The New Laokoon (Part 1)

(Pictured: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.) I am happy to present the first post of Irving Babbitt’s book The New Laokoon, an Essay on the Confusion of the Arts, published in 1910, in which Babbitt followed the model of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise on aesthetics, Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766; “Laokoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry”). Lessing criticized what he saw as a confusion of painting and poetry in the poetry of the neo-classical school. In The New Laokoon Babbitt mainly addresses a different confusion of the arts, one that he sees in nineteenth-century romantic works, manifested in things like word-painting, program music, and color-audition. Irving Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Chapter I

The Theory of Imitation

Part I

The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts

It is rare to read through a critical treatise on either art or literature, written between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century, without finding an approving mention of the Horatian simile, “as is painting, so is poetry” (ut pictura poesis); or, if the mention is not of Horace [Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Roman lyric poet and literary critic; 65-8 BC], then it is of the equivalent saying of Simonides [Simonides of Ceos, Greek lyric poet (c. 556–468 BC)] that “painting is mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture.” ‘‘There is no one,” writes Father Mambrun in 1652, reviewing the critical literature of a century or more, “who has not been pleased with this comparison between poetry and painting.” (1) [Pierre Mambrun, French Jesuit and poet; 1581-1661.] Toward the beginning of the neo-classical period the saying of Simonides is perhaps more in favor, toward the end, that of Horace; but throughout the period the assimilation of poetry to painting that both sayings are supposed to justify, is insisted on as fundamental.

Fundamental, however, as was the doctrine ut pictura poesis, it was only as the corollary of a doctrine still more fundamental. To understand what this doctrine is, we need to go back to the beginnings of the whole movement in the Italian Renaissance. We can there follow the steps by which, in a comparatively short time, two documents, Horace’s so-called “Ars Poetica” and Aristotle’s ‘‘Poetics,” acquired a supreme authority in criticism. The immense influence of Horace was in the main beneficial, though it made for an excellent prose rather than an excellent poetry. It found its consummation in seventeenth-century France, (2) where it contributed with other influences to the creating of modern French prose,—an achievement artistically so great that other nations sometimes seem to have attained a tradition of sound prose only in so far as they have learned from the French. Not even the ingenuity of a multitude of commentators succeeded in obscuring seriously the Horatian good sense; or if Horace was ever given a twist, it was, as in the case of the dictum ut pictura poesis, through the over-eagerness of the commentators to read into him an Aristotelian or pseudo-Aristotelian meaning.

The contrast in this respect between Horace and Aristotle may be inferred from the very title-page of the first modern commentary on the “Poetics,” that of Robortello (1548) [Francesco Robortello, Italian humanist; 1516–67], where the ‘‘Poetics” is proclaimed “a most difficult and obscure book, not previously elucidated by any one.” Robortello goes on to say in his preface that it had always been held among scholars that Aristotle’s “Poetics” was so hard that nobody could understand it, and that therefore he was fearful lest he should be thought guilty of presumption and conceit in trying to explain it at all. He then hazards the conjecture that Aristotle wrote so obscurely in order that he might deter slow-witted and indolent men from reading him, at the same time that he stimulated and delighted the ingenious. Accordingly, the ingenious set their wits to work on the “Poetics” and proceeded to turn out those formidable editions of the later Renaissance, where a slender rivulet of text is almost lost in the wide expanse of commentary. Goethe remarks that the “Poetics” has almost always done harm when interpreted apart from the general spirit of Aristotle’s teaching as revealed in his other writings. Yet even when thus interpreted the “Poetics” contains so much that is profound and essential, that in spite of its fragmentary and uncertain text, its dryness and logic-chopping, the evil it wrought could not fail to be strangely mingled with the good. For example, in several of his plays Racine has attained not simply a regularity of structure, but an actual perfection of dramatic technique that is unsurpassed in ancient or modern literature; and we should remember how minutely Racine studied a work like that of Heinsius (“De Tragoediae Constitutione,” 1611) [Daniël Heinsius, Dutch scholar; (1580–1655], which is itself only a quintessence of the Aristotelian lore of the Renaissance.

Having granted thus much, we must recognize what an opportunity the “Poetics ” gave pedants who wished to forge an instrument for tyrannizing over the individual conscience in matters of taste. As a body, these Italian critics are endlessly theoretical; they are often as repellent in form and abstract in substance as many of the German writers on aesthetics of the nineteenth century. . . . [L]iterary casuists held out to those who obeyed the ‘‘rules” the hope that they would be able to write a good epic or tragedy, let us say, even if they lacked any special inspiration. (3)

The far-ranging speculations of the Renaissance about the end of poetry, decorum, probability, the laws of tragedy, epic, etc., tended, then, under the influence of the literary casuists, toward a pure formalism; and when we examine more closely we discover that the means used for thus exalting questions of form and neglecting what we should call nowadays the subjective side of art, was a certain idea of imitation. We have come at last to the doctrine we set out in search of, which dominates the whole neo-classical movement, and of which ut pictura poesis itself is but a corollary. “Poetry,” says Fénelon in his letter to the French Academy, “is doubtless an imitation and a painting.” [François Fénelon, French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet, and writer; 1651-1715.] Imitation is the great word on which everything hinges and to which everything must be made to conform. On reading the title of the Abbé Batteux’s ‘‘Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe” [“The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle”], we may be sure in advance that the single principle to which he reduces all the arts is that of imitation. [Abbé Charles Batteux, French philosopher and writer on aesthetics; 1713–80.] Now in giving this all-important rôle to imitation the neo-classicists, from the Italians of the sixteenth century to the Abbé Batteux, were up to a certain point true Aristotelians. Imitation is the pivotal word of the “Poetics.” For Aristotle poetry not only imitates, but it imitates human actions, and not at random, but with reference to a definite plan or purpose: the poet is to turn away from himself and his own emotions, and work like the painter, with his eye on the object. Aristotle, in short, would have the poet intensely objective, but he would not therefore fix him in a rut of convention and traditionalism; yet it is in this latter direction, as we all know, that the neo-classic and pseudo-classic theorists tended.

To understand how, while claiming to follow Aristotle, these theorists really became pseudo-Aristotelian, we must consider certain other important aspects of the idea of imitation. The artist, says Aristotle, should imitate things not as they are but as they ought to be. He should give us truth, but a selected truth, raised above all that is local and accidental, purged of all that is abnormal and eccentric, so as to be in the highest sense representative. He should improve upon Nature with means drawn from Nature herself. Nature, in Dante’s phrase, is like a great workman whose hand trembles, (4) and the artist should strive to realize this deeper purpose, which Nature suggests but does not actually fulfil. Probably the first mention in modern times of this profound and obscure doctrine of ideal imitation is that found in the “Poetics” of Daniello (5) 1536) [Bernardino Daniello, Italian literary critic and poet; c. 1599-65]; and it is significant that Daniello’s interpretation of the doctrine is already badly twisted. History for example differs from poetry, according to Daniello, not as a lower form of truth from a higher and more representative form, but as fact from fiction. We are going to see later that this notion of poetry as an agreeable falsity, united with the confusion of poetry and painting in its pseudo-classic form to encourage the kind of poetical diction that Wordsworth attacked in English. One point should be noted in passing: the painters and those who theorized about painting arrived at a clearer idea of Aristotle’s meaning than the writers and literary theorists. (5) The “Discourses on Art” of Sir Joshua Reynolds [English painter, specializing in portraits; 1723-92], perhaps the best statement of the classical point of view in English, are no accident, but have behind them a long and in many respects a sound tradition (6) extending back to the Italian Renaissance.

(To be continued.)

(1) Dissertatio peripatetica de epico carmine.

(2) I am of course counting Boileau among the influences that made for a sound prose. Boileau was about one part Aristotle to nine parts Horace.

(3) Chapelain, for example, says that he hoped to show in La Pucelle that one who possessed the theory of the epic “might without any special elevation of mind put it successfully into practice.”

(4) Paradiso, XIII, V. 76.

(5) La Poetica, p. 41.

(6) Reynolds was initiated into this tradition not only by his residence in Italy (1749-52), but by reading such works as Dryden’s translation of Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica with the introductory “Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695) [Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, French painter and writer on his art; 1611–68]. Reynolds took serious exception to the theory of imitation. See Discourse xiii.