The New Laokoon (Part 2)

(Pictured: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.) I am happy to present the second 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

Part 2

The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter I (concluded)

The Theory of Imitation

At all events, the writers did finally come to understand thus much of Aristotle’s meaning,—that they were not to imitate ordinary nature but a selected and embellished nature (la belle nature as the French critics termed it). But with reference to what model or standard were they to select in arriving at their ideal imitation ? If they selected with reference to an image of perfection in the mind, they invited the reader or beholder likewise to look within in estimating the justness of the imitation. But to do this would for the neo-classicist be to lose himself in the vaguely subjective; it would be to set up an inner rather than an outer norm, the one thing above all he was trying to avoid. Why not get around the whole difficulty, and at the same time show proper humility, by foregoing the attempt to imitate Nature directly, and imitating rather those great writers in whom the voice of universal tradition tells us we find her idealized image ? (1) Little need to go directly to nature, says Scaliger, [Julius Caesar Scaliger, Italian scholar and physician; 1484-1548] when we have in Virgil a second nature. (2) The writer does not need to chase an elusive image of perfection in his own mind, but merely to copy Virgil; and the reader is also saved the trouble of looking within, and has merely to compare Virgil with the copy. 

There is thus added to the various real and supposed meanings of the word imitation in Aristotle a meaning that is comparatively un-Aristotelian,—the imitation of models. Reserving for separate discussion one especially important result of this coming together of the Aristotelian and un-Aristotelian meaning of the word imitation, we need simply note here how fully attention was thus turned toward the formal element of art and away from the element of personal feeling. Aristotle himself had said that metre, in which the musical throb of emotion is most distinctly felt, is not of the essence of poetry: its essence is rather in imitation,—not of the ordinary facts of life, but of those facts selected and arranged, as Aristotle would say, in what one is tempted to call his own special jargon, “according to probability or necessity.” 

This theory of imitation does not work so badly for the drama, to which Aristotle specially applies it, being as it is the most objective of the literary forms,—the form that benefits most by strict motivation and logical structure. But even the pseudo-classicists felt the difficulty of making the theory work equally well for other literary forms,—lyrical poetry for instance: how was it possible to look on lyrical poetry as turned entirely to the painting of some outer object, and to sever the bond that connects it with individual emotion? People may protest as follows,” says the Abbé Batteux: “ ‘What! . . . Is not poetry a song inspired by joy, admiration, gratitude? Is it not a cry of the heart, an enthusiasm (élan) in which Nature does everything and Art nothing ? I do not see in it any painting or picture—but only fire, feeling, intoxication. So two things are true; first, lyrical poetry is true poetry; second, it is not an imitation.’ ” (3) 

We can agree with Batteux when he adds: “Here is the objection presented in all its force.” We need not follow the process by which he gets around the objection and proceeds to prove that lyrical poetry is only imitation after all; though this process would illustrate in a very interesting way the pseudo-classic attempt to discredit the spontaneous in favor of the formal, to identify art with artificiality. He does, however, admit that the prophets, being as they were directly inspired by God, did not have to imitate. This is of course to admit a great deal. The true romantic poet, the wild-eyed magus of Victor Hugo (mage effaré), feels in his inspired moments that he is at least on a level with the prophets, if not with God himself. 

When Batteux published his book, Rousseau was on the point of beginning his warfare in the name of feeling against everything formal and traditional. In his exaltation of feeling, Rousseau’s method was to grope his way back to beginnings and to use to the utmost the argument of origins. Batteux already thinks it necessary to refer to and refute this appeal to origins. We should not, he says, go back to the first state of the arts, the mere lispings of infancy, when we are trying to define what they should be in their state of perfection. (4) At least passing mention should be made of an earlier use against the Aristotelians of the argument of origins. While the theory of imitation was still incubating in Italy, Patrizzi [Francesco Patrizzi, Italian philosopher, mathematician, historian, soldier, and literary critic; 1529-1597](5) protested against the critics who were thus weaving a strait-jacket for poetry, and tending to stifle spontaneity under formalism. Poetry, says Patrizzi, took its rise in religious enthusiasm, rhythm is essential to its being; it is not primarily an imitation. It would be possible to quote from him passages that seem to anticipate Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; passages that even remind one of the more recent Rousseauists, who delve in the depths of the primitive and seek for the origins of poetry in the rhythmic beat of communal sympathy. But such passages would be misleading: Patrizzi is a Platonist rather than a precursor of Rousseauism; that is, he associates the beginnings of poetry with what is above the reason, rather than with the region of instinct that is below it. 

By his radical departure from Aristotle, Patrizzi became the arch-dissenter of Renaissance criticism. Many persons had a sort of startled admiration for his enormous heresies, but he cannot be said to have been deeply influential. On the contrary, the tendency was to lose sight more and more of the roots of poetry in emotion and to identify it formally with painting through the interpretations that were given to the word imitation. Let us make this point clear by quoting still further the Abbé Batteux. After reducing, as we have seen, all the forms of poetry, even the lyric, to imitation, Batteux goes on as follows: “And so whether poetry sings the emotions of the heart, or acts, or narrates, or sets either gods or men to speaking, it is always a portrait of general nature (la belle nature), an artificial image, a picture, the one and only merit of which consists in right selection, arrangement, true likeness: ut pictura poesis.” 

Though the Horatian phrase thus recurs inevitably when the pseudo-classicist reaches a certain stage in his theorizing, the developments he gave to the phrase are evidently not to be found in the shrewd and untheoretical Horace. However little Aristotle himself would have countenanced the pseudo-classic confusions of poetry and painting, the point of departure of these confusions is evidently not merely in the general interpretation that was given to the “Poetics,” but in certain specific passages: for example, where he says that the “poet is an imitator like a painter or any other artist,” or where he proves the superior importance of plot over other elements in dramatic poetry by remarking that the most beautiful colors laid on confusedly will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Plot in writing thus corresponds to design in painting. Neo-classical critics are fond of discussing the elements in the art of writing that correspond to the other elements in pictorial art,—light, color, expression, etc.,—though they are not always agreed as to these correspondences. They did, however, finally reach a fair agreement as to what constitutes the element of poetical coloring. This conception of poetical coloring, arising as we have seen from the Aristotelian doctrine of imitation, finally united with the other or un-Aristotelian doctrine, i. e., the imitation of models, to encourage (6) the poetical diction which Wordsworth attacked in English, but the equivalent of which is found in other European languages. (7) Inasmuch as this important result of the pseudo-classic, or, as we may term it, formal confusion of poetry and painting, has not been adequately noticed by Lessing, nor so far as I am aware by any other critic, it may here receive the separate discussion for which we have already reserved it. 

(1) An argument similar to the one I have outlined here will be found at the beginning of Partenio’s work De Poetica Imitatione (Venice, 1565). 

(2) “ Haec omnia, quae imiteris, habes apud alteram naturam, id est, Virgilium.” [With all these things, which you will imitate, you have another nature, that is to say, Virgil.] Scaliger, Poetices lib. III, cap. iv. Virgil, as Pope tells us (Essay on Criticism) looked for his Nature to Homer:— 

But when t’ examine ev’ry part he came, 
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same, etc. 

(3) Beaux-Arts, etc., p. 244. 

(4) Beaux-Arts, etc., p. 246. 

(5) See La Deca Disputata, Ferrara, 1586. 

(6) Poetical diction was also encouraged by the whole theory of “ornament ” that had come down from classical antiquity. See B. Croce, Estetica, pp. 70-76, 450-465. 

(7) For French, see E. Barat: Le style poétique et la révolution romantique (1904).