The New Laokoon (Part 13)

(Pictured: Richard Wagner.) I am happy to present the thirteenth 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 

Great poetry, as Longinus would say, does not act by persuasion but by ecstasy; otherwise Bacon’s theory has evident points of similarity with that of Joubert. Perhaps there are no better examples of the mingling of illusion and insight that Joubert requires than some of the “myths” of Plato. Plato indeed is not only one of the most imaginative and spontaneous of writers, but his spontaneity is not a denial but rather a completion of the work of reason. Just as we have distinguished therefore between the Platonic unity of insight and the unity of instinct of which the Rousseauist dreams, so we may contrast with the spontaneity of Rousseau a higher spontaneity where the powers of illusion are in the service of the reason and not of the senses. This whole problem of illusion may very well turn out to be the central problem of art. The neo-classical theorist affected unduly the rational element in art, and allowed as little as he could for the immeasurable potentialities of illusion. The romanticists have given us plenty of illusion, but illusion divorced from rational purpose, and only too often a false illusion of the flesh. Rousseau, as we have seen, was ready to take flight from the real world into a world of pure illusion, but his dream-world as he describes it is in some ways only too reminiscent of the earth. He surrounds himself in his pays des chimères [land of chimeras] with a ‘‘seraglio of houris,” [a harem of seductive women, a houri being one of the nymphs of the Mahometan paradise] and these voluptuous visions bear the features of women he has actually known. His ‘‘blood takes fire at all this impassioned recollection. We evidently have here the very opposite of what Bacon desires.* Rousseau’s imagination has contracted a confederacy with his affections against the reason, and throws its golden glamour not only over present but also over past sensation,—a refinement that scarcely entered into Bacon’s reckoning. Rousseau indeed perfected the Epicureanism that consists in intensifying and prolonging enjoyment by revery. If he can thus fuse soul and sense he is careless of the “future and sum of time.” Rousseau himself speaks of “covering with a delicious veil the aberrations of the senses”; (1) and in the very passage where Byron calls Rousseau a lover of ideal Beauty he writes that he knew 

How to make madness beautiful, and threw 
O’er erring thoughts and deeds a heavenly hue. 

This use of imaginative illusion in making madness beautiful would, if traced down, bring us at last to what has been termed the phosphorescent slime of some of our modern decadents. The art of giving a heavenly hue to materialistic impulse assumes many aspects in the sham idealisms and pseudo-spiritualities of the nineteenth century; we have ‘‘mystical” and ‘‘Platonic” raptures that land one at last in a mire of sensuality; effusions of fine sentiments about brotherly love that are only a specious mask for envy and hatred of riches and success; “new thought” that is so lofty as to deny even the existence of matter and yet turns out somehow to be interested only in the preservation of physical health, etc.

But to return to the literary and artistic problem. The tendency I have just been describing seems a rather strange concomitant of Rousseau’s theory of the primitive and the childlike, yet such in nearly every case it can be shown to be. The breaking down of all barriers and boundaries in order to achieve the emotional and instinctive unity that the child enjoys, and that primitive man is supposed to have enjoyed, always results in a certain mingling of the flesh and spirit though it may not always go so far as what the Germans expressively but disagreeably call priapism of the soul. The art that is content to guard its own boundaries, the Rousseauist would say, is still caught in a hard formalism, and has not yet felt the expansive power of the primal love. Possibly this whole side of romanticism finds its best expression in Richard Wagner and his theory of the music-drama. According to Wagner pure music and pure poetry, that is music and poetry that keep each within its own confines, are alike unavailing. They become effective only when they are rid of an unprofitable restraint and self-limitation and melt together in a mystical erotic embrace. Poetry freed from clogging intellectualism “sinks down with his bride (Music) and learns the hidden wonders of the deep,” “knows the Unconscious, the Instinctive, the Purely-human,” and at last becomes truly creative. (2) ‘‘The offspring of this marriage of Poetry with Music, of word-speech and tone-speech, the embodied love-moment of both arts” is verse-melody; (3) and this supreme fruit of the union of Music and Poetry is only a return to the primitive kinship of the two arts, a recovery of the primitive melody (Urmelodie). (4)

In short, nothing could be conceived more Rousseauistic than Wagner’s theory of opera. It is Rousseauistic not only in the general conception that men are to meet, not in a common discipline but a common sympathy, that love is to triumph over restraint, and that in so far as men attain this emotional union they are merely reverting to a pristine felicity: it is Rousseauistic also in the specific application of this conception to music. According to Rousseau, language and music were primitively one, and this primitive speech-song was at the same time poetry. (5) The period of the unconscious, of confused emotional unity, is to be preferred to the period of clear and conscious intellectual distinctions. Like Rousseau and Wordsworth, Wagner is pervaded by the fear of the meddling intellect as being fatal to spontaneity. 

But we should already know what to think of the claims of such a point of view to be either mystical or Platonic. The higher unity and spontaneity of the Platonist is associated, as I have already said, with a concentration of the will, with a sense of awe, and elevation, and restraint, and not with either an expansion or a titillation of the sensibility. The Platonist does not confound the planes of being, and in particular is open to the charge of separating too sharply rather than of running together the planes of flesh and spirit. Goethe, who in spite of Napoleon’s remark frequently shows himself a partisan of the genre tranché [the clear and distinct genre], says that there are but two legitimate kinds of music, the kind that impels one to dance and the kind that inspires one to pray. What the modern symbolists and decadents have admired in Wagner on the other hand is a mixture of the sacred and profane elements,—what one of them has termed a “voluptuous religiosity.” 

* From our previous post, Part 12, Bacon is quoted as follows: “Reason, 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) Nouvelle Héloïse, 1^e partie, lettre 1 . 

(2) See Ellis’s translation of Wagner’s prose works, vol. ii (Opera and Drama), pp. 201, 286, 352, 353, 356. 

(3) Ibid., p. 313. 

(4) Opera and Drama, pp. 282, 293. 

(5) See Essai sur l’ Origine des langues, Rousseau has even anticipated in this essay Wagner’s attempt to foist primitivism upon the Greeks. I am not claiming a direct influence of Rousseau upon Wagner. One intermediary between Rousseau and Wagner was E. T. A. Hoffmann (cf. Oxford History of Music, vol. vi, pp. 351, 352). For Hoffmann and Rousseau, see p. 176,