The New Laokoon (Part 14)

(Pictured: Charles Beaudelaire.) I am happy to present the fourteenth post (the brief penultimate post of Chapter V) 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 (Concluded)

Platonists and Pseudo-Platonists 

Hitherto in this chapter I have been striving to distinguish between the Platonic as opposed to what I have variously called the pseudo-Platonic or Rousseauistic or romantic point of view. My use of the word romantic has doubtless caused irritation. It requires courage in any one who aspires to be looked on as a careful thinker to use the word at all. Some one indeed has suggested that it would be a philanthropic undertaking to found a society for suppressing the word romantic entirely; a still more philanthropic undertaking, in my opinion, would be to found a society for its more accurate definition. The confusion that has grown up about the word is largely to be ascribed to the romanticists themselves and their dislike of the “false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.” To abolish the word altogether would indeed be about as intelligent as to abolish the general denomination “bird” because of certain differences that exist between, let us say, an ostrich and a wren. Now I not only would admit that certain varieties of romanticists are at least as different from other varieties as an ostrich from a wren, but actually need to insist on some of these differences in the interest of my present subject. 

But before coming to the traits by which romanticists differ, we may appropriately ask what is the trait they all have in common. An Aristotelian would reply that this common trait is a love of the wonderful rather than the probable. A craving for the marvelous, for adventure and surprise, exists, as Aristotle says, to some extent in all men. A man’s temper grows romantic in proportion as he is interested in the marvelous, in adventure and surprise, rather than in tracing cause and effect. The man of the Middle Ages was often romantic in this sense: he was haunted by the idea of adventure, the rare and unusual event. In its extreme form this pursuit of adventure resulted in something similar to what we have in Don Quixote, in an actual clash between the logic of dreamland and the logic of every-day fact. 

Whenever the love of adventure is keen, and the analytical and logical faculties are either dormant or occupied elsewhere, art may very well come to be looked on as a pleasant vagabondage, rather than as a working toward a definite goal in accordance, as Aristotle would say, “with probability or necessity.” And in direct proportion as men look on art in this way, they are likely to be indifferent to the clearly defined type; in the drama, for example, they are likely to be tolerant of more mixtures than those enumerated by Polonius,—‘‘tragedy comedy, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,” etc. Now the English have always been imaginative rather than formal or logical in their art and literature, and this is no doubt one reason why the English, as compared with the Greeks or French, have been careless of the genre tranché. 

Plainly, however, this indifference to the clearly defined type is something very different from the mixtures and confusions we find in that side of the romantic movement associated with Rousseau. Indeed, this Rousseauistic romanticism is in some respects so distinct from other varieties that we may partially sympathize with those who regret that it could not have received another name. The Rousseauist resembles other romanticists in being adventurous rather than purposeful; but his adventure, his thirst for novelty, for the thrill of wonder and surprise, has assumed a new form: it is not so much a quest or a dreaming of the rare and unusual event as of the rare and unusual sensation; it is less an attitude of the spirit than a state of the sensibility, or rather the spirit itself is so used as to throw its halo over the impressions of sense, invest them with imaginative illusion, and give them a sort of infinite reverberation. Baudelaire says that he attains through odors the feeling of infinitude that others attain through the suggestive power of sound. His soul “swims” (1) on perfumes. 

But we have already spoken of this art of mingling flesh and spirit in revery. Whatever else may be thought of it, it has certainly enriched and deepened the life of the senses. But the danger of the art is already visible in its first great adept. Hume writes of Rousseau: “He has only felt during the whole course of his life; and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of: but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who were stript not only of his clothes, but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements.” (2) 

This almost pathological keenness of sensation, this hyperaesthesia as it may be termed, is, if we may judge from the confessions of many who have possessed it, a somewhat doubtful gift of the gods. At any rate, it marks off its possessors from the other types of romanticist. Keats, for example, is sometimes spoken of as an Elizabethan born out of due season; but Keats regrets his “horrid morbidity of temperament,” (3) and I for one do not believe that the Elizabethans suffered from morbidity (4) of just that kind. The great romanticists of that age were not, like so many of this modern brand, mere human sensitive-plants, recoiling from the rough and tumble of the world. They were not, as Coleridge complains of himself, “beset with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action.” They were interested in actual adventure, caring little for the mysterious dalliance of soul and sense in the tower of ivory. 

The modern school, on the other hand, is often more interested in this dalliance than it is in action of either the romantic or classical types,—in other words, in action that is either primarily adventurous or primarily purposeful. The highest literary and artistic ambition of the school is not so much to paint action as to suggest revery. We have tried to show that this revery is a product of the primitivism of Rousseau, of his attempt to revive the child-like and the spontaneous by a return to “nature,” and that in any case it should not be regarded as either Platonic or mystical. After all these preliminary explanations and definitions we should now be prepared to enter the romantic palace of dreams and to make a closer study of the magic secrets of suggestiveness that have been practiced by its occupants during the past century. 

(1) Cf. Shelley’s Alastor: “Soul-dissolving perfumes.” 

(2) Letter to Dr. Blair, 25 March, 1766. 

(3) I do not mean to disparage Keats by what I say about him here and elsewhere. I believe he had a vein of essential manliness that was a counterpoise to the “horrid morbidity.” As a matter of fact, the Rousseauistic temperament was far more marked in Shelley than in Keats. 

(4) Of course some of the later Elizabethans (e. g., Ford) suffered from their own type of morbidity.