Romantic Melancholy (Part 5)

(Pictured: Alfred de Vigny.) I am happy to present the fifth 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.

Emotional romanticism was headed from the start towards this bankruptcy [i.e., melancholy born of “the feeling of emptiness or unlimitedness and isolation”] because of its substitution for ethical effort of a mere lazy floating on the stream of mood and temperament. I have said that Buddhism saw in this ethical indolence the root of all evil. Christianity in its great days was preoccupied with the same problem. To make this point clear it will be necessary to add to what I have said about classical and romantic melancholy a few words about melancholy in the Middle Ages. In a celebrated chapter of his “Genius of Christianity” (i.e “Vague des passions”) Chateaubriand seeks to give to the malady of the age Christian and mediæval origins. This was his pretext, indeed, for introducing René into an apology for Christianity and so, as Sainte-Beuve complained, administering poison in a sacred wafer. Chateaubriand begins by saying that the modern man is melancholy because, without having had experience himself, he is at the same time overwhelmed by the second-hand experience that has been heaped up in the books and other records of an advanced civilization; and so he suffers from a precocious disillusion; he has the sense of having exhausted life before he has enjoyed it. There is nothing specifically Christian in this disillusion and above all nothing mediæval. But Chateaubriand goes on to say that from the decay of the pagan world and the barbarian invasions the human spirit received an impression of sadness and possibly a tinge of misanthropy which has never been completely effaced. Those that were thus wounded and estranged from their fellow-men took refuge formerly in monasteries, but now that this resource has failed them, they are left in the world without being of it and so they “become the prey of a thousand chimeras.” Then is seen the rise of that guilty melancholy which the passions engender when, left without definite object, they prey upon themselves in a solitary heart. (1) The vague des passions, the expansion of infinite indeterminate desire, that Chateaubriand here describes may very well be related to certain sides of Christianity—especially to what may be termed its neo-Platonic side. Yet Christianity at its best has shown itself a genuine religion, in other words, it has dealt sternly and veraciously with the facts of human nature. It has perceived clearly how a man may move towards happiness and how on the other hand he tends to sink into despair; or what amounts to the same thing, it has seen the supreme importance of spiritual effort and the supreme danger of spiritual sloth. The man who looked on himself as cut off from God and so ceased to strive was according to the mediæval Christian the victim of acedia. This sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting and abdication of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime against the Holy Ghost itself. It would in fact not be hard to show that what was taken by the Rousseauist to be the badge of spiritual distinction was held by the mediæval Christian to be the chief of all the deadly sins.

The victim of acedia often looked upon himself, like the victim of the malady of the age, as foredoomed. But though the idea of fate enters at times into mediæval melancholy, the man of the Middle Ages could scarcely so detach himself from the community as to suffer from that sense of loneliness which is the main symptom of romantic melancholy. This forlornness was due not merely to the abrupt disappearance of the older forms of communion, but to the failure of the new attempts at communion. When one gets beneath the surface of the nineteenth century one finds that it was above all a period of violent disillusions, and it is especially after violent disillusion that a man feels himself solitary and forlorn. I have said that the special mark of the half-educated man is his harboring of incompatible desires. The new religions or unifications of life that appeared during the nineteenth century made an especially strong appeal to the half-educated man because it seemed to him that by accepting some one of these he could enjoy the benefits of communion and at the same time not have to take on the yoke of any serious discipline; that he could, in the language of religion, achieve salvation without conversion. When a communion on these lines turns out to be not a reality, but a sham, and its disillusioned votary feels solitary and forlorn, he is ready to blame everybody and everything except himself.

A few specific illustrations will help us to understand how romantic solitude, which was created by the weakening of the traditional communions, was enhanced by the collapse of various sham communions. Let us return for a moment to that eminent example of romantic melancholy and disillusion, Alfred de Vigny. His “Chatterton” deals with the fatal misunderstanding of the original genius by other men. “Moïse” deals more specifically with the problem of his solitude. The genius is so eminent and unique, says Vigny, speaking for himself from behind the mask of the Hebrew prophet, that he is quite cut off from ordinary folk who feel that they have nothing in common with him. (2) This forlornness of the genius is not the sign of some capital error in his philosophy. On the contrary it is the sign of his divine election, and so Moses blames God for his failure to find happiness. (3) If the genius is cut off from communion with men he cannot hope for companionship with God because he has grown too sceptical. Heaven is empty and in any case dumb; and so in the poem to which I have already referred (Le Mont des Oliviers) Vigny assumes the mask of Jesus himself to express this desolateness, and concludes that the just man will oppose a haughty and Stoic disdain to the divine silence. (4)

All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower—a phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny. (5) In the ivory tower he can at least commune with nature and the ideal woman. But Vigny came at a time when the Arcadian glamour was being dissipated from nature. Partly under scientific influence she was coming to seem not a benign but a cold and impassive power, a collection of cruel and inexorable laws. I have already mentioned this mood that might be further illustrated from Taine and so many others towards the middle of the nineteenth century. (6) “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.” (7) (“La Maison du Berger” [“The Shepherd’s House”]); and so in the Maison roulante, or sort of Arcadia on wheels that he has imagined, he must seek his chief solace with the ideal feminine companion. But woman herself turns out to be treacherous; and, assuming the mask of Samson (“La Colère de Samson” [“The Anger of Samson”]), Vigny utters a solemn malediction upon the eternal Delilah (Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila [“And, more or less, woman is always Delilah” ]). Such is the disillusion that comes from having sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress. (8)

Now that every form of communion has failed, all that is left it would seem is to die in silence and solitude like the wolf (“La Mort du Loup” [“The Death of the Wolf”]). Vigny continues to hold, however, like the author [James Thomson] of the “City of Dreadful Night,” that though men may not meet in their joys, they may commune after a fashion in their woe. He opposes to heartless nature and her “vain splendors” the religion of pity, “the majesty of human sufferings.” (9) Towards the end when Vigny feels the growing prestige of science, he holds out the hope that a man may to a certain extent escape from the solitude of his own ego into some larger whole by contributing his mite to “progress.” But the symbol of this communion (10) that he has chosen—that of the shipwrecked and sinking mariner who consigns his geographical discoveries to a bottle in the hope that it may be washed up on some civilized shore—is itself of a singular forlornness.
Vigny has a concentration and power of philosophical reflection that is rare among the romanticists. George Sand is inferior to him in this respect but she had a richer and more generous nature, and is perhaps even more instructive in her life and writings for the student of romantic melancholy. After the loss of the religious faith of her childhood she became an avowed Rousseauist. She attacks a society that seems to her to stand in the way of the happiness of which she dreams—the supreme emotional intensity to be achieved in an ideal love. In celebrating passion and the rights of passion she is lyrical in the two main modes of the Rousseauist—she is either tender and elegiac, or else stormy and Titanic. But when she attempts to practice with Musset this religion of love, the result is violent disillusion. In the forlornness that follows upon the collapse of her sham communion she meditates suicide. “Ten years ago,” she wrote in 1845 to Mazzini, “I was in Switzerland; I was still in the age of tempests; I made up my mind even then to meet you, if I should resist the temptation to suicide which pursued me upon the glaciers.” And then gradually a new faith dawned upon her; she substituted for the religion of love the religion of human brotherhood. She set up as an object of worship humanity in its future progress; and then, like so many other dreamers, she suffered a violent disillusion in the Revolution of 1848. The radiant abstraction she had been worshipping had been put to the test and she discovered that there entered into the actual make-up of the humanity she had so idealized “a large number of knaves, a very large number of lunatics, and an immense number of fools.” What is noteworthy in George Sand is that she not only saved the precious principle of faith from these repeated shipwrecks but towards the end of her life began to put it on a firmer footing. Like Goethe she worked out to some extent, in opposition to romanticism, a genuinely ethical point of view.

This latter development can best be studied in her correspondence with Flaubert. She urges him to exercise his will, and he replies that he is as “fatalistic as a Turk.” His fatalism, however, was not oriental but scientific or pseudo-scientific. I have already cited his demand that man be studied “objectively” just as one would study “a mastodon or a crocodile.” Flaubert refused to see any connection between this determinism and his own gloom or between George Sand’s assertion of will and her cheerfulness. It was simply, he held, a matter of temperament, and there is no doubt some truth in this contention. “You at the first leap mount to heaven,” he says, “while I, poor devil, am glued to the earth as though by leaden soles.” And again: “In spite of your great sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist,” whereas “I am constantly dissecting; and when I have finally discovered the corruption in anything that is supposed to be pure, the gangrene in its fairest parts, then I raise my head and laugh.” Yet George Sand’s cheerfulness is also related to her perception of a power in man to work upon himself—a power that sets him apart from other animals.

(1) Génie du Christianisme, Pt. ii, Livre iii, ch. ix.

(2) L’orage est dans ma voix, l’éclair est sur ma bouche;
Aussi, loin de m’aimer, voilà qu’ils tremblent tous,
Et quand j’ouvre les bras, on tombe à mes genoux.
[“The storm is in my voice, the lightning is on my mouth;
So far from loving me, here they all tremble,
And when I open my arms, they fall at my knees. —Ed.]

(3) Que vous ai-je donc fait pour être votre élu?
* * * * * * * * *
Hélas! je suis, Seigneur, puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre!
[“What have I done to thee to be thy chosen one?
* * * * * * * * *
Alas! I am, Lord, powerful and lonely;
Let me sleep the sleep of the earth!” —Ed.]

(4) Le juste opposera le dédain à l’absence
Et ne répondra plus que par un froid silence
Au silence éternel de la Divinité.
[“The just man will disdain absence
And will only answer with a cold silence
The eternal silence of the Divinity.” —Ed.]

(5) See Sainte-Beuve’s poetical epistle A. M. Villemain (Pensées d’Août 1837).

(6) See [Babbitt’s] Masters of Modern French Criticism, 233, 238.

(7) Wordsworth writes
A piteous lot it were to flee from man
Yet not rejoice in Nature.
(Excursion, iv, 514.)
This lot was Vigny’s:
Ne me laisse jamais seul avec la Nature
Car je la connais trop pour n’en avoir pas peur.
[“Never leave me alone with nature,
For I know her too well not to be afraid of her” —Ed.]

(8) Madame Dorval.

(9) La Maison du Berger. Note that in Wordsworth the “still sad music of humanity” is very closely associated with nature.

(10) La Bouteille à la Mer [The Bottle in the Sea —Ed.].