ROMANTIC LOVE
What first strikes one in Rousseau’s attitude towards love is the
separation, even wider here perhaps than elsewhere, between the ideal
and the real. He dilates in the “Confessions” on the difference of
the attachment that he felt when scarcely more than a boy for two
young women of Geneva, Mademoiselle Vulson and Mademoiselle Goton. His
attachment for the latter was real in a sense that Zola would have
understood. His attachment for Mademoiselle Vulson reminds one rather
of that of a mediæval knight for his lady. The same contrast runs
through Rousseau’s life. “Seamstresses, chambermaids, shop-girls,” he
says, “attracted me very little. I had to have fine ladies.”[144] So
much for the ideal; the real was Thérèse Levasseur.
We are not to suppose that Rousseau’s love even when most ideal is
really exalted above the fleshly level. Byron indeed says of Rousseau
that “his was not the love of living dame but of ideal beauty,” and
if this were strictly true Rousseau might be accounted a Platonist.
But any particular beautiful object is for Plato only a symbol or
adumbration of a supersensuous beauty; so that an earthly love can be
at best only a stepping-stone to the Uranian Aphrodite. The terrestrial
and the heavenly loves are not in short run together, whereas the
essence of Rousseauistic love is this very blending. “Rousseau,” says
Joubert, “had a voluptuous mind. In his writings the soul is always
mingled with the body and never distinct from it. No one has ever
rendered more vividly the impression of the flesh touching the spirit
and the delights of their marriage.” I need not, however, repeat here
what I have said elsewhere[145] about this confusion of the planes of
being, perhaps the most important aspect of romantic love.
Though Rousseau is not a true Platonist in his treatment of love, he
does, as I have said, recall at times the cult of the mediæval knight
for his lady. One may even find in mediæval love something that is
remotely related to Rousseau’s contrast between the ideal and the
actual; for in its attitude towards woman as in other respects the
Middle Ages tended to be extreme. Woman is either depressed below the
human level as the favorite instrument of the devil in man’s temptation
(_mulier hominis confusio_), or else exalted above this level as the
mother of God. The figure of Mary blends sense and spirit in a way that
is foreign to Plato and the ancients. As Heine says very profanely,
the Virgin was a sort of heavenly _dame du comptoir_ whose celestial
smile drew the northern barbarians into the Church. Sense was thus
pressed into the service of spirit at the risk of a perilous confusion.
The chivalric cult of the lady has obvious points of contact with the
worship of the Madonna. The knight who is raised from one height of
perfection to another by the light of his lady’s eyes is also pressing
sense into the service of spirit with the same risk that the process
may be reversed. The reversal actually takes place in Rousseau and his
followers: spirit is pressed into the service of sense in such wise as
to give to sense a sort of infinitude. Baudelaire pays his homage to a
Parisian grisette in the form of a Latin canticle to the Virgin.[146]
The perversion of mediæval love is equally though not quite so
obviously present in many other Rousseauists.
I have said that the Middle Ages inclined to the extreme; mediæval
writers are, however, fond of insisting on “measure”; and this
is almost inevitable in view of the large amount of classical,
especially Aristotelian, survival throughout this period. But the two
distinctively mediæval types, the saint and the knight, are neither
of them mediators. They stand, however, on an entirely different
footing as regards the law of measure. Not even Aristotle himself would
maintain that the law of measure applies to saintliness, and in general
to the religious realm. The saint in so far as he is saintly has
undergone conversion, has in the literal sense of the word faced around
and is looking in an entirely different direction from that to which
the warnings “nothing too much” and “think as a mortal” apply. Very
different psychic elements may indeed appear in any particular saint. A
book has been published recently on the “Romanticism of St. Francis.”
The truth seems to be that though St. Francis had his romantic side,
he was even more religious than romantic. One may affirm with some
confidence of another mediæval figure, Peter the Hermit, that he was,
on the other hand, much more romantic than religious. For all the
information we have tends to show that he was a very restless person
and a man’s restlessness is ordinarily in inverse ratio to his religion.
If the saint transcends in a way the law of measure, the knight on
the other hand should be subject to it. For courage and the love of
woman--his main interests in life--belong not to the religious but
to the secular realm. But in his conception of love and courage the
knight was plainly not a mediator but an extremist: he was haunted
by the idea of adventure, of a love and courage that transcend the
bounds not merely of the probable but of the possible. His imagination
is romantic in the sense I have tried to define--it is straining,
that is, beyond the confines of the real. Ruskin’s violent diatribe
against Cervantes[147] for having killed “idealism” by his ridicule
of these knightly exaggerations, is in itself absurd, but interesting
as evidence of the quality of Ruskin’s own imagination. Like other
romanticists I have cited, he seems to have been not unaware of his own
kinship to Don Quixote. The very truth about either the mediæval or
modern forms of romantic love--love which is on the secular level and
at the same time sets itself above the law of measure--was uttered by
Dr. Johnson in his comment on the heroic plays of Dryden: “By admitting
the romantic omnipotence of love he has recommended as laudable and
worthy of imitation that conduct which through all ages the good have
censured as vicious and the bad have despised as foolish.”
The man of the Middle Ages, however extravagant in his imaginings,
was often no doubt terrestrial enough in his practice. The troubadour
who addressed his high-flown fancies to some fair châtelaine (usually
a married woman) often had relations in real life not unlike those
of Rousseau with Thérèse Levasseur. Some such contrast indeed between
the “ideal” and the “real” existed in the life of one of Rousseau’s
favorite poets, Petrarch. The lover may, however, run together the
ideal and the real. He may glorify some comparatively commonplace
person, crown as queen of his heart some Dulcinea del Toboso. Hazlitt
employs appropriately in describing his own passion for the vulgar
daughter of a London boarding-house keeper the very words of Cervantes:
“He had courted a statue, hunted the wind, cried aloud to the desert.”
Hazlitt like other lovers of this type is in love not with a particular
person but with his own dream. He is as one may say in love with love.
No subject indeed illustrates like this of love the nostalgia, the
infinite indeterminate desire of the romantic imagination. Something of
this diffusive longing no doubt came into the world with Christianity.
There is a wide gap between the sentence of St. Augustine that Shelley
has taken as epigraph for his “Alastor”[148] and the spirit of the
great Greek and Roman classics. Yet such is the abiding vitality of
Greek mythology that one finds in Greece perhaps the best symbol of
the romantic lover. Rousseau could not fail to be attracted by the
story of Pygmalion and Galatea. His lyrical “monodrama” in poetical
prose, “Pygmalion,” is important not only for its literary but for its
musical influence. The Germans in particular (including the youthful
Goethe) were fascinated. To the mature Goethe Rousseau’s account of the
sculptor who became enamored of his own creation and breathed into it
actual life by the sheer intensity of his desire seemed a delirious
confusion of the planes of being, an attempt to drag ideal beauty down
to the level of sensuous realization. But a passion thus conceived
exactly satisfies the romantic requirement. For though the romanticist
wishes to abandon himself to the rapture of love, he does not wish to
transcend his own ego. The object with which Pygmalion is in love is
after all only a projection of his own “genius.” But such an object is
not in any proper sense an object at all. There is in fact no object in
the romantic universe--only subject. This subjective love amounts in
practice to a use of the imagination to enhance emotional intoxication,
or if one prefers, to the pursuit of illusion for its own sake.
This lack of definite object appears just as clearly in the German
symbol of romantic love--the blue flower. The blue flower resolves
itself at last, it will be remembered, into a fair feminine
face[149]--a face that cannot, however, be overtaken. The color
typifies the blue distance in which it always loses itself, “the
never-ending quest after the ever-fleeting object of desire.” The
object is thus elusive because, as I have said, it is not, properly
speaking, an object at all but only a dalliance of the imagination
with its own dream. Cats, says Rivarol, do not caress us, they caress
themselves upon us. But though cats may suffer from what the new
realist calls the egocentric predicament, they can scarcely vie in the
subtle involutions of their egoism with the romantic lover. Besides
creating the symbol of the blue flower, Novalis treats romantic love
in his unfinished tale “The Disciples at Saïs.” He contemplated two
endings to this tale--in the one, when the disciple lifts the veil
of the inmost sanctuary of the temple at Saïs, Rosenblütchen (the
equivalent of the blue flower) falls into his arms. In the second
version what he sees when he lifts the mysterious veil is--“wonder of
wonders--himself.” The two endings are in substance the same.
The story of Novalis’s attachment for a fourteen-year-old girl, Sophie
von Kühn, and of his plans on her death for a truly romantic suicide--a
swooning away into the night--and then of the suddenness with which
he transferred his dream to another maiden, Julie von Charpentier,
is familiar. If Sophie had lived and Novalis had lived and they had
wedded, he might conceivably have made her a faithful husband, but she
would no longer have been the blue flower, the ideal. For one’s love
is for something infinitely remote; it is as Shelley says, in what is
perhaps the most perfect expression of romantic longing:
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
The sphere of Shelley’s sorrow at the time he wrote these lines to Mrs.
Williams was Mary Godwin. In the time of Harriet Westbrook, Mary had
been the “star.”
The romantic lover often feigns in explanation of his nostalgia
that in some previous existence he had been enamored of a nymph--an
Egeria--or a woman transcending the ordinary mould--“some Lilith or
Helen or Antigone.”[150] Shelley inquires eagerly in one of his letters
about the new poem by Horace Smith, “The Nympholept.” In the somewhat
unclassical sense that the term came to have in the romantic movement,
Shelley is himself the perfect example of the nympholept. In this
respect as in others, however, he merely continues Rousseau. “If it had
not been for some memories of my youth and Madame d’Houdetot,” says
Jean-Jacques, “the loves that I have felt and described would have been
only with sylphids.”[151]
Chateaubriand speaks with aristocratic disdain of Rousseau’s Venetian
amours, but on the “ideal” side he is not only his follower but perhaps
the supreme French example of nympholepsy. He describes his lady of
dreams sometimes like Rousseau as the “sylphid,” sometimes as his
“phantom of love.” He had been haunted by this phantom almost from his
childhood. “Even then I glimpsed that to love and be loved in a way
that was unknown to me was destined to be my supreme felicity. … As a
result of the ardor of my imagination, my timidity and solitude, I did
not turn to the outer world, but was thrown back upon myself. In the
absence of a real object, I evoked by the power of my vague desires a
phantom that was never to leave me.” To those who remember the closely
parallel passages in Rousseau, Chateaubriand will seem to exaggerate
the privilege of the original genius to look on himself as unique when
he adds: “I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers
another example of this nature.”[152] The pursuit of this phantom of
love gives the secret key to Chateaubriand’s life. He takes refuge in
the American wilderness in order that he may have in this primitive
Arcadia a more spacious setting for his dream.[153]
If one wishes to see how very similar these nympholeptic experiences
are not only from individual to individual, but from country to
country, one has only to compare the passages I have just been quoting
from Chateaubriand with Shelley’s “Epipsychidion.” Shelley writes of
his own youth:
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves
Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor
Paved her light steps; on an imagined shore,
Under the gray beak of some promontory
She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,
That I beheld her not, etc.
At the time of writing “Epipsychidion” the magic vision happened to
have coalesced for the moment with Emilia Viviani, though destined soon
to flit elsewhere. Shelley invites his “soul’s sister,” the idyllic
“she,” who is at bottom only a projection of his own imagination, to
set sail with him for Arcady. “Epipsychidion,” indeed, might be used as
a manual to illustrate the difference between mere Arcadian dreaming
and a true Platonism.
Chateaubriand is ordinarily and rightly compared with Byron rather
than with Shelley. He is plainly, however, far more of a nympholept
than Byron. Mr. Hilary, indeed, in Peacock’s “Nightmare Abbey” says
to Mr. Cypress (Byron): “You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love
nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph,
and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a
sylph.”[154] Certain distinctions would have to be made if one were
attempting a complete study of love in Byron; yet after all the love of
Don Juan and Haidée is one that Sappho or Catullus or Burns would have
understood; and these poets were not nympholepts. They were capable
of burning with love, but not, as Rousseau says of himself, “without
any definite object.”[155] Where Chateaubriand has some resemblance
to Byron is in his actual libertinism. He is however nearer than
Byron to the libertine of the eighteenth century--to the Lovelace who
pushes the pursuit of pleasure to its final exasperation where it
becomes associated with the infliction of pain. Few things are stranger
than the blend in Chateaubriand of this Sadic fury[156] with the new
romantic revery. Indeed almost every type of egotism that may manifest
itself in the relations of the sexes and that pushed to the superlative
pitch, will be found in this theoretical classicist and champion of
Christianity. Perhaps no more frenzied cry has ever issued from human
lips than that uttered by Atala[157] in describing her emotions when
torn between her religious vow and her love for Chactas: “What dream
did not arise in this heart overwhelmed with sorrow. At times in fixing
my eyes upon you, I went so far as to form desires as insensate as
they were guilty; at one moment I seemed to wish that you and I were
the only living creatures upon the earth; and then again, feeling a
divinity that held me back in my horrible transports, I seemed to want
this divinity to be annihilated provided that clasped in your arms I
should roll from abyss to abyss with the ruins of God and the world.”
Longing is here pushed to a pitch where it passes over, as in Wagner’s
“Tristan and Isolde,” into the desire for annihilation.
Actual libertinism is no necessary concomitant of nympholeptic longing.
There is a striking difference in this respect between Poe, for
example, and his translator and disciple, Baudelaire. Nothing could be
less suggestive of voluptuousness than Poe’s nostalgia. “His ecstasy,”
says Stedman, “is that of the nympholept seeking an evasive being of
whom he has glimpses by moonlight, starlight, even fenlight, but never
by noonday.” The embodiments of his dream that flit through his tales
and poems, enhanced his popularity with the ultra-romantic public in
France. These strange apparitions nearly all of whom are epileptic,
cataleptic, or consumptive made a natural appeal to a school that was
known among its detractors as _l’école poitrinaire_. “Tender souls,”
says Gautier, “were specially touched by Poe’s feminine figures, so
vaporous, so transparent and of an almost spectral beauty.” Perhaps
the nympholepsy of Gérard de Nerval is almost equally vaporous and
ethereal. He pursued through various earthly forms the queen of Sheba
whom he had loved in a previous existence and hanged himself at last
with what he believed to be her garter: an interesting example of the
relation between the extreme forms of the romantic imagination and
madness.[158]
The pursuit of a phantom of love through various earthly forms led
in the course of the romantic movement to certain modifications
in a famous legend--that of Don Juan. What is emphasized in the
older Don Juan is not merely his libertinism but his impiety--the
gratification of his appetite in deliberate defiance of God. He is
animated by Satanic pride, by the lust of power as well as by the lust
of sensation. In Molière’s treatment of the legend we can also see
the beginnings of the philanthropic pose.[159] With the progress of
Rousseauism Don Juan tends to become an “idealist,” to seek to satisfy
in his amorous adventures not merely his senses but his “soul” and his
thirst for the “infinite.”[160] Along with this idealistic Don Juan we
also see appearing at a very early stage in the movement the exotic
Don Juan who wishes to have a great deal of strangeness added to his
beauty. In his affair with the “Floridiennes,” Chateaubriand shows the
way to a long series of exotic lovers.
I said to my heart between sleeping and waking,
Thou wild thing that always art leaping or aching,
What black, brown or fair, in what clime, in what nation,
By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-pat-ation?
These lines are so plainly meant for Pierre Loti that one learns
with surprise that they were written about 1724 by the Earl of
Peterborough.[161]
Byron’s Don Juan is at times exotic in his tastes, but, as I have
said, he is not on the whole very nympholeptic--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” 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?”[162] 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.[163] 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”[164] 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.”[165] 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.”[166] 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 Héloïse,” 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.”[167]
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.[168] 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.[169]
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 æsthetic 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 æsthetic
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 æsthete 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._) 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.