the Rousseauist. The Rousseauist, as indeed the modern man in general, is more preoccupied with his separate and private self than the classicist. Modern melancholy has practically always this touch of isolation not merely because of the proneness of the "genius" to dwell on his own uniqueness, but also because of the undermining of the traditional communions by critical analysis. The noblest form of the "malady of the age" is surely that which supervened upon the loss of religious faith. This is what distinguishes the sadness of an Arnold or a Senancour from that of a Gray. The "Elegy" belongs to the modern movement by the humanitarian note, the sympathetic interest in the lowly, but in its melancholy it does not go much beyond the milder forms of classical meditation on the inevitable sadness of life—what one may term pensiveness. Like the other productions of the so-called graveyard school, it bears a direct relation to Milton's "Il Penseroso." It is well to retain Gray's own distinction. "Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part," he wrote to Richard West in 1742, "but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt." Gray did not experience the more poignant sadness, one may suspect, without some loss of the "trembling hope" that is the final note of the 'Elegy." No forlornness is greater than that of the man who has known faith and then lost it. Renan writes of his own break with the Church: 66 The fish of Lake Baikal, we are told, have spent thousands of years in becoming fresh-water fish after being salt-water fish. I had to go through my transition in a few weeks. Like an enchanted circle Catholicism embraces the whole of life with so much strength that when one is deprived of it everything seems insipid. I was terribly lost. The universe produced upon me the impression of a cold and arid desert. For the moment that Christianity was not the truth, all the rest appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, barely worthy of interest. The collapse of my life upon itself left in me a feeling of emptiness like that which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love-affair.1 The forlornness at the loss of faith is curiously combined in many of the romanticists with the mood of revolt. This type of romanticist heaps reproaches on a God in whose existence he no longer believes (as in Leconte de Lisle's "Quaïn," itself related to Byron's "Cain"). He shakes his fist at an empty heaven, or like Alfred de Vigny (in his Jardin des Oliviers) assumes towards this emptiness an attitude of proud disdain. He is loath to give up this grandiose defiance of divinity if only because it helps to save him from subsiding into platitude. A somewhat similar mood appears in the "Satanic" Catholics who continue to cling to religion simply because it adds to the gusto of sinning. A Barbey succeeded in combining the rôle of Byronic Titan with that of champion of the Church. But in general the romantic Prometheus spurns the traditional forms of communion whether classical or Christian. He is so far as everything established is concerned enormously centrifugal, but he hopes to erect on the ruins of the past the new religion of human brotherhood. Everything in this movement from Shaftesbury down hinges on the rôle that is thus assigned to sympathy: if it can really unite 1 Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 329–30. 2 "[Villiers] était de cette famille des néo-catholiques littéraires dont Chateaubriand est le père commun, et qui a produit Barbey d'Aurévilly, Baudelaire et plus récemment M. Joséphin Peladan. Ceux-là ont goûté par-dessus tout dans la religion les charmes du péché, la grandeur du sacrilège, et leur sensualisme a caressé les dogmes qui ajoutaient aux voluptés la suprême volupté de se perdre." A. France, Vie Littéraire, III, men who are at the same time indulging each to the utmost his own "genius" or idiosyncrasy there is no reason why one should not accept romanticism as a philosophy of life. But nowhere else perhaps is the clash more violent between the theory and the fact. No movement is so profuse in professions of brotherhood and none is so filled with the aching sense of solitude. "Behold me then alone upon the earth," is the sentence with which Rousseau begins his last book;1 and he goes on to marvel that he, the "most loving of men," had been forced more and more into solitude. "I am in the world as though in a strange planet upon which I have fallen from the one that I inhabited." 2 When no longer subordinated to something higher than themselves both the head and the heart (in the romantic sense) not only tend to be opposed to one another, but also, each in its own way, to isolate. Empedocles was used not only by Arnold but by other victims of romantic melancholy, as a symbol of intellectual isolation: by his indulgence in the "imperious lonely thinking power " Empedocles has broken the warm bonds of sympathy with his fellows: thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought, But a naked eternally restless mind! His leaping into Etna typifies his attempt to escape from his loneliness by a fiery union with nature herself. According to religion one should seek to unite with a something that is set above both man and nature, whether this something is called God as in Christianity 1 Première Promenade. 2 Ibid. E.g., Hölderlin and Jean Polonius. or simply the Law as in various philosophies of the Far East. The most severe penalty visited on the man who .transgresses is that he tends to fall away from this union. This is the element of truth in the sentence of Diderot that Rousseau took as a personal affront: "Only the wicked man is alone." Rousseau asserted in reply, anticipating Mark Twain, that "on the contrary only the good man is alone." Now in a sense Rousseau is right. "Most men are bad," as one of the seven sages of Greece remarked, and any one who sets out to follow a very strenuous virtue is likely to have few companions on the way. Rousseau is also right in a sense when he says that the wicked man needs to live in society so that he may have opportunity to practice his wickedness. Yet Rousseau fails to face the main issue: solitude is above all a psychic thing. A man may frequent his fellows and suffer none the less acutely, like Poe's "Man of the Crowd," from a ghastly isolation. And conversely one may be like the ancient who said that he was never less alone than when he was alone. Hawthorne, who was himself a victim of solitude, brooded a great deal on this whole problem, especially, as may be seen in the "Scarlet Letter" and elsewhere, on the isolating effects of sin. He perceived the relation of the problem to the whole trend of religious life in New England. The older Puritans had a sense of intimacy with God and craved no other companionship. With the weak 1 A striking passage on solitude will be found in the Laws of Manu, IV, 240-42. ("Alone a being is born: alone he goes down to death." His kin forsake him at the grave; his only hope then is in the companionship of the Law of righteousness [Dharma]. "With the Law as his companion he crosses the darkness difficult to cross.") ening of their faith the later Puritans lost the sense of a divine companionship, but retained their aloofness from men. Hawthorne's own solution of the problem of solitude, so far as he offers any, is humanitarian. Quicken your sympathies. Let the man who has taken as his motto Excelsior 1 be warned. Nothing will console him on the bleak heights either of knowledge or of power for the warm contact with the dwellers in the valley. Faust, who is a symbol of the solitude of knowledge, seeks to escape from his forlornness by recovering this warm contact. That the inordinate quest of power also leads to solitude is beyond question. Napoleon, the very type of the superman, must in the nature of the case have been very solitary. His admirer Nietzsche wrote one day: "I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child." Carlyle, whose "hero" derives like the superman from the original genius of the eighteenth century, makes the following entry in his diary: "My isolation, my feeling of loneliness, unlimitedness (much meant by this) what tongue shall say? Alone, alone!" 4 3 1 In the poem by the Swiss poet C. Didier from which Longfellow's poem seems to be derived, the youth who persists in scaling the heights in spite of all warnings is Byron! Et Byron... disparaît aux yeux du pâtre épouvanté. (See E. Estève, Byron en France, 147). In the Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe Chateaubriand quotes from the jottings of Napoleon on the island of Elba. "Mon cœur se refuse aux joies communes comme à la douleur ordinaire." He says of Napoleon elsewhere in the same work: “Au fond il ne tenait à rien: homme solitaire, il se suffisait; le malheur ne fit que le rendre au désert de sa vie." The solitude of the "genius" is already marked in Blake: Why was I not born like the rest of my race? When I look, each one starts; when I speak, I offend; |