Romanticism and Nature (Part 2)

(Pictured: Salvator Rosa.) I am happy to present the second post of Chapter VIII of Rousseau and Romanticism, “Romanticism and Nature,” in which Irving Babbitt treats of the idolatry of outer nature, conceived as a paradise where the romanticist may live free of social convention and practice revery. 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.

Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less trimness in both nature and human nature were not it is true entirely without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting—as the very word picturesque testifies—for the encouragement they failed to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed like a picture (1) and it might be not merely irregular but savage if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa [1715-1673]. This association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the style of Le Nôtre [1613-1700]. (2) As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry, nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle Héloïse.” (3) Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path, and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so plentifully supplied by the Revolution.

Rousseau himself, it should hardly be necessary say, stands for far more than an artificial wildness. Instead of imposing decorum on nature like the neo-classicist, he preached constantly the elimination of decorum from man. Man should flee from that “false taste for grandeur which is not made for him” and which “poisons his pleasures,” (4) to nature. Now “it is on the summits of mountains, in the depths of forests, on deserted islands that nature reveals her most potent charms.” (5) The man of feeling finds the savage and deserted nook filled with beauties that seem horrible to the mere worldling. (6) Rousseau indeed did not crave the ultimate degree of wildness even in the Alps. He did not get beyond what one may term the middle zone of Alpine scenery—scenery that may be found around the shores of Lake Leman. He was inclined to find the most appropriate setting for the earthly paradise in the neighborhood of Vevey. Moreover, others about the same time and more or less independently of his influence were opposing an even more primitive nature to the artificialities of civilization. The mountains of “Ossian” are, as has been said, mere blurs, yet the new delight in mountains is due in no small measure throughout Europe to the Ossianic influence.

The instinct for getting away from the beaten track, for exploration and discovery, has of course been highly developed at other epochs, notably at the Renaissance. Much of the romantic interest in the wild and waste places of the earth did not go much beyond what might have been felt in Elizabethan England. Many of the Rousseauists, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand for example, not only read eagerly the older books of travel but often the same books. The fascination of penetrating to regions “where foot of man hath ne’er or rarely trod,’’ is perennial. It was my privilege a few years ago to listen to Sir Ernest Shackleton speak of his expedition across the Antarctic continent and of the thrill that he and the members of his party felt when they saw rising before them day after day mountain peaks that no human eye had ever gazed upon. The emotion was no doubt very similar to that of “stout Cortez” when the Pacific first “swam into his ken.” Chateaubriand must have looked forward to similar emotions when he planned his trip to North America in search of the North West Passage. But the passion for actual exploration which is a form of the romanticism of action is very subordinate in the case of Chateaubriand to emotional romanticism. He went into the wilderness first of all not to make actual discoveries but to affirm his freedom from conventional restraint, and at the same time to practice the new art of revery. His sentiments on getting into what was then the virgin forest to the west of Albany were very different we may assume from those of the early pioneers of America. “When,” he says, “after passing the Mohawk I entered woods which had never felt the axe, I was seized by a sort of intoxication of independence: I went from tree to tree, to right and lefty saying to myself, ‘Here are no more roads or cities or monarchy or republic or presidents or kings or men.’ And in order to find out if I was restored to my original rights I did various wilful things that made my guide furious. In his heart he believed me mad” The disillusion that followed is also one that the early pioneers would have had some difficulty in understanding. For he goes on to relate that while he was thus rejoicing in his escape from conventional life to pure nature he suddenly bumped up against a shed, and under the shed he saw his first savages—a score of them both men and women. A little Frenchman named M. Violet, “bepowdered and befrizzled, with an apple-green coat, drugget waistcoat and muslin frill and cuffs, was scraping on a pocket fiddle” and teaching the Indians to dance to the tune of Madelon Friquet. M. Violet, it seemed, had remained behind on the departure from New York of Rochambeau’s forces at the time of the American Revolution, and had set up as dancing-master among the savages. He was very proud of the nimbleness of his pupils and always referred to them as “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau,” Chateaubriand concludes, “this introduction to savage life by a ball that the ex-scullion of General Rochambeau was giving to Iroquois? I felt very much like laughing, but I was at the same time cruelly humiliated.”

In America, as elsewhere, Chateaubriand’s chief concern is not with any outer fact or activity, but with his own emotions and the enhancement of these emotions by his imagination. In him as in many other romanticists the different elements of Rousseauism—Arcadian longing, the pursuit of the dream woman, the aspiration towards the “infinite” (often identified with God)—appear at times more or less separately and then again almost inextricably blended with one another and with the cult of nature. It may be well to consider more in detail these various elements of Rousseauism and their relation to nature in about the order I have mentioned. The association of Arcadian longing with nature is in part an outcome of the conflict between the ideal and the real. The romantic idealist finds that men do not understand him: his “vision” is mocked and his “genius” is unrecognized. The result is the type of sentimental misanthropy of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter. He feels, as Lamartine says, that there is nothing in common between the world and him. Lamartine adds, however, “But nature is there who invites you and loves you.” You will find in her the comprehension and companionship that you have failed to find in society. And nature will seem a perfect companion to the Rousseauist in direct proportion as she is uncontaminated by the presence of man. Wordsworth has described the misanthropy that supervened in many people on the collapse of the revolutionary idealism. He himself overcame it, though there is more than a suggestion in the manner of his own retirement into the hills of a man who retreats into an Arcadian dream from actual defeat. The suggestion of defeat is much stronger in Ruskin’s similar retirement. Ruskin doubtless felt in later life, like Rousseau, that if he had failed to get on with men “it was less his fault than theirs.” (7) Perhaps emotional misanthropy and the worship of wild nature are nowhere more fully combined than in Byron. He gives magnificent expression to the most untenable of paradoxes—that one escapes from solitude by eschewing human haunts in favor of some wilderness. (8) In these haunts, he says, he became like a “falcon with clipped wing,” but found in nature the kindest of mothers.

Oh! she is fairest in her features wild,
Where nothing polished dare pollute her path:
To me by day or night she ever smiled
Though I have marked her when none other hath
And sought her more and more, and loved her best in wrath. (9)

He not only finds companionship in nature but at the same time partakes of her infinitude—an infinitude, one should note, of feeling:

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture. (10)

[To be continued.]

(1) It was especially easy for the poets to go for their landscapes to the painters because according to the current theory poetry was itself a form of painting (ut pictura poesis [poetry is like a picture]). Thus Thomson writes in The Castle of Indolence:

Sometimes the pencil, in cool airy halls.
Bade the gay bloom of vernal landskips rise,
Or autumn’s varied shades embrown the walls:
Now the black tempest strikes the astonished eyes;
Now down the steep the flashing torrent flies;
The trembling sun now plays o’er ocean blue,
And now rude mountains frown amid the skies;
Whatever Lorrain light touched with softening hue,
Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.

(C. i, st. 38.)

(2) Disparaissez, monuments du génie,
Parcs, jardins immortels, que Le Nôtre a plantés;
De vos dehors pompeux l’exacte symmétrie,
Etonne vainement mes regards attristés.
J’aime bien mieux ce désordre bizarre,
Et la variété de ces riches tableaux
Que disperse l’Anglais d’une main moins avare.

[Pass out of sight, ye monuments of genius,
Parks, immortal gardens, which Le Nôtre planted;
That pompous exact outdoor symmetry of yours,
Surprised my gloomy looks in vain.
I much prefer this strange disorder,
And the variety of these rich paintings
That disperses the Englishman with a less stingy hand.]

Berlin, 19e Elégie of Les Amours.

(3) Pt. iv, Lettre xi.

(4) Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. iv, Lettre xi.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid., Pt. iv, Lettre xvii.

(7) Confessions, Livre v (1732).

See especially Childe Harold, canto ii, xxv ff.

Ibid., canto ii, xxxvii.

Ibid., canto iii, lxxii.