Romantic Morality: The Real (Part 4)

(Pictured: Euripides.) I am happy to present the fourth post of  Chapter V, “Romantic Morality: The Real,” in which Irving 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. 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 4)

In art that has the ethical quality, and I am again not setting up a metaphysical theory but reporting from observation, the calm that comes from imaginative insight into the universal is inextricably blended with an element of uniqueness—with a something that belongs to a particular time and place and individual. The truth to the universal, as Aristotle would say, gives the work verisimilitude and the truth to the particular satisfies man’s deep-seated craving for novelty; so that the best art unites the probable with the wonderful. But the probable, one cannot insist too often, is won no less than the wonderful with the aid of the imagination and so is of the very soul of art. The romanticist who is ready to sacrifice the probable to the wonderful and to look on the whole demand for verisimilitude as an academic superstition is prone to assume that he has a monopoly of soul and imagination. But the word soul is at least in as much need of Socratic definition as the word intuition. It is possible, for example, with the aid of the ethical imagination so to partake of the ultimate element of calm as to rise to the religious level. The man who has risen to this level has a soul, but it is a soul of peace. Both soul and imagination are also needed to achieve the fine adjustment and mediation of the humanist. It is not enough, however, to have a religious or a humanistic soul if one is to be a creator or even a fully equipped critic of art. For art rests primarily not on ethical but aesthetic perception. This perception itself varies widely according to the art involved. One may, for instance, be musically perceptive and at the same time lack poetic perception. To be a creator in any art one must possess furthermore the technique of this art—something that is more or less separable from its “soul’’ in any sense of the word. It is possible to put a wildly romantic soul into art, as has often been done in the Far East, and at the same time to be highly conventional or traditional in one’s technique. Writers like Mérimée, Renan, and Maupassant again are faithful in the main to the technique of French prose that was worked out during the classical period, but combine with this technique an utterly unclassical “soul.”

Rules, especially perhaps rules as to what to avoid, may be of aid in acquiring technique, but are out of place in dealing with the soul of art. There one passes from rules to principles. The only rule, if we are to achieve art that has an ethical soul, is to view life with some degree of imaginative wholeness. Art that has technique without soul in either the classical or romantic sense, and so fails either to inspire elevation or awaken wonder, is likely to be felt as a barren virtuosity. The pseudo-classicist was often unduly minute in the rules he laid down for technique or outer form, as one may say, and then ignored the ethical imagination or inner form entirely, or else set up as a substitute mere didacticism. Since pseudo-classic work of this type plainly lacked soul and imagination, and since the romanticist felt and felt rightly that he himself had a soul and imagination, he concluded wrongly that soul and imagination are romantic monopolies. Like the pseudo-classicist, he inclines to identify high seriousness in art, something that can only come from the exercise of the ethical imagination at its best, with mere preaching, only he differs from the pseudo-classicist in insisting that preaching should be left to divines. One should insist, on the contrary, that the mark of genuinely ethical art, art that is highly serious, is that it is free from preaching. Sophocles is more ethical than Euripides for the simple reason that he views life with more imaginative wholeness. At the same time he is much less given to preaching than Euripides. He does not, as FitzGerald says, interrupt the action and the exhibition of character through action in order to “jaw philosophy.”

It is not unusual for the modem artist to seek, like Euripides, to dissimulate the lack of true ethical purpose in his work by agitating various problems. But problems come and go, whereas human nature abides. One may agitate problems without number, and yet lack imaginative insight into the abiding element in human nature. Moreover, not being of the soul of art, the problem that one agitates is in danger of being a clogging intellectualism. Furthermore to seek in problems an equivalent for the definition and purpose that the ethical imagination alone can give is to renew, often in an aggravated form, the neo-classical error. The moralizing of the pseudo-classic dramatist, even though dull and misplaced, was usually sound enough in itself; whereas the moralizing of those who seek nowadays to use the stage as a pulpit, resting as it does on false humanitarian postulates, is in itself dubious. The problem play succeeds not infrequently in being at once dull and indecent.

The problem play is often very superior in technique or outer form to the earlier romantic drama, but it still suffers from the same lack of inner form, inasmuch as its social purpose cannot take the place of true human purpose based on imaginative insight into the universal. The lack of inner form in so much modern drama and art in general can be traced to the original unsoundness of the break with pseudo-classic formalism. To a pseudo-classic art that lacked every kind of perceptiveness the Rousseauist opposed aesthetic perceptiveness, and it is something, one must admit, thus to have discovered the senses. But to his aesthetic perceptiveness he failed, as I have already said, to add ethical perceptiveness because of his inability to distinguish between ethical perceptiveness and mere didacticism, and so when asked to put ethical purpose into art he replied that art should be pursued for its own sake (l’ art pour l’ art) and that “beauty is its own excuse for being.’’ One should note here the transformation that this pure aestheticism brought about in the meaning of the word beauty itself. For the Greek beauty resided in proportion, (1) and proportion can be attained only with the aid of the ethical imagination. With the elimination of the ethical element from the soul of art the result is an imagination that is free to wander wild with the emancipated emotions. The result is likely to be art in which a lively aesthetic perceptiveness is not subordinated to any whole, art that is unstructural, however it may abound in vivid and picturesque details; and a one-sided art of this kind the romanticist does not hesitate to call beautiful. “If we let the reason sleep and are content to watch a succession of dissolving views,” says Mr. Elton of Shelley’s “Revolt of Islam,’’ “the poem is seen at once to overflow with beauty.” (2) Mere reason is not strictly speaking a sufficient remedy for this unstructural type of “beauty.” Thus Chateaubriand’s reason is on the side of proportion and all the classical virtues but his imagination is not (and we cannot repeat too often that it is what a man is imaginatively and not what he preaches that really counts). Instead of siding with his reason and aiding it to ethical perception Chateaubriand’s imagination is the free playmate of his emotions. “What did I care for all these futilities” (i.e. his functions as cabinet minister), he exclaims, “I who never cared for anything except for my dreams, and even then on condition that they should last only for a night.” When a man has once spoken in that vein sensible people will pay little heed to what he preaches; for they will be certain that the driving power of his work and personality is elsewhere. The imagination holds the balance of power between the reason and the perceptions of sense, and Chateaubriand’s imagination is plainly on the side of sensuous adventure. This vagabondage of the imagination appears especially in his imagistic trend, in his pursuit of the descriptive detail for its own sake. To set out like Chateaubriand to restore the monarchy and the Christian religion and instead to become the founder of “l’ école des images à tout prix” [“the school of images at all costs”] is an especially striking form of the contrast in romantic morality between the ideal and the real.

The attempt that we have been studying to divorce beauty from ethics led in the latter part of the eighteenth century to the rise of a nightmare subject,—aesthetics. Shaftesbury indeed, as we have seen already, anticipates the favorite romantic doctrine that beauty is truth and truth beauty, which means in practice to rest both truth and beauty upon a fluid emotionalism. Thus to deal aesthetically with truth is an error of the first magnitude, but it is also an error, though a less serious one, to see only the aesthetic element in beauty. For beauty to be complete must have not only aesthetic perceptiveness but order and proportion; and this brings us back again to the problem of the ethical imagination and the permanent model or pattern with reference to which it seeks to impose measure and proportion upon sensuous perception and expansive desire. We should not hesitate to say that beauty loses most of its meaning when divorced from ethics even though every aesthete in the world should arise and denounce us as philistines. To rest beauty upon feeling as the very name aesthetics implies, is to rest it upon what is ever shifting. Nor can we escape from this endless mobility with the aid of physical science, for physical science does not itself rise above the naturalistic flux. After eliminating from beauty the permanent pattern and the ethical imagination with the aid of which it is perceived, a man will be ready to term beautiful anything that reflects his ordinary or temperamental self. Diderot is a sentimentalist and so he sees as much beauty in the sentimentalist Richardson as in Homer. If a man is psychically restless he will see beauty only in motion. The Italian futurist Marinetti says that for him a rushing motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. A complete sacrifice of the principle of repose in beauty (which itself arises from the presence of the ethical imagination) to the suggesting of motion such as has been seen in certain recent schools, runs practically into a mixture of charlatanism and madness. “He that is giddy thinks the world goes round.” says Shakespeare, and the exponents of certain ultra-modern movements in painting are simply trying to paint their inner giddiness. As a matter of fact the pretension of the aesthete to have a purely personal vision of beauty and then treat as a philistine every one who does not accept it, is intolerable. Either beauty cannot be defined at all or we must say that only is beautiful which seems so to the right kind of man, and the right kind of man is plainly he whose total attitude towards life is correct, who views life with some degree of imaginative wholeness, which is only another way of saying that the problem of beauty is inseparable from the ethical problem. In an absolute sense nobody can see life steadily and see it whole; but we may at least move towards steadiness and wholeness. The aesthete is plainly moving in an opposite direction; he is becoming more and more openly a votary of the god Whirl. His lack of inner form is an error not of aesthetics but of general philosophy.
(To be continued.)

(1) “Beauty resides in due proportion and order,” says Aristotle (Poetica,
ch. vii).

(2) A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830 (1912), ii, 191.