Romantic Love (Part 3)

(Pictured: George Sand.) I am happy to present the third and concluding post of Chapter VI of Rousseau and Romanticism, “Romantic Love,” in which Irving Babbitt shows that the romantic lover’s “ever-fleeting” object of desire only turns out in the end to be the lover himself in disguise. 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.

Byron’s Don Juan is at times exotic in his tastes, but, as I have said, he is not on the whole very nympholeptic [Subject to frenzied emotion, as for something unattainable. —Ed.]—much less so than the Don Juan of Alfred de Musset, for example. Musset indeed suggests in many respects a less masculine Byron—Mademoiselle Byron as he has been called. In one whole side of his art as well as his treatment of love he simply continues like Byron the eighteenth century. But far more than Byron he aspires to ideal and absolute passion; so that the Musset of the “Nuits’’ [published 1835-1837 —Ed.] is rightly regarded as one of the supreme embodiments, and at the same time the chief martyr, of the romantic religion of love. The outcome of his affair with George Sand may symbolize fitly the wrecking of thousands of more obscure lives by this mortal chimera. Musset and George Sand sought to come together, yet what they each sought in love is what the original genius seeks in all things—self-expression. What Musset saw in George Sand was not the real woman but only his own dream. But George Sand was not content thus to reflect back passively to Musset his ideal. She was rather a Galatea whose ambition it was to create her own Pygmalion. “Your chimera is between us,’’ Musset exclaims; but his chimera was between them too. The more Titan and Titaness try to meet, the more each is driven back into the solitude of his own ego. They were in love with love rather than with one another: and to be thus in love with love means on the last analysis to be in love with one’s own emotions. “To love,” says Musset, “is the great point. What matters the mistress? What matters the flagon provided one have the intoxication?” He then proceeds to carry a love of this quality up into the presence of God and to present it to him as his justification for having lived. The art of speaking in tones of religious consecration of what is in its essence egoistic has never been carried further than by the Rousseauistic romanticist. God is always appearing at the most unexpected moments. (1) The highest of which man is capable apparently is to put an uncurbed imagination into the service of an emancipated temperament. The credo that Perdican recites at the end of the second act of “On ne badine pas avec l’Amour” [“One Does Not Trifle with Love” (published 1834) —Ed.] throws light on this point. Men and women according to this credo are filled with every manner of vileness, yet there is something “sacred and sublime,” and that is the union of two of these despicable beings.

The confusion of ethical values here is so palpable as scarcely to call for comment. It is precisely when men and women set out to love with this degree of imaginative and emotional unrestraint that they come to deserve all the opprobrious epithets Musset heaps upon them. This radiant apotheosis of love and the quagmire in which it actually lands one is, as I have said, the whole subject of “Madame Bovary.” I shall need to return to this particular disproportion between the ideal and the real when I take up the subject of romantic melancholy.

The romantic lover who identifies the ideal with the superlative thrill is turning the ideal into something very transitory. If the summum bonum is as Browning avers the “kiss of one girl,” the summum bonum is lost almost as soon as found. The beautiful moment may however be prolonged in revery. The romanticist may brood over it in the tower of ivory, and when thus enriched by being steeped in his temperament it may become more truly his own than it was in reality. “Objects make less impression upon me than my memory of them,” says Rousseau. He is indeed the great master of what has been termed the art of impassioned recollection. This art is far from being confined in its application to love, though it may perhaps be studied here to the best advantage. Rousseau, one should note, had very little intellectual memory, but an extraordinarily keen memory of images and sensations. He could not, as he tells us in the “Confessions,” learn anything by heart, but he could recall with perfect distinctness what he had eaten for breakfast about thirty years before. In general he recalls his past feelings with a clearness and detail that are perhaps more feminine than masculine. “He seems,” says Hazlitt, one of his chief disciples in the art of impassioned recollection, “to gather up the past moments of his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from them; his alternate pleasures and pains are the bead-roll that he tells over and piously worships; he makes a rosary of the flowers of hope and fancy that strewed his earliest years.” (2) This highly developed emotional memory is closely associated with the special quality of the romantic imagination—its cult of Arcadian illusion and the wistful backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood and youth when illusion was most spontaneous. “Let me still recall [these memories],” says Hazlitt, “that they may breathe fresh life into me, and that I may live that birthday of thought and romantic pleasure over again! Talk of the ideal! This is the only true ideal—the heavenly tints of Fancy reflected in the bubbles that float upon the spring-tide of human life.” (3) Hazlitt converts criticism itself into an art of impassioned recollection. He loves to linger over the beautiful moments of his own literary life. The passing years have increased the richness of their temperamental refraction and bestowed upon them the “pathos of distance.” A good example is his account of the two years of his youth he spent in reading the “Confessions” and the “Nouvelle Héloîse,” and in shedding tears over them. “They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, sweet is the dew of their memory and pleasant the balm of their recollection.”(4)

Rousseau’s own Arcadian memories are usually not of reading, like Hazlitt’s, but of actual incidents, though he does not hesitate to alter these incidents freely, as in his account of his stay at Les Charmettes, and to accommodate them to his dream. He neglected the real Madame de Warens at the very time that he cherished his recollection of her because this recollection was the idealized image of his own youth. The yearning that he expresses at the beginning of his fragmentary Tenth Promenade, written only a few weeks before his death, is for this idyllic period rather than for an actual woman. (5) A happy memory, says Musset, repeating Rousseau, is perhaps more genuine than happiness itself. Possibly the three best known love poems of Lamartine, Musset, and Hugo respectively—“Le Lac,” “Souvenir,’’ and “La Tristesse d’Olympio,” all hinge upon impassioned recollection and derive very directly from Rousseau. Lamartine in particular has caught in the “Le Lac’’ the very cadence of Rousseau’s reveries. (6)

Impassioned recollection may evidently be an abundant source of genuine poetry, though not, it must be insisted, of the highest poetry. The predominant rôle that it plays in Rousseau and many of his followers is simply a sign of an unduly dalliant imagination. Experience after all has other uses than to supply furnishings for the tower of ivory; it should control the judgment and guide the will; it is in short the necessary basis of conduct. The greater a man’s moral seriousness, the more he will be concerned with doing rather than dreaming (and I include right meditation among the forms of doing). He will also demand an art and literature that reflect this his main preoccupation. Between Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Aristotle’s definition of poetry as the imitation of human action according to probability or necessity, a wide gap plainly opens. One may prefer Aristotle’s definition to that of Wordsworth and yet do justice to the merits of Wordsworth’s actual poetical performance. Nevertheless the tendency to put prime emphasis on feeling instead of action shown in the definition is closely related to Wordsworth’s failure not only in dramatic but in epic poetry, in all poetry in short that depends for its success on an element of plot and sustained narrative.

A curious extension of the art of impassioned recollection should receive at least passing mention. It has been so extended as to lead to what one may term an unethical use of literature and history. What men have done in the past and the consequences of this doing should surely serve to throw some light on what men should do under similar circumstances in the present. But the man who turns his own personal experience into mere dalliance may very well assume a like dalliant attitude towards the larger experience of the race. This experience may merely provide him with pretexts for revery. This narcotic use of literature and history, this art of creating for one’s self an alibi as Taine calls it, is nearly as old as the romantic movement. The record of the past becomes a gorgeous pageant that lures one to endless imaginative exploration and lulls one to oblivion of everything except its variety and picturesqueness. It becomes everything in fact except a school of judgment. One may note in connection with this use of history the usual interplay between scientific and emotional naturalism. Both forms of naturalism tend to turn man into the mere product and plaything of physical forces—climate, heredity, and the like, over which his will has no control. Since literature and history have no meaning from the point of view of moral choice they may at least be made to yield the maximum of aesthetic satisfaction. Oscar Wilde argues in this wise for example in his dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” and concludes that since man has no moral freedom or responsibility, and cannot therefore be guided in his conduct by the past experience of the race, he may at least turn this experience into an incomparable “bower of dreams.” “The pain of Leopardi crying out against life becomes our pain. Theocritus blows on his pipe and we laugh with the lips of nymph and shepherd. In the wolf-skin of Pierre Vidal we flee before the hounds, and in the armor of Lancelot we ride from the bower of the queen. We have whispered the secret of our love beneath the cowl of Abelard, and in the stained raiment of Villon have put our shame into song,” etc.

The assumption that runs through this passage that the mere aesthetic contemplation of past experience gives the equivalent of actual experience is found in writers of far higher standing than Wilde—in Renan, for instance. The aesthete would look on his dream as a substitute for the actual, and at the same time convert the actual into a dream. (Die Welt wird Traum, Der Traum wird Welt. [“The world becomes dream, the dream becomes world.” —Ed.]) It is not easy to take such a programme of universal dreaming seriously. In the long run the dreamer himself does not find it easy to take it seriously. For his attempts to live his chimera result, as we have seen in the case of romantic love, in more or less disastrous defeat and disillusion. The disillusioned romanticist continues to cling to his dream, but intellectually, at least, he often comes at the same time to stand aloof from it. This subject of disillusion may best be considered, along with certain other important aspects of the movement, in connection with the singular phenomenon known as romantic irony.
[End of the chapter.]

(1) It has been said that in the novels of George Sand when a lady wishes to change her lover God is always there to facilitate the transfer.

(2) Table-Talk, On the Past and Future.

(3) The Plain Speaker. On Reading Old Books.

(4) The Round Table. On the Character of Rousseau.

(5) “Aujourd’hui, jour de Pâques fleuries, il y a précisément cinquante ans de ma première connaissance avec Madame de Warens.” [“Today, day of flowering Easter, it is exactly fifty years since my first acquaintance with Madame de Warens.” —Ed.]

(6) Even on his death-bed the hero of Browning’s Confessions gives himself up to impassionated recollection:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet.