Romantic Melancholy (Part 2)

(Pictured: Chateaubriand.) I am happy to present the second post of Chapter IX of Rousseau and Romanticism, “Romantic Melancholy,” in which Irving Babbitt asks, “does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperaesthetic, by burning with infinite indeterminate desire?” 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.

We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and superficial of all types—the professional optimist who insists on inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.” (1) In general the Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller—the Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the everlasting wondersong of youth” (2)—is a romantic myth. We read in the Iliad: (3) “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry:

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind. (4)

One should indeed not fail to distinguish between the note of melancholy in a Homer or a Virgil and the melancholy of the ancients, whether Stoic or Epicurean, who had experienced the hopelessness and helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ultimate problems. The melancholy of the Stoic is the melancholy of the man who associates with the natural order a “virtue” that the natural order does not give, and so is tempted to exclaim at last with Brutus, that he had thought virtue a thing and had found that it was only a word. The melancholy of the Epicurean is that of the man who has tasted the bitter sediment (amari aliquid) in the cup of pleasure. It is not difficult to discover modern equivalents of both Stoic and Epicurean melancholy. “One should seek,” says Sainte-Beuve “in the pleasures of René the secret of his ennuis,” and so far as this is true Chateaubriand is on much the same level as some Roman voluptuary who suffered from the taedium vitae in the time of Tiberius or Nero. (5) But though the Roman decadent gave himself up to the pursuit of sensation and often of violent and abnormal sensation he was less prone than a Chateaubriand to associate this pursuit with the “infinite’’; and so he was less nostalgic and hyperaesthetic. His Epicureanism was therefore less poetical no doubt, but on the other hand he did not set up mere romantic restlessness as a sort of substitute for religion. It was probably easier therefore for him to feel the divine discontent and so turn to real religion than it would have been if he had, like the Rousseauist, complicated his Epicureanism with sham spirituality.
To say that the melancholy even of the decadent ancient is less nostalgic is perhaps only another way of saying what I have said about the melancholy of the ancients in general—that it is not so purely personal. It derives less from his very private and personal illusions and still less from his very private and personal disillusions. In its purely personal quality romantic melancholy is indeed inseparable from the whole conception of original genius. The genius sets out not merely to be unique but unique in feeling, and the sense uniqueness in feeling speedily passes over into that of uniqueness in suffering—on the principle no doubt laid down by Horace Walpole that life, which is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. To be a beautiful soul, to preserve one’s native goodness of feeling among men who have been perverted by society, is to be the elect of nature and yet this election turns out as Rousseau tells us to be a “fatal gift of heaven.” It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however, who assumes this elegiac tone. We need to consider what he means by happiness while he still seeks for it in the actual world and not in the pays des chimères [land of chimeras]. Rousseau tells us that he based the sense of his own worth on the fineness of his powers of perception. Why should nature have endowed him with such exquisite faculties (6) if he was not to have a satisfaction commensurate with them, if he was “to die without having lived”? We have here the psychological origins of the right to happiness that the romanticists were to proclaim. “We spend on the passions,” says Joubert, “the stuff that has been given us for happiness.” The Rousseauist hopes to find his happiness in the passions themselves. Romantic happiness does not involve any moral effort and has been defined in its extreme forms as a “monstrous dream of passive enjoyment.” Flaubert has made a study of the right to happiness thus understood in his “Madame Bovary.” Madame Bovary, who is very commonplace in other respects, feels exquisitely; and inasmuch as her husband had no such fineness the right to happiness meant for her, as it did for so many other “misunderstood” women, the right to extra-marital adventure. One should note the germs of melancholy that lurk in the quest of the superlative moment even if the quest is relatively successful. Suppose Saint-Preux [a principle character in Rousseau’s novel, La Nouvelle Héloise] had succeeded in compressing into a single instant “the delights of a thousand centuries”; and so far as outer circumstances are concerned had had to pay no penalty. The nearer the approach to a superhuman intensity of feeling the greater is likely to be the ensuing languor. The ordinary round of life seems pale and insipid compared with the exquisite and fugitive moment. One seems to one’s self to have drained the cup of life at a draught and save perhaps for impassioned recollection of the perfect moment to have no reason for continuing to live. One’s heart is “empty and swollen” (7) and one is haunted by thoughts of suicide.
This sense of having exhausted life (8) and the accompanying temptation to suicide that are such striking features of the malady of the age are not necessarily associated with any outer enjoyment at all. One may devour life in revery and then the melancholy arises from the disproportion between the dream and the fact. The revery that thus consumes life in advance is not necessarily erotic. What may be termed the cosmic revery of a Senancour [Étienne Pivert de Senancour, French essayist and philosopher; 1770-1846] or an Amiel [Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic; 1821-1881] has very much the same effect.
The atony and aridity of which the sufferer from romantic melancholy complains may have other sources besides the depression that follows upon the achieving of emotional intensity whether in revery or in fact; it may also be an incident in the warfare between head and heart that assumes so many forms among the spiritual posterity of Jean-Jacques. The Rousseauist seeks happiness in emotional spontaneity and this spontaneity seems to be killed by the head which stands aloof and dissects and analyzes. Perhaps the best picture of the emotionalist who is thus incapacitated for a frank surrender to his own emotions is the “Adolphe” of Benjamin Constant  [Franco-Swiss novelist and political writer; 1767-1830] (a book largely reminiscent of Constant’s actual affair with Madame de Staël).
Whether the victim of romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded action and at the same time become highly sensitive and highly self-conscious. The man who thrills more exquisitely to pleasure than another will also thrill more exquisitely to pain; nay, pleasure itself in its extreme is allied to pain; (10) so that to be hyperaesthetic is not an unmixed advantage especially if it be true, as Pindar says, that the Gods bestow two trials on a man for every boon. Perhaps the deepest bitterness is found, not in those who make a pageant of their bleeding hearts, but in those who, like Leconte de Lisle [French poet; 1818-1894] (11) and others (les impassibles), disdain to make a show of themselves to the mob, and so dissimulate their quivering sensibility under an appearance of impassibility; or, like Stendhal [French novelist 1783-1842], under a mask of irony that “is imperceptible to the vulgar.”
Stendhal aims not at emotional intensity only, but also glorifies the lust for power. He did as much as any one in his time to promote the ideal of the superman. Yet even if the superman has nerves of steel, as seems to have been the case with Stendhal’s favorite, Napoleon, and acts on the outer world with a force of which the man in search of a sensation is quite incapable, he does not act upon himself, he remains ethically passive. This ethical passivity is the trait common to all those who incline to live purely on the naturalistic level—whether they sacrifice the human law and its demands for measure to the lust of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power. The man who neglects his ethical self and withdraws into his temperamental or private self, must almost necessarily have the sense of isolation, of remoteness from other men. We return here to the psychology of the original genius to whom it was a tame and uninteresting thing to be simply human and who, disdaining to seem to others a being of the same clay as themselves, wished to be in their eyes either an angel or a demon—above all a demon. (12) René does not, as I have said, (13) want even the woman who loves him to feel at one with him, but rather to be at once astonished and appalled. He exercises upon those who approach him a malign fascination; for he not only lives in misery himself as in his natural element, but communicates this misery to those who approach him. He is like one of those fair trees under which one cannot sit without perishing. Moreover René disavows all responsibility for thus being a human Upas-tree. Moral effort is unavailing, for it was all written in the book of fate.

(1) Pythian Odes, iii, 81-82.
(2) Song of the Banjo, in the Seven Seas.
(3) xvii, 446-47.
(4) A brief survey of melancholy among the Greeks will be found in Professor S. H. Butcher’s Some Aspects of the Greek Genius.
(5) The exasperated quest of novelty is one of the main traits both of the ancient and the modern victim of ennui. See Seneca, De Tranquilliate animi: “Fastidio illis esse coepit vita, et ipse mundus; et subit illud rabidorum deliciarum: quousque eadem?” [“I begin to loathe my life, and the world itself; and yet steal passionate delights: how long the same?”] (Cf. La Fontaine: Il me faut du nouveau, n’en fût-il plus au monde. [“I need something new, even if no longer in the world.”])
(6) “A quoi bon m’avoir fait naître avec des facultés exquises pour les laisser jusqu’à la fin sans emploi? Le sentiment de mon prix interne en me donnant celui de cette injustice m’en dédommageait en quelque sorte, et me faisait verser des larmes que j’aimais a laisser couler.” [“To what end was I born with exquisite faculties? To suffer them to remain unemployed? the sentiment of conscious merit, which made me consider myself as suffering injustice, was some kind of reparation, and caused me to shed tears which with pleasure I suffered to flow.”] Confessions. Livre ix (1756).
(7) Nouvelle Héloise, Pt. vi, Lettre viii.
(8) “Encore enfant par la tête, vous êtes déjà vieux par le cœur.” [“Still a child according to the head, you are already old according to the heart.”] Ibid.
(9) See the examples quoted in Arnold: Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 305-06.
(10) This is the thought of Keats’s Ode to Melancholy:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine.
(11) See his sonnet Les Montreurs. This type of Rousseauist is anticipated by “Milord” Bomston in La Nouvelle Héloïse. Rousseau directed the engraver to depict him with “un maintien grave et stoïque sous lequel il cache avec peine une extrême sensibilité” [“a grave and stoical restraint under which he barely conceals extreme sensitivity”].
(12) “Qui es-tu? À coup sûr tu n’es pas un être pétri du même limon et animé de la même vie que nous! Tu es un ange ou un démon mais tu n’es pas une créature humaine. . . . Pourquoi habiter parmi nous, qui ne pouvons te suffire ni te comprendre?” [“Who are you? Surely you are not a being molded of the same clay and animated by the same life as we! You are an angel or a demon but you are not a human creature. . . . Why live among us, who cannot be sufficient or understand you”] G. Sand, Lélia, i, 11.
(13) “Céluta felt that she was going to fall upon the bosom of this man as one falls into an abyss.”