Romantic Love (Part 1)

(Pictured: Pygmalion and Galatea.) I am happy to present the first post of Chapter VI of Rousseau and Romanticism, “Romantic Love,” in which Irving Babbitt shows that the romantic lover’s “ever-fleeting” object of desire only turns out in the end to be the lover himself in disguise. 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.

What first strikes one in Rousseau’s attitude towards love is the separation, even wider here perhaps than elsewhere, between the ideal and the real. He dilates in the “Confessions” on the difference of the attachment that he felt when scarcely more than a boy for two young women of Geneva, Mademoiselle Vulson and Mademoiselle Goton. His attachment for the latter was real in a sense that Zola would have understood. His attachment for Mademoiselle Vulson reminds one rather of that of a medieval knight for his lady. The same contrast runs through Rousseau’s life. “Seamstresses, chambermaids, shop-girls” he says, “attracted me very little. I had to have fine ladies.” (1) So much for the ideal; the real was Thérèse Levasseur.

We are not to suppose that Rousseau’s love even when most ideal is really exalted above the fleshly level. Byron indeed says of Rousseau that “his was not the love of living dame but of ideal beauty,” and if this were strictly true Rousseau might be accounted a Platonist. But any particular beautiful object is for Plato only a symbol or adumbration of a supersensuous beauty; so that an earthly love can be at best only a stepping-stone to the Uranian Aphrodite. The terrestrial and the heavenly loves are not in short run together, whereas the essence of Rousseauistic love is this very blending. “Rousseau,” says Joubert, “had a voluptuous mind. In his writings the soul is always mingled with the body and never distinct from it. No one has ever rendered more vividly the impression of the flesh touching the spirit and the delights of their marriage” I need not, however, repeat here what I have said elsewhere (2) about this confusion of the planes of being, perhaps the most important aspect of romantic love.

Though Rousseau is not a true Platonist in his treatment of love, he does, as I have said, recall at times the cult of the mediaeval knight for his lady. One may even find in mediaeval love something that is remotely related to Rousseau’s contrast between the ideal and the actual; for in its attitude towards woman as in other respects the Middle Ages tended to be extreme. Woman is either depressed below the human level as the favorite instrument of the.devil in man’s temptation (mulier hominis confusio [“Woman is man’s shame.” —Ed.]), or else exalted above this level as the mother of God. . . . The chivaric cult of the lady has obvious points of contact with the worship of the Madonna. The knight who is raised from one height of perfection to another by the light of his lady’s eyes is also pressing sense into the service of spirit with the same risk that the process may be reversed. The reversal actually takes place in Rousseau and his followers: spirit is pressed into the service of sense in such wise as to give to sense a sort of infinitude. Baudelaire pays his homage to a Parisian grisette in the form of a Latin canticle to the Virgin. (3) The perversion of mediaeval love is equally though not quite so obviously present in many other Rousseauists.

I have said that the Middle Ages inclined to the extreme; mediaeval writers are, however, fond of insisting on “measure”; and this is almost inevitable in view of the large amount of classical, especially Aristotelian, survival throughout this period. But the two distinctively mediaeval types, the saint and the knight, are neither of them mediators. They stand, however, on an entirely different footing as regards the law of measure. Not even Aristotle himself would maintain that the law of measure applies to saintliness, and in general to the religious realm. The saint in so far as he is saintly has undergone conversion, has in the literal sense of the word faced around and is looking in an entirely different direction from that to which the warnings “nothing too much” and “think as a mortal” apply. Very different psychic elements may indeed appear in any particular saint. A book has been published recently on the “Romanticism of St. Francis.” The truth seems to be that though St. Francis had his romantic side, he was even more religious than romantic. One may affirm with some confidence of another mediaeval figure, Peter the Hermit, that he was, on the other hand, much more romantic than religious. For all the information we have tends to show, that he was a very restless person and a man’s restlessness is ordinarily in inverse ratio to his religion.

If the saint transcends in a way the law of measure, the knight on the other hand should be subject to it. For courage and the love of woman—his main interests in life—belong not to the religious but to the secular realm. But in his conception of love and measure the knight was plainly not a mediator but an extremist: he was haunted by the idea of adventure, of a love and courage that transcend the bounds not merely of the probable but of the possible. His imagination is romantic in the sense I have tried to define—it is straining, that is, beyond the confines of the real. Ruskin’s violent diatribe against Cervantes (4) for having killed “idealism” by his ridicule of these knightly exaggerations, is in itself absurd, but interesting as evidence of the quality of Ruskin’s own imagination. Like other romanticists I have cited, he seems to have been not unaware of his own kinship to Don Quixote. The very truth about either the mediaeval or modern forms of romantic love—love which is on the secular level and at the same time sets itself above the law of measure—was uttered by Dr. Johnson in his comment on the heroic plays of Dryden: “By admitting the romantic omnipotence of love he has recommended as laudable and worthy of imitation that conduct which through all ages the good have censured as vicious and the bad have despised as foolish.”

The man of the Middle Ages, however extravagant in imaginings, was often no doubt terrestrial enough in practice. The troubadour who addressed his high-flown fancies to some fair chastelaine (usually a married woman) often had relations in real life not unlike those of Rousseau with Thérèse Levasseur. Some such contrast indeed between the “ideal” and the “real” existed in the life of one of Rousseau’s favorite poets, Petrarch. The lover may, however, run together the ideal and the real. He may glorify some comparatively commonplace person, crown as queen of his heart some Dulcinea del Toboso. Hazlitt employs appropriately in describing his own passion for the vulgar daughter of a London boarding-house keeper the very words of Cervantes: “He had courted a statue, hunted the wind, cried aloud to the desert.” Hazlitt like other lovers of this type is in love not with a particular person but with his own dream. He is as one may say in love with love. No subject indeed illustrates like this of love the nostalgia, the infinite indeterminate desire of the romantic imagination. Something of this diffusive longing no doubt came into the world with Christianity. There is a wide gap between the sentence of St. Augustine that Shelley has taken as epigraph for his “Alastor” (5) and the spirit of the great Greek and Roman classics. Yet such is the abiding vitality of Greek mythology that one finds in Greece perhaps the best symbol of the romantic lover. Rousseau could not fail to be attracted by the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. His lyrical “monodrama” in poetical prose, “Pygmalion,” is important not only for its literary but for its musical influence. The Germans in particular (including the youthful Goethe) were fascinated. To the mature Goethe Rousseau’s account of the sculptor who became enamored of his own creation and breathed into it actual life by the sheer intensity of his desire seemed a delirious confusion of the planes of being, an attempt to drag ideal beauty down to the level of sensuous realization. But a passion thus conceived exactly satisfies the romantic requirement. For though the romanticist wishes to abandon himself to the rapture of love, he does not wish to transcend his own ego. The object with which Pygmalion is in love is after all only a projection of his own “genius.” But such an object is not in any proper sense an object at all. There is in fact no object in the romantic universe—only subject. This subjective love amounts in practice to a use of the imagination to enhance emotional intoxication, or if one prefers, to the pursuit of illusion for its own sake.

This lack of definite object appears just as clearly in the German symbol of romantic love—the blue flower. The blue flower resolves itself at last, it will be remembered, into a fair feminine face (6)—a face that cannot, however, be overtaken. The color typifies the blue distance in which it always loses itself. “The never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire.” The object is thus elusive because, as I have said, it is not, properly speaking, an object at all but only a dalliance of the imagination with its own dream. Cats, says Rivarol, do not caress us, they caress themselves upon us. But though cats may suffer from what the new realist calls the ego-centric predicament, they can scarcely vie in the subtle involutions of their egoism with the romantic lover. Besides creating the symbol of the blue flower, Novalis treats romantic love in his unfinished tale “The Disciples at Saïs.” He contemplated two endings to this tale—in the one, when the disciple lifts the veil of the inmost sanctuary of the temple at Saïs, Rosenblütchen (the equivalent of the blue flower) falls into his arms. In the second version what he sees when he lifts the mysterious veil is—“wonder of wonders—himself.” The two endings are in substance the same.

(1) Confessions, Livre iv.

(2) The New Laokoon, ch. v.

(3) Franciscae meae laudes, in Les Fleurs du mal.

(4) Architecture and Painting, Lecture ii. This diatribe may have been suggested by Byron’s Don Juan, Canto xiii, ix-xi:

Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away:
A single laugh demolished the right arm
Of his own country, etc

(5) “Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, quaerebam quid amarem, amans amare.” [“I was not yet in love, and I loved to be in love, I sought what I might love, in love with loving.” —Ed.]

(6) Cf. Shelley’s Alastor:

Two eyes,
Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought
And seemed with their serene and azure smiles
To beckon.