The Romantic Agony By MARIO PRAZ ‘TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY ANGUS DAVIDSON “Fai trowvt la défnition du Beau, de mon Beau. Crest quelque chose d' ardent et de triste... Fe ne congois gudre un type de Beaut# obit n'y ait du Malheur’ BAUDELAIRE, Journaux intimes. SECOND EDITION GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON NEW YORK TORONTOOxford University Press, Amen House, London B.C. 4 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CAPT TOWN IBADAN Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University FIRS PUBLISHED 1933 SECOND EDITION 1951 SECOND IMPRFSSION 1954 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAINNOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION For many years the present book has been out of print, and its scarcity is responsible for many a legend. So we have happened to read in Charles Jackson’s The Outer Edges ew York, Rinehart & Co., 1948), p. 185, that the ‘best reading in God’s world’ for a sexual delinquent is supplied by ‘Mario Pratz [sic] and Bertold Brecht’. Mr. Wyndham Lewis, in Men Without Art (p. 175), spoke of the present book as a ‘gigantic pile of satanic bric-a-brac, so indus- triously assembled, under my direction [?], by Professor Praz’. And Montague Summers, referring in his Gothic Quest to this opinion of Mr. Wyndham Lewis and to my letter to The Times Literary Supplement for August 8th, 1935, qualifying it, concluded: ‘After all it does not in the least matter who is responsible for such disjointed gimcrack as The Romantic Agony.’ Serious scholars have thought otherwise, and the term ‘Romantic Agony’ has become current in the meantime in literary criticism. The present reissue, besides satisfying a steady demand, is destined to vindicate the author of the book from Mon- tague Summers's strictures (p. 396 of The Gothic Quest: ‘The voluble but not very rgliable pages of Signor Mario Praz’). Only avery few corrections were needed to remove occasional inaccuracies, unavoidable in such a vast survey: they amount to the deletion of passages referring to Keats and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, and to the correction of the date of issue of The Monk. Much new material included in the later Italian editions has been added as Appendix II, since the photographic reprint did not admit ofits insertion into its proper places in the text. Although this may be inconvenient to the reader, there was no other way of doing it. Attention is drawn to this added material by asterisks in the text. ROME MARIO PRAZ August 1950FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION TE aim of the greater part of this book is a study of Romantic literature (of which the Decadent Move- ment of the end of the last century is only a development) under one of its most characteristic aspects, that of erotic ysensibility. It is, therefore, a study of certain states of mind and peculiarities of behaviour, which are given a definite direction by various types and themes that recur a ae as myths engendered in the ferment of the blood. Looked at from this point of view, the literature of the nineteenth century appears as a unique, clearly distinct whole, which the various formulas such as ‘romanticism’, ‘realism’, ‘decadence,’ &c., tend to disrupt. In no other literary period, I think, has sex been so obviously the emainspring of works of imagination: but it is more profit- able to study the historical development of such a tendency than to repeat from hearsay, and as though incidentally, the vague accusations of sensuality and perversity with which critics of that period are generally content to label the darker portions of the picture. A student who undertakes such a discussion runs a tisk of being classed with a band of writers who have made their name by a professedly scientific treatment of such subjects, such as Dr. Dithren (Ivan Bloch) or Max Nordau. Nordau’s volume on Degeneration aims at being a literary nosology of the Decadent Movement, but it is completely discredited by its pseudo-erudition, its grossly positivist point of view, and its insincere moral tone. A ‘writer who, adopting the method of Lombroso, classifies a degenerate tram-conductor with Verlaine, and places Rossetti among the weak-minded (or even the imbecile, as he delicately hints in parenthesis) as described by Sollier, seems hardly capable of tracing the hidden sources of Decadent ‘degeneration’. Again, it is much easier to label as monsters certain writers who were tormented by obsessions, than to discern the universal human background which is visible behindvia FOREWORD their paroxysms. The sexual idiosyncrasies which will be discussed in the following pages offer, so to speak, a dis- vtorted image of characteristics common to all mankind. The remark made by Edmond Jaloux about Lafourcade’s study of Swinburne! is apposite: ‘Pourquoi alors ne pas s’expliquer franchement sur le sadisme et ne pas vouloir accepter qu'il soit un des ferments les plus naturels de V’ame humaine? On ne l’en débusquera que plus facile- ment si on le connait bien.’ To any one who may protest, therefore, that the intimate examination of an artist’s life is irreverent, or worse, we may answer with Sainte-Beuve: ‘Quand on fait une étude sur un homme considérable, il faut oser tout voir, tout regarder, et au moins tout indiquer.’* We must not pay so much attention to momentary exclamations of satisfied curiosity—such as ‘Habemus confitentem’, ‘nous touchons ici a la clef’—as to the more general aim of casting some light upon the most profound instincts of humanity—an aim in which a study like the present may perhaps, in the end, succeed. It must, however, be stated without further delay that a study such as the present one differs from a medico- scientific treatise in that the recurrence of certain morbid themes in a particular period of literature is not invariably treated as an indication of a psychopathic state in the writers discussed. The genetic link is in this case provided by taste and fashion; literary sources are discussed, and not—is it necessary to mention?—resemblances due to physiological causes, so that, side by side with writers of genuinely specialized sensibility are to be found others who give a mere superficial echo of certain themes. Again, this study has not even a remote connexion with the socio- ee study or the study of collective psychology, in which case it would have had to include documentations from police and assize reports, scientific or pseudo- scientific works, and anonymous or popular literary pro- ductions The Marquis de Sade, in whom Sainte-Beuve saw ‘one 1 In the Nouvelles littdraires, June 14th, 1930. 2 Chateaubriand et som groupe, vol. i, p. 102.FOREWORD ix of the greatest inspirers of the moderns’, will be frequently mentioned in the following pages. But an immediate word of warning is needed, no longer (as would have been necessary a few years ago) ainst the time-honoured condemnation of the author of Justine, but against the reaction in his favour which a few years ago became fashion- able in certain literary circles in France. The conclusions of the present study will prove, even to those who are least well-informed, that Sade’s work is a monument—not indeed, as Guillaume Apollinaire was pleased to declare, ‘de la pensée humaine’—but at least of something. But that the light which his work throws upon the less mentionable impulses of the man-animal should suffice immediately to classify the author as an original thinker, or, without further ado, as a man of genius, is a conclusion only to be pardoned if the ignorance and momentary infatuation of its formulator are taken into account. Maurice Heine, in his introduction to the recent edition of the manuscript of the Jnfortunes de la vertu, declares: ‘La coalition des intéréts que, pour les mieux masquer, on qualifie généralement de moraux et de spirituels, s'est livrée pendant un sidcle, contre la pensée d’un homme de génie, & une agression per- manente et appuyée de toutes les forces répressives. Le but escompté nest pas atteint, ne le sera jamais. Certes, le préjudice causé au patrimoine humain par une importante destruction de manuscrits équivaut 4 un désastre. Mais par contre Ja salutaire révolte, pro- voquée et entretenue dans les esprits libres par une si odieuse per- sécution, devait aboutir au mouvement d’attention et de sympathie qui, en France et 4 l’étranger, entoure désormais le nom de Sade. .. . Ilya... lieu de croire que Sade, aprés avoir inquiété tout un sigcle qui ne pouvait le lire, sera de plus en plus lu pour remédier & Pin quiétude du suivant.’ Jean Paulhan, reviewing Heine’s book in the Nouvelle Revue franzaise of September 1930, speaks of Sade as ‘un écrivain qu’il faut placer sans doute parmi les plus grands’, and discovers in his work merits of style. The recent en- ythusiasm of the Surrealists for Sade might well form a section of my chapter on ‘Byzantium’: but neither the conspiracy of silence which ended only yesterday, nor the A3x FOREWORD apotheosis towards which there is a tendency to-day, can be accepted. Let us give Sade his due, as having been the first to expose, in all its crudity, the mechanism of homo sensualis, let us even assign him a place of honour as a psycho-pathologist and admit his influence on a whole century of literature; but courage (to give a nobler name to what most people would call shamelessness) does not suffice to give originality to a thought, nor does the hurried jotting down of all the cruel fantasies which obsess the mind suffice to give a work mastery of style! It is true that the Surrealists, who have now made themselves the champions of Sade’s greatness, hold a curious theory on ithe subject of ‘automatic writing’, as being the only kind le writing to reveal the whole man, without hypocrisy or changes of mind; but this theory of untrammelled self- expression is precisely an extreme application of that very romanticism which, being so open to Sade’s influence, is on that account the least fitted to judge him dispassionately, The most elementary qualities of a writer—let us not say, of a writer of genius—are lacking in Sade. Though more worthy of the title of polygrapher and pornographer than a writer such as Aretino, his whole merit lies in having left documents illustrative of the mythological, infantile phase of psycho-pathology: he gives, in the form of a fantastic tale, the first systematized account of sexual perversions. Was Sade a ‘surromantique’? No, but he was certainly a sinister force in the Romantic Movement, a familiar spirit whispering in the ear of the ‘mauvais maitres’ and the ‘pottes maudits’; actually he did nothing more than give a name to an impulse which exists in every man, an 1 Already in rg2r, R.-L. Doyon in an Appendix to his reprint of Barbey a’Aurevilly’s Le Cachet d’onyx, p. 96, wrote of Sade: ‘A l’énormité du prnedoze, sajoute une écriture claire, gracieuse méme, & peine alourdie par issertations communes aux disciples attardés de Jean-Jacques, de telle sorte que la fortune littéraire du marquis dépravé tient a Ja folie, au cynisme de ses aveux, & l’étrangeté de ses histoires, & la spécialité de son genre et anssi & Pagrément de son style.’ But a better judge, Marcel Schwob, in a review of a book by Remy de Gourmont in the Mercure de France for Jaly 1894 (see CEuores complites de M. Schwob, Cironigues, Paris, Bernouard, 1928, pp. 201-2), said apropos of Sade: ‘Par infortune ce mauvais écrivain est resté le meilleur représentant de son tour d’esprit.’FOREWORD xi impulse mysterious as the very forces of life and death with which it is inextricably connected. Isolating, as it does, one particular aspect, fundamental though it may be, of Romantic literature—that is, the education of sensibility, and more especially of erotic sensibility—this study must be considered as a mono- graph, not as a synthesis, and the point of view of its author might be compared to that of some one who, in Poe’s well-known story, examined merely the crack which runs zig-zag across the front of the House of Usher, without troubling about its general architecture. I wish to add to the remarks on this point in the Foreword to the Ttalian edition certain explanations which seem to be called for by Benedetto Croce’s criticisms of my book!—‘Praz Yseems to make out that what is called Romanticism con- sists in the formation of a new sensibility, that particular sensibility which is displayed in the various tendencies and fantasies which he so amply expounds. But is not Roman- ticism, even in its “‘historical” sense, and according to the current use of the word, a very much more complex thing? Is it not rich, not only in theoretical values such as those which are commonly called dialectics, aesthetics, history, and the like, but also in moral values, and even in maladies and crises which are less shameful than those which he examines?” The reply to these questions already given in my Foreword—that is, that ‘the present study must be considered as a monograph, not as a synthesis’, and that ‘other tendencies and energies contribute to creating the atmosphere of the nineteenth century’—might be re- inforced by the words of André Gide (Les Faux-mon- nayeurs, pp. 179-80): “Toutes les grandes écoles ont apporté, avec un nouveau style, une nouvelle éthique, un nouveau cahier des charges, de nouvelles tables, une nouvelle facon de voir, de comprendre l’amour, et de se comporter dans la vie’; I might also argue that the study of one of these aspects does not attempt to deny the presence of the others, but that the way in which Croce establishes their interdependence seems to me to be questionable. ‘ 1 La Critica, vol. xxix, no. 2 (March 20th, 1931), pp. 133-4-Fi PURE WURD apotheosis towards which there is a tendency to-day, can be accepted. Let us give Sade his due, as having been the first to expose, in all its crudity, the mechanism of homo sensualis, let us even assign him a place of honour as a psycho-pathologist and admit his influence on a whole century of literature; but courage (to give a nobler name to what most people would call shamelessness) does not suffice to give originality to a thought, nor does the hurried jotting down of all the cruel fantasies which obsess the mind suffice to give a work mastery of stylet It is true that the Surrealists, who have now made themselves the champions of Sade’s greatness, hold a curious theory on the subject of ‘automatic writing’, as being the only kind f writing to reveal the whole man, without hypocrisy or changes of mind; but this theory of untrammelled self- expression is precisely an extreme application of that ve: romanticism which, being so open to Sade’s influence, is on that account the least fitted to judge him dispassionately. ‘The most elementary qualities of a writer—let us not say, of a writer of genius—are lacking in Sade. Though more worthy of the title of polygrapher and pornographer than a writer such as Aretino, his whole merit lies in having left documents illustrative of the mythological, infantile phase of psycho-pathology: he gives, in the form of a fantastic tale, the first systematized account of sexual perversions. ‘Was Sade a ‘surromantique’? No, but he was certainly a sinister force in the Romantic Movement, a familiar spirit whispering in the ear of the ‘mauvais maitres’ and e ‘pottes maudits’; actually he did nothing more than give a name to an impulse which exists in every man, an * Already in 1921, R-L. Doyon in an Appendix to his reprint of Bar PAurevilly’s Le Caches onyx, p. 96, ean A tena paradore, s'ajoute une écriture clare, gracieuse méme, a peine alourdie par Jes dissertations communes aux disciples attardés de Jean-Jacques, de telle sorte que la fortune littéraire du marquis dépravé tient ala folie, au cynisme de ses aveur, a l’étrangeté de ses histoires, a la spécialité de son genre et aussi 2 Pagrément de son style.’ But a better judge, Marcel Schwob, in a teview of a book by Remy de Gourmont in the Mercure de France for July 1894 (see GEuores completes de M. Schwob, Chronigues, Paris, Bernouard, 1928, pp. 201-2), said apropos of Sade: ‘Par infortune ce tmauvais écrivain est resté le meilleur représentant de son tour d’esprit.’”PUREWUKD impulse mysterious as the very forces of life and dea with which it is inextricably connected. Isolating, as it does, one particular aspect, fundamen though it may be, of Romantic literature—that is, t education of sensibility, and more especially of ero sensibility—this study must be considered as a mor graph, not as a synthesis, and the point of view of author might be compared to that of some one who, Poe’s well-known story, examined merely the crack whi runs zig-zag across the front of the House of Ush: without troubling about its general architecture. I wi to add to the remarks on this point in the Foreword to t Italian edition certain explanations which seem to be call for by Benedetto Croce’s criticisms of my book!—‘Pr seems to make out that what is called Romanticism cc sists in the formation of a new sensibility, that particu’ sensibility which is displayed in the various tendencies a fantasies which he so amply expounds. But is not Roma ticism, even in its “‘historical” sense, and according to t current use of the word, a very much more complex thin Is it not rich, not only in theoretical values such as the which are commonly called dialectics, aesthetics, histo: and the like, but also in moral values, and even in malad and crises which are less shameful than those which examines” The reply to these questions already given my Foreword—that is, that ‘the present study must considered as a monograph, not as a synthesis’, and tl “other tendencies and energies contribute to creating t atmosphere of the nineteenth century’—might be inforced by the words of André Gide (Les Faux-m nayeurs, pp. 179-80): “Toutes les grandes écoles ¢ apporté, avec un nouveau style, une nouvelle éthique, nouveau cahier des charges, de nouvelles tables, u nouvelle facon de voir, de comprendre l'amour, et de comporter dans la vie’; I might also argue that the stu of one of these aspects does not attempt to deny t presence of the others, but that the way in whi Croce establishes their interdependence seems to me be questionable. ‘ 3 La Critica, vol. xxix, no. 2 (March 20th, 1931), pp. 133-4