Rousseau and Romanticism

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 hyperæsthetic 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 æsthetic 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.252 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.253 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.254

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.255 A Barbey 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;256 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.”257 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 victims258 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 artA living man no more, Empedocles!Nothing but a devouring flame of thought, —But a naked eternally restless mind!

His leaping into Ætna typifies his attempt to escape from his loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself.

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.259 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,260 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 Excelsior261 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.262 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 genius263 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!”264

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.265 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.266 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 emptiness267 or unlimitedness and isolation should be the special mark of the melancholy of this period. René complains of his “moral solitude”;268 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 novel “A Rebours,”269 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 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.”271

Emotional romanticism was headed from the start towards this bankruptcy 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” (Le 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.272

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.273 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.274 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.275

All that is left for the genius is to retire into his ivory tower – a phrase appropriately applied for the first time to Vigny.276 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.277 “I am called a ‘mother,’” Vigny makes Nature say, “and I am a tomb.”278 (“La Maison du Berger”); 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”), Vigny utters a solemn malediction upon the eternal Delilah (Et, plus ou moins, la Femme est toujours Dalila). Such is the disillusion that comes from having sought an ideal communion in a liaison with a Parisian actress.279

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”). Vigny continues to hold, however, like the author 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.”280 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 communion281 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.