Romantic Melancholy (Part 3)

(Pictured: Barbey d’Aurevilly.) I am happy to present the third 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.

The victim of romantic melancholy is at times tender and elegiac, at other times he sets up as a heaven-defying Titan. This latter pose became especially common in France around 1830 when the influence of Byron had been added to that of Chateaubriand. Under the influence of these two writers a whole generation of youth became “things of dark imaginings,” (1) predestined to a blight that was at the same time the badge of their superiority. One wished like René to have an “immense, solitary and stormy soul,” and also, like a Byronic hero, to have a diabolical glint in the eye and a corpse-like complexion, (2) and so seem the “blind and deaf agent of funereal mysteries.” (3) “It was possible to believe everything about René except the truth.” The person who delights in being as mysterious as this easily falls into mystification. Byron himself we are told was rather flattered by the rumor that he had committed at least one murder. Baudelaire, it has been said, displayed his moral gangrene as a warrior might display honorable wounds. This flaunting of his own perversity was part of the literary attitude he had inherited from the “Satanic School.”
When the romanticist is not posing as the victim of fate he poses as the victim of society. Both ways of dodging moral responsibility enter into the romantic legend of the poète maudit [the accursed poet]. Nobody loves a poet. His own mother according to Baudelaire utters a malediction upon him. (4) That is because the poet feels so exquisitely that he is at once odious and unintelligible to the ordinary human pachyderm. Inasmuch as the philistine is not too sensitive to act he has a great advantage over the poet in the real world and often succeeds in driving him from it and indeed from life itself. This inferiority in action is a proof of the poet’s ideality. “His gigantic wings,” as Baudelaire says, “keep him from walking.” He has, in Coleridgean phrase, fed on “honey dew and drunk the milk of paradise,” (5) and so can scarcely be expected to submit to a diet of plain prose. It is hardly necessary to say that great poets of the past have not been at war with their public in this way. The reason is that they were less taken up with the uttering of their own uniqueness; they were, without ceasing to be themselves, servants of the general sense.
Chatterton became for the romanticists a favorite type of the poète maudit, and his suicide a symbol of the inevitable defeat of the “ideal” by the “real.” The first performance of Vigny’s Chatterton (1835) with its picture of the implacable hatred of the philistine for the artist was received by the romantic youth of Paris with something akin to delirium. As Gautier says in his well-known account of this performance one could almost hear in the night the crack of the solitary pistols. The ordinary man of letters, says Vigny in his preface to this play, is sure of success, even the great writer may get a hearing, but the poet, a being who is on a far higher level than either, can look forward only to “perpetual martyrdom and immolation.” He comes into the world to be a burden to others; his native sensibility is so intimate and profound that it “has plunged him from childhood into involuntary ecstasies, interminable reveries, infinite inventions. Imagination possesses him above all . . . it sweeps his faculties heavenward as irresistibly as the balloon carries up its car.” From that time forth he is more or less cut off from normal contact with his fellow-men. “His sensibility has become too keen; what only grazes other men wounds him until he bleeds.” He is thrown back more and more upon himself and becomes a sort of living volcano, “consumed by secret ardors and inexplicable languors,” and incapable of self-guidance. Such is the poet. From his first appearance he is an outlaw. Let all your tears and all your pity be for him. If he is finally forced to suicide not he but society is to blame. He is like the scorpion that cruel boys surround with live coals and that is finally forced to turn his sting upon himself. Society therefore owes it to itself to see that this exquisite being is properly pensioned and protected by government, to the end that idealism may not perish from the earth. M. Thiers who was prime minister at that time is said to have received a number of letters from young poets, the general tenor of which was: “A position or I’ll kill myself.” (6)
A circumstance that should interest Americans is that Poe as interpreted by Baudelaire came to hold for a later generation of romanticists the place that Chatterton had held for the romanticists of 1830. Poe was actually murdered, says Baudelaire—and there is an element of truth in the assertion along with much exaggeration—by this great gas-lighted barbarity (i.e., America). All his inner and spiritual life whether drunkard’s or poet’s, was one constant effort to escape from this antipathetic atmosphere “in which,” Baudelaire goes on to say, “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny, the tyranny of the beasts, a zoöcracy”; and in this human zoo a being with such a superhuman fineness of sensibility as Poe was of course at a hopeless disadvantage. In general our elation at Poe’s recognition in Europe should be tempered by the reflection that this recognition is usually taken as a point of departure for insulting America. Poe is about the only hyperaesthetic romanticist we have had, and he therefore fell in with the main European tendency that comes down from the eighteenth century. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom I have already cited as an extreme example of romantic idealism, was one of Poe’s avowed followers; but Villiers is also related by his aesthetic and “diabolic” Catholicism to Chateaubriand; and the religiosity of Chateaubriand itself derives from the religiosity of Rousseau.
Hitherto I have been studying for the most part only one main type of modern melancholy. This type even in a Chateaubriand or a Byron and still more in their innumerable followers may seem at once superficial and theatrical. It often does not get beyond that Epicurean toying with sorrow, that luxury of grief, which was not unknown even to classical antiquity. (7) The despair of Chateaubriand is frequently only a disguise of his love of literary glory, and Chesterton is inclined to see in the Byronic gloom an incident of youth and high spirits. (8) But this is not the whole story even in Byron and Chateaubriand. To find what is both genuine and distinctive in romantic melancholy we need to enlarge a little further on the underlying difference between the classicist and the Rousseauist. The Rousseauist, as indeed the modern man in general, is more preoccupied with his separate and private self than the classicist. Modern melancholy has practically always this touch of isolation not merely because of the proneness of the “genius” to dwell on his own uniqueness, but also because of the undermining of the traditional communions by critical analysis. The noblest form of the “malady of the age” is surely that which supervened upon the loss of religious faith. This is what distinguishes the sadness of an Arnold or a Senancour from that of a Gray. The “Elegy” belongs to the modern movement by the humanitarian note, the sympathetic interest in the lowly, but in its melancholy it does not go much beyond the milder forms of classical meditation on the inevitable sadness of life—what one may term pensiveness. Like the other productions of the so-called graveyard school, it bears a direct relation to Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” It is well to retain Gray’s own distinction. “Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part,” he wrote to Richard West in 1742, “but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt.” Gray did not experience the more poignant sadness, one may suspect, without some loss of the “trembling hope” that is the final note of the “Elegy.” No forlornness is greater than that of the man who has known faith and then lost it. Renan writes of his own break with the Church:
“The fish of Lake Baikal, we are told, have spent thousands of years in becoming fresh-water fish after being salt-water fish. I had to go through my transition in a few weeks. Like an enchanted circle Catholicism embraces the whole of life with so much strength that when one is deprived of it everything seems insipid. I was terribly lost. The universe produced upon me the impression of a cold and arid desert. For the moment that Christianity was not the truth, all the rest appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, barely worthy of interest. The collapse of my life upon itself left in me a feeling of emptiness like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love-affair.” (9)
The forlornness at the loss of faith is curiously combined in many of the romanticists with the mood of revolt. This type of romanticist heaps reproaches on a God in whose existence he no longer believes (as in Leconte de Lisle’s “Quaïn,” itself related to Byron’s “Cain”). He shakes his fist at an empty heaven, or like Alfred de Vigny (in his Jardin des Oliviers) assumes towards this emptiness an attitude of proud disdain. He is loath to give up this grandiose defiance of divinity if only because it helps to save him from subsiding into platitude. A somewhat similar mood appears in the “Satanic” Catholics who continue to cling to religion simply because it adds to the gusto of sinning. (10) A Barbey [Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly, French novelist and short story writer; 1808-1889] succeeded in combining the rôle of Byronic Titan with that of champion of the Church. But in general the romantic Prometheus spurns the traditional forms of communion whether classical or Christian. He is so far as everything established is concerned enormously centrifugal, but he hopes to erect on the ruins of the past the new religion of human brotherhood. Everything in this movement from Shaftesbury down hinges on the rôle that is thus assigned to sympathy: if it can really unite men who are at the same time indulging each to the utmost his own “genius” or idiosyncrasy there is no reason why one should not accept romanticism as a philosophy of life.
But nowhere else perhaps is the clash more violent between the theory and the fact. No movement is so profuse in professions of brotherhood and none is so filled with the aching sense of solitude. “Behold me then alone upon the earth,” is the sentence with which Rousseau begins his last book; (11) and he goes on to marvel that he, the “most loving of men,” had been forced more and more into solitude. “I am in the world as though in a strange planet upon which I have fallen from the one that I inhabited.” (12) When no longer subordinated to something higher than themselves both the head and the heart (in the romantic sense) not only tend to be opposed to one another, but also, each in its own way, to isolate. Empedocles was used not only by Arnold but by other victims (13) of romantic melancholy, as a symbol of intellectual isolation: by his indulgence in the “imperious lonely thinking power” Empedocles has broken the warm bonds of sympathy with his fellows:
thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,—
But a naked eternally restless mind!
His leaping into Aetna typifies his attempt to escape from his loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself.

(1) See Lara, xviii, xix, perhaps the best passage that can be quoted for the Byronic hero.
(2) Cf. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme: “Il était de mode alors dans l’école romantique d’être pâle, livide, verdâtre, un peu cadavéreux, s’il était possible. Cela donnait l’air fatal, byronien, giaour, dévoré par les passions et les remords.” [“It was fashionable then in the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a bit cadaverous, if possible. This gave a fatal air, Byronic, giaour, devoured by passions and remorse.” Byron wrote a poem entitled “The Giaour”; giaour is a pejorative Turkish word for infidel. —Ed.]
(3) Hugo, Hernani.
(4) Lorsque, par un décret des puissances suprêmes,
Le Poète apparaît dans ce monde ennuyé,
Sa mère épouvantée et pleine de blasphèmes
Crispe ses poings vers Dieu, qui la prend en pitié
[When, by a decree of the supreme powers,
The Poet appears in this bored world,
His mother, terrified and full of blasphemies,
Shakes her fists at God, who takes pity on her.]
Fleurs du mal: Bénédiction.
(5) Coleridge has a side that relates him to the author of Les Fleurs du mal. In his Pains of Sleep he describes a dream in which he felt
Desire with loathing strangely mix’d,
On wild or hateful objects fix’d.
(6) Keats according to Shelley was an example of the poète maudit. “The poor fellow” he says “was literally hooted from the stage of life.” Keats was as a matter of fact too sturdy to be snuffed out by an article and had less of the quivering Rousseauistic sensibility than Shelley himself. Cf. letter of Shelley to Mrs. Shelley (Aug. 7, 1820): “Imagine my despair of good, imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run further the gauntlet through this hellish society of men.”
(7) Euripides speaks of the Χάρις γόων in his Ἱκέτιδες [The Suppliants] (Latin, “dolendi voluptas” [the enjoyment of pain]; German, “die Wonne der Wehmut”).
(8) Chesterton is anticipated in this paradox by Wordsworth:
In youth we love the darksome lawn
Brushed by the owlet’s wing.
Then Twilight is preferred to Dawn
And autumn to the spring.
Sad fancies do we then affect
In luxury of disrespect
To our own prodigal excess
Of too familiar happiness.
Ode to Lycoris.
(9) Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 329-30.
(10) “[Villiers] était de cette famille des néo-catholiques littéraires dont Chateaubriand est le père commun, et qui a produit Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire et plus récemment M. Joséphin Peladan. Ceux-là ont goûté par-dessus tout dans la religion les charmes du péché, la grandeur du sacrilège, et leur sensualisme a caressé les dogmes qui ajoutaient aux voluptés la suprême volupté de se perdre.” [“Villiers was of that family of neo-Catholic literati of whom Chateaubriand is the common father, and which produced Barbey d’Aurevilly, Baudelaire and more recently M. Joséphin Peladan. These have tasted above all in religion the charms of sin, the grandeur of sacrilege, and their sensualism caressed the dogmas which added to voluptuousness the supreme pleasure of being lost.”] A. France, Vie Littéraire, iii,
(11) Première Promenade.
(12) Ibid.
(13) E.g., Hölderlin and Jean Polonius.