The New Laokoon (Part 10)

(Pictured: Heinrich Heine.) I am happy to present the tenth 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 II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter IV 

The Theory of Spontaneity (concluded)

“Nothing is beautiful but the truth,” says Boileau; “the truth alone is lovely.” One might urge at least as plausibly that it is easier to appeal to most men by the loveliness of error,—as Erasmus has in fact done in his wise book, “The Praise of Folly.” Boileau’s more poetical contemporary. La Fontaine, in the course of a delightful account of the creative imagination, says of man’s power to enchant himself with his own dreams:—

L’homme est de glace aux vérités, 
Il est de feu pour les mensonges. 

[“Of truth mankind are languid in desire,
But falsehood’s charms their passions always fire.”]

Neo-classical theory recognized in a way this insatiable appetite of man for illusions, that he is hungry not for fact but for fiction; only it would have the fiction doled out to him under the supervision of the cold and calculating understanding. As appears so clearly in the theory of the three unities [unity of action, unity of place, and unity of time], it conceived of the creative artist not as a magician but as a deliberate deceiver, as one whose business it is to cheat the intellect rather than to enchant the imagination. (1) 

Literary movements often remind one of the law of physics,—action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions. The neo-classicist tried to impose the standards of prose upon poetry, Rousseau and the romanticists carried the standards of poetry into prose. The neo-classicist desired logic and reality without illusion, the romanticist would have illusion without reality. Rousseau wished to banish “rule and pale forethought” not only from literature but from life. When a youth at Turin, he tells us, he had an excellent position in the household of the Count de Gouvon, a position that would have led him by assured stages to an honorable future. But all this savored for him too much of cause and effect; or, as he puts it, he “saw no adventures in it all,” and so ‘‘not without difficulty” he got himself discharged, and wandered off one fine morning, in order that he might taste with his friend Bâcle the joys of vagabondage. 

Later, at the Hermitage, he relates that he was rude to visitors who recalled him to earth at the moment when he was on the point of “setting out for the world of enchantment” (partir pour le monde enchanté). ‘‘The impossibility of attaining to real objects cast me into the land of dreams (le pays des chimères), and seeing no actual object worthy of my delirium I nourished it in an ideal world that my creative imagination had soon peopled with beings according to my heart.” (2) The creative imagination is thus for Rousseau a means of escape into a land of heart’s desire, a world of sheer unreality. Rousseau would have sympathized with that ancient, who, as Horace narrates, had the gift of witnessing gorgeous spectacles in an empty theatre, and who, when restored to his senses by copious doses of hellebore, cried out to his officious friends that they had undone him and not saved him by thus bringing him back to a dull reality and robbing him of his delightful dreams. This ancient was, indeed, merely a romanticist born out of due season. Does not Keats in his tale pronounce his curse, not upon the snake-woman, but upon “the sage, old Apollonius,” the type of a hateful rationality that dispelled the magic vision (mentis gratissimus error [a most gratifying error of mind]) and 

made 
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade?

The romanticist is ready to fly into the arms even of a false enchantress rather than submit to “cold philosophy.” Any vision, though it be the vision of vertigo, or delirium, or intoxication, the mere fumes of opium or alcohol, is to be courted if only it bring oblivion of prose. 

Voltaire says that imagination is not to be esteemed when it is divorced from rationality and judgment. For example, fairy tales are immensely imaginative, yet we despise them because of their lack of “order and good-sense.” Not many years later Novalis proclaimed fairy tales to be the highest form of art just because they lacked logical coherency, and converted the world into a ‘‘magic dream-picture, a musical fantasy.” (3) In thus sacrificing the probable so completely to the wonderful, the romanticist is naturally led to exalt childhood. Dr. Johnson says that wonder is “a pause of reason.” But for the child it is not even a pause of reason since reason can scarcely be said to have begun. Wherever children are, says Novalis, there is the golden age. For the child, life is still an adventure, a succession of beautiful moments each independent of the last, a series of ever fresh surprises; childhood is the age of unreflective happiness, of vivid and spontaneous sensation,—

the hour 
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. 

The romanticist, we must admit, is often happily inspired by this poetry of childhood. Rousseau was not only before everything else an apostle of spontaneity, but, unlike many other apostles, he actually achieved what he preached. Some of the pages in which he celebrates his escape from artificiality and the “meddling intellect,” and describes his Arcadian revery close to the bosom of Nature, have still an incomparable freshness and charm. No verses again are more inevitable than those of Wordsworth at his best. “Nature,” as Matthew Arnold says, “seems to take the pen out of his hand and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.” Some of the shorter poems of Blake, to take another example almost at random, are admirable for a naïve and childlike wonder. At the same time we cannot scrutinize too closely this craving for a renascence of wonder; for as I have already said, instead of being a sign of real naturalness and simplicity, it often marks the last stage of over-refinement. Walt Whitman, for instance, so far from being the poet of natural and simple people, is rather the poet of the over-civilized. The more one considers the question, indeed, the wider appears the gap between the primitivism of the Rousseauist and the genuinely primitive traits that reveal themselves in the childhood of either the individual or the race. Romantic primitivism is the source of our modern confusion of the arts, as well as of many other confusions, and so we shall need to consider certain aspects of it carefully, though without any attempt to be exhaustive. 

In the first place the child is not self-conscious. The romanticist on the contrary, though willing to purchase his renascence of wonder by an eclipse of reason, finds that the reason often refuses to be eclipsed in spite of his efforts to drug and narcotize it. It looks down mockingly on the part of the self that is trying to become naïve and primitive, and there arises that conflict of the head and the heart that assumes so many forms in the romantic movement from Rousseau down, one form being the self-parody of so-called romantic irony. Romantic irony will, of course, be at its maximum in a writer like Heine, who is at once intensely sentimental and keenly intellectual Childhood moreover is the period of play, and so the romanticists proclaimed that art and literature should not accept the discipline of a definite purpose but should also be merely forms of play. (4) But the romantic primitivist is curiously different in his ways of playing from the genuine child. Children’s games have rules, some of them in fact being about as highly regulated as seventeenth-century tragedy. By observing these outer forms children do homage in their way to the god Terminus. Children and savages indeed are in many respects the most conventional of beings. The romantic primitivist on the other hand is inspired above all by the desire to escape from the conventional. In dealing with the arts and literature especially he would discard all the old formal distinctions, and then instead of seeking for a higher discipline would rest in the delightful sense of having got rid of all boundaries and limitations whatsoever. 

“It is the beginning of all poetry,” says Friedrich Schlegel, ‘‘to abolish the laws and method of the rationally proceeding reason, and to plunge us once more into the ravishing confusions of fantasy, the original chaos of human nature.” Things are no longer seen analytically, “in disconnection dull and spiritless,” but in a sort of emotional unity, where everything is so bound together that when one sense receives a vivid impression the other senses thrill sympathetically; where all frontiers vanish away and all firm outlines melt together in vague and voluptuous revery. Let us listen once more to Novalis, who, it will be remembered, set up the fairy tale as the canon of art: “One can imagine tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems which are melodious and full of beautiful words but destitute of meaning or connection; at most comprehensible stanzas here and there, like fragments of perfectly unrelated things. This true poetry can of course have only a symbolical significance and an indirect effect like music.” This passage does not describe the kind of art that will ever appeal to any normal child; it does describe remarkably what many nineteenth-century artists, from Novalis himself down to the French symbolists, have actually attempted.

This type of art may be defined as illusion for the sake of illusion, a mere Nepenthe [a drug of forgetfulness in Greek mythology] of the spirit, a means not of becoming reconciled to reality but of escaping from it. Yet many of the writers and artists who thus take flight into a pays des chimères would at the same time pose as mystics or Platonic idealists. In fact, it is almost normal for the romanticist, on breaking away from the authority of Aristotle and the neo-classical rules, to put himself under the patronage of Plato. For example, A. W. Schlegel sets out to show how very much ‘‘the anatomical ideas which have been stamped as rules are below the essential requisites of poetry”; how, permitting as they do of an appeal to the understanding only, they have entirely missed the nature of true poetical illusion; and Schlegel gives what is in many respects an admirable account of this true illusion. “It is,” he says, “a waking dream to which we voluntarily surrender ourselves.” He then proceeds to score both Aristotle and Lessing for not having done justice to this emotional factor in art, for having been analytical where they should have been imaginative, and adds: “Were I to select a guide from among the ancient philosophers it should undoubtedly be Plato, who acquired the idea of the beautiful, not by dissection which can never give it, but by intuitive inspiration,” (5) etc. The passage is typical. We are, in fact, forced to inquire whether the romantic writers were true Platonists, just as we were led to inquire whether the neo-classic writers were true Aristotelians. This inquiry is essential to our subject and deserves to be treated in a separate chapter. 

[Concluded.]

(1) Cf. for the corresponding idea in painting, Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe: “A quoi se réduisent toutes les règles de la peinture? à tromper les yeux par la ressemblance, à nous faire croire que l’objet est réel, tandis que ce n’est qu’une image. Cela est évident.” [What do all the rules of painting boil down to? to fool the eyes with resemblance, to make us believe that the object is real, while it is only an image. This is clear.] 

(2) Confessions, 2e partie, livre ix (1756). 

(3) R. Haym has brought together and discussed the utterances of Novalis on this subject (Die romantische Schule). 

(4) The most important expression of the play theory of art is found in Schiller’s Esthetic Letters, a work written under the combined influence of Rousseau and Kant and of Rousseau through Kant. 

(5) Dramatic Art and Literature, Lecture xvii. Schlegel had a rather unexpected predecessor in his ideas about true illusion—Dr. Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare). Schlegel makes proper acknowledgment to Johnson.