The New Laokoon (Part 12)

(Pictured: Joseph Joubert.) I am happy to present the twelfth 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 V (Continued)

Platonists and Pseudo-Platonists 

A man becomes un-Platonic and pseudo-mystical in direct ratio to his contempt for rationality as compared with the unconscious, the spontaneous, the instinctive. The speeches of all the sages, says Maeterlinck [Count Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian playwright, symbolist poet, and essayist; 1862-1949], are outweighed by the unconscious wisdom of the passing child. “L’enfant qui se tait est mille fois plus sage que Marc Aurele qui parle.” [“The child who is silent is a thousand times wiser than Marcus Aurelius who speaks.”] This is not the utterance of a genuine mystic, but of a Rousseauist who pays to what is below the reason the homage that is due only to what is above it; who with all his glorification of the child does not attain the truly childlike, but merely the confused revery and sense of strangeness that come from emancipating the subliminal self from rational control. Insight does not thus confound the subconscious with the superconscious and abolish all the distinctions of the intellect in the process. It draws with special sharpness the very line that the Rousseauist would obliterate—that between man and nature. So far from encouraging a return to nature, it rather makes one feel, as Arnold puts it, that man and nature can never be fast friends. The more mystical the insight becomes, the stronger this feeling is likely to be. It may very well lead to an attitude toward outer nature, that is not simply indifferent but ascetic; and this of course is the opposite excess from that of the Rousseauist. “There is surely a piece of divinity within us,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun.” The new unity that the sentimental naturalist or Rousseauist proclaims assumes the exact opposite. According to the Rousseauist, we should overcome the sense of the separateness of man and nature of which Sir Thomas Browne speaks, and arrive rather at a ‘‘sense sublime” of their common essence, of a something, as Wordsworth goes onto say, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and in the mind of man.”

Formerly not merely the Platonist and the mystic, but the ordinary humanist, looked on outer nature as alien, or at least irrelevant, to the highest interests of man. Indeed, Plato himself has rendered admirably at the beginning of the “Phaedrus” the humanistic attitude toward nature,—an attitude as far removed from indifference or ascetic distrust as it is from the worship of the Rousseauist. Socrates, we there read, so far from looking on books as a “vain and endless strife,” had allowed Phaedrus to entice him out into the country by the hope of reading a book, much as “the hungry flocks are led on by those who shake leaves or some fruit before them.” But once in the country Socrates feels so keenly and describes so happily its freshness and charm, that Phaedrus expresses surprise that he does not come oftener; and Socrates replies: ‘‘The fields and trees will not teach me anything but men in the city do.” If we compare the Platonic Socrates with the Wordsworthian sage whose “daily teachers had been woods and rills,” we shall perceive the gap between the humanist of the old type and the modern sentimental naturalist. 

We have already seen how easily this humanistic point of view may be exaggerated. Lessing’s attitude toward landscape-painting is an example. For the purposes of art at least Lessing was not willing to grant that the landscape is a state of the soul. For Lessing, as for every true classicist, the highest thing in art is the plot or design and the subordinating of everything else to its orderly development. There is evidently an antinomy between this concentration of the will on a definite end, and the mood of melting into nature that has been so cultivated by our modern romanticists. What Hazlitt says of Raphael applies equally to Lessing: “Raphael not only could not paint a landscape; he could not paint people in a landscape. . . . His figures have always an in-door look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary, dramatic character, arising from their own passions, or a watchfulness of those of others, and want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements. He has nothing romantic about him.” 

This interpenetration of nature and human nature, this running together in revery, not merely of the different planes of being but, as we shall see presently, of the different sense-impressions on the physical plane, is the point of departure of all our distinctively modern confusions. The refusal to sacrifice the firm distinctions established by the intellect and enforced by the will between the planes of being is in general the chief difference between the Platonist and the Rousseauist. This difference comes out with special clearness at the very point where the Rousseauist usually claims to be most Platonic,—in his conception of love. Byron says that Rousseau was a lover of ‘‘ideal Beauty,” and one immediately thinks of Plato. But let us not be the dupes of fine phrases. In his dealings with love as with everything else Plato invariably shows himself what Wordsworth would call an “officious slave” of the “false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” He distinguishes between an earthly and an Uranian Aphrodite, and while recognizing that the first may be a stepping-stone to the second, never actually confounds the two. Every one, on the other hand, must have been struck with the indiscriminate use of the word love in the romantic movement. Alfred de Musset, for example, does not draw any clear line between his love for God and his love for a grisette [a pretty or flirtatious French working-class girl]. If any individual romanticist escapes from this error, he has to thank the coldness of his temperament or the accidents of his training and environment rather than his philosophy. 

The biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti says that Rossetti’s message to the world is summed up in such lines as—

Lady, I fain would tell how evermore 
Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor 
Thee from myself, neither our love from God. 

So far from separating the earthly and heavenly loves Rossetti evidently mixes them in one intoxicating brew. The ultimate origins of this modern mixture are doubtless mediaeval, but for the forms of it that bear upon our subject we do not need to go behind Rousseau. Joubert is probably the first to point out how pervasive in Rousseau is this particular confusion of the planes of being: “Rousseau had a voluptuous mind. In his writings the soul is always mingled with the body and never distinct from it. No one has ever rendered more vividly the impression of the flesh touching the spirit and the delights of their marriage.” [Joseph Joubert, French moralist and essayist; 1754-1824.]

Now Joubert remarks elsewhere that spirit and matter can come into relation with one another only through the medium of illusion; and he goes on to say some of the most penetrating things that have been said by any writer about the role of imaginative illusion in mediating between the lower and the higher nature of man. Joubert, we should add, was a genuine Platonist in an age when pseudo-Platonism was rife, though at times he tends to fall into excessive subtlety, to be too vaporous and ethereal. Joubert, then, conceives it to be the role of the imagination, mediating as it does between sense and reason, to lend its magic and glamour to the latter, to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion over some essential truth. Perhaps this is as fair a statement as can be made of the aim of the highest art, though it may evidently become a pretext for falling into a lifeless allegory. [1] The imagination must be really free and spontaneous, and the truth itself must not be too precisely formulated, if we are to arrive at that vital fusing of illusion and insight with the accompanying sense of infinitude that is found in the true symbol. 

This alliance of the imagination and reason, of l’illusion et la sagesse, is something that transcends all rule, and is indeed so difficult that it has seemed even to great thinkers impossible. We have already mentioned Pascal’s attack on the imagination. The imagination, he says, is ‘‘a mistress of error and falsity,” “a proud power hostile to reason,” so reinforcing with its illusions the affections and impressions of sense that reason will inevitably succumb, unless it has the aid of a sort of deus ex machina in the form of a divine revelation. This theory reveals of course profound insight into the ordinary facts of human nature, and goes vastly deeper than any idle chatter about art for art’s sake. Yet it has in it something morose and ascetic, inasmuch as it seems to deny that alliance between illusion and rationality,  or, in Aristotelian parlance, between the wonderful  and the probable, that is actually found in the greatest poetry, pagan as well as Christian. In any case the theory does not hold out much hope for the modern man. He is likely to find more to his purpose in the remarkable theory of the imagination outlined by Bacon in his “Advancement of Learning.” He is discussing the rôle of rhetoric and rhetorical persuasion in a scheme of studies. “Reason,” he says, “would become captive and servile if eloquence of persuasion did not practice and win the imagination from the affection’s part, and contract a confederacy between the reason and imagination against the affections. For the affections themselves carry ever an appetite to good as the reason doth; the difference is that the affection beholdeth merely the present; reason beholdeth the future and sum of time; and therefore, the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth.” 

[1] This was the frequent result of a somewhat similar view of art in the Middle Ages. Cf. Petrarch’s phrase ; Veritatem rerum pulchris velaminibus adornare [To adorn the truth of things with beautiful veils].