The New Laokoon (Part 3)

(Pictured: Alexander Pope.) I am happy to present the third 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 II 

POETICAL DICTION 

Something has already been said of the bad twist that was given to Aristotle’s doctrine of ideal imitation as early as Daniello: poetry is to differ from prose, not as a higher from a lower truth but as fiction from fact. Inasmuch as men are always more or less the victims of words, this view of poetry was encouraged by Aristotle’s word for plot (µυθoς [mythos]), which was rendered ‘‘fable.” At first sight this emphasis on the fabulous and fictitious seems an invitation to the poet to mount the hippogriff; but the neo-classical hippogriff is tied to a tether. No sooner has the poet accepted the invitation to indulge himself freely in fiction, than he is confronted with the terrible phrase “according to probability or necessity.” He is to be a liar, it is true, but a logical liar; for, as Rymer says, “What is more hateful than an improbable lie?” [Thomas Rymer, English poet, critic, antiquary, and historian; c.1643–1713.] The neo-classical theorist is not willing to recognize that the imagination has its own reasons of which the reason knows nothing; that there are other ways of making a thing probable, or convincing as we should say nowadays, besides merely appealing to one’s logic and sense of fact; for this would be to recognize that region of the spontaneous and unexpected in human nature which he is doing his best to eliminate. Everything must be deliberate and prearranged, with no break in the sharp sequence of cause and effect. To be sure, there was one obstacle to thus making poetry purely rational and formal. Ancient authorities whom the neo-classicist was bound to respect had declared that poetry has nothing to do with reasoning, but is a sort of divine madness; and so, in an age of formalism, poetic fury itself became a formal requirement—something to turn on judiciously, about as one might turn on a tap. Few things are more amusing than the businesslike way in which the neo-classic poet speaks of his ‘‘rages” and his “fires.” Some of the critics, even though they have to accept furor poeticus strive at least to keep it within narrow limits. Thus Father Mambrun says that the epic poet must not be furious in the constitution of his plot, though he “does not deny that a little poetic fury may be sprinkled in in the episodes.” (1) 

In their attempt to deny the rights of the imagination the neo-classical theorists . . . were led to convert the divine illusion of poetry into an agreeable falsity. Even in creating his fictions, or it might be more correct to say in manufacturing his lies, since he was supposed to do everything with malice prepense, the poet was not to imitate directly, that is, rely on his own resources; for he might thus expose himself to being called “monstrous,” the word that the neo-classicist always had in reserve for any one who was too unexpected. The poet was rather to fall back on the second main form of imitation, the imitation of models, and to copy the fictions that are already found in the ancient poets; in other words, he was to draw freely on the wardrobe of mythological frippery, and many of the theorists demanded that he should not use even this fiction for its own sake, but merely allegorically, to inculcate some moral truth. 

The poet, then, is an imitator, and a painter who in drawing his design, that is, in choosing a subject, and mode of treatment, is to be unspontaneous and traditional. He is also to be unspontaneous and traditional in laying on his poetical colors; and by poetical colors the neo-classicist understands words, elegant phrases, figures of speech, and the like. (2) Horace already speaks of words as poetical colors (3) in much this sense, and the expression is found even in Wordsworth. Both words and imagery are regarded by the neo-classicist as being laid on like pigments from the outside. They are not, in Wordsworthian phrase, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; they lack the vital thrill that would save them from artificiality. The result might not have been so bad if the poet had painted with his eye on the object. But at this point the other theory of imitation intervened, and in supplying his palette with poetical colors (that is, words, happy phrases, figures of speech, etc.), he must not look to nature but to models. Wordsworth [4] and Coleridge both say that the habit of regarding the language of poetry as something dissociated from personal emotion, and as made up rather of words and flowers of speech culled from models, was promoted by the writing of Greek and Latin verse in school. To any one who composed by piecing together words and phrases he had picked out of a gradus, poetry came to seem, even in his own tongue, an artificial process. 

Johnson praises Dryden as the father of poetical diction in English, and Dryden is reprobated for the same reason by Lowell. It is, of course, true that poetical diction came in with the whole French influence about the time of Dryden. It is also true that the model to whom the average poet of the eighteenth century turned when he was laying in a supply of poetical pigments, was not Dryden, but Pope, especially the translation of Homer. Evidently two things were needed to rid poetry of “its gaudiness and inane phraseology”: first, that the poet should write with his eye on the object and not on the models and the stock of traditional poetical colors; second, that he should be spontaneous, so that his every word and phrase might be saved from artificiality and ring responsive to genuine feeling. The first of these two requirements was fulfilled, in England at least, before the second. For example, the “Nocturnal Reverie” of Lady Winchelsea, which Wordsworth praises, is more remarkable for its exact rendering of certain sights and sounds of nature without false finery or flowers of speech than it is for the true romantic thrill. [Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, English poetess and courtier; 1661-1720.] The same may be said of Cowper [William Cowper, English poet; 1731-1800] and some other eighteenth-century poets. But poetic diction was far from being discredited by an occasional performance of this kind. There is no more flagrant example of poetic diction than Erasmus Darwin’s “Botanic Garden” [Erasmus Darwin, English physician, natural philosopher, physiologist, inventor, and poet; grandfather to Charles Darwin; 1731-1802]; unless, indeed, it be the early poems of William Wordsworth, which show that the young poet already had his eye on the object; but they are none the less filled with artificial elegancies and conventional adornments. [5] For Erasmus Darwin poetry is a process of painting to the eye. Both his theory [6] and practice are indeed merely the ultimate outcome of a confusion of poetry and painting that has its origins in the literary casuistry of the Renaissance. The confusion that led to poetical diction is fundamental in the neo-classic movement, and the reaction against poetical diction is equally fundamental in romanticism. The romantic movement probably did as much to compromise as it did to forward the standards of sound prose; but it had a legitimate task in emancipating the poetic imagination from its straitjacket of artificiality and convention. It is therefore important to note that the wave of emotion that finally swept away poetical diction in England came from France. “Guilt and Sorrow,” the first poem in which Wordsworth attains vital directness and sincerity of expression, was written, not primarily under the influences of the ballads, or Milton, or Spenser, but under the emotional stress of the French Revolution; and Wordsworth is the father of nineteenth-century English poetry. Certain tendencies in eighteenth-century England, that bulk so largely in the eyes of some critics among the causes of the English romantic movement, still have about them something that is conventional and, in the neo-classical sense, imitative. The Spenserian and Miltonian revivals, for example, led simply to new forms of poetical diction. In laying in their assortment of poetical pigments people went to Spenser and Milton instead of to Pope. 

My purpose, however, is not to go into a minute study of poetical diction. I have merely wanted to show how inevitably it arose from the formal identification, of poetry and painting. One would have expected this identification to lead not only to poetic diction, but to a general riot of word-painting and descriptive writing; as a matter of fact the possibilities of the theory in this direction were slow to develop, and the reason is not far to seek. Poetry, it is true, is an imitation and a painting, but a painting, the orthodox Aristotelian theorist would hasten to add, not of outer objects, but of human actions. To be sure, the critics were from the start not entirely agreed on this point. If we consult the literary case-books of the later Renaissance and early seventeenth century, we shall find that grave authorities are quoted, much as they might be in the Jesuitical case-books in theology, on both sides of the question as to what the poet may imitate. Too much Aristotelian rigor in interpreting the doctrine of imitation had some awkward consequences. If poetry could imitate only human actions, then the “Georgies” were not poetry, and yet Virgil was the supreme neo-classical model !  Was it not veneration of Virgil that led to the reversion of the Aristotelian decision in so grave a matter as the relative dignity of tragedy and epic? It seems strange to us that men of undoubted intellectual power, like the best of the Renaissance critics, should have conducted such purely formal inquiries. The subjective test is alone intelligible for us. If a thing really “finds” us, we do not worry much about form or the dignity of genre. The actual appeal of a work of art “sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic,” says Emerson, “out of notice. ’T is like making a question concerning the paper on which a king’s message is written.” But our sense of superiority should be tempered by the reflection that the neo-classic formalism was closely related to a virtue—the love of clear and logical distinctions; and that our modern appreciativeness is often only the amiable aspect of a fault—an undue tolerance for indeterminate enthusiasms and vapid emotionalism.

(1) Dissertatio peripatetica de epico carmine. 

(2) Batteux says that “les mesures et l’harmonie” constitute the coloring of poetry, “l’imitation,” its design (Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe [The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle] [1747]). The usual point of view is that of A. Donatus in his Ars poetica (Cologne, 1633): “Colores enim poetici verba sunt et locutiones,” [“For the colors of poetry are the words and phrases”] etc. Dryden includes in poetical coloring, “the words, the expressions, the tropes and figures, the versification, and all the other elegancies of sound,” etc. Essays. 

(3) Cf. Dryden: “Operum colores [works of colors] is the very word which Horace uses to signify words and elegant expressions,” etc. 

[4] Wordsworth says that he was 

Cf. also Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. i. 

[5] Cf. Legouis’s Wordsworth, p. 131 ff. 

[6] For Darwin’s theory of poetry, see the “Interludes” that follow the cantos of his poem, especially the “Interlude” to Canto I of Part II (The Loves of the Plants, 1789). The acme of poetic artificiality was reached in France about the same time as in England, in the Abbé Delille’s Jardins (1782), a work inspired by Thomson’s Seasons.