The New Laokoon (Part 4)

(Pictured: James Thomson.) I am happy to present the fourth 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.

I think it desirable to point out that in the following post and in the one immediately preceding it, Babbitt is condemning what I should call an unimaginative use of poetic diction. On the subject of poetic diction, which was a universal hallmark of poetry for millennia—not simply during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—it would be useful to quote as follows from Chapter V of Gilbert Murray’s Classical Tradition in Poetry, which can be accessed in three previous posts of Tradition Restored, in the category Poetry and the Classical Tradition, beginning on March 8, 2017:

“There has always been, among both the despisers of poetry and the admirers, a feeling of impatience and rebellion against the robes and ornaments in which she is swathed. . . . Everyone at times feels something like this. Yet before we yield to the feeling, we must bear in mind the enormous weight of authority against us. Homer, Vergil, Milton, Shakespeare—are they too classical and sophisticated? Then think of the strangely artificial language of the mediaeval poets, of the curious tortuousness of much of Dante. Think of the great primitive Icelandic poems, with their riddles and kennings, or equally of the early Irish. It is quite indubitable that poetry, and primitive poetry as much as any, does try to make its language different from that of ordinary life.”

Making reference to Aristotle, Murray writes of poetic language as follows (pp.125-6):

“[E]xpressions unknown to common life”. . .keep [the language] away from the associations of the shop, the newspaper, and the drinking saloon. . .they carry with them the atmosphere and associations of poetry. . . . [O]ld words are generally poetical: not simply because they are old, but because it is chiefly through poetry or good literature that they are known. They bring to our mind Chaucer or Shakespeare, not their average vulgar contemporaries.

Elsewhere in the book (pp. 42-3), he writes about the dancers of Dionysus, from whom tragedy is said to have developed:

The magic of Memory was at work. . . ‘waker of longing,’ the enchantress who turns the common to the heavenly and fills men’s eyes with tears because the things that are now past were so beautiful. . . . they [the dancers] liked to cling to the old words that had always been used in these songs instead of the clearer and commoner modern words, and liked them perhaps all the better when people were not quite sure of their exact meaning but only felt the atmosphere and the fragrance, and of course the actual magic, that clung about them.

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Part I

The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts

CHAPTER II 

POETICAL DICTION  (Concluded)

The love of clear distinctions and sharply defined types led the neo-classic writer to avoid a mixture that his theory would otherwise have permitted,—that of the poem in prose. For if the essence of poetry is not in metre but in imitation, why not imitate poetically in prose? That is, paint a picture of life not according to literal fact, of course, but “according to probability or necessity.” Fénelon must have gone through some such reasoning when he wrote his “Télémaque,” a genuinely neo-classic prose-poem, only remotely related to the poetical prose with which the romantic movement has made us familiar. Yet such was the prejudice in favor of the genre tranché [distinct genre] that “Télémaque” did not escape censure. In Voltaire’s ‘‘Temple du Goût” the repentant Fénelon is made to confess that there can be no true poem in prose. (1)

To return to our main topic, we may surmise that the comparative lack of descriptive writing during the early part of the neo-classical period was due in part to concentration on man and human action, and in part to positive critical precept. Boileau is only repeating previous critics when he ridicules those who interrupt the course of a narrative to indulge in a long-winded description, for example, of some palace and its grounds. “I skip twenty pages to get to the end of it all,” says Boileau, “and then escape with difficulty through the garden.” (2) Early in the eighteenth century, however, we can observe a change. There were already beginning to gather beneath the smug surface of neo-classic formalism those emotional elements that were destined to explode toward the end of the century. The age was gradually growing less humanistic in temper, and becoming more interested, both scientifically and sentimentally, in outer nature. A notable example of the latter kind of interest is Thomson’s “Seasons.” [James Thomson, Scottish poet and playwright; 1700-1748.] Whatever it may be in itself, considered as an influence, Thomson’s “Seasons ” is a pseudo-classical document. It led to a school of descriptive and pictorial poetry, but pictorial in a pseudo-classic sense,—that is, conceiving of words and phrases as pigments to be laid on from without; and this school was not slow to justify itself by an appeal to the maxim ut pictura poesis [as is painting, so is poetry].

At the same time a somewhat different influence was also tending to confuse the standards of painting and poetry. We hear a great deal in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century of the virtuosi, (3) men who collected anything from coins to butterflies, and were endlessly ridiculed by the wits of the time as examples of meaningless and random curiosity. The bent thus revealed for precise observation and classification may be connected directly with the founding of the Royal Society (1662), and in a more general way with the Baconian tradition. In the retrospect we can see that some of these virtuosi were on the way to become serious antiquaries, and that the antiquaries in turn prepared the way for Winckelmann [Johann Joachim Winckelmann, German art historian and archaeologist; 1717-1768] and modern archaeology. Now any one who got together a cabinet of antiques was naturally led to compare the treatment of the ancient legends, etc., in art with the treatment of the same legends by the poets; and at this point there intervened the inevitable ut pictura poesis reinforced by the neo-classical notion that no one could do anything without copying from some one else. One of the first persons who encouraged this sort of thing, as Lessing complains, was Addison in his “Dialogues on Medals” (1702). [Joseph Addison, English poet, dramatist, and essayist; 1672-1719.]

Perhaps the most important of the other authors who developed a parallelism between pictorial and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, were Spence in his ‘‘Polymetis” (1747), [Joseph Spence, English historian, literary scholar, and anecdotist; 1699-1768] and finally Count Caylus in his “Pictures Drawn from Homer” (1757). [Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, French antiquarian, collector, patron, writer, and amateur printmaker; 1602-1765.] Lessing maintains that Spence’s “book is absolutely intolerable to every reader of taste.” This is not flattering for the English aristocracy of the period, many of the most distinguished of whom appear in the list of his subscribers and patrons. The general suggestion of these books is that the standards of poetic and plastic art are interchangeable, and that any good poetical picture may profitably be treated in the same way by the painter or sculptor. Spence, for example, becomes a fair mark for Lessing when he says (page 311), “Scarce anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture.” At the same time, if we study these writers directly, we shall be surprised to find how much more sensible they are than we should ever suppose from Lessing’s attacks. Caylus, indeed, anticipates Lessing in important respects. ‘‘For every idea that he has borrowed from Caylus,” says M. Rocheblave, “Lessing bestows upon him a censure.” (4)

We should now be prepared to understand the conditions that led to the writing of the “Laokoon.” There was the school of descriptive poetry, largely imitative of Thomson’s “Seasons”; there were also the new erudition and antiquarianism of the eighteenth century, (5) uniting with art and literature, and, like the school of descriptive poetry, making a liberal use of the maxim ut pictura poesis. The general background was the whole theory of imitation as elaborated by the critics of the Renaissance. Of these elements the theory of imitation is by far the most important, and it is the one of which the Germans in general have said the least. (6)

(1) In the article “Épopée” (Dict. philosophique), Voltaire says: “Pour les poèmes en prose, je ne sais ce que c’est que ce monstre: je n’y vois que l’impuissance de faire des vers,” etc. [“As to prose poems, I do not know what this monster is: I see only the inability to write verses”.]
Cf., however, the Abbe Du Bos who approves of the prose poem on good neo-classic grounds (Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, t. I, p. 510). 

(2) Cf. D’Aubignac, Pratique du théâtre, p. 51: “Mal à propos le poète ferait une description exacte des colonnes, des portiques, des ornements . . . d’un temple,” etc. [“At the wrong time, the poet would give an exact description of the columns, the porticoes, the ornaments. . . of a temple”.] Boileau had especially in mind in his satire the description of the magic palace in Canto III of Scudéry’s Alaric which was itself suggested by previous descriptions in Ariosto, etc. [Georges de Scudéry. French novelist, dramatist, and poet; 1601-1667.]

(3) An interesting article on the virtuosi by N. Pearson will be found in the Nineteenth Century for Nov., 1909. 

(4) S. Rocheblave. Essai sur le Comte de Caylus, p. 220. 

(5) For this revival of Greek in the eighteenth century and the coming together of antiquarianism and literature, see L. Bertrand La Fin du classicisme et le retour à l’antique [The End of Classicism and the Return to Antiquity]. [Louis Bertrand, French writer, historian, and publicist; 1866-1941.]

(6) For the period immediately preceding Lessing, F. Braitmaier’s book (Geschichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Diskursen der Maler bis auf Lessing [History of poetic theory and criticism from the discourses of painters to Lessing], 1888), though dull, is fairly complete.