Romantic Morality: The Real (Part 6)

(Pictured: Alfred de Musset.) I am happy to present the sixth and final 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.

The romantic violence of expression is at once a proof of “soul” and a protest against the tameness and smugness of the pseudo-classicist. The human volcano must overflow at times in a lava of molten words. “Damnation!” cries Berlioz, “I could crush a red-hot iron between my teeth.” (1) The disproportion between the outer incident and the emotion that the Rousseauist expends on it is often ludicrous. (2) The kind of force that the man attains who sees in emotional intensity a mark of spiritual distinction, and deems moderation identical with mediocrity, is likely to be the force of delirium or fever. What one sees in “Werther,” says Goethe himself, is weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength; and this remark goes far. There is in some of the romanticists a suggestion not merely of spiritual but of physical anaemia. (3) Still the intensity is often that of a strong but unbridled spirit. Pleasure is pushed to the point where it runs over into pain, and pain to the point where it becomes an auxiliary of pleasure. The âcre baiser [acrid kiss] of the “Nouvelle Héloïse” that so scandalized Voltaire presaged even more than a literary revolution. The poems of A. de Musset in particular contain an extraordinary peversion of the Christian doctrine of purification through suffering. There is something repellent to the genuine Christian as well as to the worldling in what one is tempted to call Musset’s Epicurean cult of pain. (4)

Moments of superlative intensity whether of pleasure or pain must in the nature of the case be brief—mere spasms or paroxysms; and one might apply to the whole school the term paroxyst and spasmodist assumed by certain minor groups during the past century. The Rousseauist is in general loath to rein in his emotional vehemence, to impair the zest with which he responds to the solicitations of sense, by any reference to the “future and sum of time,” by any reference, that is, to an ethical purpose. He would enjoy his thrill pure and unalloyed, and this amounts in practice to the pursuit of the beautiful or sensation-crowded moment. Saint-Preux says of the days spent with Julie that a “sweet ecstasy” absorbed “their whole duration and gathered it together in a point like that of eternity. There was for me neither past nor future, and I enjoyed at one and the same time the delights of a thousand centuries.” (5) The superlativist one might suppose could go no further. But in the deliberate sacrifice of all ethical values to the beautiful moment Browning has perhaps improved even on Rousseau:

Truth, that’s brighter than gem.
Trust, that’s purer than pearl,—
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.

Browning entitles the poem from which I am quoting Summum Bonum. The supreme good it would appear is identical with the supreme thrill.

I have already said enough to make clear that the title of this chapter and the last is in a way a misnomer. There is no such thing as romantic morality. The innovations in ethics that are due to romanticism reduce themselves on close scrutiny to a vast system of naturalistic camouflage. To understand how this camouflage has been so successful one needs to connect Rousseauism with the Baconian movement. Scientific progress had inspired man with a new confidence in himself at the same time that the positive and critical method by which it had been achieved detached him from the past and its traditional standards of good and evil. To break with tradition on sound lines one needs to apply the utmost keenness of analysis not merely to the natural but to the human law. But man’s analytical powers were very much taken up with the new task of mastering the natural law, so much so that he seemed incapable of further analytical effort, but longed rather for relaxation from his sustained concentration of intellect and imagination on the physical order. At the same time he was so elated by the progress he was making in this order that he was inclined to assume a similar advance on the moral plane and to believe that this advance could also be achieved collectively. A collective salvation of this kind without any need of a concentration of the intellect and imagination is precisely what was opened up to him by the Rousseauistic “ideal” of brotherhood. This “ideal,” as I have tried to show, was only a projection of the Arcadian imagination on the void But in the abdication of analysis and critical judgment, which would have reduced it to a purely recreative rôle, this Arcadian dreaming was enabled to set up as a serious philosophy, and to expand into innumerable Utopias. Many who might have taken alarm at the humanitarian revolution in ethics were reassured by the very fervor with which its promoters continued to utter the old words—conscience, virtue, etc. No one puts more stress than Rousseau himself on conscience, while in the very act of transforming conscience from an inner check into an expansive emotion.

We have seen that as a result of this transformation of conscience, temperament is emancipated from both inner and outer control and that this emancipation tends in the real world to the rise of two main types—the Bohemian and the superman, both unprimitive, inasmuch as primitive man is governed not by temperament but by convention; and that what actually tends to prevail in such a temperamental world in view of the superior “hardness” of the superman, is the law of cunning and the law of force. So far as the Rousseauists set up the mere emancipation of temperament as a serious philosophy, they are to be held responsible for the results of this emancipation whether displayed in the lust of power or the lust of sensation. But the lust of power and the lust of sensation, such as they appear, for example, in the so-called realism of the later nineteenth century, are not in themselves identical with romanticism. Many of the realists, like Flaubert, as I have already pointed out, are simply bitter and disillusioned Rousseauists who are expressing their nausea at the society that has actually arisen from the emancipation of temperament in themselves and others. The essence of Rousseauistic as of other romance, I may repeat, is to be found not in any mere fact, not even in the fact of sensation, but in a certain quality of the imagination. Rousseauism is, it is true, an emancipation of impulse, especially of the impulse of sex. Practically all the examples I have chosen of the intense and beautiful moment are erotic. But what one has even here, as the imagination grows increasingly romantic, is less the reality than the dream of the beautiful moment, an intensity that is achieved only in the tower of ivory. This point can be made clear only by a fuller study of the romantic conception of love.
[To be undertaken in Chapter VI.]

(1) Letter to Joseph d’Ortigue, January 19, 1833.

(2) Here is an extreme example from Maigron’s manuscript collection (Le Romantism et les moeurs, 153). A youth forced to be absent three weeks from the woman he loves writes to her as follows: “Trois semaines, mon amour, trois semaines loin de toi! . . . Oh! Dieu m’a maudit! . . . Hier j’ai erré toute l’après-midi comme une bête fauve, une bête traquée. . . . Dans la forêt, j’ai hurlé, hurlé comme un démon . . . je me suis roulé par terre . . . j’ai broyé sous mes dents des branches que mes mains avaient arrachée. . . . Alors, de rage, j’ai pris ma main entre mes dents; j’ai serré, serré convulsivement; le sang a jailli et j’ai craché au ciel morceau de chair vive . . . j’aurais voulu lui cracher mon coeur.” [“Three weeks, my love, three weeks far from you! . . . Oh God! I am cursed . . . Today, I wandered all afternoon like a wild beast, a hunted beast . . . . In the forest, I screamed, screamed like a demon . . . I rolled on the ground . . . I crushed between my teeth branches that I had ripped off with my hands. . . . Then, from rage, I put my hand between my teeth; I shook, shook convulsively; the blood spurted and I spat a piece of raw flesh at the sky . . . I should have liked to spit my heart at it.” —Ed.]

(3) Maxime Du Camp asserts in his Souvenirs littéraires (1, 118) that this anaemia was due in part to the copious blood-letting to which the physicians of the time, disciples of Broussais, were addicted.

(4) This perversion was not unknown to classical antiquity. Cf . Seneca, To Lucillius: “Quid turpius quam captare in ipso luctu voluptatem; et inter lacrymas quoque, quod juvet, quaerere?” [“What is more degrading than to seek to win pleasure in the very midst of mourning; and amid tears to seek it still?” —Ed.]

(5) Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. iii, Lettre vi.