Rousseau and Romanticism

CHAPTER IX

ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY

Rousseau and his early followers – especially perhaps his early French followers – were very much preoccupied with the problem of happiness. Now in a sense all men – even those who renounce the world and mortify the flesh – aim at happiness. The important point to determine is what any particular person means by happiness and how he hopes to attain it. It should be plain from all that has been said that the Rousseauist seeks happiness in the free play of the emotions. The “Influence of the Passions on Happiness” is the significant title of one of Madame de Staël’s early treatises. The happiness that the Rousseauist seeks involves not merely a free play of feeling but – what is even more important – a free play of the imagination. Feeling acquires a sort of infinitude as a result of this coöperation of the imagination, and so the romanticist goes, as we have seen, in quest of the thrill superlative, as appears so clearly in his nympholepsy, his pursuit of the “impossible she.” But the more imaginative this quest for emotional happiness grows the more it tends to become a mere nostalgia. Happiness is achieved so far as it is achieved at all in dreamland. Rousseau says of himself: Mon plus constant bonheur fut en songe. Every finite satisfaction by the very fact that it is finite leaves him unsatisfied. René says that he had exhausted solitude as he had exhausted society: they had both failed to satisfy his insatiable desires. René plainly takes his insatiableness to be the badge of his spiritual distinction. To submit to any circumscribing of one’s desires is to show that one has no sense of infinitude and so to sink to the level of the philistine.

But does one become happy by being nostalgic and hyperæsthetic, by burning with infinite indeterminate desire? We have here perhaps the chief irony and contradiction in the whole movement. The Rousseauist seeks happiness and yet on his own showing, his mode of seeking it results, not in happiness but in wretchedness. One finds indeed figures in the nineteenth century, a Browning, for example, who see in life first of all an emotional adventure and then carry this adventure through to the end with an apparently unflagging gusto. One may affirm nevertheless that a movement which began by asserting the goodness of man and the loveliness of nature ended by producing the greatest literature of despair the world has ever seen. No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom.227

According to a somewhat doubtful authority, Ninon de Lenclos, “the joy of the spirit measures its force.” When the romanticist on the other hand discovers that his ideal of happiness works put into actual unhappiness he does not blame his ideal. He simply assumes that the world is unworthy of a being so exquisitely organized as himself, and so shrinks back from it and enfolds himself in his sorrow as he would in a mantle. Since the superlative bliss that he craves eludes him he will at least be superlative in woe. So far from being a mark of failure this woe measures his spiritual grandeur. “A great soul,” as René says, “must contain more grief than a small one.” The romantic poets enter into a veritable competition with one another as to who shall be accounted the most forlorn. The victor in this competition is awarded the palm not merely for poetry but wisdom. In the words of Arnold:

Amongst us one

Though Arnold may in this poem, as some one has complained, reduce the muse to the rôle of hospital nurse, he is, like his master Senancour, free from the taint of theatricality. He does not as he said of Byron make “a pageant of his bleeding heart”; and the Byronic pose has a close parallel in the pose of Chateaubriand. An Irish girl at London once told Chateaubriand that “he carried his heart in a sling.” He himself said that he had a soul of the kind “the ancients called a sacred malady.”

Chateaubriand, to be sure, had his cheerful moments and many of them. His sorrows he bestowed upon the public. Herein he was a true child of Jean-Jacques. We are told by eye-witnesses how heartily Rousseau enjoyed many aspects of his life at Motiers-Travers. On his own showing, he was plunged during this period in almost unalloyed misery. Froude writes of Carlyle: “It was his peculiarity that if matters were well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.” We can follow clear down to Gissing the assumption in some form or other that “art must be the mouthpiece of misery.” This whole question as to the proper function of art goes to the root of the debate between the classicist and the Rousseauist. “All these poets,” Goethe complains to Eckermann of the romanticists of 1830, “write as though they were ill, and as though the whole world were a hospital. … Every one of them in writing tries to be more desolate than all the others. This is really an abuse of poetry which has been given to make man satisfied with the world and with his lot. But the present generation is afraid of all solid energy; its mind is at ease and sees poetry only in weakness. I have found a good expression to vex these gentlemen. I am going to call their poetry hospital poetry.”228

Now Goethe is here, like Chateaubriand, mocking to some degree his own followers. When he suffered from a spiritual ailment of any kind he got rid of it by inoculating others with it; and it was in this way, as we learn from his Autobiography, that he got relief from the Weltschmerz of “Werther.” But later in life Goethe was classical not merely in precept like Chateaubriand, but to some extent in practice. The best of the poetry of his maturity tends like that of the ancients to elevate and console.

The contrast between classic and romantic poetry in this matter of melancholy is closely bound up with the larger contrast between imitation and spontaneity. Homer is the greatest of poets, according to Aristotle, because he does not entertain us with his own person but is more than any other poet an imitator. The romantic poet writes, on the other hand, as Lamartine says he wrote, solely for the “relief of his heart.” He pours forth himself – his most intimate and private self; above all, his anguish and his tears. In his relation to his reader, as Musset tells us in a celebrated image,229 he is like the pelican who rends and lacerates his own flesh to provide nourishment for his young (Pour toute nourriture il apporte son cœur):

To make of poetry a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, usually of sorrowful emotion, is what the French understand by lyricism (le lyrisme); and it may be objected that it is not fair to compare an epic poet like Homer with a lyricist like Musset. Let us then take for our comparison the poet whom the ancients themselves looked upon as the supreme type of the lyricist – Pindar. He is superbly imaginative, “sailing,” as Gray tells us, “with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air,” but his imagination is not like that of Musset in the service of sensibility. He does not bestow his own emotions upon us but is rather in the Aristotelian sense an imitator. He is indeed at the very opposite pole from Rousseau and the “apostles of affliction.” “Let a man,” he says, “not darken delight in his life.” “Disclose not to strangers our burden of care; this at least shall I advise thee. Therefore is it fitting to show openly to all the folk the fair and pleasant things allotted us; but if any baneful misfortune sent of heaven befalleth man, it is seemly to shroud this in darkness.”231 And one should also note Pindar’s hostility towards that other great source of romantic lyricism – nostalgia (“The desire of the moth for the star”), and the closely allied pursuit of the strange and the exotic. He tells of the condign punishment visited by Apollo upon the girl Coronis who became enamoured of “a strange man from Arcadia,” and adds: “She was in love with things remote – that passion which many ere now have felt. For among men, there is a foolish company of those who, putting shame on what they have at home, cast their glances afar, and pursue idle dreams in hopes that shall not be fulfilled.”232

We are not to suppose that Pindar was that most tiresome and superficial of all types – the professional optimist who insists on inflicting his “gladness” upon us. “The immortals,” he says, “apportion to man two sorrows for every boon they grant.”233 In general the Greek whom Kipling sings and whom we already find in Schiller – the Greek who is an incarnation of the “joy of life unquestioned, the everlasting wondersong of youth”234– is a romantic myth. We read in the Iliad:235 “Of all the creatures that breathe or crawl upon the earth, none is more wretched than man.” Here is the “joy of life unquestioned” in Homer. Like Homer the best of the later Greeks and Romans face unflinchingly the facts of life and these facts do not encourage a thoughtless elation. Their melancholy is even more concerned with the lot of man in general than with their personal and private grief. The quality of this melancholy is rendered in Tennyson’s line on Virgil, one of the finest in nineteenth century English poetry:

Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind.236

One should indeed not fail to distinguish between the note of melancholy in a Homer or a Virgil and the melancholy of the ancients, whether Stoic or Epicurean, who had experienced the hopelessness and helplessness of a pure naturalism in dealing with ultimate problems. The melancholy of the Stoic is the melancholy of the man who associates with the natural order a “virtue” that the natural order does not give, and so is tempted to exclaim at last with Brutus, that he had thought virtue a thing and had found that it was only a word. The melancholy of the Epicurean is that of the man who has tasted the bitter sediment (amari aliquid) in the cup of pleasure. It is not difficult to discover modern equivalents of both Stoic and Epicurean melancholy. “One should seek,” says Sainte-Beuve, “in the pleasures of René the secret of his ennuis,” and so far as this is true Chateaubriand is on much the same level as some Roman voluptuary who suffered from the tædium vitæ in the time of Tiberius or Nero.237 But though the Roman decadent gave himself up to the pursuit of sensation and often of violent and abnormal sensation he was less prone than a Chateaubriand to associate this pursuit with the “infinite”; and so he was less nostalgic and hyperæsthetic. His Epicureanism was therefore less poetical no doubt, but on the other hand he did not set up mere romantic restlessness as a sort of substitute for religion. It was probably easier therefore for him to feel the divine discontent and so turn to real religion than it would have been if he had, like the Rousseauist, complicated his Epicureanism with sham spirituality.

To say that the melancholy even of the decadent ancient is less nostalgic is perhaps only another way of saying what I have said about the melancholy of the ancients in general – that it is not so purely personal. It derives less from his very private and personal illusions and still less from his very private and personal disillusions. In its purely personal quality romantic melancholy is indeed inseparable from the whole conception of original genius. The genius sets out not merely to be unique but unique in feeling, and the sense uniqueness in feeling speedily passes over into that of uniqueness in suffering – on the principle no doubt laid down by Horace Walpole that life, which is a comedy for those who think, is a tragedy for those who feel. To be a beautiful soul, to preserve one’s native goodness of feeling among men who have been perverted by society, is to be the elect of nature and yet this election turns out as Rousseau tells us to be a “fatal gift of heaven.” It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however, who assumes this elegiac tone. We need to consider what he means by happiness while he still seeks for it in the actual world and not in the pays des chimères. Rousseau tells us that he based the sense of his own worth on the fineness of his powers of perception. Why should nature have endowed him with such exquisite faculties238 if he was not to have a satisfaction commensurate with them, if he was “to die without having lived”? We have here the psychological origins of the right to happiness that the romanticists were to proclaim. “We spend on the passions,” says Joubert, “the stuff that has been given us for happiness.” The Rousseauist hopes to find his happiness in the passions themselves. Romantic happiness does not involve any moral effort and has been defined in its extreme forms as a “monstrous dream of passive enjoyment.” Flaubert has made a study of the right to happiness thus understood in his “Madame Bovary.” Madame Bovary, who is very commonplace in other respects, feels exquisitely; and inasmuch as her husband had no such fineness the right to happiness meant for her, as it did for so many other “misunderstood” women, the right to extra-marital adventure. One should note the germs of melancholy that lurk in the quest of the superlative moment even if the quest is relatively successful. Suppose Saint-Preux had succeeded in compressing into a single instant “the delights of a thousand centuries”; and so far as outer circumstances are concerned had had to pay no penalty. The nearer the approach to a superhuman intensity of feeling the greater is likely to be the ensuing languor. The ordinary round of life seems pale and insipid compared with the exquisite and fugitive moment. One seems to one’s self to have drained the cup of life at a draught and save perhaps for impassioned recollection of the perfect moment to have no reason for continuing to live. One’s heart is “empty and swollen”239 and one is haunted by thoughts of suicide.

This sense of having exhausted life240 and the accompanying temptation to suicide that are such striking features of the malady of the age are not necessarily associated with any outer enjoyment at all. One may devour life in revery and then the melancholy arises from the disproportion between the dream and the fact. The revery that thus consumes life in advance is not necessarily erotic. What may be termed the cosmic revery of a Senancour or an Amiel241 has very much the same effect.

The atony and aridity of which the sufferer from romantic melancholy complains may have other sources besides the depression that follows upon the achieving of emotional intensity whether in revery or in fact; it may also be an incident in the warfare between head and heart that assumes so many forms among the spiritual posterity of Jean-Jacques. The Rousseauist seeks happiness in emotional spontaneity and this spontaneity seems to be killed by the head which stands aloof and dissects and analyzes. Perhaps the best picture of the emotionalist who is thus incapacitated for a frank surrender to his own emotions is the “Adolphe” of Benjamin Constant (a book largely reminiscent of Constant’s actual affair with Madame de Staël).

Whether the victim of romantic melancholy feels or analyzes he is equally incapable of action. He who faces resolutely the rude buffetings of the world is gradually hardened against them. The romantic movement is filled with the groans of those who have evaded action and at the same time become highly sensitive and highly self-conscious. The man who thrills more exquisitely to pleasure than another will also thrill more exquisitely to pain; nay, pleasure itself in its extreme is allied to pain;242 so that to be hyperæsthetic is not an unmixed advantage especially if it be true, as Pindar says, that the Gods bestow two trials on a man for every boon. Perhaps the deepest bitterness is found, not in those who make a pageant of their bleeding hearts, but in those who, like Leconte de Lisle243 and others (les impassibles), disdain to make a show of themselves to the mob, and so dissimulate their quivering sensibility under an appearance of impassibility; or, like Stendhal, under a mask of irony that “is imperceptible to the vulgar.”

Stendhal aims not at emotional intensity only, but also glorifies the lust for power. He did as much as any one in his time to promote the ideal of the superman. Yet even if the superman has nerves of steel, as seems to have been the case with Stendhal’s favorite, Napoleon, and acts on the outer world with a force of which the man in search of a sensation is quite incapable, he does not act upon himself, he remains ethically passive. This ethical passivity is the trait common to all those who incline to live purely on the naturalistic level – whether they sacrifice the human law and its demands for measure to the lust of knowledge or the lust of sensation or the lust of power. The man who neglects his ethical self and withdraws into his temperamental or private self, must almost necessarily have the sense of isolation, of remoteness from other men. We return here to the psychology of the original genius to whom it was a tame and uninteresting thing to be simply human and who, disdaining to seem to others a being of the same clay as themselves, wished to be in their eyes either an angel or a demon – above all a demon.244 René does not, as I have said,245 want even the woman who loves him to feel at one with him, but rather to be at once astonished and appalled. He exercises upon those who approach him a malign fascination; for he not only lives in misery himself as in his natural element, but communicates this misery to those who approach him. He is like one of those fair trees under which one cannot sit without perishing. Moreover René disavows all responsibility for thus being a human Upas-tree. Moral effort is unavailing, for it was all written in the book of fate. 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,”246 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,247 and so seem the “blind and deaf agent of funereal mysteries.”248 “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. Nobody loves a poet. His own mother according to Baudelaire utters a malediction upon him.249 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,”250 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.”251