Romantic Melancholy (Part 7)

(Pictured: Faust and Mephistopheles.) I am happy to present the seventh, and final, 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.

This union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint, though in a way the upshot of the whole movement we have been studying, is especially marked in the modern German. Goethe as I have pointed out is ready to pardon Faust for grave violations of the moral law because of work which, so far from being ethical, is, in view of the ruin in which it involves the rustic pair, Baucis and Philemon, under suspicion of being positively unethical. [In Act V of Goethe’s Faust, Faust haughtily evicts the old couple, Baucis and Philemon, from their property. —Ed.] Yet Goethe was far from being a pure utilitarian and he had reacted more than most Germans of his time from Rousseauism. Rousseau is glorified by Germans as a chief source of their Kultur, as I have already pointed out. Now Kultur when analyzed breaks up into two very different things—scientific efficiency and emotionalism or what the Germans (and unfortunately not the Germans alone) term “idealism.” There is no question about the relation of this idealism to the stream of tendency of which Rousseau is the chief representative. By his corruption of conscience Rousseau made it possible to identify character with temperament. It was easy for Fichte and others to take the next step and identify national character with national temperament. The Germans according to Fichte are all beautiful souls, the elect of nature. If they have no special word for character it is because to be a German and have character are synonymous. Character is something that gushes up from the primordial depths of the German’s being without any conscious effort on his part. (1) The members of a whole national group may thus flatter one another and inbreed their national “genius” in the romantic sense, and feel all the while that they are ecstatic “idealists”; yet as a result of the failure to refer their genius back to some ethical centre, to work, in other words, according to the human law, they may, so far as the members of other national groups are concerned, remain in a state of moral solitude.
Everything thus hinges on the meaning of the word work. In the abstract and metaphysical sense man can know nothing of unity. He may, however, by working in the human sense, by imposing, that is, due limits on his expansive desires, close up in some measure the gap in his own nature (the “civil war in the cave”) and so tend to become inwardly one. He may hope in the same way to escape from the solitude of his own ego, for the inner unity that he achieves through work is only an entering into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men. Thus to work ethically is not only to become more unified and happy but also to move away from what is less permanent towards what is more permanent and therefore more peaceful in his total nature; so that the problem of happiness and the problem of peace turn out at last to be inseparable.
Souls, says Emerson, never meet; and it is true that a man never quite escapes from his solitude. That does not make the choice of direction any the less important. An infinite beckons to him on either hand. The one inspires the divine discontent, the other romantic restlessness. If instead of following the romantic lure he heeds the call from the opposite direction, he will not indeed attain to any perfect communion but he will be less solitary. Strictly speaking a man is never happy in the sense of being completely satisfied with the passing moment, (2) or never, Dr. Johnson would add, except when he is drunk. The happiness of the sober and waking man resides, it may be, not in his content with the present moment but in the very effort that marks his passage from a lower to a higher ethical level.
The happiness of which Rousseau dreamed, it has been made plain, was not this active and ethical happiness, but rather the passive enjoyment of the beautiful moment—the moment that he would like to have last forever. After seeking for the beautiful moment in the intoxication of love, he turned as we have seen to pantheistic revery. “As long as it lasts,” he says of a moment of this kind, “one is self-sufficing like God.” Yes, but it does not last, and when he wakes from his dream of communion with nature, he is still solitary, still the prisoner of his ego. The pantheistic dreamer is passive in every sense. He is not working either according to the human or according to the natural law, and so is not gaining either in material or in ethical efficiency. In a world such as that in which we live this seems too much like picnicking on a battlefield. Rousseau could on occasion speak shrewdly on this point. He wrote to a youthful enthusiast who wished to come and live with him at Montmorency: “The first bit of advice I should like to give you is not to indulge in the taste you say you have for the contemplative life and which is only an indolence of the spirit reprehensible at every age and especially at yours. Man is not made to meditate but to act.”
The contemplative life is then, according to Rousseau, the opposite of action. But to contemplate is according to an Aristotle or a Buddha to engage in the most important form of action, the form that leads to happiness. To identify leisure and the contemplative life with pantheistic revery, as Rousseau does, is to fall into one of the most vicious of confusions. Perhaps indeed the most important contrast one can reach in a subject of this kind is that between a wise strenuousness and a more or less wise passiveness, between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer, between a Saint Paul, let us say, and a Walt Whitman.
The spiritual idling and drifting of the Rousseauist would be less sinister if it did not coexist in the world of to-day with an intense material activity. The man who seeks happiness by work according to the natural law is to be rated higher than the man who seeks happiness in some form of emotional intoxication (including pantheistic revery). He is not left unarmed, a helpless dreamer in the battle of life. The type of efficiency he is acquiring also helps him to keep at bay man’s great enemy, ennui. An Edison, we may suppose, who is drawn ever onward by the lure of wonder and curiosity and power, has little time to be bored. It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire. (3)
I have already pointed out, however, the peril in a one-sided working of this kind. It makes man efficient without making him ethical. It stimulates rather than corrects a fearless, formless expansion on the human level. This inordinate reaching out beyond bounds is, as the great Greek poets saw with such clearness, an invitation to Nemesis. The misery that results from unrestraint, from failure to work according to the human law, is something different from mere pain and far more to be dreaded; just as the happiness that results from a right working according to the human law is something different from mere pleasure and far more worthy of pursuit.
The present alliance between emotional romanticists and utilitarians (4) is a veritable menace to civilization itself. It does not follow, as I said in a previous chapter, because revery or “intuition of the creative flux” cannot take the place of leisure or meditation, that one must therefore condemn it utterly. It may like other forms of romanticism have a place on the recreative side of life. What finally counts is work according to either the human or the natural law, but man cannot always be working. He needs moments of relief from tension and concentration and even, it should seem, of semi-oblivion of his conscious self. As one of the ways of winning such moments of relaxation and partial forgetfulness much may be said for revery. In general one must grant the solace and rich source of poetry that is found in communion with nature even though the final emphasis be put on communion with man. It is no small thing to be, as Arnold says Wordsworth was, a “priest of the wonder and bloom of the world.” One cannot however grant the Wordsworthian that to be a priest of wonder is necessarily to be also a priest of wisdom. Thus to promote to the supreme and central place something that is legitimate in its own degree, but secondary, is to risk starting a sham religion.
Those who have sought to set up a cult of love or beauty or science or humanity or country are open to the same objections as the votaries of nature. However important each of these things may be in its own place, it cannot properly be put in the supreme and central place for the simple reason that it does not involve any adequate conversion or discipline of man’s ordinary self to some ethical centre. I have tried to show that the sense of solitude or forlornness that is so striking a feature of romantic melancholy arises not only from a loss of hold on the traditional centres, but also from the failure of these new attempts at communion to keep their promises. The number of discomfitures of this kind in the period that has elapsed since the late eighteenth century, suggests that this period was even more than most periods an age of sophistry. Every age has had its false teachers, but possibly no age ever had so many dubious moralists as this, an incomparable series of false prophets from Rousseau himself down to Nietzsche and Tolstoy. It remains to sum up in a closing chapter the results of my whole inquiry and at the same time to discuss somewhat more specifically the bearing of my whole point of view, especially the idea of work according to the human law, upon the present situation.
(1) Reden an die deutsche Nation, xii.
(2) I should perhaps allow for the happiness that may be experienced in moments of supernormal consciousness—something quite distinct from emotional or other intoxication. Fairly consistent testimony as to moments of this kind is found in the records of the past from the early Buddhists down to Tennyson.
(3) I scarcely need say that I am speaking of the man of science only in so far as he is purely naturalistic in his point of view. There may enter into the total personality of Edison or any particular man of science other and very different elements.
(4) M. René Berthelot has written a book on pragmatism and similar tendencies in contemporary philosophy entitled Un Romantisme utilitaire [Librairie Félix Alean, 1911]. I have not read it but the title alone is worth more than most books on the subject I have read.