The New Laokoon (Part 5)

(Pictured: Boileau.) I am happy to present the fifth 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 I

The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts

CHAPTER III 

LESSING AND THE “LAOKOON” 

One of the most important passages in Lessing is that in which he defends criticism—and by criticism he means the setting up of definite standards and a rational discipline—against those who asserted that it suppressed originality and genius. In this passage Lessing declares that he felt in himself no living fountain, and had to force everything out of himself by “pipes and pressure.” “I should be poor, cold, short-sighted,” he continues, “if I had not learned in a measure to borrow foreign treasures, to warm myself at foreign fires, and to strengthen my eyes by the glasses of art. I am therefore always ashamed or annoyed when I hear or read anything in disparagement of criticism. It is said to suppress genius, and I flattered myself I had gained from it something very nearly approaching genius. I am a lame man who cannot possibly be edified by abuse of his crutch.” 

Lessing, then, according to his own estimate, is more remarkable for his powers of assimilation than for his spontaneity. The more one studies the material that, from the Renaissance on, prepared the way for his work,—not to speak of the remoter classical background,—noting how much he owes not merely to those with whom he agrees, but even to the very Frenchmen, like Voltaire, whom he is striving to discredit, the more one is inclined to agree with Lessing’s self-estimate; the more especially one studies the “Laokoon” in this way, the less it seems to contain that is strictly original. Evidently, if the Germans are to justify the high claims they make for Lessing as a critic, they must rest them on other grounds than his intellectual originality or the fineness of his taste. The decisive word about Lessing was really uttered by Goethe: We may, he said, have another intelligence like Lessing, but we shall wait long before seeing another such character.

* * * * *

Lessing protested against the critical creed the foundations of which were laid in sixteenth-century Italy, but which had been actually elaborated and imposed upon the world by the French . . ., an orthodoxy which seemed to Lessing to have colored sound classical doctrine with its own special tradition, distorted it with casuistical interpretations, and turned the true spirit of the law into mere artificial rules and conventions. . . . [I]n distinguishing between the truly classical and the pseudo-classic [Lessing] set up Aristotle’s ‘‘Poetics” as a sort of visible absolute, a complete criterion in everything relating to literature, especially the drama. Every one knows the passage in which Lessing declares that the “Poetics” is as infallible in its own way as the elements of Euclid. . . . [I]n emancipating Germany from intellectual and literary servitude to France, [Lessing] proposed to substitute a true code for the false code he had abrogated, and looked with disgust on the young antinomians of the Storm and Stress, who were for getting rid of all codes and setting up instead an uncharted emotionalism. . . . [I]n his attack on neo-classic formalism, [he] remained more or less of a formalist himself by his insistence on an infallible Aristotle. 

From one point of view Lessing may be defined as the last and greatest of the Aristotelian formalists. The underlying unity of his critical work—both the “Laokoon” and “Hamburg Dramaturgy”—lies in his endeavor to distinguish the truly classic from the pseudo-classical; and in practice this nearly always means, as I have said, to discriminate between true and false Aristotelianism. He disavows all claim to be systematic, but he is at least keenly logical and analytical. He has indeed laid himself open to the charge Cardinal Newman brings against Aristotle, that of looking on logic as the foundation of the fine arts. In general he is a lover of boundaries and distinctions, and of the clearly defined type, though not of course in a narrow or pedantic way. He even justifies in one passage a mixture of the genres by the somewhat unexpected argument that a mule is a very useful beast, in spite of the fact that it is neither a horse nor an ass. 

We should add that there is one whole side of Lessing that is less humanistic and more humanitarian, a side that connects him with the great expansion of knowledge and sympathy just then beginning, and more specifically with the influence of a Frenchman like Diderot [Denis Diderot, French man of letters and philosopher; 1713-1784]. Lowell, however, is very misleading when he describes Diderot as a “deboshed” Lessing. In reality the difference is far more fundamental. In his whole temper Lessing is not merely rational but disciplinary; whereas Diderot, perhaps a more brilliant and certainly a more spontaneous genius, is deficient in this guiding and controlling judgment. Diderot, in his own phrase, lives at the “mercy of his diaphragm,” tends to overstrain all boundaries of thought and feeling, and so prepares the way for the Titanism of every kind that has marked our modern emancipation. 

Lessing, on the contrary, looks in his critical method backward to the Renaissance, rather than forward to the nineteenth century. If we approach his critical writings without preconceived notions or conventional admiration, we shall admit that there is something about them that from our point of view is foreign, remote, and disconcerting. He usually judges, not from the immediate impression, but by certain fixed laws and principles which he proceeds to found upon Aristotle. In this respect, if we may be allowed to digress for a moment, he is really farther away from us than Boileau; for Boileau, who under certain romantic obsessions has come to be looked on as an arch-formalist, was in reality the leader of a reaction against formalism. [Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, French poet and critic; 1636-1711] Few contrasts, indeed, are more surprising than that between the real Boileau and Boileau the romantic bugaboo. Boileau was simply a wit and man of the world, not especially logical or imaginative or profound, but with an admirable integrity of character and an extraordinarily keen and correct sensibility. Literary works, and especially epics and tragedies, turned out mechanically according to the neo-classic recipes, had ended in intolerable boredom, and Boileau for one decided he could stand it no longer. It was in this spirit that he assailed and overthrew Chapelain, the chief of the Aristotelian formalists, whose perfectly “regular” epic, “La Pucelle,” had no fault according to Boileau except that nobody could read it. [Jean Chapelain, French poet and critic; 1595–1674.] Boileau’s message to the authors of his time was simple: It is proper and indeed necessary for you to obey the rules, but at best the rules have only a negative virtue: the really important matter is that you should interest us. He added to his own precept his translation of Longinus “On the Sublime,” with its constant measuring of literature not according to its formal perfection, but according to its power to stir emotion. [Longinus, traditional name of an unknown author, dated to the first century AD.] As rendered by Boileau, Longinus takes his place with Horace and Aristotle as a supreme critical authority. Henceforth the appeal is even more to taste than to the rules: in other words, what we should call the subjective test receives increasing emphasis, though we may surmise that the emotional undercurrent we have already detected in the early eighteenth century, and which runs in Diderot into actual Titanic unrestraint, is something very different from the true spirit of Longinus. 

Molière, although he had little faith even in the negative virtue of the rules, was with Boileau in other respects. He wrote the famous scene between Vadius and Trissotin [characters in Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies), premiered in 1672] in much the spirit in which his friend assailed Chapelain; but like most of the wits of the age of Louis XIV, Molière carried the warfare on pedantry to a point where it became a menace to sound learning and an encouragement to polite superficiality. Vadius is laughed at because he knows more Greek than any man in France; but, as Dr. Johnson would have told us, this is in itself the most respectable of accomplishments. 

[To be continued.]