Romanticism and Nature (Part 3)

(Pictured: Wordsworth.) I am happy to present the third 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.

In his less misanthropic moods the Rousseauist sees in wild nature not only a refuge from society, but also a suitable setting for his companionship with the ideal mate, for what the French term la solitude à deux.

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place
With one fair Spirit for my minister.
That I might all forget the human race
And, hating no one, love but only her! (1)

The almost innumerable passages in the romantic movement that celebrate this Arcadian companionship in the wilderness merely continue in a sense the pastoral mood that must be as old as human nature itself. But in the past the pastoral mood has been comparatively placid. It has not been associated in any such degree with misanthropy and wildness, with nympholeptic longing and the thirst for the infinite. The scene that Chateaubriand has imagined between Chactas and Atala in the primeval forest, is surely the stormiest of Arcadias; so stormy indeed that it would have been unintelligible to Theocritus. It is not certain that it would have been intelligible to Shakespeare, who like the other Elizabethans felt at times that he too had been born in Arcadia. The Arcadian of the past was much less inclined to sink down to the sub-rational and to merge his personality in the landscape. Rousseau describes with a charm that has scarcely been surpassed by any of his disciples, the reveries in which he thus descends below the level of his rational self. Time, no longer broken up by the importunate intellect and its analysis, is then felt by him in its unbroken flow; the result is a sort of “eternal present that leaves no sense of emptiness.” Of such a moment of revery Rousseau says, anticipating Faust, that he “would like it to last forever.” Bergson [Henri-Louis Bergson, French philosopher, 1859-1941 —Ed.] in his conception of the summum bonum as a state in which time is no longer cut up into artificial segments but is perceived in its continuous stream as a “present that endures,” (2) has done little more than repeat Rousseau. The sight and sound of water seem to have been a special aid to revery in Rousseau’s case. His accounts of the semi-dissolution of his conscious self that he enjoyed while drifting idly on the Lake of Bienne are justly celebrated. Lamartine’s soul [Alphonse de Lamartine, French poet and diplomat, 1790-1869 —Ed.] was, like that of Rousseau, lulled by “the murmur of waters.” Nothing again is more Rousseauistic than the desire Arnold attributes to Maurice de Guérin [French poet, 1810-1839 —Ed.]—the desire “to be borne on forever down an enchanted stream.” That too is why certain passages of Shelley are so near in spirit to Rousseau—for example, the boat revery in “Prometheus Unbound” in which an Arcadian nature and the dream companion mingle to the strains of music in a way that is supremely romantic. (3)

The association of nature with Arcadian longing and the pursuit of the dream woman is even less significant than its association with the idea of the infinite. For as a result of this latter association the nature cult often assumes the aspect of a religion. The various associations may indeed as I have said be very much blended or else may run into one another almost insensibly. No better illustration of this blending can be found perhaps than in Chateaubriand—especially in that compendium of Rousseauistic psychology, his “René.” The soul of René, one learns, was too great to adjust itself to the society of men. He found that he would have to contract his life if he put himself on their level. Men, for their part, treated him as a dreamer, and so he is forced more and more by his increasing disgust for them into solitude. Now René rests the sense of his superiority over other men on two things: first, on his superlative capacity to feel grief (4); secondly, on his thirst for the infinite. “What is finite,” he says, “has no value for me.” What is thus pushing him beyond all bounds is “an unknown good of which the instinct pursues me.” “I began to ask myself what I desired. I did not know but I thought all of a sudden that the woods would be delicious to me!” What he found in this quest for the mystical something that was to fill the abyss of his existence was the dream woman. “I went down into the valley, I strode upon the mountain, summoning with all the force of my desire the ideal object of a future flame; I unbraced this object in the winds; I thought that I heard it in the meanings of the river. All was this phantom of the imagination—both the stars in heaven and the very principle of life in the universe.” I have already quoted a very similar passage and pointed out the equivalent in Shelley. No such close equivalent could be found in Byron, and Wordsworth, it is scarcely necessary to say, offers no equivalent at all. If one reads on, however, one finds passages that are Byronic and others that are Wordsworthian. Paganism, Chateaubriand complains, by seeing in nature only certain definite forms—fauns and satyrs and nymphs—had banished from it both God and the infinite. But Christianity repelled these thronging figures in turn and restored to the grottoes their silence and to the woods their revery. The true God thus became visible in his works and bestowed upon them his own immensity. What Chateaubriand understands by God and the infinite appears in the following description of the region near Niagara seen by moonlight. The passage is Byronic as a whole with a Wordsworthian touch at the end. “The grandeur, the amazing melancholy of this picture cannot be expressed in human language; the fairest night of Europe can give no conception of it. In vain in our cultivated fields does the imagination seek to extend itself. It encounters on every hand the habitations of men; but in these savage regions the soul takes delight in plunging into an ocean of forests, in hovering over the gulf of cataracts, in meditating on the shores of lakes and rivers and, so to speak, in finding itself alone in the presence of God.” The relation between wild and solitary nature and the romantic idea of the infinite is here obvious. It is an aid to the spirit in throwing off its limitations and so in feeling itself “free.” (5)

A greater spiritual elevation it is sometimes asserted is found in Wordsworth’s communings with nature than in those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. The difference perhaps is less one of spirit than of temperament. In its abdication of the intellectual and critical faculties, in its semi-dissolution of the conscious self, the revery of Wordsworth does not differ from that of Rousseau (6) and Chateaubriand; but the erotic element is absent. In the “Genius of Christianity” Chateaubriand gives a magnificent description of sunset at sea and turns the whole picture into a proof of God. Elsewhere he tells us that it was “not God alone that I contemplated on the waters in the splendor of his works. I saw an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. . . . I should have sold eternity for one of her caresses. I imagined that she was palpitating behind that veil of the universe that hid her from my eyes,” etc. Wordsworth was at least consistently religious in his attitude towards the landscape: he did not see in it at one moment God, and at another an unknown woman and the miracle of her smile. At the same time his idea of spirituality is very remote from the traditional conception. Formerly spirituality was held to be a process of recollection, of gathering one’s self in, that is, towards the centre and not of diffusive emotion; so that when a man wished to pray he retired into his closet, and did not, like a Wordsworth or a Rousseau, fall into an inarticulate ecstasy before the wonders of nature. As for the poets of the past, they inclined as a rule to look on nature as an incentive not to religion but to love. Keble, following Wordsworth, protests on this ground against Aristophanes, and Catullus and Horace and Theocritus. He might have lengthened the list almost indefinitely. Chateaubriand bids us in our devotional moods to betake ourselves “to the religious forest.” La Fontaine is at least as near to normal human experience and also at least as poetical when he warns “fair ones” to “fear the depths of the woods and their vast silence.” (7)

No one would question that Wordsworth has passages of great ethical elevation. But in some of these passages he simply renews the error of the Stoics who also display at times great ethical elevation; he ascribes to the natural order virtues that the natural order does not give. This error persists to some extent even when he is turning away, as in the “Ode to Duty,” from the moral spontaneity of the Rousseauist. It is not quite clear that the law of duty in the breast of man is the same law that preserves “the stars from wrong.” His earlier assertion that the light of setting suns and the mind of man are identical in their essence is at best highly speculative, at least as speculative as the counter assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “there is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.” Furthermore this latter sense of the gap between man and nature seems to be more fully justified by its fruits in life and conduct, and this is after all the only test that counts in the long run.

(1) See especially Childe Harold, canto iv, clxxvii.

(2) See La Perception du changement, 30.

(3) Asia
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an angel sit
Beside a helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever, for ever
Upon that many-winding river.
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A paradise of wildernesses!

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Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions
In music’s most serene dominions;
Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.
And we sail on away, afar,
Without a course, without a star.
But by the instinct of sweet music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets
By thee, most beautiful of pilots.
Where never mortal pinnace glided
The boat of my desire is guided;
Realms where the air we breathe is love—
Prometheus Unbound, Act ii, Sc. v

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(4) “Si tu souffres plus qu’un autre des choses de la vie, il ne faut pas t’en étonner; une grande âme doit contenir plus de douleurs qu’une petite.” [“If thou suffer more than another regarding the things of life, it should not surprise thee; a great soul must contain more sorrows than a small.” —Ed.]

(5) Cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo:

I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

(6) Cf. for example, the passage of Rousseau in the seventh Promenade (“Je sens des extases, des ravissements inexprimables à me fondre pour ainsi dire dans le système des êtres,” etc. [“I feel ecstasies, inexpressible raptures in melting, so to speak, into the system of beings” —Ed.]) with the revery described by Wordsworth in The Excursion, i, 200-218.

(7) O belles, craignez le fond des bois, et leur vaste silence.