Inspiration and Effort

ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY AND

EXISTENTIALIST ANGUISH

(A LETTER)

If I were a historian of literary thought I should call your letter a connecting-link of tendencies between some moods of the nineteenth century and some complexes of the twentieth. In terms of colour, it is a creamy grey of uncertain aestheticism, joining the poetic pallors of those days to the philosophic blacknesses of our own. In terms of shape, it is a bridge between romantic melancholy and existentialist anguish — shall we say, a Bridge of Sighs, recalling those lines of Byron's? —

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,

A palace and a prison on each hand....

Well, the word "palace" may seem odd as a description of the romantic melancholy. But a little consideration will resolve the paradox. For, this melancholy was something rich and splendid, a mood in which the poets luxuriated and which they exhibited to the world in a vivid grandiose form. When we speak of its pallors we at once think of the pale magnificence of marble. Indeed it stands before us like a palace.

The word "prison" describes the existentialist anguish very well. The Romantics were strangely happy in their unhappiness, the Existentialists writhe and quiver even in their pleasures. They do not — like Byron — trail all over Europe the pageant of a bleeding heart; they concentrate their bile, they gather their bitterness into intense packets and feel that their souls are caught in a severe constriction, pressed into a lightless prison. The Romantics lived in the presence of a supernal Mystery, in comparison to which this known world was a sphere of imperfection and sorrow. With

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their very tears went the blur of a Beyond that was all loveliness. To the Existentialists there is no burning secret except of an internal fever. No beautiful Beyond beckons to them across the desert here: they live in the presence of no ineffable dream, they live in a sharp realisation that there can never be such a dream. Not a wonderful presence but a terrible absence haunts their yearning eyes. Man is for them dreadfully alone, uncompanioned by any God: he is locked within his own fearful loneliness and a mass of men is but a multiplicity of small solitudes and not a largeness in which the individual finds release. In fact, Sartre, the "prophet" of Existentialism says: "Hell is other people."

The Romantics also shunned "other people" at times; yet when they withdrew into themselves they felt the friendship of the infinite Spirit — a friendship which did not transfigure their own world, as it would a true mystic's, but which gave them a spacious imaginative escape. The Existentialists meet with nothing except an abyss when they are withdrawn from other people, for the most horrible fact, the deepest tragedy, for them is that in place of God they see a neant, a void, a nothing. Here they differ from the Dialectical Materialists who dispense with God because they feel no need for Him: God's "non-existence" is a matter of indifference to them. Not so to the Existentialists. They agonise under that "nonexistence", that "absence": they are people to whom it is a crucial experience whether God exists or not. In this the existentialist Man is the Man of Pascal, who is profoundly concerned about God. Only, this Man is the Pascalian Man inverted — he is religiously vibrant with God's devastating disappearance from his consciousness. That is one of the reasons why Sartre, for all his regrettable co-operation with the Marxists, can never be a follower of the philosophy of Marx or be psychologically in tune with Soviet Russia. A sociological delusion makes him join hands with the French Communists. (On a less intellectual plane I suppose it is the same delusion that led an extreme individualist and ultramodern painter like Picasso to participate in the bogus peace-

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campaign sponsored by Stalin.)

The Romantics, of course, are doubly removed from the Dialectical Materialists. But we are not here concerned with their difference from the brood of Sartre. Apart from the question of God's presence or absence, the solitude of the Romantics is never doomed to be so stark, so absolute, as that of the Existentialists. For, they believed in the old proverb that two is company and, while shunning the crowd, they hungered for the one beloved, representing on earth the Eternal Beauty. To quote Byron again:

Oh that the desert were my dwelling place,

With one fair spirit for my minister,

That I might all forget the human race

And, hating no one, love but only her!

We cannot imagine an existentialist poet rhapsodising in this vein. He does have a sweetheart — like Sartre's own famous Simone de Beauvoir — but she is still "other people" and all her ministrations cannot reduce the philosophic sense he has of his own lonely Godlessness. The Romantic is temperamentally and emotionally a man of sorrow and solitude: the Existentialist is philosophically and intellectually so, and hence the sweetheart's embrace is at the same time a delight and a reminder that he is held tight as in a prison, the prison of his own self, the narrow absurdity of a finite that has not the Infinite for its ultimate ground and rationale.

To characterise Existentialism I have suggested the Pasca-lian Man standing on his head. Perhaps a closer link with the depth of things would be in terms of an eastern religion. At the heart of Existentialism there is a Buddhism manque, an unrecognised missing of Nirvana, just as at the heart of Romanticism one may discern a would-be Vedanta, the puzzled sense expressed by Shelley:

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

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Not awakening to the truth by which they are moved, both mix with the basic spiritual source a lot of odd matter: in the case of the Romantic the assertion of the individual — at the best the egotistical sublime — and the flight from hurtful actuality into flashing fantasy, in the case of the Existentialist the morbid isolation from the whole and the constant nausea at the sight of a fragmented world. Because the centrally moving truth is not wide-open to their gaze, their relation with the rest of their fellows is also somewhat falsified. They cannot avoid the relation, but it fails to show the right adjustment: what is wanting is the harmonious touch of the Vedantic equality and at-home-ness of the One Self that has become all beings and things, what is lacking is the Buddhist compassion for and service of the universal multiplicity that can find no rest until it forgets its own changeful surface existence and dissolvingly deepens into a fathomless featureless Unknowable.

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