The New Laokoon (Part 7)

(Pictured: Lessing.) I am happy to present the seventh 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” [Concluded.]

. . . The moment, then, is all-important for the plastic artist; as Lessing puts it, he must select ‘‘the most pregnant moment,”—the one that throws the most light on the past stages of the action and points the way most clearly to what is still to come. At this point Lessing seems to relax the objective rigor of his method and to consider painting not merely in its outer means of realization, but in its effects upon the imagination.

“The only fruitful moment is the one that allows the imagination free scope. The longer we gaze, the more must our imagination add; and the more our imagination adds, the more we must believe we see. In the whole course of an emotion there is no moment which possesses this advantage so little as its highest stage. There is nothing beyond this; and the presentation of extremes to the eye clips the wings of Fancy, prevents her from soaring beyond the impressions of the senses, and compels her to occupy herself with weaker images,” etc. (1)

In other words, the painter is confined by the limits of his art to one moment of an action, but can suggest other moments; and his ambition should be to select the moment that has the most of this suggestiveness. Though objectively limited to images, he can set the spectator to dreaming of motion and action. 

Lessing can scarcely be said to have developed adequately the converse doctrine that, though the poet is objectively limited to the painting of motion and action, he can act suggestively upon the reader and set him to dreaming of images. (2) Lessing is so humanistic that even in the sort of waking dream that is the illusion of true art, he would have us dream of action. Perhaps, indeed, it is misleading to apply to Lessing at all such words as dreaming and suggestiveness. He does not for example concern himself sufficiently, to our modern thinking, with the suggestiveness of words. He looks on them too much as a sort of passive material, and on the poet as too conscious and deliberate in his combining of them. We are more inclined to dwell on the mystery and magic that words may acquire at the touch of a true poet; on the almost hypnotic spell they may be made to cast over our feelings:—

“All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.” [Tennyson.]

In thus tending to dissociate language from emotion, to allow insufficiently for the unconscious and the spontaneous, in short, to treat art too analytically, Lessing has points of contact with the very school he assailed. His ambition was simply to oppose a true analysis to the false analysis of the pseudo-classic critics. The main result of this analysis—the great central generalization of the “Laokoon,” that poetry deals with temporal, painting with spatial relations, poetry with the successive and painting with the coexistent—will not, as I have already said, seem extremely original to one who is familiar with the previous literature of the subject. In his introduction Blümner gives a list of the writers who furnished hints to Lessing, and in some cases partly anticipated him. Long as this list is, it is not, as I can testify from my own reading, complete. For example, Blümner says nothing of a passage from Caylus in which the Count comes very near to making Lessing’s main distinction. [Lessings Laokoon by Hugo Blümner, circa 1880; Count Caylus, French antiquarian, proto-archaeologist and man of letters; 1692-1765.] This distinction, indeed, forced itself even on some of those who were trying hardest to confuse the arts according to the pseudo-classic formula. I find a remarkable example of this fact in a writer whom Blümner has also failed to mention. Father Castel. [Louis Bertrand Castel, S.J., French writer on physics, mathematics, morals, aesthetics, theology and history; 1688-1757.] As is well known, the “Laokoon” in its present form is only a fragment,—one of three parts Lessing had planned to write. In the third part he had intended to discuss the arts of music and dancing. We can only infer his ideas on these arts from his few scattered memoranda for this uncompleted portion of his work; but in his treatment of music, as in that of poetry and painting, he would evidently have been chiefly interested in establishing boundaries and frontiers. We may judge from his reference to the Kapellmeister Telemann that he was no friend of musical painting, that he would have condemned any mixing up of the domain of sound with that of color and vision. [Georg Philipp Telemann, German Baroque composer; 1681-1767.]

Now no one was more celebrated in the eighteenth century for confusions of this kind than Father Castel. One finds constant allusion in the literature of the period to his clavecin des couleurs or clavecin oculaire,—in other words, a sort of instrument he had constructed to make sound visible and interpret it in terms of color. Father Castel set forth the theory of his color-clavichord in the “Mercure” of November, 1725. He completed the first model of the new instrument, as he tells us, on December 21, 1734. He says that he had been put on the track of his discovery by something he had read in the “Musurgia” of Kircher. (3) “If at the time of a fine concert,” writes Kircher, “we could see the air stirred by all the vibrations communicated to it by the voices and instruments, we should be surprised to see it filled with the liveliest and most finely blended colors.” (4) It was Castel’s ambition to make these analogical colors visible; to arrange a series of colors in the same harmonic proportions as sounds; to connect them with a key-board in such wise that, when the fingers touched certain keys, the colors should appear ordered and combined in the same way as the sounds of the musical notes corresponding to these keys. But what colors are equivalent to what notes? “The green,” answers Father Castel, “corresponds to re, and will doubtless make them [the audience] feel that this note re is natural, rural, sprightly, pastoral. Red, which corresponds to sol, will give them the idea of a warlike note, bloody, angry, terrible. Blue, corresponding to do, will give them the impression of a note that is noble, majestic, celestial, divine, etc. (5) The deaf in this way will be able to see the music of the ears, the blind to hear the music of the eyes, and those who have eyes as well as ears will enjoy each kind of music better by enjoying both.” (6)

But Father Castel is not satisfied with colors merely arranged in a diatonic series, and appearing and disappearing rapidly at the touch of a key-board in imitation of musical notes. He would like to give more permanency to his color concerts, to arrive, as he says, at a still easier means of “painting music and sounds,” and he proceeds to work out a scheme for what he calls “musical and harmonic tapestries.” “Can you imagine,” he asks, “what a room will be, the walls of which are hung with rigadoons and minuets, with sarabands and passacaglias, with cantatas and sonatas, and even, if you please, with a very complete representation of all the music of an opera?” When painting has thus succeeded in reproducing analogically all the harmonic effects of music, there will be more reason than heretofore, says Castel, giving a slight twist to Simonides, for calling it a dumb music; “but a music all the more effective,” he adds, “in that it will steal its way into the heart with less noise and tumult.” Father Castel would evidently have agreed with Keats, that “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” 

Not content with confusing sound and color Father Castel meditated still other confusions. Thus he gives a recipe for constructing a clavecin des odeurs: by striking a key-board one could open and shut the vents of a row of scent-boxes arranged in a sort of diatonic series, and so play concerts of perfumes. The ideas of Castel, indeed, are the reductio ad absurdum of certain pseudo-classical tendencies: for it will be observed that he does not confuse the arts subjectively, but objectively and formally in their means of realization; and in attempting this outer and formal confusion he was led curiously enough to anticipate Lessing. “One difference between color and sound,” he says, “had kept him in a state of uncertainty for the past twelve or thirteen years as to the completeness of the analogy,” which he had been trying all that time to establish between them: colors were fixed in space and sounds were fugitive in time; and on several occasions he states the difficulty almost as forcibly as Lessing. (7) But though this doubt as to the truth of his analogy tormented Father Castel, it did not deter him from riding his hobbies and making of himself a target for the mockeries of Voltaire. 

Father Castel is the kind of figure that usually appears toward the very end of a literary movement. His color-clavichord is as symptomatic in this respect as the mouth-organ of Des Esseintes that we shall discuss in a later chapter. Only Castel marks the supreme exaggerations of the pseudo-classic, Des Esseintes of the romantic point of view. With this mention of Castel we may therefore terminate appropriately our very incomplete survey of the pseudo-classical confusion of the arts. (8) 

[Part II of The New Laokoon next.]

(1) Blümner, 165 (III). 

(2) The clearest allusion to this dreaming of images in the Laokoon is in xiv and the note at the very end (Blümner, 247, 248). 

(3) Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) was a German Jesuit. His Musurgia universalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni appeared in 1650. 

(4) See Esprit, Saillies et singularites du P. Castel (1763), p. 280.

(5) Father Castel may have had a touch of color-audition to help on his pseudo-classic theorizing. Cf. the sonnet of Arthur Rimbaud I refer to later. 

(6) Father Castel is probably indebted for his theories, not only to Kircher, but to Newton (see Optics, Book I, Pt. II, Propositions 3 and 6). A discussion of the whole subject will be found in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (Interlude to Canto II). Darwin considers the possibility of improving on Castel, and concludes that “if visible music can be agreeably produced, it would be more easy to add sentiment to it by the representations of groves and Cupids and sleeping nymphs amid the changing colors, than is commonly done by the words of audible music.” 

(7) Cf. Kircher: “Les couleurs suivent l’étendue des lieux; les lieux sont fixes et permanents; mais les sons suivent l’étendue des temps; or les temps sont essentiellement successifs et inalliables.” [Colors follow the extension of places; places are fixed and permanent: but sounds follow the extension of time; times are essentially successive and incompatible.]

(8) If I were attempting a complete survey, I should need to take a glance at certain aspects of the baroque and rococo styles, etc. A wider survey of this kind would furnish fresh illustrations of the pseudo-classic tendency to confuse the arts formally and objectively (usually in terms of painting). The man who did more than any one else to confound the standards of painting with those of sculpture and architecture was of course Bernini. Lessing reacted so far in the opposite direction that he has been justly accused of carrying the standards of sculpture into painting.