Werther,” and the lust of power in “Götz.” If we view life solely from the naturalistic level and concern ourselves solely with the world of action, we are justified in neglecting, like Hobbes, the other lusts and putting supreme emphasis on the lust for power. (1) Professor F. J. Mather, Jr., has distinguished between “hard” and “soft” sentimentalists. His distinction might perhaps be brought more closely into line with my own distinctions if I ventured to coin a word and to speak of hard and soft temperamentalists. The soft temperamentalist will prove unable to cope in the actual world with the hard temperamentalist, and is very likely to become his tool. Balzac has very appropriately made Lucien de Rubempré, the romantic poet and a perfect type of a soft temperamentalism, the tool of Vautrin, the superman.

Here indeed is the supreme opposition between the ideal and the real in romantic morality. The ideal to which Rousseau invites us is either the primitivistic anarchy of the “Second Discourse,” in which egoism is tempered by “natural pity” or else a state such as is depicted in the “Social Contract,” in which egoism is held in check by a disinterested “general will.” The preliminary to achieving either of these ideals is that the traditional checks on human nature should be removed. But in exact proportion as this programme of emancipation is carried out what emerges in the real world is not the mythical will to brotherhood, but the ego and its fundamental will to power. Give a bootblack half the universe, according to Carlyle, and he will soon be quarreling with the owner of the other half. He will if he is a very temperamental bootblack. Perhaps indeed all other evils in life may be reduced to the failure to check that something in man that is reaching out for more and ever for more. In a society in which the traditional inhibitions are constantly growing weaker, the conflict I have just sketched between the ideal and the real is becoming more and more acute. The soft temperamentalists are overflowing with beautiful professions of brotherly love, and at the same time the hard temperamentalists are reaching out for everything in sight; and inasmuch as the hard temperamentalists operate not in dreamland, but in the real world, they are only too plainly setting the tone. Very often, of course, the same temperamentalist has his hard and his soft side. The triumph of egoism over altruism in the relations between man and man is even more evident in the relations between nation and nation. The egoism that results from the inbreeding of temperament on a national scale runs in the case of the strong nations into imperialism. (2) We have not reflected sufficiently on the fact that the soft temperamentalist Rousseau is more than any other one person the father of Kultur [“German civilization and culture (sometimes used in a derogatory sense to suggest elements of racism, authoritarianism, or militarism”).—Oxford Living Dictionaries]; (3) and that the exponents of Kultur in our own day have been revealed as the hardest of hard temperamentalists.

To understand the particular craving that is met by Rousseauistic idealism one would need to go with some care into the psychology of the half-educated man. The half-educated man may be defined as the man who has acquired a degree of critical self-consciousness sufficient to detach him from the standards of his time and place, but not sufficient to acquire the new standards that come with a more thorough cultivation. It was pointed out long ago that the characteristic of the half-educated man is that he is incurably restless; that he is filled with every manner of desire. In contrast with him the uncultivated man, the peasant, let us say, and the man of high cultivation have few and simple desires. Thus Socrates had fewer and simpler desires than the average Athenian. But what is most noteworthy about the half-educated man is not simply that he harbors many desires and is therefore incurably restless, but that these desires are so often incompatible. He craves various good things, but is not willing to pay the price—not willing to make the necessary renunciations. He pushes to an extreme what is after all a universal human proclivity—the wish to have one’s cake and eat it too. Thus, while remaining on the naturalistic level, he wishes to have blessings that accrue only to those who rise to the humanistic or religious levels. He wishes to live in “a universe with the lid off,” to borrow a happy phrase from the pragmatist, and at the I same time to enjoy the peace and brotherhood that are the fruits of restraint. The moral indolence of the Rousseauist is such that he is unwilling to adjust himself to the truth of the human law; and though living naturalistically, he is loath to recognize that what actually prevails on the naturalistic level is the law of cunning and the law of force. He thus misses the reality of both the human and the natural law and in the pursuit of a vague Arcadian longing falls into sheer unreality. I am indeed overstating the case so far as Rousseau is concerned. He makes plain in the “Emile” that the true law of nature is not the law of love but the law of force. Emile is to be released from the discipline of the human law and given over to the discipline of nature; and this means in practice that he will have “to bow his neck beneath the hard yoke of physical necessity.” In so far the “nature” of Emile is no Arcadian dream. Where the Arcadian dreaming begins is when Rousseau assumes that an Emile who has learned the lesson of force from Nature herself, will not pass along this lesson to others, whether citizens of his own or some other country, but will rather display in his dealings with them an ideal fraternity. In the early stages of the naturalistic movement, in Hobbes and Shaftesbury, for example, egoism and altruism, the idea of power and the idea of sympathy, are more sharply contrasted than they are in Rousseau and the later romanticists. Shaftesbury assumes in human nature an altruistic impulse or will to brotherhood that will be able to cope successfully with the will to power that Hobbes declares to be fundamental. Many of the romanticists, as we have seen, combine the cult of power with the cult of brotherhood. Hercules, as in Shelley’s poem, is to bow down before Prometheus, the lover of mankind. The extreme example, however, is probably William Blake. He proclaims himself of the devil’s party, he glorifies a free expansion of energy, he looks upon everything that restricts this expansion as synonymous with evil. At the same time he pushes his exaltation of sympathy to the verge of the grotesque. (4)

Such indeed is the jumble of incompatibles in Blake that he would rest an illimitable compassion on the psychology of the superman. For nothing is more certain than that the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is among other things a fairly complete anticipation of Nietzsche.
[To be continued.]

*This, of course, is Babbitt’s shorthand for repudiating the Catholic Church (as if She were not the mediator of inwardly transforming supernatural grace), without achieving his posited humanistic self- control.

(1) “So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.” Leviathan, Part i, ch. xi.

(2) E. Seillière has been tracing, in Le Mal romantique and other volumes, the relation between Rousseauism and what he terms an “irrational imperialism.” His point of view is on the constructive side very different from mine.

(3) The best account of Rousseau’s German influence is still that of H. Hettner in his Literaturgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Compared with Rousseau’s German influence, says Professor Paul Hensel in his Rousseau (1907), “his influence in France seems almost trifling.” In Germany “Rousseau became the basis not of a guillotine but of a new culture (Kultur). . . . We have drawn his spirit over to us, we have made it our own.” (121.) See also Professor Eugen Kühnemann, Vom Weltreich des deutschen Geistes (1914), 54-62, and passim, German idealism is, according to Kühnemann, the monument that does the greatest honor to Rousseau.

(4) A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage
*           *           *           *           *           *
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.
*           *           *           *           *           *
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.

Auguries of Innocence.