Romantic Melancholy (Part 4)

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

According to religion one should seek to unite with a something that is set above both man and nature, whether this something is called God as in Christianity or simply the Law as in various philosophies of the Far East. (1) The most severe penalty visited on the man who transgresses is that he tends to fall away from this union. This is the element of truth in the sentence of Diderot that Rousseau took as a personal affront: “Only the wicked man is alone.” Rousseau asserted in reply, anticipating Mark Twain (2), that “on the contrary only the good man is alone.” Now in a sense Rousseau is right. “Most men are bad,” as one of the seven sages of Greece remarked, and any one who sets out to follow a very strenuous virtue is likely to have few companions on the way. Rousseau is also right in a sense when he says that the wicked man needs to live in society so that he may have opportunity to practice his wickedness. Yet Rousseau fails to face the main issue: solitude is above all a psychic thing. A man may frequent his fellows and suffer none the less acutely, like Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” from a ghastly isolation. And conversely one may be like the ancient who said that he was never less alone than when he was alone.
Hawthorne, who was himself a victim of solitude, brooded a great deal on this whole problem, especially, as may be seen in the “Scarlet Letter” and elsewhere, on the isolating effects of sin. He perceived the relation of the problem to the whole trend of religious life in New England. The older Puritans had a sense of intimacy with God and craved no other companionship. With the weakening of their faith the later Puritans lost the sense of a divine companionship, but retained their aloofness from men. Hawthorne’s own solution of the problem of solitude, so far as he offers any, is humanitarian. Quicken your sympathies. Let the man who has taken as his motto Excelsior (3) be warned. Nothing will console him on the bleak heights either of knowledge or of power for the warm contact with the dwellers in the valley. Faust, who is a symbol of the solitude of knowledge, seeks to escape from his forlornness by recovering this warm contact. That the inordinate quest of power also leads to solitude is beyond question. Napoleon, the very type of the superman, must in the nature of the case have been very solitary. (4) His admirer Nietzsche wrote one day: “I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child.” Carlyle, whose “hero” derives like the superman from the original genius (5) of the eighteenth century, makes the following entry in his diary: “My isolation, my feeling of loneliness, unlimitedness (much meant by this) what tongue shall say? Alone, alone!” (6)
It cannot be granted, however, that one may escape by love, as the Rousseauist understands the word, from the loneliness that arises from the unlimited quest either of knowledge or power. For Rousseauistic love is also unlimited whether one understands by love either passion or a diffusive sympathy for mankind at large. “What solitudes are these human bodies,” Musset exclaimed when fresh from his affair with George Sand. Wordsworth cultivated a love for the lowly that quite overflowed the bounds of neo-classic selection. It is a well-known fact that the lowly did not altogether reciprocate. “A desolate-minded man, ye kna,” said an old inn-keeper of the Lakes to Canon Rawnsley, “’Twas potry as did it.” If Wordsworth writes so poignantly of solitude one may infer that it is because he himself had experienced it. (7) Nor would it be difficult to show that the very philanthropic Ruskin was at least as solitary as Carlyle with his tirades against philanthropy.
I have spoken of the isolating effects of sin, but sin is scarcely the right word to apply to most of the romanticists. The solitude of which so many of them complain does, however, imply a good deal of spiritual inertia. Now to be spiritually inert, as I have said elsewhere, is to be temperamental, to indulge unduly the lust for knowledge or sensation or power without imposing on these lusts some centre or principle of control set above the ordinary self. The man who wishes to fly off on the tangent of his own temperament and at the same time enjoy communion on any except the purely material level is harboring incompatible desires. For temperament is what separates. A sense of unlimitedness (“much meant by this” as Carlyle says) and of solitude are simply the penalties visited upon the eccentric individualist. If we are to unite on the higher levels with other men we must look in another direction than the expansive outward striving of temperament: we must in either the humanistic or religious sense undergo conversion. We must pull back our temperaments with reference to the model that we are imitating, just as, in Aristotle’s phrase, one might pull back and straighten out a crooked stick. (8) Usually the brake on temperament is supplied by the ethos, the convention of one’s age and country. I have tried to show elsewhere that the whole programme of the eccentric individualist is to get rid of this convention, whatever it may be, without developing some new principle of control. The eccentric individualist argues that to accept control, to defer to some centre as the classicist demands, is to cease to be himself. But are restrictions upon temperament so fatal to a man’s being himself? The reply hinges upon the definition of the word self, inasmuch as man is a dual being. If a man is to escape from his isolation he must, I have said, aim at some goal set above his ordinary self which is at the same time his unique and separate self. But because this goal is set above his ordinary self, it is not therefore necessarily set above his total personality. The limitations that he imposes on his ordinary self may be the necessary condition of his entering into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men. Aristotle says that if a man wishes to achieve happiness he must be a true lover of himself. It goes without saying that he means the ethical self. The author of a recent book on Ibsen says that Ibsen’s message to the world is summed up in the line:
This above all,—to thine own self be true.
It is abundantly plain from the context, however, that Polonius is a decayed Aristotelian and not a precursor of Ibsen. The self to which Aristotle would have a man be true is at the opposite pole from the self that Ibsen and the original geniuses are so eager to get uttered.
To impose the yoke of one’s human self upon one’s temperamental self is, in the Aristotelian sense, to work. Aristotle conceives of happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists, on the other hand, are from the human point of view, passive. The happiness that they crave is a passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the energy of a Napoleon and yet remain ethically passive. He may absorb whole encyclopædias and remain ethically passive. He may expand his sympathies until, like Schiller, he is ready to “bestow a kiss upon the whole world” and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to be ethically passive only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian sense, that is when he begins to put the brake on temperament and impulse, and in the same degree he tends to become ethically efficient. By his denial of the dualism of the spirit, Rousseau discredited this inner working, so that inwardness has come to seem synonymous with mere subjectivity; and to be subjective in the Rousseauistic sense is to be diffusive, to lack purpose and concentration, to lose one’s self in a shoreless sea of revery.
The utilitarian intervenes at this point and urges the romanticist, since he has failed to work inwardly, at least to work outwardly. Having missed the happiness of ethical efficiency he may in this way find the happiness of material efficiency, and at the same time serve the world. This is the solution of the problem of happiness that Goethe offers at the end of the Second Faust, and we may affirm without hesitation that it is a sham solution. To work outwardly and in the utilitarian sense, without the inner working that can alone save from ethical anarchy is to stimulate rather than repress the most urgent of all the lusts—the lust of power. It is only too plain that the unselective sympathy or joy in service with which Goethe would complete Faust’s utilitarian activity is not in itself a sufficient counterpoise to the will to power, unless indeed we assume with Rousseau that one may control expansive impulses by opposing them to one another.
A terrible danger thus lurks in the whole modern programme: it is a programme that makes for a formidable mechanical efficiency and so tends to bring into an ever closer material contact men who remain ethically centrifugal. The reason why the humanitarian and other schemes of communion that have been set up during the last century have failed is that they do not, like the traditional schemes, set any bounds to mere expansiveness, or, if one prefers, they do not involve any conversion. And so it is not surprising that the feeling of emptiness (9) or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral solitude”; (10) but strictly speaking his solitude is the reverse of moral. Only by cultivating his human self and by the unceasing effort that this cultivation involves does a man escape from his nightmare of separateness and so move in some measure towards happiness. But the happiness of which René dreams is unethical—something very private and personal and egoistic. Nothing is easier than to draw the line from René to Baudelaire and later decadents—for instance to Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s [Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, French novelist and art critic; 1848-1907] novel “A Rebours,” (11) who is typical of the last exaggerations of the movement. Des Esseintes cuts himself off as completely as possible from other men and in the artificial paradise he has devised gives himself up to the quest of strange and violent sensation; but his dream of happiness along egoistic lines turns into a nightmare,[270] (12) his palace of art becomes a hell. Lemaître is quite justified in saying of Des Esseintes that he is only René or Werther brought up to date—“a played-out and broken-down Werther who has a malady of the nerves, a deranged stomach and eighty years more of literature to the bad.”
(1) A striking passage on solitude will be found in the Laws of Manu, iv, 240-42. (“Alone a being is born: alone he goes down to death.” His kin forsake him at the grave; his only hope then is in the companionship of the Law of righteousness [Dharma]. “With the Law as his companion he crosses the darkness difficult to cross.”)
(2) “Be good and you will be lonely.”
(3) In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow’s poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron!
Et Byron . . . disparaît aux yeux du pâtre épouvanté.
[And Byron . . . vanishes in the eyes of the terrified herdsman].
(See E. Estève, Byron en France, 147).
(4) In the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. “Mon cœur se refuse aux joies communes comme à la douleur ordinaire.” [“My heart refuses common joys like run-of-the-mill pain.”] He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait à rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au désert de sa vie.” [“Essentially he wanted nothing: a lonely man, it was enough; misfortune only returned him to the desert of his life.”]
(5) The solitude of the “genius” is already marked in Blake:
O! why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like the rest of my race?
When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend;
Then I’m silent and passive and lose every friend.
(6) Froude’s Carlyle, ii, 377.
(7) No finer lines on solitude are found in English than those in which Wordsworth relates how from his room at Cambridge he could look out on
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
(Prelude iii, 61-63.)
(8) Eth. Nic., 1109 b.
(9) James Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night says that he would have entered hell
gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.
(10) R. Canat has taken this phrase as the title of his treatment of the subject: La Solitude morale dans le mouvement romantique.
(11) Decadent Rome had the equivalent of Des Esseintes. Seneca (To Lucilius, cxxii) speaks of those who seek to affirm their originality and attract attention to themselves by doing everything differently from other people and, “ut ita dicam, retro vivunt.” [“so to speak, living backwards they live.”]
(12) Tennyson has traced this change of the aesthetic dream into a nightmare in his Palace of Art.
(13) Contemporains, i, 332.