Romanticism and Nature (Part 4)

(Pictured: Lamartine.) I am happy to present the fourth 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.

One of the reasons why pantheistic revery has been so popular is that it seems to offer a painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort. In its extreme exponents, a Rousseau or a Walt Whitman, it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination. Even in its milder forms it encourages one to assume a tone of consecration in speaking of experiences that are aesthetic rather than truly religious. “ ’T is only heaven that’s given away,” sings Lowell; “ ’T is only God may be had for the asking.” God and heaven are accorded by Lowell with such strange facility because he identifies them with the luxurious enjoyment of a “day in June.” When pushed to a certain point the nature cult always tends towards sham spirituality.

Oh World as God has made it
—All is beauty,
And knowing this is love, and
Love is duty.

It seems to follow from these verses of Browning, perhaps the most flaccid spiritually in the English language, that to go out and mix one’s self up with the landscape is the same as doing one’s duty. As a method of salvation this is even easier and more aesthetic than that of the Ancient Mariner, who, it will be remembered, is relieved of the burden of his transgression by admiring the color of water-snakes!

The nature cult arose at a time when the traditional religious symbols were becoming incredible. Instead of working out new and firm distinctions between good and evil, the Rousseauist seeks to discredit all precise distinctions whether new or old, in favor of mere emotional intoxication. The passage to which I have already alluded, in which Faust breaks down the scruples of Marguerite by proclaiming the supremacy of feeling, surpasses even the lines I have cited from Browning as an example of sham spirituality:

Marguerite: Dost thou believe in God?
Faust: My darling, who dares say,
Yes, I in God believe?
Question or priest or sage, and they
Seem, in the answer you receive,
To mock the questioner.
Marguerite: Then thou dost not believe?
Faust: Sweet one, my meaning do not misconceive!
Him who dare name
And who proclaim,
Him I believe?
Who that can feel,
His heart can steel.
To say: I believe him not?
The All-embracer,
All-sustainer,
Holds and sustains he not
Thee, me, himself?
Lifts not the Heaven its dome above?
Doth not the firm-set earth beneath us lie?
And beaming tenderly with looks of love
Climb not the everlasting stars on high?
Do I not gaze into thine eyes?
Nature’s impenetrable agencies,
Are they not thronging on thy heart and brain,
Viewless, or visible to mortal ken,
Around thee weaving their mysterious chain?
Fill thence thy heart, how large soever it be;
And in the feeling when thou utterly art blest,
Then call it what thou wilt—
Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is all;
Name is but sound and smoke (1)

The upshot of this enthusiasm that overflows all boundaries and spurns definition as mere smoke that veils its heavenly glow is the seduction of a poor peasant girl. Such is the romantic contrast between the “ideal” and the “real.”

Those to whom I may seem to be treating the nature cult with undue severity should remember that I am treating it only in its pseudo-religious aspect. In its proper place all this refining on man’s relation to the “outworld’’ may be legitimate and delightful; but that place is secondary. My quarrel is only with the aesthete who assumes an apocalyptic pose and gives forth as a profound philosophy what is at best only a holiday or week-end view of existence. No distinction is more important for any one who wishes to maintain a correct scale of values than that between what is merely recreative and what ministers to leisure. There are times when we may properly seek solace and renewal in nature, when we may invite both our souls and our bodies to loaf. The error is to look on these moments of recreation and relief from concentration on some definite end as in themselves the consummation of wisdom. Rousseau indeed assumes that his art of mixing himself up with the landscape is identical with leisure; like innumerable disciples he confuses revery with meditation—a confusion so grave that I shall need to revert to it later. He parodies subtly what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of what is below it. He thus brings under suspicion the most necessary of all truths—that the kingdom of heaven is within us.

The first place always belongs to action and purpose and not to mere idling, even if it be like that of the Rousseauist transcendental idling. The man who makes a deliberate choice and then plans his life with reference to it is less likely than the aimless man to be swayed by every impulse and impression. The figures of Raphael according to Hazlitt have always “a, set, determined, voluntary character,’’ they “want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements.” And Hazlitt therefore concludes rightly that Raphael has “nothing romantic about him.” The distinction is so important that it might be made the basis for a comparison between the painting of the Renaissance and some of the important schools of the nineteenth century. Here again no sensible person would maintain that the advantage is all on one side. Romanticism gave a great impulse to landscape painting and to the painting of man in the landscape. Few romantic gains are more indubitable. One may prefer the best work of the Barbizon school [1830-1870, typified by loose brushwork and softness of form —Ed.] for example to the contemporary product in French literature. But even here it must be insisted that painting from which man is absent or in which he is more or less subordinated to the landscape is not the highest type of painting. Turner, one of the greatest masters of landscape, was almost incapable of painting the human figure. Ruskin is therefore indulging in romantic paradox when he puts Turner in the same class as Shakespeare. Turner’s vision of life as compared with that of Shakespeare is not central but peripheral.

The revolution that has resulted from the triumph of naturalistic over humanistic tendencies in painting extends down to the minutest details of technique; it has meant the subordination of design—the imposition; that is, on one’s material of a firm central purpose —to light and color; and this in painting corresponds to the literary pursuit of glamour and illusion for their own sake. It has meant in general a tendency to sacrifice all the other elements of painting to the capture of the vivid and immediate impression. And this corresponds to the readiness of the writer to forego decorum in favor of intensity. The choice that is involved, including a choice of technique, according as one is a naturalist or a humanist, is brought out by Mr. Kenyon Cox in his comparison of two paintings of hermits (2), one by Titian and one by John Sargent: the impressionistic and pantheistic hermit of Sargent is almost entirely merged in the landscape; he is little more than a pretext for a study of the accidents of light. The conception of Titian’s St. Jerome in the Desert is perhaps even more humanistic than religious. The figure of the saint on which everything converges is not merely robust, it is even a bit robustious. The picture affirms in its every detail the superior importance of man and his purposes to his natural environment. So far as their inner life is concerned the two hermits are plainly moving in opposite directions. An appropriate motto for Sargent’s hermit would be the following lines that I take from a French symbolist, but the equivalent of which can be found in innumerable other Rousseauists:

Je voudrais me confondre avec les choses, tordre
Mes bras contre la pierre et les fraïches écorses,
Etre l’arbre, le mur, le pollen et le sel,
Et me dissoudre au fond del l’être universel.

[I want to mix myself with things, twist
My arms against the stone and the fresh bark,
To be the tree, the wall, the pollen and the salt,
And dissolve myself at the bottom of universal being. —Ed.]

This is to push the reciprocity between man and nature to a point where the landscape is not only a state of the soul but the soul is a state of the landscape, just as in Shelley’s Ode, Shelley becomes the West Wind and the West Wind becomes Shelley. (3) The changes in the romantic soul are appropriately mirrored in the changes of the seasons. In Tieck’s “Genoveva,” for example, Golo’s love blossoms in the springtime, the sultry summer impels him to sinful passion, the autumn brings grief and repentance, and in winter avenging judgment overtakes the offender and casts him into the grave. (4) Autumn is perhaps even more than springtime the favorite season of the Rousseauist. The movement is filled with souls who like the hero of Poe’s “Ulalume” have reached the October of their sensations. Some traces of this sympathetic relation between man and nature may indeed be found in the literature of the past. The appropriateness of the setting in the “Prometheus Bound” of Aeschylus would scarcely seem to be an accident. The storm in “Lear” may also be instanced. But as I have already said occidental man did not before Rousseau show much inclination to mingle with the landscape. The parallelism that Pater establishes in “Marius the Epicurean” between the moods of the hero and the shifting aspects of nature is felt as a distinct anachronism. If we wish to find any early approximations to the subtleties and refinements of the Rousseauist in his dealings with nature we need to turn to the Far East—especially to the Taoist movement in China. (5) As a result of the Taoist influence China had from a very early period poets and painters for whom the landscape is very plainly a state of the soul.
[To be continued.]

(1) Faust (Miss Swanwick’s translation).

(2) Artists and Public, 134 ff.

(3) Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves, etc.

Cf. Lamartine:

Quand la feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie,
Le vent du soir s’élève et l’arrache aux vallons;
Et moi, je suis semblable à la feuille flétrie;
Emportez-moi comme elle, orageux aquilons.

[When the leaf of the woods falls in the meadow,
The evening wind rises and snatches it away to the valleys;
And I am like the withered leaf;
Take me away like her, stormy north wind.]

L’Isolement.

(4) Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156.

(5) See appendix on Chinese primitivism.