Kitabı oku: «Rousseau and Romanticism», sayfa 15

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.

CHAPTER VII
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: