The New Laokoon (Part 8)

(Pictured: Schelling.) I am happy to present the eighth 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. Our previous post concluded Babbitt’s treatment of the neo-classical confusion of the arts; with this post we begin his treatment of the romantic confusion of the arts. 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 II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter IV 

The Theory of Spontaneity 

We have seen the rôle that was played during the neo-classical period by Horace’s comparison between poetry and painting, or the equivalent one of Simonides. The saying that really bears the same relation to the modern period that the Horatian simile does to the neo-classical—though it has had less actual vogue—is that of Friedrich Schlegel: Architecture is frozen music. (1) Ut pictura poesis had been taken by the neo-classicists to mean that the common bond of the arts of which Cicero speaks is purely formal. Friedrich Schlegel, on the other hand, representing the romanticists, would seek for this commune vinculum not in form, but in feeling: even architecture, apparently the most formal of the arts, arose originally in response to a rhythmic thrill; is, in short, only congealed emotion. Long before Walter Pater [English essayist, literary and art critic, and fiction writer; 1839-94], the Germans declared that music is the most artistic of the arts because it is the least formal; that the other arts tend toward their perfection in proportion as they approximate to music. 

Now, just as we have found that all the neo-classic comparing and confusing of poetry and painting is only a corollary of something still more fundamental, namely, the doctrine of imitation, so the exaltation of music is only a corollary of something still more fundamental in romanticism, namely, the theory of spontaneity. By making the arts purely imitative the neo-classicist had reduced the rôle of the spontaneous, the unexpected, the original. He aimed to bring everything so far as possible under the control of the cold and deliberate understanding, to the neglect of all that is either above or below a certain rational level,—the sense of awe and mystery as well as the sense of wonder. He would have everything logical, conventionally correct, dryly didactic, able to give a clear account of itself when tested by the standards of common sense and ordinary fact. By his unwillingness to allow for the unconscious and the unpremeditated, he tended to identify art with the artificial, and to turn the divine illusion of poetry into a sort of elegant falsehood. 

This is, of course, an extreme statement of the neo-classic point of view. Not even a Chapelain [Jean Chapelain, French poet and critic during the Grand Siècle (Great Century); 1595-1674] or a Rymer [Thomas Rymer, English poet, critic, antiquary, and historian; 1643-1713] or a Gottsched [Johann Christoph Gottsched, German philosopher, author, and critic; 1700-66] would realize it in every particular. Then, too, we should not forget the influences that, during the neo-classical period itself, were making against a pure formalism: for example, Boileau and his rendering of Longinus, and the growing emphasis from this time forth on the personal and emotional factor,—the rise, in short, of a school of taste. A closely allied influence was that of women and the drawing-rooms, and their recognition, if not of the spontaneous, at least of the undefinable element in artistic creation, of the je ne sais quoi [I do not know what], as they were fond of calling it. We must also remember that the tendency to submit everything to the hard and dry light of the understanding is by no means a purely neo-classic phenomenon. There were various other contributing causes to the so-called period of enlightenment (Aufklärung): for example, the philosophy of Descartes [René Descartes, French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist; 1596-1650] and the developments it received in Germany in the systems of Leibniz [Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher, mathematician, scientist, diplomat, and polymath; 1646-1716] and Christian Wolf [German philosopher, mathematician, and scientist; 1679–1754]. 

Whatever the explanation, few will deny that the early eighteenth century had arrived at an over-analytical dryness of mind, and so combined it with social convention as to repress a number of very natural human instincts. According to some modern psychologists, when an essential side of human nature is thus denied and starved, it is not eliminated entirely, but merely forced into the subconscious; and when it has there accumulated for a certain time, it makes its way back to the surface in a sort of “subliminal uprush.” In an epoch of convention and dry rationality there finally arises, in the words of Matthew Arnold, the need of ‘‘storms, passion, effusion, and relief.” We can follow the gradual accumulation of such emotional elements beneath the surface of the eighteenth century as well as the subliminal uprush or overflow of emotion at the end,—an overflow that assumed forms as different as the German Storm and Stress, the Wesleyan movement in England, and the French Revolution. 

We inevitably think of Rousseau as the most important single figure in this emotional reaction, as the great apostle of the original and the spontaneous. That such a reaction would have taken place without Rousseau is certain; but it is equally certain that he first gave powerful expression to it and profoundly influenced the forms that it assumed. “The root of the whole Storm and Stress movement in Germany,” says Hettner, “is Rousseau’s gospel of Nature.” A. W. Schlegel [German poet, translator, and critic; 1767-1845] and Madame de Stael [French woman of letters and radical political theorist; 1766-1817] do little more than repeat Rousseau in their onslaughts on the imitative and conventional. (2) Wordsworth has given merely one special application to Rousseau’s message, in his dictum that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Schelling [Friedrich von Schelling, German idealist philosopher; 1775-1854] attacks systematically the whole theory of imitation (3) as we have outlined it in the first part of this book; and this was very fitting in a philosopher who, according to a German authority, set out to romanticize the whole universe; but Rousseau had romanticized the universe before him. 

Neo-classicism as it developed in France might be defined as a mixture of Aristotle and the dancing-master,—Aristotle being more in evidence at the beginning of the movement and the dancing-master at the end. At first sight Rousseau seems to have a quarrel with the dancing-master rather than with Aristotle, to be more concerned with getting rid of social than of literary conventions. To the tyranny of etiquette and the artificiality of the drawing-rooms he opposes a world of freshness, naturalness, spontaneity. ‘‘I was so tired,” he writes, “of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, insipid mincing airs, great suppers, that whenever I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, or in passing through a hamlet snuffed the odor of a good chervil omelette, or heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd’s songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.” (4)

This first appearance is, however, somewhat misleading. Rousseau’s deeper quarrel is, after all, not with the dancing-master, but with Aristotle, especially if Aristotle be taken to typify not merely the tyranny of classical imitation, but in general the logical and analytical attitude toward life. Man, says Rousseau, should not reason or analyze but feel (sentio ergo sum [I feel, therefore I am). The activity of the intellect, indeed, so far from being a gain, is a source of degeneracy. The intellect has divided man against himself, destroyed the unity of instinct, the freshness and spontaneity that primitive man enjoyed and that the child continues to enjoy. Rousseau is an obscurantist of a new species. He sees in man’s eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge the cause of his fall from Nature, much as the theologian sees in the same event the cause of his fall from God. With him begins that revulsion from the rational, the attack on the analytical understanding, on the ‘‘false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions,” which pervades the whole romantic movement. If we would find our way back to the Arcadia of fresh and spontaneous feeling, we should cease to think. “The man who thinks,” says Rousseau, “is a depraved animal”. . . .

(1) The authorship of this phrase does not seem quite certain. The chief claimants to it besides F. Schlegel are Schelling and Görres. . . . The idea of the phrase is of course contained in the passage I quote later from A. W. Schlegel. 

(2) Cf., for example, the Nouvelle Héloïse 2e partie, lettres xiv-xvii, with De l’ Allemagne, 1e partie, and with A. W. Schlegel’s Dramatic Art and Literature, passim. 

(3) Schelling opposed the idea of creative spontaneity to that of mechanical imitation in his Uber das Verhältniss der bildenden Kiinste zur Natur (1807), an address that was influential on Coleridge. 

(4) Confessions, livre ix (1756).