ROMANTIC IRONY
The first romanticist who worked out a theory of irony was Friedrich
Schlegel.[170] The attempt to put this theory into practice, after
the fashion of Tieck’s plays, seemed and seemed rightly even to later
representatives of the movement to be extravagant. Thus Hegel, who
in his ideas on art continues in so many respects the Schlegels,
repudiates irony. Formerly, says Heine, who is himself in any larger
survey, the chief of German romantic ironists, when a man had said a
stupid thing he had said it; now he can explain it away as “irony.”
Nevertheless one cannot afford to neglect this early German theory.
It derives in an interesting way from the views that the partisans
of original genius had put forth regarding the rôle of the creative
imagination. The imagination as we have seen is to be free to wander
wild in its own empire of chimeras. Rousseau showed the possibilities
of an imagination that is at once extraordinarily rich and also
perfectly free in this sense. I have said that Kant believed like the
original genius that the nobility of art depends on the free “play”
of the imagination; though he adds that art should at the same time
submit to a purpose that is not a purpose--whatever that may mean.
Schiller in his “Æsthetic Letters” relaxed the rationalistic rigor of
Kant in favor of feeling and associated even more emphatically the
ideality and creativeness of art with its free imaginative play,
its emancipation from specific aim. The personal friction that arose
between the Schlegels and Schiller has perhaps obscured somewhat their
general indebtedness to him. The Schlegelian irony in particular merely
pushes to an extreme the doctrine that nothing must interfere with
the imagination in its creative play. “The caprice of the poet,” as
Friedrich Schlegel says, “suffers no law above itself.” Why indeed
should the poet allow any restriction to be placed upon his caprice in
a universe that is after all only a projection of himself? The play
theory of art is here supplemented by the philosophy of Fichte.[171]
In justice to him it should be said that though his philosophy may
not rise above the level of temperament, he at least had a severe and
stoical temperament, and if only for this reason his “transcendental
ego” is far less obviously ego than that which appears in the irony
of his romantic followers. When a man has taken possession of his
transcendental ego, according to the Schlegels and Novalis, he looks
down on his ordinary ego and stands aloof from it. His ordinary ego may
achieve poetry but his transcendental ego must achieve the poetry of
poetry. But there is in him something that may stand aloof even from
this aloofness and so on indefinitely. Romantic irony joins here with
what is perhaps the chief preoccupation of the German romanticists, the
idea of the infinite or, as they term it, the striving for endlessness
(_Unendlichkeitstreben_). Now, according to the romanticist, a man
can show that he lays hold imaginatively upon the infinite only by
expanding beyond what his age holds to be normal and central--its
conventions in short; nay more, he must expand away from any centre he
has himself achieved. For to hold fast to a centre of any kind implies
the acceptance of limitations and to accept limitations is to be
finite, and to be finite is, as Blake says, to become mechanical; and
the whole of romanticism is a protest against the mechanizing of life.
No man therefore deserves to rank as a transcendental egotist unless
he has learned to mock not merely at the convictions of others but at
his own, unless he has become capable of self-parody. “Objection,” says
Nietzsche, “evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of
health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”[172]
One cannot repeat too often that what the romanticist always sees at
the centre is either the mere rationalist or else the philistine; and
he therefore inclines to measure his own distinction by his remoteness
from any possible centre. Now thus to be always moving away from
centrality is to be paradoxical, and romantic irony is, as Friedrich
Schlegel says, identical with paradox. Irony, paradox and the idea of
the infinite have as a matter of fact so many points of contact in
romanticism that they may profitably be treated together.
Friedrich Schlegel sought illustrious sponsors in the past for his
theory of irony. Among others he invoked the Greeks and put himself in
particular under the patronage of Socrates. But Greek irony always had
a centre. The ironical contrast is between this centre and something
that is less central. Take for example the so-called irony of Greek
tragedy. The tragic character speaks and acts in darkness as to
his impending doom, regarding which the spectator is comparatively
enlightened. To take another example, the German romanticists
were especially absurd in their attempts to set up Tieck as a new
Aristophanes. For Aristophanes, however wild and irresponsible he may
seem in the play of his imagination, never quite loses sight of his
centre, a centre from which the comic spirit proceeds and to which it
returns. Above all, however far he may push his mockery, he never mocks
at his own convictions; he never, like Tieck, indulges in self-parody.
A glance at the parabasis of almost any one of his plays will suffice
to show that he was willing to lay himself open to the charge of
being unduly didactic rather than to the charge of being aimless. The
universe of Tieck, on the other hand, is a truly romantic universe: it
has no centre, or what amounts to the same thing, it has at its centre
that symbol of spiritual stagnation, the philistine, and his inability
to rise above a dull didacticism. The romanticist cherishes the
illusion that to be a spiritual vagrant is to be exalted on a pinnacle
above the plain citizen. According to Professor Stuart P. Sherman, the
Irish dramatist Synge indulges in gypsy laughter from the bushes,[173]
a good description of romantic irony in general.
The irony of Socrates, to take the most important example of Greek
irony, is not of the centrifugal character. Socrates professes
ignorance, and this profession seems very ironical, for it turns out
that his ignorance is more enlightened, that is, more central than
other men’s swelling conceit of knowledge. It does not follow that
Socrates is insincere in his profession of ignorance; for though his
knowledge may be as light in comparison with that of the ordinary
Athenian, he sees that in comparison with true and perfect knowledge it
is only darkness. For Socrates was no mere rationalist; he was a man of
insight, one would even be tempted to say a mystic were it not for the
corruption of the term mystic by the romanticists. This being the case
he saw that man is by his very nature precluded from true and perfect
knowledge. A path, however, opens up before him towards this knowledge,
and this path he should seek to follow even though it is in a sense
endless, even though beyond any centre he can attain within the bounds
of his finite experience there is destined always to be something still
more central. Towards the mere dogmatist, the man who thinks he has
achieved some fixed and final centre, the attitude of Socrates is that
of scepticism. This attitude implies a certain degree of detachment
from the received beliefs and conventions of his time, and it is
all the more important to distinguish here between Socrates and the
romanticists because of the superficial likeness; and also because
there is between the Rousseauists and some of the Greeks who lived
about the time of Socrates a real likeness. Promethean individualism
was already rife at that time, and on the negative side it resulted
then as since in a break with tradition, and on the positive side in an
oscillation between the cult of force and the exaltation of sympathy,
between admiration for the strong man and compassion for the weak. It
is hardly possible to overlook these Promethean elements in the plays
of Euripides. Antisthenes and the cynics, again, who professed to
derive from Socrates, established an opposition between “nature” and
convention even more radical in some respects than that established
by Rousseau. Moreover Socrates himself was perhaps needlessly
unconventional and also unduly inclined to paradox--as when he
suggested to the jury who tried him that as an appropriate punishment
he should be supported at the public expense in the prytaneum. Yet in
his inner spirit and in spite of certain minor eccentricities, Socrates
was neither a superman nor a Bohemian, but a humanist. Now that the
critical spirit was abroad and the traditional basis for conduct was
failing, he was chiefly concerned with putting conduct on a positive
and critical basis. In establishing this basis his constant appeal is
to actual experience and the more homely this experience the more it
seems to please him. While working out the new basis for conduct he
continues to observe the existing laws and customs; or if he gets away
from the traditional discipline it is towards a stricter discipline;
if he repudiates in aught the common sense of his day, it is in
favor of a commoner sense. One may say indeed that Socrates and the
Rousseauists (who are in this respect like some of the sophists) are
both moving away from convention but in opposite directions. What the
romanticist opposes to convention is his “genius,” that is his unique
and private self. What Socrates opposes to convention is his universal
and ethical self. According to Friedrich Schlegel, a man can never be a
philosopher but only become one; if at any time he thinks that he is a
philosopher he ceases to become one. The romanticist is right in thus
thinking that to remain fixed at any particular point is to stagnate.
Man is, as Nietzsche says, the being who must always surpass himself,
but he has--and this is a point that Nietzsche did not sufficiently
consider--a choice of direction in his everlasting pilgrimage. The
man who is moving away from some particular centre will always seem
paradoxical to the man who remains at it, but he may be moving away
from it in either the romantic or the ethical direction. In the first
case he is moving from a more normal to a less normal experience,
in the second case he is moving towards an experience that is more
profoundly representative. The New Testament abounds in examples of the
ethical paradox--what one may term the paradox of humility. (A man must
lose his life to find it, etc.) It is possible, however, to push even
this type of paradox too far, to push it to a point where it affronts
not merely some particular convention but the good sense of mankind
itself, and this is a far graver matter. Pascal falls into this excess
when he says that sickness is the natural state of the Christian. As a
result of its supreme emphasis on humility Christianity from the start
inclined unduly perhaps towards this type of paradox. It is hardly
worth while, as Goethe said, to live seventy years in this world if all
that one learn here below is only folly in the sight of God.
One of the most delicate of tasks is to determine whether a paradox
occupies a position more or less central than the convention to which
it is opposed. A somewhat similar problem is to determine which of
two differing conventions has the greater degree of centrality. For
one convention may as compared with another seem highly paradoxical.
In 1870, it was announced at Peking that his Majesty the Emperor had
had the good fortune to catch the small-pox. The auspiciousness of
small-pox was part of the Chinese convention at this time, but to
those of us who live under another convention it is a blessing we would
willingly forego. But much in the Chinese convention, so far from being
absurd, reflects the Confucian good sense, and if the Chinese decide to
break with their convention, they should evidently consider long and
carefully in which direction they are going to move--whether towards
something more central, or something more eccentric.
As to the direction in which Rousseau is moving and therefore as
to the quality of his paradoxes there can be little question. His
paradoxes--and he is perhaps the most paradoxical of writers--reduce
themselves on analysis to the notion that man has suffered a loss of
goodness by being civilized, by having had imposed on his unconscious
and instinctive self some humanistic or religious discipline--e.g.,
“The man who reflects is a depraved animal”; “True Christians are meant
to be slaves”; decorum is only the “varnish of vice” or the “mask of
hypocrisy.” Innumerable paradoxes of this kind will immediately occur
to one as characteristic of Rousseau and his followers. These paradoxes
may be termed in opposition to those of humility, the paradoxes of
spontaneity. The man who holds them is plainly moving in an opposite
direction not merely from the Christian but from the Socratic
individualist. He is moving from the more representative to the less
representative and not towards some deeper centre of experience,
as would be the case if he were tending towards either humanism or
religion. Wordsworth has been widely accepted not merely as a poet but
as a religious teacher, and it is therefore important to note that his
paradoxes are prevailingly of the Rousseauistic type. His verse is
never more spontaneous or, as he would say, inevitable, than when it
is celebrating the gospel of spontaneity. I have already pointed out
some of the paradoxes that he opposes to pseudo-classic decorum: e.g.,
his attempt to bestow poetical dignity and importance upon the ass,
and to make of it a model of moral excellence, also to find poetry in
an idiot boy and to associate sublimity with a pedlar in defiance of
the ordinary character of pedlars. In general Wordsworth indulges in
Rousseauistic paradoxes when he urges us to look to peasants for the
true language of poetry and would have us believe that man is taught
by “woods and rills” and not by contact with his fellow men. He pushes
this latter paradox to a point that would have made even Rousseau
“stare and gasp” when he asserts that
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.
Another form of this same paradox that what comes from nature
spontaneously is better than what can be acquired by conscious effort
is found in his poem “Lucy Gray”:
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!
True maidenhood is made up of a thousand decorums; but this
Rousseauistic maiden would have seemed too artificial if she had been
reared in a house instead of “growing” out of doors; she might in
that case have been a human being and not a “thing” and this would
plainly have detracted from her spontaneity. Wordsworth’s paradoxes
about children have a similar origin. A child who at the age of six
is a “mighty prophet, seer blest,” is a highly improbable not to say
impossible child. The “Nature” again of “Heart-Leap Well” which both
feels and inspires pity is more remote from normal experience than the
Nature “red in tooth and claw” of Tennyson. Wordsworth indeed would
seem to have a penchant for paradox even when he is less obviously
inspired by his naturalistic thesis.
A study of Wordsworth’s life shows that he became progressively
disillusioned regarding Rousseauistic spontaneity. He became less
paradoxical as he grew older and in almost the same measure, one is
tempted to say, less poetical. He returns gradually to the traditional
forms until radicals come to look upon him as the “lost leader.” He
finds it hard, however, to wean his imagination from its primitivistic
Arcadias; so that what one finds, in writing like the “Ecclesiastical
Sonnets,” is not imaginative fire but at best a sober intellectual
conviction, an opposition between the head and the heart in short that
suggests somewhat Chateaubriand and the “Genius of Christianity.”[174]
If Wordsworth had lost faith in his revolutionary and naturalistic
ideal, and had at the same time refused to return to the traditional
forms, one might then have seen in his work something of the homeless
hovering of the romantic ironist. If, on the other hand, he had
worked away from the centre that the traditional forms give to life
towards a more positive and critical centre, if, in other words,
he had broken with the past not on Rousseauistic, but on Socratic
lines, he would have needed an imagination of different quality, an
imagination less idyllic and pastoral and more ethical than that he
usually displays.[175] For the ethical imagination alone can guide one
not indeed to any fixed centre but to an ever increasing centrality.
We are here confronted once more with the question of the infinite
which comes very close to the ultimate ground of difference between
classicist and romanticist. The centre that one perceives with the
aid of the classical imagination and that sets bounds to impulse and
desire may, as I have already said, be defined in opposition to the
outer infinite of expansion as the inner or human infinite. If we
moderns, to repeat Nietzsche, are unable to attain proportionateness
it is because “our itching is really the itching for the infinite,
the immeasurable.” Thus to associate the infinite only with the
immeasurable, to fail to perceive that the element of form and the curb
it puts on the imagination are not external and artificial, but come
from the very depths, is to betray the fact that one is a barbarian.
Nietzsche and many other romanticists are capable on occasion of
admiring the proportionateness that comes from allegiance to some
centre. But after all the human spirit must be ever advancing, and
its only motive powers, according to romantic logic, are wonder and
curiosity; and so from the perfectly sound premise that man is the
being who must always surpass himself, Nietzsche draws the perfectly
unsound conclusion that the only way for man thus constantly to surpass
himself and so show his infinitude is to spurn all limits and “live
dangerously.” The Greeks themselves, according to Renan, will some
day seem the “apostles of ennui,” for the very perfection of their
form shows a lack of aspiration. To submit to form is to be static,
whereas “romantic poetry,” says Friedrich Schlegel magnificently, is
“universal progressive poetry.” Now the only effective counterpoise to
the endless expansiveness that is implied in such a programme is the
inner or human infinite of concentration. For it is perfectly true that
there is something in man that is not satisfied with the finite and
that, if he becomes stationary, he is at once haunted by the spectre
of ennui. Man may indeed be defined as the insatiable animal; and the
more imaginative he is the more insatiable he is likely to become, for
it is the imagination that gives him access to the infinite in every
sense of the word. In a way Baudelaire is right when he describes
ennui as a “delicate monster” that selects as his prey the most highly
gifted natures. Marguerite d’Angoulême already speaks of the “ennui
proper to well-born spirits.” Now religion seeks no less than romance
an escape from ennui. Bossuet is at one with Baudelaire when he
dilates on that “inexorable ennui which is the very substance of human
life.” But Bossuet and Baudelaire differ utterly in the remedies they
propose for ennui. Baudelaire hopes to escape from ennui by dreaming
of the superlative emotional adventure, by indulging in infinite,
indeterminate desire, and becomes more and more restless in his quest
for a something that at the end always eludes him. This infinite of
nostalgia has nothing in common with the infinite of religion. No
distinction is more important than that between the man who feels the
divine discontent of religion, and the man who is suffering from
mere romantic restlessness. According to religion man must seek the
satisfaction that the finite fails to give by looking not without but
within; and to look within he must in the literal sense of the word
undergo conversion. A path will then be found to open up before him, a
path of which he cannot see the end. He merely knows that to advance
on this path is to increase in peace, poise, centrality; though beyond
any calm he can attain is always a deeper centre of calm. The goal
is at an infinite remove. This is the truth that St. Augustine puts
theologically when he exclaims: “For thou hast made us for thyself
and our heart is restless until it findeth peace in thee.”[176] One
should insist that this question of the two infinites is not abstract
and metaphysical but bears on what is most concrete and immediate
in experience. If the inner and human infinite cannot be formulated
intellectually, it can be known practically in its effect on life and
conduct. Goethe says of Werther that he “treated his heart like a sick
child; its every wish was granted it.” “My restless heart asked me
for something else,” says Rousseau. “René,” says Chateaubriand, “was
enchanted, tormented and, as it were, possessed by the demon of his
heart.” Mr. Galsworthy speaks in a similar vein of “the aching for the
wild, the passionate, the new, that never quite dies in a man’s heart.”
But is there not deep down in the human breast another heart that is
felt as a power of control over this romantic heart and can keep within
due bounds “its aching for the wild, the passionate, the new.” This is
the heart, it would seem, to which a man must hearken if he is not for
a “little honey of romance” to abandon his “ancient wisdom and austere
control.”
The romantic corruption of the infinite here joins with the romantic
corruption of conscience, the transformation of conscience from an
inner check into an expansive emotion that I have already traced in
Shaftesbury and Rousseau. But one should add that in some of its
aspects this corruption of the idea of the infinite antedates the
whole modern movement. At least the beginnings of it can be found in
ancient Greece,--especially in that “delirious and diseased Greece”
of which Joubert speaks--the Greece of the neo-Platonists. There is
already in the neo-Platonic notion of the infinite a strong element
of expansiveness. Aristotle and the older Greeks conceived of the
infinite in this sense as bad. That something in human nature which
is always reaching out for more--whether the more of sensation or of
power or of knowledge--was, they held, to be strictly reined in and
disciplined to the law of measure. All the furies lie in wait for the
man who overextends himself. He is ripening for Nemesis. “Nothing too
much.” “Think as a mortal.” “The half is better than the whole.” In his
attitude towards man’s expansive self the Greek as a rule stands for
mediation, and not like the more austere Christian, for renunciation.
Yet Plato frequently and Aristotle at times mount from the humanistic
to the religious level. One of the most impressive passages in
philosophy is that in which Aristotle, perhaps the chief exponent of
the law of measure, affirms that one who has really faced about and
is moving towards the inner infinite needs no warning against excess:
“We should not give heed,” he says, “to those who bid one think as
a mortal, but so far as we can we should make ourselves immortal and
do all with a view to a life in accord with the best Principle in
us.”[177] (This Principle Aristotle goes on to say is a man’s true
self.)
The earlier Greek distinction between an outer and evil infinite
of expansive desire and an inner infinite that is raised above the
flux and yet rules it, is, in the Aristotelian phrase, its “unmoved
mover,” became blurred, as I have said, during the Alexandrian period.
The Alexandrian influence entered to some extent into Christianity
itself and filtered through various channels down to modern times.
Some of the romanticists went directly to the neo-Platonists,
especially Plotinus. Still more were affected by Jacob Boehme, who
himself had no direct knowledge of the Alexandrian theosophy. This
theosophy appears nevertheless in combination with other elements in
his writings. He appealed to the new school by his insistence on the
element of appetency or desire, by his universal symbolizing, above
all by his tendency to make of the divine an affirmative instead of a
restrictive force--a something that pushes forward instead of holding
back. The expansive elements are moderated in Boehme himself and in
disciples like Law by genuinely religious elements--e.g., humility
and the idea of conversion. What happens when the expansiveness is
divorced from these elements, one may see in another English follower
of Boehme--William Blake. To be both beautiful and wise one needs,
according to Blake, only to be exuberant. The influence of Boehme
blends in Blake with the new æstheticism. Jesus himself, he says, so
far from being restrained “was all virtue, and acted from impulse not
from rules.” This purely æsthetic and impulsive Jesus has been cruelly
maligned, as we learn from the poem entitled the “Everlasting Gospel,”
by being represented as humble and chaste. Religion itself thus becomes
in Blake the mere sport of a powerful and uncontrolled imagination,
and this we are told is mysticism. I have already contrasted with
this type of mysticism something that goes under the same name and
is yet utterly different--the mysticism of ancient India. Instead
of conceiving of the divine in terms of expansion the Oriental sage
defines it experimentally as the “inner check.” No more fundamental
distinction perhaps can be made than that between those who associate
the good with the yes-principle and those who associate it rather with
the no-principle. But I need not repeat what I have said elsewhere on
the romantic attempt to discredit the veto power. Let no one think
that this contrast is merely metaphysical. The whole problem of evil
is involved in it and all the innumerable practical consequences that
follow from one’s attitude towards this problem. The passage in which
Faust defines the devil as the “spirit that always says no” would seem
to derive directly or indirectly from Boehme. According to Boehme
good can be known only through evil. God therefore divides his will
into two, the “yes” and the “no,” and so founds an eternal contrast
to himself in order to enter into a struggle with it, and finally to
discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature
is the transforming of the will which says “no” into the will which
says “yes.”[178] The opposition between good and evil tends to lose
its reality when it thus becomes a sort of sham battle that God gets
up with himself (without contraries is no progression, says Blake),
or when, to take the form that the doctrine assumes in “Faust,” the
devil appears as the necessary though unwilling instrument of man’s
betterment. The recoil from the doctrine of total depravity was perhaps
inevitable. What is sinister is that advantage has been taken of this
recoil to tamper with the problem of evil itself. Partial evil we are
told is universal good; or else evil is only good in the making. For
a Rousseau or a Shelley it is something mysteriously imposed from
without on a spotless human nature; for a Wordsworth it is something
one may escape by contemplating the speargrass on the wall.[179] For a
Novalis sin is a mere illusion of which a man should rid his mind if he
aspires to become a “magic idealist.”[180] In spite of his quaint Tory
prejudices Dr. Johnson is one of the few persons in recent times that
one may term wise without serious qualification because he never dodges
or equivocates in dealing with the problem of evil; he never fades away
from the fact of evil into some theosophic or sentimental dream.
The rise of a purely expansive view of life in the eighteenth century
was marked by a great revival of enthusiasm. The chief grievance of
the expansionist indeed against the no-principle is that it kills
enthusiasm. But concentration no less than expansion may have its own
type of enthusiasm. It is therefore imperative in an age that has
repudiated the traditional sanctions and set out to walk by the inner
light that all general terms and in particular the term enthusiasm
should be protected by a powerful dialectic. Nothing is more perilous
than an uncritical enthusiasm, since it is only by criticism that one
may determine whether the enthusiast is a man who is moving towards
wisdom or is a candidate for Bedlam. The Rousseauist, however, exalts
enthusiasm at the same time that he depreciates discrimination.
“Enthusiasm,” says Emerson, “is the height of man. It is the passage
from the human to the divine.” It is only too characteristic of Emerson
and of the whole school to which he belongs, to put forth statements of
this kind without any dialectical protection. The type of enthusiasm
to which Emerson’s praise might be properly applied, the type that
has been defined as exalted peace, though extremely rare, actually
exists. A commoner type of enthusiasm during the past century is that
which has been defined as “the rapturous disintegration of civilized
human nature.” When we have got our fingers well burned as a result of
our failure to make the necessary discriminations, we may fly to the
opposite extreme like the men of the early eighteenth century among
whom, as is well known, enthusiasm had become a term of vituperation.
This dislike of enthusiasm was the natural recoil from the uncritical
following of the inner light by the fanatics of the seventeenth
century. Shaftesbury attacks this older type of enthusiasm and at the
same time prepares the way for the new emotional enthusiasm. One cannot
say, however, that any such sharp separation of types appears in the
revival of enthusiasm that begins about the middle of the eighteenth
century, though some of those who were working for this revival felt
the need of discriminating:
That which concerns us therefore is to see
What Species of Enthusiasts we be--
says John Byrom in his poem on Enthusiasm. The different species,
however,--the enthusiasm of the Evangelicals and Wesleyans, the
enthusiasm of those who like Law and his disciple Byrom hearken back
to Boehme, the enthusiasm of Rousseau and the sentimentalists, tend to
run together. To “let one’s feelings run in soft luxurious flow,”[181]
is, as Newman says, at the opposite pole from spirituality. Yet much of
this mere emotional facility appears alongside of genuinely religious
elements in the enthusiasm of the Methodist. One may get a notion of
the jumble to which I refer by reading a book like Henry Brooke’s
“Fool of Quality.” Brooke is at one and the same time a disciple of
Boehme and Rousseau while being more or less affiliated with the
Methodistic movement. The book indeed was revised and abridged by
John Wesley himself and in this form had a wide circulation among his
followers.[182]
The enthusiasm that has marked the modern movement has plainly not been
sufficiently critical. Perhaps the first discovery that any one will
make who wishes to be at once critical and enthusiastic is that in a
genuinely spiritual enthusiasm the inner light and the inner check
are practically identical. He will find that if he is to rise above
the naturalistic level he must curb constantly his expansive desires
with reference to some centre that is set above the flux. Here let me
repeat is the supreme rôle of the imagination. The man who has ceased
to lean on outer standards can perceive his new standards or centre of
control only through its aid. I have tried to show that to aim at such
a centre is not to be stagnant and stationary but on the contrary to
be at once purposeful and progressive. To assert that the creativeness
of the imagination is incompatible with centrality or, what amounts to
the same thing, with purpose, is to assert that the creativeness of
the imagination is incompatible with reality or at least such reality
as man may attain. Life is at best a series of illusions; the whole
office of philosophy is to keep it from degenerating into a series
of delusions. If we are to keep it from thus degenerating we need to
grasp above all the difference between the eccentric and the concentric
imagination. To look for serious guidance to an imagination that owes
allegiance to nothing above itself, is to run the risk of taking some
cloud bank for terra firma. The eccentric imagination may give access
to the “infinite,” but it is an infinite empty of content and therefore
an infinite not of peace but of restlessness. Can any one maintain
seriously that there is aught in common between the “striving for
endlessness” of the German romanticists and the supreme and perfect
Centre that Dante glimpses at the end of the “Divine Comedy” and in the
presence of which he becomes dumb?
We are told to follow the gleam, but the counsel is somewhat ambiguous.
The gleam that one follows may be that which is associated with the
concentric imagination and which gives steadiness and informing
purpose, or it may be the romantic will o’ the wisp. One may, as I
have said, in recreative moments allow one’s imagination to wander
without control, but to take these wanderings seriously is to engage
in a sort of endless pilgrimage in the void. The romanticist is
constantly yielding to the “spell” of this or the “lure” of that, or
the “call” of some other thing. But when the wonder and strangeness
that he is chasing are overtaken, they at once cease to be wondrous
and strange, while the gleam is already dancing over some other object
on the distant horizon. For nothing is in itself romantic, it is only
imagining that makes it so. Romanticism is the pursuit of the element
of illusion in things for its own sake; it is in short the cherishing
of glamour. The word glamour introduced into literary usage from
popular Scotch usage by Walter Scott itself illustrates this tendency.
Traced etymologically, it turns out to be the same word as grammar. In
an illiterate age to know how to write at all was a weird and magical
accomplishment,[183] but in an educated age, nothing is so drearily
unromantic, so lacking in glamour as grammar.
The final question that arises in connection with this subject is
whether one may quell the mere restlessness of one’s spirit and impose
upon it an ethical purpose. “The man who has no definite end is lost,”
says Montaigne. The upshot of the romantic supposition that purpose is
incompatible with the freedom of the imagination is a philosophy like
that of Nietzsche. He can conceive of nothing beyond whirling forever
on the wheel of change (“the eternal recurrence”) without any goal or
firm refuge that is set above the flux. He could not help doubting
at times whether happiness was to be found after all in mere endless,
purposeless mutation.
Have _I_ still a goal? A haven towards which _my_ sail is set?
A good wind? Ah, he only who knoweth _whither_ he saileth,
knoweth what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.
What still remaineth to me? A heart weary and flippant; an
unstable will; fluttering wings; a broken backbone.
…
_Where_ is _my_ home? For it do I ask and seek, and have
sought, but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal
nowhere, O eternal--in vain.[184]
To allow one’s self to revolve passively on the wheel of change
(_samsāra_) seemed to the Oriental sage the acme of evil. An old Hindu
writer compares the man who does not impose a firm purpose upon the
manifold solicitations of sense to a charioteer who fails to rein
in his restless steeds[185]--a comparison suggested independently
to Ricarda Huch by the lives of the German romanticists. In the
absence of central control, the parts of the self tend to pull each
in a different way. It is not surprising that in so centrifugal a
movement, at least on the human and spiritual level, one should find
so many instances of disintegrated and multiple personality. The
fascination that the phenomenon of the double (_Doppelgängerei_) had
for Hoffmann and other German romanticists is well known.[186] It may
well be that some such disintegration of the self takes place under
extreme emotional stress.[187] We should not fail to note here the
usual coöperation between the emotional and the scientific naturalist.
Like the romanticist, the scientific psychologist is more interested
in the abnormal than in the normal. According to the Freudians, the
personality that has become incapable of any conscious aim is not left
entirely rudderless. The guidance that it is unable to give itself is
supplied to it by some “wish,” usually obscene, from the sub-conscious
realm of dreams. The Freudian then proceeds to develop what may be true
of the hysterical degenerate into a complete view of life.
Man is in danger of being deprived of every last scrap and vestige of
his humanity by this working together of romanticism and science. For
man becomes human only in so far as he exercises moral choice. He must
also enter upon the pathway of ethical purpose if he is to achieve
happiness. “Moods,” says Novalis, “undefined emotions, not defined
emotions and feelings, give happiness.” The experience of life shows
so plainly that this is not so that the romanticist is tempted to
seek shelter once more from his mere vagrancy of spirit in the outer
discipline he has abandoned. “To such unsettled ones as thou, seemeth
at last even a prisoner blessed. Didst thou ever see how captured
criminals sleep? They sleep quietly, they enjoy their new security. …
Beware in the end lest a narrow faith capture thee, a hard rigorous
delusion! For now everything that is narrow and fixed seduceth and
tempteth thee.”[188]
Various reasons have been given for romantic conversions to
Catholicism--for example, the desire for confession (though the
Catholic does not, like the Rousseauist, confess himself from the
housetops), the æsthetic appeal of Catholic rites and ceremonies, etc.
The sentence of Nietzsche puts us on the track of still another reason.
The affinity of certain romantic converts for the Church is that of the
jelly-fish for the rock. It is appropriate that Friedrich Schlegel,
the great apostle of irony, should after a career as a heaven-storming
Titan end by submitting to this most rigid of all forms of outer
authority.
For it should now be possible to return after our digression on paradox
and the idea of the infinite and the perils of aimlessness, to romantic
irony with a truer understanding of its significance. Like so much
else in this movement it is an attempt to give to a grave psychic
weakness the prestige of strength--unless indeed one conceives the
superior personality to be the one that lacks a centre and principle of
control. Man it has usually been held should think lightly of himself
but should have some conviction for which he is ready to die. The
romantic ironist, on the other hand, is often morbidly sensitive about
himself, but is ready to mock at his own convictions. Rousseau was no
romantic ironist, but the root of self-parody is found nevertheless
in his saying that his heart and his head did not seem to belong to
the same individual. Everything of course is a matter of degree. What
poor mortal can say that he is perfectly at one with himself? Friedrich
Schlegel is not entirely wrong when he discovers elements of irony
based on an opposition between the head and the heart in writers like
Ariosto and Cervantes, who love the very mediæval tales that they are
treating in a spirit of mockery. Yet the laughter of Cervantes is not
gypsy laughter. He is one of those who next to Shakespeare deserve the
praise of having dwelt close to the centre of human nature and so can
in only a minor degree be ranked with the romantic ironists.
In the extreme type of romantic ironist not only are intellect and
emotion at loggerheads but action often belies both: he thinks one
thing and feels another and does still a third. The most ironical
contrast of all is that between the romantic “ideal” and the actual
event. The whole of romantic morality is from this point of view, as
I have tried to show, a monstrous series of ironies. The pacifist,
for example, has been disillusioned so often that he should by this
time be able to qualify as a romantic ironist, to look, that is, with
a certain aloofness on his own dream. The crumbling of the ideal is
often so complete indeed when put to the test that irony is at times,
we may suppose, a merciful alternative to madness. When disillusion
overtakes the uncritical enthusiast, when he finds that he has taken
some cloud bank for terra firma, he continues to cling to his dream,
but at the same time wishes to show that he is no longer the dupe of
it; and so “hot baths of sentiment,” as Jean Paul says of his novels,
“are followed by cold douches of irony.” The true German master of
the genre is, however, Heine. Every one knows with what coldness his
head came to survey the enthusiasms of his heart, whether in love or
politics. One may again measure the havoc that life had wrought with
Renan’s ideals if one compares the tone of his youthful “Future of
Science” with the irony of his later writings. He compliments Jesus by
ascribing to him an ironical detachment similar to his own. Jesus, he
says, has that mark of the superior nature--the power to rise above
his own dream and to smile down upon it. Anatole France, who is even
more completely detached from his own dreams than his master Renan,
sums up the romantic emancipation of imagination and sensibility from
any definite centre when he says that life should have as its supreme
witnesses irony and pity.
Irony is on the negative side, it should be remembered, a way of
affirming one’s escape from traditional and conventional control, of
showing the supremacy of mood over decorum. “There are poems old and
new which throughout breathe the divine breath of irony. … Within lives
the poet’s mood that surveys all, rising infinitely above everything
finite, even above his own art, virtue or genius.”[189] Decorum is for
the classicist the grand masterpiece to observe because it is only
thus he can show that he has a genuine centre set above his own ego;
it is only by the allegiance of his imagination to this centre that
he can give the illusion of a higher reality. The romantic ironist
shatters the illusion wantonly. It is as though he would inflict upon
the reader the disillusion from which he has himself suffered. By his
swift passage from one mood to another (_Stimmungsbrechung_) he shows
that he is subject to no centre. The effect is often that of a sudden
breaking of the spell of poetry by an intrusion of the poet’s ego. Some
of the best examples are found in that masterpiece of romantic irony,
“Don Juan.”[190]
Closely allied to the irony of emotional disillusion is a certain type
of misanthropy. You form an ideal of man that is only an Arcadian dream
and then shrink back from man when you find that he does not correspond
to your ideal. I have said that the romantic lover does not love a
real person but only a projection of his mood. This substitution of
illusion for reality often appears in the relations of the romanticist
with other persons. Shelley, for example, begins by seeing in Elizabeth
Hitchener an angel of light and then discovers that she is instead a
“brown demon.” He did not at any time see the real Elizabeth Hitchener.
She merely reflects back to him two of his own moods. The tender
misanthropy of the Rousseauist is at the opposite pole from that of a
Swift, which is the misanthropy of naked intellect. Instead of seeing
human nature through an Arcadian haze he saw it without any illusion at
all. His irony is like that of Socrates, the irony of intellect. Its
bitterness and cruelty arise from the fact that his intellect does not,
like the intellect of Socrates, have the support of insight. Pascal
would have said that Swift saw man’s misery without at the same time
seeing his grandeur. For man’s grandeur is due to his infinitude and
this infinitude cannot be perceived directly, but only through a veil
of illusion; only, that is, through a right use of the imagination.
Literary distinctions of this kind must of course be used cautiously.
Byron’s irony is prevailingly sentimental, but along with this romantic
element he has much irony and satire that Swift would have understood
perfectly.
The misanthropist of the Rousseauistic or Byronic type has a resource
that was denied to Swift. Having failed to find companionship among men
he can flee to nature. Rousseau relates how when he had taken refuge on
St. Peter’s Island he “exclaimed at times with deep emotion: Oh nature,
oh my mother, here I am under your protection alone. Here is no adroit
and rascally man to interpose between you and me.”[191] Few aspects of
romanticism are more important than this attempt to find companionship
and consolation in nature.