Romantic Love (Part 2)

(Pictured: Antigone.) I am happy to present the second 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.

The story of Novalis’s attachment for a fourteen-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn, and of his plans on her death for a truly romantic suicide—a swooning away into the night—and then of the suddenness with which he transferred his dream to another maiden, Julie von Charpentier, is familiar. If Sophie had lived and Novalis had lived and they had wedded, he might conceivably have made her a faithful husband, but she would no longer have been the blue flower, the ideal. For one’s love is for something infinitely remote; it is as Shelley says, in what is perhaps the most perfect expression of romantic longing:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

The sphere of Shelley’s sorrow at the time he wrote these lines to Mrs. Williams was Mary Godwin. In the time of Harriet Westbrook, Mary had been the “star.”

The romantic lover often feigns in explanation of his nostalgia that in some previous existence he had been enamored of a nymph—an Egeria—or a woman transcending the ordinary mould—‘‘some Lilith or Helen or Antigone.” (1) Shelley inquires eagerly in one of his letters about the new poem by Horace Smith, “The Nympholept.” [A nympholept is a person caught up in a frenzy of emotion for an unattainable ideal. —Ed.] In the somewhat unclassical sense that the term came to have in the romantic movement, Shelley is himself the perfect example of the nympholept. In this respect as in others, however, he merely continues Rousseau. “If it had not been for some memories of my youth and Madame d’Houdetot,” says Jean-Jacques, “the loves that I have felt and described would have been only with sylphids.” (2)

Chateaubriand speaks with aristocratic disdain of Rousseau’s Venetian amours, but on the “ideal’’ side he is not only his follower but perhaps the supreme French example of nympholepsy. He describes his lady of dreams sometimes like Rousseau as the “sylphid,” sometimes as his “phantom of love.” He had been haunted by this phantom almost from his childhood. “Even then I glimpsed that to love and be loved in a way that was unknown to me was destined to be my supreme felicity. . . . As a result of the ardor of my imagination, my timidity and solitude, I did not turn to the outer world, but was thrown back upon myself. In the absence of a real object, I evoked by the power of my vague desires a phantom that was never to leave me.” To those who remember the closely parallel passages in Rousseau, Chateaubriand will seem to exaggerate the privilege of the original genius to look on himself as unique when he adds: “I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another example of this nature.” (3) The pursuit of this phantom of love gives the secret key to Chateaubriand’s life. He takes refuge in the American wilderness in order that he may have in this primitive Arcadia a more spacious setting for his dream. (4)

If one wishes to see how very similar these nympholeptic experiences are not only from individual to individual, but from country to country, one has only to compare the passages I have just been quoting from Chateaubriand with Shelley’s “Epipsychidion.” Shelley writes of his own youth:

There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn.
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps; on an imagined shore,
Under the gray beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
That I beheld her not, etc.

At the time of writing ‘’Epipsychidion” the magic vision happened to have coalesced for the moment with Emilia Viviani, though destined soon to flit elsewhere. Shelley invites his “soul’s sister,” the idyllic “she,” who is at bottom only a projection of his own imagination, to set sail with him for Arcady. “Epipsychidion,” indeed, might be used as a manual to illustrate the difference between mere Arcadian dreaming and a true Platonism.

Chateaubriand is ordinarily and rightly compared with Byron rather than with Shelley. He is plainly, however, far more of a nympholept than Byron. Mr. Hilary, indeed, in Peacock’s “Nightmare Abbey” says to Mr. Cypress (Byron): “You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph. (5) Certain distinctions would have to be made if one were attempting a complete study of love in Byron; yet after all the love of Don Juan and Haidée is one that Sappho or Catullus or Burns would have understood; and these poets were not nympholepts. They were capable of burning with love, but not, as Rousseau says of himself, “without any definite object.” (6) Where Chateaubriand has some resemblance to Byron is in his actual libertinism. He is however nearer than Byron to the libertine of the eighteenth century—to the Lovelace who pushes the pursuit of pleasure to its final exasperation where it becomes associated with the infliction of pain. Few things are stranger than the blend in Chateaubriand of this Sadic fury. (7) with the new romantic revery. Indeed almost every type of egotism that may manifest itself in the relations of the sexes and that pushed to the superlative pitch, will be found in this theoretical classicist and champion of Christianity. Perhaps no more frenzied cry has ever issued from human lips than that uttered by Atala (8) in describing her emotions when torn between her religious vow and her love for Chactas: “What dream did not arise in this heart overwhelmed with sorrow. At times in fixing my eyes upon you, I went so far as to form desires as insensate as they were guilty; at one moment I seemed to wish that you and I were the only living creatures upon the earth; and then again, feeling a divinity that held me back in my horrible transports, I seemed to want this divinity to be annihilated provided that clasped in your arms I should roll from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and the world” Longing is here pushed to a pitch where it passes over, as in Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” into the desire for annihilation.

Actual libertinism is no necessary concomitant of nympholeptic longing. There is a striking difference in this respect between Poe, for example, and his translator and disciple, Baudelaire. Nothing could be less suggestive of voluptuousness than Poe’s nostalgia. “His ecstasy,” says Stedman, “is that of the nympholept seeking an evasive being of whom he has glimpses by moonlight, starlight, even fenlight, but never by noonday.” The embodiments of his dream that flit through his tales and poems, enhanced his popularity with the ultra-romantic public in France. These strange apparitions nearly all of whom are epileptic, cataleptic, or consumptive made a natural appeal to a school that was known among its detractors as l’école poitrinnaire [“the thoracic school” —Ed.]. “Tender souls,” says Gautier, “were specially touched by Poe’s feminine figures, so vaporous, so transparent and of an almost spectral beauty.” Perhaps the nympholepsy of Gérard de Nerval is almost equally vaporous and ethereal. He pursued through various earthly forms the queen of Sheba whom he had loved in a previous existence and hanged himself at last with what he believed to be her garter: an interesting example of the relation between the extreme forms of the romantic imagination and madness. (9)

The pursuit of a phantom of love through various earthly forms led in the course of the romantic movement to certain modifications in a famous legend—that of Don Juan. What is emphasized in the older Don Juan is not merely his libertinism but his impiety—the gratification of his appetite in deliberate defiance of God. He is animated by Satanic pride, by the lust of power as well as by the lust of sensation. In Molière’s treatment of the legend we can also see the beginnings of the philanthropic pose. (10) With the progress of Rousseauism Don Juan tends to become an “idealist” to seek to satisfy in his amorous adventures not merely his senses but his “soul’’ and his thirst for the “infinite.” (11) Along with this idealistic Don Juan we also see appearing at a very early stage in the movement the exotic Don Juan who wishes to have a great deal of strangeness added to his beauty. In his affair with the “Floridiennes” Chateaubriand shows the way to a long series of exotic lovers.

I said to my heart between sleeping and waking,
Thou wild thing that always art leaping or aching,
What black, brown or fair, in what clime, in what nation,
By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-pat-ation?

These lines are so plainly meant for Pierre Loti that one learns with surprise that they were written about 1724 by the Earl of Peterborough. (12)

(1) “Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie.” Shelley to John Gisborne, October 22, 1821.

(2) Confessions, Livre xi (1761).

(3) Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, November, 1817.

(4) “Je me faisais une félicité de réaliser avec ma sylphide mes courses fantastiques dans les forêts du Nouveau Monde.” [“I congratulated myself on realizing with my sylph my fantastic racing in the forests of the New World.” —Ed.]
Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, December, 1821.

(5) Peacock has in mind Childe Harold, canto iv, cxxi ff.

(6) Rousseau plans to make a nympholept of his ideal pupil, Emile: “Il faut que je sois le plus maladroit des hommes si je ne le rends d’avance passionné sans savoir de quoi,” etc. [“I must be the most awkward of men if I do not make a passionate advance without knowing what. . . .” —Ed.]
Emile, Liv, iv.

(7) Cf. René’s letter to Céluta in Les Natchez: “Je vous ai tenue sur ma poitrine au milieu du désert, dans les vents de l’orage, lorsque, après vous avoir portée de l’autre côté d’un torrent, j’aurais voulu vous poignarder pour fixer le bonheur dans votre sein, et pour me punir de vous avoir donné de bonheur.” [“I held you to my breast in the midst of the desert, in the winds of the storm, when, after having carried you on the other side of a torrent, I would have wanted to stab you to fix the happiness in your breast, and to punish me for giving you happiness.” —Ed.]

(8) The romantic lover, it should be observed, creates his dream companion even less that he may adore her than that she may adore him.

(9) Walter Bagehot has made an interesting study of the romantic imagination in his essay on a figure who reminds one in some respects of Gérard de Nerval—Hartley Coleridge.

(10) Don Juan bids his servant give a coin to the beggar not for the love of God but for the love of humanity.

(11) Demandant aux forêts, à la mer, à la plaine,
Aux brises du matin, à toute heure, à tout lieu,
La femme de son âme et de son premier voeu!
Prenant pour fiancée un rêve, une ombre vaine,
Et fouillant dans le coeur d’une hécatombe humaine,
Prêtre désespéré pour y trouver son Dieu.

[“Calling the forests, the sea, the plain,
In the morning breezes, at any time, at any place,
For the woman of his soul and his first wishes!
Taking a dream, a vain shade, for a fiancée,
And rummaging through the heart of a human slaughter,
A priest desperate to find his God.” —Ed.]
A. de Musset, Namouna.

“Don Juan avait en lui cet amour pour la femme idéale; il a couru le monde serrant et brisant de dépit dans les bras toutes les imparfaites images qu’il croyait un moment aimer; et il est mort épuisé de fatigue, consumé de son insatiable amour.”

[“Don Juan had in him that love for the ideal woman; he roamed the world spitefully squeezing and shattering in his arms all the imperfect images he once believed he loved; he died exhausted from fatigue, consumed with his insatiable passion.” —Ed.]
Prévost-Paradol, Lettres, 149.

(12) See Scott’s (2d) edition of Swift, xiii, 310 [i.e., The Works of Jonathan Swift edited by Sir Walter Scott (1824) —Ed.].