Even as a boy I took delight in Chateaubriand and the whole Romantic school. Kollár’s strictures upon Romanticism displeased me, and it was comparatively late before I became aware of the unhealthy element in it. This may be seen from many of my criticisms of what I have often called “Decadence,” though that is not quite the right term for it. I was struck by the peculiarly morbid and even perverse sexualism in the French Romantics, a trend of feeling of which I believe de Musset has hitherto been the most typical exponent. In this element of Romanticism I sought—rightly, I think—the influence of Catholicism on quasi-Catholic people; for Catholicism, with its asceticism and ideal of celibacy, turns the mind too much towards sex and magnifies its importance even in tender youth. The sexualism of French literature—and, in this respect, France is truly representative—I attribute especially to this Catholic education. The pro-Catholic poet, Charles Guérin, expressed it as the “eternal duel between the fire of the Pagan body and the celestial yearning of the Catholic soul.” It is not asceticism alone but exaggerated transcendentalism as a whole that leads sceptics and unbelievers of Catholic origin to the extremes of extreme naturalism. I compared the French and the Italians with the English, the Americans and the Germans. Among Protestant (and Orthodox) peoples and writers there is neither this sexual romanticism nor the peculiar kind of blasphemy that arises from the constant and obvious contrast between the transcendental religious world and the ascetic ideal, on the one hand, and the real world of experience on the other. This contrast disturbs and excites. Protestantism is less transcendental; it is realistic. In Baudelaire the romantic association of the ideal of a Catholic Madonna with a naturalistic Venus finds graphic and typical expression—the same somersault is turned as when Comte surrenders Positivist science to fetishism. Zola threw this somersault in his naturalistic novels, which are strange mixtures of unpositivist Positivism and of gross Romanticism.
Carrère’s literary studies on Romanticism, which I had not seen before, were a pleasant surprise. He says many things that I had already said in my essays. One of the chief tasks in French spiritual development has hitherto been to analyse and to criticise Romanticism. De Tocqueville, as afterwards Taine and Brunetière, condemned it. To-day its adversaries are numerous, for instance, Seillière, in his “Away from Rousseau,” and his pupils, Lasserre, Faguet, Gillouin and also
