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In the final essay of this three-part series, the author suggests that the artificial sense of "intellectual" belongs especially to the past two centuries and is inextricably linked to the rise of technology.

A short, wry poem from a diehard admirer of truth.

If romanticism is understood as an openness to the novel and the imaginative rather than as a pedantic scholarly distinction, then a heavy infusion of its vigor is needed to resuscitate our literature.

The author of the foregoing essay and Praesidium’s editor exchange views about romanticism and art generally, often with mild disagreement.

French scholar Pierre Lasserre turned the Sorbonne inside-out with his assault upon the romantics’ moral, intellectual, and spiritual poverty. These excerpts recover his most stunning insights from moth balls.

Professor Carlson reflects further upon the wire-and-wave-transmitted feelings of contemporary life.

The "special issue" topic for this quarter took me quite by surprise. I had known for some while that my young contact through an Internet writing group, John Wright, wanted to compose an essay for the journal about romanticism. I had no early hints, however, that his subject was not any certain collection of historically designated romantics (or Romantics, in other words), but the romantic tendency itself. I therefore went about building my own essay on the Western intellectual’s rise and his culture’s decline in blithe ignorance: little did I know that, in a way, I was also writing about the rise of the romantic influence! Or rather, I knew this well enough, naturally—but I would not have chosen (and in fact did not choose) to link our culture’s decline with the romantics tout court. The degenerative forces at work, in my opinion, were far greater than those which produce a new literary or artistic epoch. At most, romanticism was as much victim as villain in the piece. It was the all-but-inevitable response (for is anything in human events really inevitable?) to the West’s increasing disparagement of imaginative and spiritual realities and its increasing valuation of the materially viable and useful.

Now, Mr. Wright will surely cry foul at the stingy charity of my "as much victim as villain" remark. He has chosen to define romanticism in a way which identifies it virtually one-to-one with imagination, spirituality, and—in short—our lately victimized humanity. He shows himself fully aware that academic definitions, with their emphasis of historical causality, their incessant dropping of names, and their dense jargon, are out of step with his method; yet he prefers to be out of step and risk the sacrifice of clinical precision, and he makes an appealing case that such precision reduces vital forces to stale corpses. No one who has toiled through the gulags of graduate school or has reeled amid fumes of coffee and doughnuts at some endless Conference on Literary Signifiers and Signifying Literature can fail to share this impatience with pedantry. At the same time, I personally believe that there is enough of the historically conditioned about the romantic phenomenon that the "r" word makes me fidget as a synonym for all things bright and beautiful. John and I go round and round this maypole in our series of e-mail exchanges which I present as a postscript to his essay. It doesn’t seem to me that we resolve any of our differences—but it occurs to me that a resolution is difficult for the very reason that, behind our widely divergent understanding of terms, we agree upon so much.

If my view of the romantics is uncharitable, then French scholar Pierre Lasserre’s was ruthless. I have been fascinated by Lasserre since I was first exposed to him; and, for almost the same amount of time, I have been hounding Ms. DiRoberti to translate some excerpts for the journal. I confess that I find myself in the front row of the Lasserre cheering section when the great man lays into Rousseau and Hugo, both of whom I have always thought as insufferable in their moral arrogance as they are brilliant in their rhetorical dexterity. Hugo, especially, possessed one of the greatest gifts for metaphor that I have ever encountered: if only he had confined himself to the worship of nature in verse! I believe it was Auden who called Tennyson the "stupidest of the great poets". I must conclude, after a long dose of Hugo, that Auden had only English poets in mind.

Ironically, Lasserre is very hard to translate for what might well be called a certain romanticism of style. No classically cadenced cola and lucid phrases for him! His writing is suffused in metaphors almost as arresting, sometimes, as Hugo’s, and in lists which work themselves into such a fever-pitch that they appear to forget where they started. Gianna is to be highly commended for having comprehensibly rendered so many apostrophes and denunciations of such insistent hammering or all-points-covered irony. I know that she is distressed at having translated only about half of the passages she had marked for presentation. A scholarly exhaustion overtook her, however, at just the right moment, since a longer submission could not have been accommodated in this issue. I have confidence that we will see the second half at another time.

Or does it? Isn’t the notion that the human heart can, after all, find a channel through technology, or that the most embittered of hearts can still not suppress new hope, a romantic one? A stretch, perhaps—but John Wright would approve of that stretch! ~J.H.

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Optimus est post malum principem dies primus.

"The best day after a bad ruler is the first."

Tacitus, Historiae 4.42

 

"If the truth of real things is in our soul, would not the soul then be immortal, so that a stout heart could confidently undertake to seek and (as it were) remember what you happen not to know now—that is, what you don’t recall?"

Plato, Menon 86b

 

In my second essay about the increasing division of modern life into simplistically, truculently opposite points of view, I indicted both fascism and communism for exploiting ill-educated masses. The rank and file became a force to be reckoned with only in the latter nineteenth century. Before then, it was often little more than cannon fodder, beholden to ruling élites for a bit of land, a small break on the rent, a portion of grog at festival time, and relative security from ransacking brigands. Several forces converged, however, so as to liberate common people from their "contented squalor" about a century and a half ago. The Christian recognition of every soul as equal in God’s eyes had long fermented in the West when the printing press made a more widespread literacy possible and allowed the common man actually to lift his intellectual and spiritual cultivation above common levels. The Reformation had already shaken the rigid hierarchy imposed upon Christendom for centuries, and the Enlightenment had extended the ordinary man’s right to choose for himself into the political realm. Yet such amelioration of Everyman’s lot was visited upon just a few, in reality, as long as food had to be grown through intensive, back-breaking labor. The Industrial Revolution, for all the novel urban miseries and nightmares it concocted, took common folk off the land in great droves and resettled them where they had constant contact with printed documents and literate interpreters, even if they themselves could scarcely sign their name. This new throng of impoverished laborers could be instantly informed of shocking occurrences or ambitious undertakings. It could be fanned like a flame, and it could be more or less directed like a flame carefully ignited when the winds are right. In the hands of skilled demagogues, it could bring down governments, suspend a nation’s economic life, or launch a war to which individual minds under no duress would never have consented. Still cannon fodder… but now "the people" believed that they were asserting themselves.

The tight similarity between fascism and communism in this regard is seldom remarked (or perhaps often suppressed). Both systems relied on the expert, cynical manipulation of the masses by demagogues who shrewdly used the popular press and later (as in Hitler’s case) electronic amplification and radio. In neither movement do we find those "victims" who are urged to rise up indignantly being urged, as well, to go home and search their souls. On the contrary, the individual’s exercise of conscience is now a selfish indulgence to be avoided and, in persistent cases, punished. French novelist Georges Duhamel has left us a minutely accurate sketch of typical left-wing activism in post-liberation Paris, its rhetoric now fully purged of any pre-World War One pacificism except, precisely, as rhetoric. Duhamel’s protagonist, highly reputed physiologist Patrice Périot, indeed attempts to chasten such outbursts by affixing his august name to innumerable petitions for judicial clemency and global justice (though the text of these petitions often mysteriously changes before publication). Yet it is the author-journalist turned political hopeful, Gérin-Labrit, who always seems to carry the day. Addressing a large audience in a steamy room one evening, this sinister warrior-of-words almost ignites a riot:

I have written my fill about the demagogues, and also about the crowd-baiting journalists who served (often unwittingly) as their bull whips and outriders. What I wish to ponder in this final essay is the role of the intellectual during the past century of moral and spiritual decline. After all, if more and more day laborers were being given the vote, taught to read newspapers, and introduced to a world of abstract ideas about freedom and justice, it must be because more and more teachers, scholars, and thinkers were fueling such change. The elevation of the masses can hardly be called a disingenuous ruse or a fiendishly clever conspiracy even by the most cynical observer. Lest we romanticize the pastoral days which preceded widespread public educational ventures, we should always have in mind such scenes as Tomás de Paor recalls of his grandfather’s generation in latter nineteenth-century Ireland:

Superstition can murder mind and soul as brutally as ever did the hammers of a hellish urban foundry or assembly line. The work of nineteenth-century reformers to educate the peasantry was, to be sure, sometimes incomplete, sometimes inflexible, and almost always tinged with arrogance. It was largely well-intentioned, however, and it certainly poses no very credible gateway to the era of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

In other words, the mass media have come so to dominate Western culture over the past fifty years (and we are talking, of course, primarily about television) that a handsome or pretty face which can play the part of the specialist need no longer have much specialized knowledge to be permitted sweeping judgments on the most delicate social or moral issues. A talk-show host of my generation regularly described his frequent guest, psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers, as "my favorite redhead". Comely Bettany Hughes is now narrating the sort of historical documentaries for the BBC which Sir Kenneth Clark once hosted; and however sound the former’s credentials, she lacks that venerable experience of life which was once assumed to be mandatory for pronouncing verdicts on the ravages of human vice and ambition. Local TV stations everywhere currently employ well-groomed, verbally fluent medical doctors to present segments on health issues. Today we indeed inhabit a different world from the tight-lipped, lab-coated technician’s. As our intellectuals respond to it, their necessary qualification is more and more a certain "entertainment appeal" and their level of competence more and more open to negotiation.

The truth is that as we become a post-literate society, we are also becoming a post-intellectual one—or at least post-reflective (for the meaning of the word "intellectual" is problematic throughout this paper). The days of the professional thinker are numbered, if they have not already passed. Like politicians and jurists, teachers are turning into performers. Rather than a theory or philosophy, they have a "shtick". It is tempting to blame television for all this—and I have just proposed, I grant, that the downward trend of close analysis rapidly accelerated with the rise of TV. I shall no doubt surprise those of my readers who have observed my irrepressible distaste for the "idiot box" when I attempt to absolve TV from some of the culpability. I believe, in fact, that our curious modern beast, the card-carrying intellectual, has been a latent thespian from the start, and that television merely lured his love of melodramatic posturing to the surface in surroundings where no stones from streetcorner hecklers need be feared.

By no means am I implying that all scholars and learned practitioners are wildly gesturing prime donne… but then, the word "intellectual" has rarely been applied to men and women who do research with sterilized hands. The empirical creed of the chemist or physicist, after all, has specific and visible application. Such sages replace hearts or split atoms. They may be called "mad scientists" from time to time, but they are spared the "i" word. To this day, most of them continue to flee the public spotlight: the Carl Sagans and Stephen J. Goulds among them compose an extraordinary minority. As for the Kinseys and the Dr. Joyces… well, lab coat or not, the "science" of the human psyche remains something less like spectral analysis of stars than symbolist poetry.

For it is precisely within the humanities—literature, philosophy, history, the social "sciences"—that the concept of the intellectual has evolved. Even within these strictures, the intellectual was a long time coming. There was virtually no one in the Middle Ages, for instance, who would have filled the bill. Augustine an intellectual? Thomas Aquinas? But they were churchmen, and theologians. In their day, their work was regarded as more tautly indexed to reality, perhaps, than our cardiologists’ and epidemiologists’. We may scoff at such a claim now, but the point is that in their milieu they were not thought of, nor would have thought of themselves, as theorists or visionaries. One reason for this was that everything written by such scholars was meticulously referenced to the past. They were not inventors of ideas: they analyzed received knowledge and wisdom in search of neglected relationships and lost emphases. While they did not disdain universal human reason as a tool in this search (Aquinas, indeed, found in reason a clear sign of God’s beckoning paternal love), they were thereby certainly not attempting to withdraw into meditations inaccessible to most. On the contrary, since reason was a gift of God to all people, its revelations about the material world were objective. To call such revelation intellectual because the mind had midwifed it might be accurate in some narrow sense, but it would also be otiose. To insist upon a distinction here would be to say that a staircase does not actually lead upward—that ascent is a product of working legs.

The objective use of reason was later so emphasized in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, however, that ties to received wisdom began to snap. Descartes dryly confided in his Discourse on the Method that he derived very little profit from studying respected precedents in school. In the Meditations, he would clear his head even of sacred teaching lest it prejudice his judgment; and though he claimed at last that reason had led him right back to Church doctrine, the orthodox clergy remained extremely uncomfortable with the whole experience. No doubt, it divined in the wings the ruthlessly methodical figure of Kant. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone refused to have anything to do with unnerving miracles, blindly accepted dogma, and abjectly revered hierarchy. Far more than Luther (though far less lucidly), Kant insisted that the Christian faith could be truly practiced only by those who chose to subordinate their will to an inwardly vital principle of perfect goodness.

If such formulations are beginning to look more plausibly intellectual, they are still redeemed from the taint of subjectivism by the heavy stress they lay on rational objectivity. Say if you like that Kant’s categorical imperative unjustifiably elevates whimsy to objective law: many have said so, though with little evidence of having read Kant closely. The fact is in no way altered that Kant, like Aquinas, saw himself as appealing to universally valid rules of thought (in ethics, the rule of honoring what could be thought universally), and he made a stupendous, voluminous effort to engage those rules. An honest assessment of his undertaking would recognize that he sought precisely to purge religious faith of subjective indulgence: emotionally overwrought responses to rare events, dislocation of moral obedience from a prodding conscience to a "we’ll fix it" clergy, and so on. This is an attempt to meet hard, bare moral realities head-on. If assuming full responsibility for one’s actions if to be reckoned intellectualism, then would that both the Third Reich and the chic campus revolutionaries of the sixties had been thus intellectual!

Even the poets of these centuries were scarcely constructing fantasy worlds from their daydreams. Throughout the Renaissance, poetry remained a true poiêsis—a craftsmanly construction strictly governed by precedent. Herbert’s pious meditations and Du Bellay’s melancholy reflections stand out for their candid intimacy when we view them against their day’s standard, but we must finally admit that something like a universal human sentiment remains their target and that conventional form is very much their vehicle. As we near the eighteenth century, an author’s feet are still both firmly fixed in what he considers reality—in what is widely considered reality, we may say. No great changes are envisioned by the artist yet, no radical restructuring of the world after a blueprint entrusted only to a brain throbbing with prophecy. As famous a fantasy as Thomas More’s Utopia was viewed as a meander through the impossible (just as its title—No Place—implies) rather than a serious political manifesto. More’s ramble is somewhat less burlesque than Cyrano de Bergerac’s États de l’Autre Monde, yet it stands in the same tradition of smiling at human gullibility. In the European outlook of this era, only a madman would become so engrossed in idealistic crusades as to forget the raw facts of human nature—an Orlando driven insane by love, perhaps, or a Don Quixote reduced to a second childhood by too many silly romances of yesteryear. This, bear in mind, is what writers of books had to say about the bookish!

In fact, up until this time, very few artists and thinkers had any motive for what we might call idle speculation. Boccaccio, as he revealed in his preface, was fully aware that he was writing mostly for aristocratic ladies, as were all of the romanciers of the Middle Ages. (Hence Don Quixote’s grave error: his reading matter was not intended for the active gender!) Poets like Sydney and Charles d’Orleans were themselves immersed in the exigencies of the courtly life, and versified with the same commitment which they brought to the practice of fencing and horsemanship. The bourgeois secular author wrote for a specific audience from which he expected specific rewards, and his blue-blooded counterpart wrote to imitate Castiglione’s portrait of the perfect courtier. These were all thoughtful people, and many of them must have been outstandingly intelligent. There was no general perception, however, that they had devoted themselves specially to the intellect or sacrificed their role in public affairs to chase a Faustian star. Contrast Marlowe’s Faust with Goethe’s, for that matter, and you will observe that only the latter is an intellectual in our current sense. Faustus, instead, is an ambitious, malign scholar determined to pervert his great knowledge toward worldly, material, even carnal ends. He is not trying to crack the riddle of life: he is trying to pluck the fruit of power.

Dr. Faustus reminds us, too, that science was already acquiring that "nuts and bolts" practicality which spares it today from the stigma of intellectualism. If Bacon was a purposeful dabbler, Descartes was the father of scientific method and Newton (with his keen application of mathematics to physical questions) perhaps the first fully modern scientist. Reality was assuming a more material form: the day was at hand when one could not claim to be hot in its pursuit while writing of immaterial events or "noumena" (the reason, no doubt, why Kant’s endeavor is so often mismeasured: i.e., because his giving preeminent authority to moral duty defied his day’s empirical bias). Note that, of the three early scientists named above, only Bacon might also have been called a literary artist. Descartes was probably more interested in music and painting than poetry, but of sound and color he has left us only essays on the physiology of perception. Newton had no belleletrist pretensions whatever. A cleft was opening between the realms of matter and spirit. As new technology burgeoned upon the ground of "pure" scientific research throughout the late eighteenth century, the specialization discussed earlier grew ever more exaggerated; and as young men (and women—but especially men) found ever greater rewards for applying their minds to practical problems, they found ever more paltry ones for turning their minds to the arts.

The intellectual, I contend, first appears on the scene as this chasm between matter and spirit becomes unbridgeable. Religious answers to his questions are still broadly available; but orthodoxy has discredited itself by opposing science in a series of humiliating debates (about the solar system, about the earth’s age, etc.), and formal religion is implicated, besides, in corrupt regimes and brutal sectarian fighting. As for education, it goes without saying that this new breed of creature has read belles lettres and written poetry rather than apprenticed under a watchmaker and studied systems using cogs and springs. He is young Werther, not young Eli Whitney. His class origins are probably haut bourgeois: a prosperous merchant father or uncle must have had enough money to "waste" on sending him through years of school and, perhaps, of foreign travel. Chaucer and Boccaccio came from such origins, too. In their day, however, a well-educated young man unattached to the clergy was a sufficient rarity that he was much sought after for important secretarial assignments. This sensitive spirit of the eighteenth century, in contrast, has few opportunities. In Britain or France or Russia of a few decades later, he would have found enormous—and ever growing—civil service machines quite capable of dispatching him to the Far East or burying him under reams of paper in the capital city. Grim as such a fate proved to many ardent men, it was at any rate an existence, a way to survive. By the late eighteenth century, there are as yet no bureaucratic monstrosities plugging away like shiny new engines, and neither is there much interest in a youth without the brilliance to be an engineer.

Add to these factors two others: an unstable economy and the proliferation of printed matter. Two investment "bubbles" in 1720 (one English and one French) had left a great many prosperous European families suddenly destitute. Even the aristocracy was beset with debts—more so than other social classes, in fact. A pool of very literate but almost penniless young people whose preparation for life was widely regarded as worthless was rapidly welling up. That the overflow should be expressed in print as essays, poems, and novels was another phenomenon one would not have witnessed earlier. The reading public was now more ample than it had ever been (though its size still did not remotely approximate universal literacy), and its members were close enough to the spiritual crisis that they responded electrically when a Rousseau or a Foscolo recorded his anguish. (Books were actually published on a subscription basis sometimes: Foscolo had to secure five hundred subscribers to his Dante commentary while exiled in England before his work went to press.) The living to be obtained thereby was meager, indeed—but the author occasionally enjoyed the compensation of being celebrated for every plaint or moan he could pen.

And his progeny, of course, have proved the same. Hegel with his future riding high on an imperial white horse, Marx with his impending revolution to end Original Sin, Nietzsche with his supermanly triumph over moral scruples, Heidegger with his impenetrably mystical fulfillment of being… all of these minds unapologetically rejected the truth before their eyes to strain after a vision of their own fabrication. Marxist footsoldier Ernst Bloch even pledged his allegiance (in a fashion which has become routine of all contemporary politicians) to dreams! Over the past two centuries, such treacherous beacons have drawn the bright, brooding intellects of young poets as flames draw moths. For the modern intellectual, in the final analysis, is a poet. He creates fanciful imagery and calls it an agenda for social reform, or at least (most often) borrows the images of his favorite creator. "Disciplines" like philosophy and literary studies have long abandoned any regard for either convention or objective reason, courtesy of Rousseau’s heirs. As disciplines, they have ceased to exist. History and political science remain scenes of bitter in-fighting due to the clear basis of one in circumstantial fact and of the other in moral consensus, but the retreat of the objectivist phalanx has been steady. Metaphor has prevailed on all fronts. To be captured by a utopian daydream is sufficient cause to undermine mores, foment unrest and riot, and even to look away from (if not quite, for most, to participate in) bloody mass murder.

The modern intellectual, on the other hand, has offered us a false idealism indexed to a material state, a fanciful Never Never Land. This idealism is false precisely because it disengages moral responsibility, wherein our only true ideals reside, to pursue a material arrangement. The pseudo-philosophers I mentioned just above—the poets of imminent earthly paradise—fueled the rhetoric of both fascists and communists throughout the twentieth century. (Sometimes, as in the case of Hegel and Heidegger—and perhaps Nietzsche—they could indeed fuel both machines at once.) As the genocidal tendencies of the two juggernauts have been left progressively bare above history’s rubble, even for those whose eyes were shut most resolutely, we have become better able to appreciate that the ultimate enemy of the intellectualized ideal is none other than moral idealism: that is, freedom, the faith that people might choose the better way if dissuaded from following trend, blind prejudice, and selfish impulse. Instead, fascist and communist alike merely supplanted a set of mores with a straitjacket of drills, complete with specialized armbands and special salutes. Like pieces on a chessboard, "citizens" were given their marching orders in strict accordance with the newly dominant allegory’s demands. Indeed, once these experiments in scripted living reached the lock-and-load stage, the intellectuals who had rabidly instigated them were often re-deployed—with consummate cynicism—to argue in journals and universities that all culture has always been mere metaphor, anyway. Try telling that to the assembled multitudes in Red Square or the Berlin Sportpalast!

But, of course, the underlying nihilism of the modern intellectual has always been his dirty little secret, acknowledged only to subvert rival idealists of a genuinely moral bent. Rousseau for the masses and, perhaps, for one’s personal vanity: Voltaire (that other face of the intellectual) for the educated opposition. Roger Martin du Gard’s sinister leader of a Swiss revolutionary cell, Meynestral, expresses the nihilistic core of his universe in such dramatic terms that one of his ingenuous entourage repeats the exchange to Jacques all aglow with admiration:

I suspect that few of our intellectuals are capable of such candor. Their egotism will not withstand so forthright an admission of their moral vacuity. My observations of graduate students steeped in deconstruction and similar "theory" over the years have never caught a single one confessing that, since all knowledge is a mere game of metaphors, his own lofty scorn for bourgeois hypocrisy can only be a sneaky trick to steal kingship of the mountain. On the contrary, intellectuals can be appallingly thoughtless when their own hypocrisy is involved. We are all made pretty much the same, after all—but what a sordid place to re-discover our universal brotherhood!

For anyone who might desire a locus classicus which sums up the persistence of human arrogance, a casual search would quickly turn up several. This from Seneca would work: aliena vitia in oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt—"The vices of others stand directly before our eyes, our own stay behind our back." Far more fascinating than aphoristic generality, however, is the appearance in print—two thousand years ago—of just the kind of self-deluding nihilism, derisive abroad but indulgent at home, so common in the modern intellectual. Our contemporary sage’s brooding earnestness where his private fantasies are concerned is quite unique to recent times, as far as I can tell; but his easy mockery of rival positions in a bid to render fantasy less discredited is, it turns out, as old as the hills. The following remark from second-century (AD) Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus shows that the moral anesthesia of relativism had been discovered long before Jacques Deridda.

In fact, the skeptics were hoping to achieve ataraxia [imperturbability] through passing a decisive judgment on the disorder between appearances and thoughts; but when they could not do this, they drew back. As if by chance, ataraxia then came trailing after them in their state of withholding judgment just as a shadow trails a body.

Sextus Empiricus, 1.29

I suppose what all this indicates about our modern intellectual (other than that one side of him is not so modern, after all) is that, once again, he is more in love with the poetry of utter transformation than in league with transformatory death squads. No doubt, this is a faintly redeeming tribute to his humanity (if not to his fidelity—nor, indeed, to his thoughtfulness). That is to say, he is quite happy scoffing at the status quo à la Voltaire and talking revolution at wine-and-cheese parties à la Rousseau, but so quickly blanches at the sight of a gun that he has acquired a facility for blocking out such dissonant images. For this reason, the intellectual has remained and must always remain a minor player, and a rather contemptible one, in real-life upheavals. The strong men stroke his ego as they stockpile weapons, allowing him to win over young listeners with his Shangri-La stories, to embarrass the bourgeois establishment with his acid diatribes, and to intoxicate wavering academics or bureaucrats no less astute than he with a world-weary aporia. He has his reward, and his handlers have theirs. For him, a delicious, sustained, and not wholly unjustified illusion that he is indeed undermining a culture which turned its vast back on him; and for them—the strong men awaiting the moment to break out their weapons—the eradication of an unprepared rival. Yet should such a strong man vault into the saddle, the intellectual will discover that he has undermined himself as well as his culture—that he has held the stirrup for a philistine no less unjust than a robber baron, and quite a bit more sanguinary. His happiest outcome, then (as one would have thought any deconstructionist could figure out), is the revolution’s indefinite postponement. The illusion of laboring toward a New Jerusalem may thus be sustained throughout a lifetime—his lifetime—which is all the intellectual really ever wanted: the prolonging of the idyll on Keats’s Grecian Urn, the renewing with poetry’s opium of a fantasy along Xanadu’s corridors. I would not be the first to do so if I remarked here the affection of intellectuals for rigid, non-negotiable political platforms which cannot possibly win a plebiscite. Such defeats are new leases on life. They show that the "struggle" must continue, and they delay yet further any sobering collision with the narrow limits of human existence.

Surely it will be apparent now why the intellectual of our time is constantly dramatizing conflicts and drawing lines in the sand—why he is forever at daggerpoints and loggerheads with his adversaries rather than open to compromise. To allow compromise is to commit treason: it is to vitiate the poem’s thrilling metaphor with some bland cliché. Martin du Gard’s reluctant communist Jacques is raked over the coals by one of the faithful for just such rational susceptibility to bargaining:

Obviously, this type of hotspur (who would have me shot for pondering his words as I am) is caught up in a kind of frenzy. He would not only rather die than bargain over the elements of his cause: he would rather die than scrutinize them—for to think about them, after all, would be to face the necessity of apologizing for them.

If I seem to write on this subject with a certain fervor, it is because I know it from the inside. Which of us with an advanced degree in the humanities does not? I know the frustration of feeling oneself an albatross in a culture without cliffs or winds, where only swarms of starlings survive. I know the smoldering fury that builds up—the utter disgust, not so much with vulgarity and stupidity, but with their overweening pride at having prevailed. Be vulgar and prosper: be of dim wit and reach vast audiences! To be virtually unemployed, or under-employed, for year after year with your degree in ancient languages while some drone who connects cables or feeds disks to a machine lives like a prince is a challenge to any person’s soul. Werther already knew the feeling well; and Rousseau, though he managed to parley it into a modest success far exceeding any genuine effort he had invested, must have wrestled with such alienation, as well. One does not willingly cut deals with the dark fires of outrage in one’s heart. Or rather, since one is rarely offered any deals to begin with, one makes oneself diabolical promises sometimes to take no prisoners should the option ever arise.

In the academic world, naturally (where intellectuals collect in "purest" form), deals are cut all the time, and the alienated firebrands of the more poetic fields must either accede or face the abyss of unemployment again. They compromise more often than not; but these repeated wounds to their pride and (let us be fair) to their principles do not heal over. As they watch the Philosophy Department shrivel up to a speck or see English "adopted" as a technical-writing appendage of Communications, the old fury is more alive than ever. "The coarse fools!" they brood, "the greedy consumerist pimps!" Such remarks are not aimed just at administrators and trustees, but at an entire society—at the entirety of Western capitalist culture. For thirty pieces of silver, the finer things of life must go pandering for students as electives while a new computer requirement eats up precious hours. The people who feel this kind of resentment—the people I once worked with, and with whom I can deeply sympathize—are not temperamentally aggressive, for the most part. As bright, sensitive spirits with active imaginations, they are mostly introverts. They are not much given to pushing and shoving. When they find a chance before their classes, therefore, to vent this immense frustration with a crass, venal world, they release into it all the force which more brutal beings might have expended in punches. They hate the pimping, they hate the consumerism, and they hate the forced compromise. They ring down damnation on the whole system as they see it—as Rousseau and Marx and their other favorite arch-poets saw it: the capitalist system, the system which places a dollar sign on everything and allows it to sell or rot at the fish market.

Ironically, it was fascism which displayed far greater interest in preserving the arts—if only for their salutary effect on morale—in the mid-twentieth century. While Walter Giesking was playing to full houses in Hitler’s Germany, Sergei Prokofiev was being bullied for not composing like a peasant in Stalin’s Russia. Yet the modern intellectual seems to contemplate more calmly the exile of such as he to penal colonies by the revolution than the patronizing absorption of his labors by the bourgeois system he so detests. I cannot reiterate often enough that the "liberal arts" have shifted, one and all, toward an apocalyptic genre of poetry in a time of dead souls. They no longer free mind and spirit, these glorious studies: they intoxicate the caged psyche with vengeful ecstasies of contradiction and annihilation which may well include its own demise. Recall the "comrade" in Martin du Gard’s novel who furiously indicts Jacques’s rationality.

I have already conceded that a great many leftist intellectuals do not in practice go so far as to countenance mass murder. In fact, they develop a special talent for overlooking incidents of carnage as rightest propaganda. Some are more caught up than others in the whirling-dervish crescendo of their symphony. Hence the array of intellectual responses to the twentieth century’s most appalling moments. Many scholars retreat into their copious notes and verifying documentation just as their less "intellectual", more pragmatic colleagues in white coats retreat to their laboratories. Others equivocate. The scandal of deconstructionist standard-bearer Paul De Man’s youthful collaboration with the Nazis is only the best-known (and most execrated) of several such tales. Thomas Mann managed to skirt deftly (or evade abjectly, depending on your level of moral expectation) any theme which would have brought him in conflict with fascism. Even Sartre somehow found subjects which never ran afoul of the fascist censors in occupied Paris, though he was writing abundantly at the time. An aging Gabriele D’Annunzio allowed Mussolini to stroke his ego and manipulate him into a figurehead. Poetry, if its guiding metaphors must remain chaste, is nevertheless capable of tolerating myriad interpretations. A man who lives only for a set of images can always finesse one signification over another. Stalin himself was quite cozy with Hitler for a couple of years.

Hence I would emphasize (as I begin to conclude another long essay) that the modern intellectual’s pronounced leftward tilt is less properly a commitment to any clear agenda than to "progress", and that this progress is less properly a moral response to the underclass’s material hardships than a misplaced poetic wooing of that which can never be reached. One might argue that as much is true of all the political Left nowadays—that leftism is precisely an "intellectualizing" (i.e., a fantasizing) of the facts to create a breathless drama with key roles for all partisans. I am not prepared to carry the present discussion so far. I limit myself to the intellectual, and I say of him that he has sadly failed the twentieth century. When he might have alerted the gullible, uneducated masses to their exploitation at the hands of demagogues, he aligned himself, instead, with the demagogues who railed most tumidly against the status quo. He allowed his personal sense of having been slighted, cheated, and derided to overrule a holy obligation to seek truth. The emptiness which had been created in his life by a vulgar, material culture cried out to be filled. Rather than filling it by pursuing things of the spirit—by handling the pieces of our material world with supreme regard for what they may mean beyond this world—he fell into the obvious trap of prizing things as his enemies did. They were vulgar, those capitalist ruffians: the thought of a hard-riding Hun someday trampling them under thrilled his heart. They were materialistic: the thought that he himself might someday have their titles and offices raptured his soul. Poetry, it turns out, is a very poor substitute for dry, blank, do-or-die ethics. If it can lift the imagination to heaven, it can also degrade heaven to earthly squalor. Sealed up with a vengeance which he fondled like a lover, the intellectual has inverted the whited sepulcher of bourgeois hypocrisy. Within his vision all is resplendent, but it intersects the world in a mass of rotting corpses.

Why such grave misjudgment? Why have our intellectuals not been more intelligent? Surely the fatal error is as old as Rousseau. The essay on The Origin and Basis of Inequality had laid all the blame on human greed, and had considered technology only an accelerant in the decline of human nobility. But this attribution has all the Manichaean arrogance of fanaticism. Every human being is greedy at various times, and always has been and will be. To extract the evidence of greed from human society, you would have to execute one half of the population and hold the other half at gunpoint—which, of course, has often been the revolutionary game plan. Even then, do not your epic slaughters indict a certain greed about your zeal to end greed? Or is maniacal hatred (if you prefer) any less evil than hunger after possessions? If you render life so miserable to your subjects that they are content innocently to starve and dream of something beyond death, wherein do you differ from a cultist who hands out hemlock and proposes a toast to the heaven of anti-matter?

These are the questions an intellectual should pose instead of preaching the annihilation of the status quo. But then, they assume a real apprenticeship to material fact and moral duty as well as to poetry… so are they ultimately "intellectual" questions? Would not the person who could answer them be fully immersed in reality—full reality, truth seen and unseen—rather than in imaginary labyrinths? I confess, now that I am almost done, to having used the word "intellectual" in a provocative manner throughout this essay when I might have chosen, say, "intellectualist". Even better, I might have reprised the term I favored in my previous essay, "ideologue". Yet my argument here has been precisely that the sequestration of ideas to the individual’s Cloudcuckooland is ideology—a whimsical arrangement of certain facts which scornfully ignores certain other facts; and why, I ask, should the thoughtful person who resists such dishonesty be distinguished as an intellect? He is thoughtful, yes: but is honesty a function of high intelligence? Does a lofty IQ inspire moral sensitivity to the poor naifs likely to be misled by images of the New Dawn, or to the poor wretches likely to pay the awakening’s practical costs? I have to admit sadly that, to the contrary, I sometimes observe the relationship between intelligence and responsibility to be inverse!

So call the intellectual a person who thinks about things, if you wish—but let us at least be clear about the quality of his thought. Let the intellectual be deliberately, deeply conscious of reality’s every aspect if he is not to be a mere intellectualist. Let him not be carried away by a magnificent design for human society if accomplishing its perfect angles and arches requires armed guards patrolling every city block. Let him not propound a physician-bureaucrat’s utopia, on the other hand, where staircases are banned and parents must be certified to teach their children bike-riding. An objectively measurable quality of life (longevity, body fat ratio, dopamine level) is no more the end of human existence than objectively verifiable equity of financial income. The intellectual should know this, and he should know that such knowledge is not primarily a matter of astute intellect (if, that is, we choose a more generous sense of the word than I have been using). What I said of pre-modern philosophers is just as true of this thoughtful twenty-first century figure: he or she is not really cloistered in the mind’s private places at all, but most insistent, rather, that the material world not be granted any privacy from human admiration for beauty and human obligation to do good. In this sense, perhaps, the scientist is far more "intellectualist" for seeking to extract human intelligence from a flux of vital activity measurable only by human intelligence. What a quixotic undertaking! And the ideologue, of course (if one may believe Martin du Gard and others who have observed the species up close) has historically met the scientist on his own terms: from God to Man, from Man to… nothing. Perfected human society as an orderly bed of insects—this is the materialist vision, whether seen through the biologist’s microscope or the totalitarian’s Five Year Plan.

In a nutshell, the chore of getting back on the right track entails turning the intellectual back into a down-to-earth human being who thinks of ends beyond this earth. Or in the terms of my first essay, he must be a realist with ideals: he must recognize the reality of a good apprehended only through internal experience. You might as well say, too, that he must be a realistic idealist—that he must not convert things to private fancy with wanton disregard for their objective roots. He must know in his heart that falsehood is wrong, but he must know his heart better than to air out delicate discoveries which win him acclaim or promotion over rivals. He must know in his heart that matter never gestures more compellingly beyond itself than in great art, but he must know the snares of beauty better than to let children freeze by night because their hovel participates in a quaint landscape by day.

Yet what am I talking about now, if not the good person? Bright people must aspire to be good, which may or may not dim their brilliance. Just so. The last hope of Western culture is in the goodness which it once argued could not be entirely extinguished while human beings survived. If that high poetry is true, and not mere poetry, then we have no great cause for alarm.

NOTES

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Introduction

When I first proposed to Mr. Harris that I should write an essay on romanticism, I did not know what I was getting myself into. I suggested it on the impulse of affection; I enjoy much of what is called romanticism, it had been on my mind as a result of recent reading, and I was desirous of producing some piece on literature for this publication.

But the more I came to think of my subject and what it meant to me, the more I realized the complications of the message I wanted to convey. It was not, is not, romanticism itself that I love, but what romanticism signifies to me through certain works. There are qualities of romanticism that seem especially needful to literature, art and culture at present. I cannot say so much of classicism or modernism.

Our time has its characteristic discomforts and peculiar demands: in addition to the hurry and the crowd of our days, there are the intellectual and moral demands of democratic obligation. From an early age, we are encouraged to encounter moral and political issues that are frankly beyond our education or experience. I was thirteen when I first read, in magazines such as The Atlantic and Mother Jones, the tirades of disappointment written by my father’s generation over the political ignorance of my own. I learned from essays such as those—as well as from books, movies, television, and the whole collective present voice of the world—that I must hasten to know something of nearly everything, to have in my possession certain favorite facts and, above all, at least to have an opinion. I was dutiful to those calls inasmuch as I made my unguided way through what surrounded me in pursuit of knowing something and having an opinion on everything. It was made clear to me also that I should not only know, but feel all possible convictions. And here, you will think I have misstated myself, but it is not so. In the arguments and images I observed, it seemed the highest virtue to anticipate all outrages and to answer them, even to precipitate them if it could be done in the cause voicing righteous moral and political claims. The reader may object that my experience is uncommon. I will say that I did not observe a marked piquancy of moral or political interest among the great majority of my classmates. However, in the seventeen years which have passed since then, I have certainly noticed the symptoms of the same experience almost universally exhibited by people of letters.

There is also the exposure of free speech: we must hear and see everything. When I go to the video store, I can scarcely pass an aisle without seeing innumerable covers of videos depicting women in erotic or obscene poses. I see the same when I pass the magazine rack at the grocery. Moreover, since what is newsworthy is usually the worst and strangest of life, and since we follow at least a modicum of news for our democratic responsibility as well as a fat portion of gossip to satisfy the demands of social chatter, then we continually fill ourselves with news of the worst and strangest. We must watch the Allied films of the concentration camps; we must talk of O.J. Simpson and Arabs and racial profiling; we must argue whether everyone must say the pledge of allegiance or whether no one can say it; we must speculate on the rates of incest and rape, and choose the higher number.

As for our literary entertainments, our properly elective reading, we find no refuge there. Our writers and artists are equally committed to doing the necessary deeds of conscience, to not wasting anyone’s time, and to getting on with a titillating story. A young writer is instructed to produce something of interest; he listens to the talk of the world and assumes that this should involve lesbians and serial killers. He recognizes that the prurient interest must be upheld alongside the moral. He should not depict lesbians at lovemaking because homosexuals are special group not to be so exploited; but he may, perhaps must, depict everyone else at some manner of fornication, and the more criminal, perverse, or anatomically detailed, the better. He realizes that no one cares to read a story about men in Africa spreading AIDS among barely pubescent or prepubescent girls, but he may, and perhaps should, occasionally allow his principal character a brief tirade on the subject. One is not to be decorous but politically sensitive; not to be moral at length and through example, but to be anecdotally conscientious. A writer wants the epigrammatic rant at the right moment and then move swiftly to the next scene, or else the reader (being of a lesser patience than himself) will faint at his reading and turn away to his videos and drugs.

Writers are also to write what has never been written before; to avoid the clichéed subjects of falling in love, enduring loneliness or being commonly poor; and to disdain, in respectable upper-case Literature, that mere fantasy which is no good to the starving, an abdication of the troubles of the real world. That the starving, once fed, should wish for nothing more than the flavors and fancies that delight us all or that no man has stood off famine with a moral novel, does not matter. Only we must decline pleasure for the sake of the ill, as if the salvation of the world lay with Lenten abstinence from literary comforts. Not that we would undertake any radical measures to save the helpless—not that our nation should forgo the collection of any debt or risk much fortune—but we may snub an innocent good and balm our consciences with petty denials.

We are all to get on with everything, say everything, see everything and never repeat, like so many mechanical shovels to dig holes in the ground, to cover the earth with holes and see that no inch of ground is without one.

***

The purpose of this essay is to speak of romanticism because it reminds me of so much that literature presently forgoes. This abstinence, severity, sometimes brutality and often humorless vulgarity of our literature concerns me because I take much of my pleasure in leisure from books and because I believe that an art mirrors the men who make it. Therefore, my immediate concern is with the state of contemporary literature, and what good or guidance can be taken from the precedents of romanticism. My greater implicit concern is with all our lives and what the world may be when our generations are done. This latter concern indeed lies behind all of what is best in literature, even in those frivolous writings that seem to bear no concern at all. But levity may also stand with the cause of humanity and conscience. To the suffering, laughter is dearer than hard thoughts. To the faint of hope, good humor is sweeter than rectitude.

I. Freedom

Romanticism is so variously defined and exemplified that one cannot describe it according to what it is; nor according to an era, since romantics have come out of season and out of place, neither in England or Germany nor in the 19th century but here and now and not long ago. Romanticism is only rightly defined according to what it allows and what it connotes.

What romanticism allows is anything that serves fluency; what it connotes is possibility, expansion and hope; or if not hope, then such a movement toward the ultimate that it signifies the search for hope.

Of the three great tendencies of western art, the remaining two are more easily reduced. Classicism does service to form and tradition. Modernism does service to reality, and in two ways: to describe what can be outwardly observed (realists, naturalists) and what can be inwardly observed (in stream-of-consciousness, symbolism, surrealism, cubism, etc.). I see nothing wrong with those aims, considered as particular aims. But as general modes of art, they are defective. Merely that they can be so easily and aptly described suggests a lack of humanity in their dictates. Or else, in dictating to an artist the importance of recording reality, the practitioners of those schools (loosely called) have defined reality too narrowly.

None of this serves to deny the worth of all writers and artists identified with those tendencies, but merely to remark the inability of modernism or classicism (or postmodernism, for that matter) to describe any artist of great value. A writer may claim to write as a postmodernist, neoclassicist or a realist; yet as soon as he produces anything of greatness, then he has succeeded in art and failed in his school's profession.

I will note briefly the flaws of those schools of thought, or historical tendencies, as they are usually formulated.

Realism forms the largest and most successful part of modernism. Yet in attempting to describe what reality is or has been, it fails entirely to take account of what it might be. It sets itself to be the recorder and poet of the past. It must be only the poet of the past, as a reality can only be related which has been previously observed. If one objects that realism is not only to record what has been, then one objects that realism is not only real—and so contradicts its only generally identifiable trait. Or one may say ask what is wrong with only recording what has already occurred. The answer, as implied by my definition of romanticism above, is the absence of hope. And as one may only hope for what is not, being unable to desire what has already been obtained, then all the hope for present humanity lies in that which is not and where reality has not yet been. It need not be the intention of a modernist for this to be so. It is often the case that one follows a particular dictum without tracing it to its ultimate implications. So it is with all naturalistic tendencies. To the extent that they are exclusively naturalistic, they become also exclusive of our hopes, of what has never been.

Classicism pays its tribute to form and to tradition. Tradition is the most easily assailable of these. As tradition has erred, so the imitation of tradition carries with it a similar likelihood of error. It is true that the passage of time may make a tradition more true than when the men lived who made it; but this is happenstance and lends nothing more to art than the good or ill chances of history. As for form, it has its uses to the artist as a framework for thought, that materials may be organized or that some train of thought may be reinforced. Yet again, as inspiration becomes doctrine, and hardens further into artificial rites and dogmas and blind pedantry, so form also often calcifies into nothing better than an encircling crust that gives no form to life but kills what life might have lived within it.

Modernism and classicism in their worst (which is to say, their purest) forms are the Sadducees and the Pharisees of art. The modernist believes there is no hope for the dead, and the classicist cares more for hand-washing than for love.

II. Of Hope and False Hope

I am proposing romanticism to the reader on the non-negotiable condition that romanticism not be reduced to any formula or narrow doctrine. If an artist wishes to choose for himself some protocol of work which serves a happy fit to his individual genius, then that is good. But we are speaking not of individual habits but of broad prescriptions, and it is the latter that is to be turned aside.

In truth, realism was good when it was itself a hope: a hope to tell what has not previously been said; the sincere desire to discover people to themselves and tell the truth. But since that school of thought has aged, I find that it no longer serves its better purpose, while it is only a technical mode by which verisimilitude is gathered. It has become a plowshare and good for gathering wheat, but serving in nowise to do war against the grossness and falseness of the world. It is key to my parting ways with our still-established realistic tendencies in literature that what I read corresponds so little with what I observe. I do not see myself, my family, my life or my thoughts in our literature; realism itself has become a fantasy to comfort the weakness of those who write it.

Again, classicism (and neoclassicism) was once itself a hope; a hope against chaos and decay, to preserve by form and tradition the destruction threatened by barbarity, decadence, factions, nature and time. Four pillars were hope when they stood against destruction, were good until they became the bars of a cage.

Then if romanticism is to have value to us, it must also serve the needs of our place and time. For example, I have spoken of freedom. One may well ask why freedom should be at issue, when many have said that too much freedom is all the cause of our worst troubles, that we gorge ourselves on our liberties until we choke on them, like so many fast lunches, drugs, orgies, and controversies that fill our mouths. On this point, I must be excused to distinguish between freedom and licentiousness. Where freedom refers to the loosening of something painfully or unjustly confined (unjust, in the sense of treating unevenly), licentiousness refers to that which exceeds satisfaction and induces physical, mental or moral illness. A man who eats more than stills his hunger develops indigestion; a child treated with high favor over his brothers develops impatience and condescension. Therefore, freedom and licentiousness can be distinguished according to results. Freedom results in health, licentiousness in sickness.

In this sense, the romanticism I suggest should treat not only the absence of freedom (to which I will shortly come) but also, by elective form and restriction, the presence of licentiousness.

The freedoms that are at issue are numerous. Modernism confines hope by restricting speech to precedent. A writer thinks of writing a story that is a criticism, a parody, or a novel variation on the present. Yet he does not so often think of projecting any positive answer to the world. When a man has criticized something, it is fair to ask him what he would suggest by way of alternative. But the modern writer is so accustomed to reporting what he has seen that he has lost much of the habit of depicting what he has not. It is true that all fictions, to the extent that they are fictions, are depictions of what no one has seen. But the point remains that the variations doctrinally allowed to the contemporary writer are so narrow as to be generally indistinguishable from journalism by the reader. A little change of phrasing and a few bibliographic references would serve to convince many that the fabrication is fact.

Also, modernism has confined, in certain ways, the author’s mode of expression. He is allowed the plain prose and the dialectical or common speech. He is allowed certain moments of fractured prose for psych