The New Laokoon (Part 15)

(Pictured: Diderot.) I am happy to present the fifteenth post (inaugurating Chapter VI) 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 VI

Suggestiveness in Romantic Art 

1 Word Painting

CHAPTER VI

Suggestiveness in Romantic Art 

1. Word-Painting

According to neo-classic theory, as we have seen, the poet is to be a painter of things outside himself,—in other words, he is to be purely objective. Homer, says Aristotle, does not entertain us with his own person, but is more than any other poet an imitator. Now if the poet is thus to imitate the outer world he must have wide knowledge of it. “The sovereign poem” (i. e., the epic), says Muzio, (1) “is a painting of the universe”; and the epic poet should therefore be universal. According to the romanticist, on the other hand, all that the poet, even the epic poet, needs to possess is feeling. What, for example, was Lamartine’s equipment for writing epics? We may infer from the verse of Sainte-Beuve: 

Lamartine ignorant qui ne sait que son âme [Untaught Lamartine, who only knows his soul],—

and “soul” in romantic parlance we should remember is about synonymous with a gush of sensibility. 

The theory that would divert the poet from himself, and make of him a painter of human actions, has its advantages, especially for such forms as the drama or epic. There are evident dangers in taking the next step and dealing in this detached and objective way with words, in looking on them merely as the colors with which the poet paints his pictures. Lessing, who refuted the confusion that had arisen from this assimilation of words to colors, does not himself escape the charge of treating words too objectively. Words do indeed follow one another in time, but not in quite so inert and passive a way as Lessing’s theory seems to imply; or, rather, they are inert and passive only in proportion as they are employed unimaginatively. But imagination may transform them, play about them like a lambent flame, (2) and infuse into them a new and active potency. Only three years after the publication of the “Laokoon,” Herder pointed out the inadequacy of Lessing’s way of looking on words. Herder’s point of view is what we should call distinctively romantic. ‘‘The essence of poetry,” says Herder, “is in the power that cleaves to words, a magic power that works upon my soul through fantasy and recollection.” (3) And he regrets that Lessing has not put “working on our souls or energy,” (4) at the very centre of poetry, in contrasting it with painting. He had learned especially from Homer, Herder continues, that poetry does not act upon the ear through a mere succession of sounds, but energizes and stimulates into synthetic activity the inner powers of the spirit, above all, the imagination. Herder, in short, makes a plea for what we should call suggestiveness. 

In his praise of Homer, Herder may have been influenced by a work that exercised also an important influence on Lessing,—Diderot’s “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb” (1751). This work of Diderot’s is the kind one might expect from a man who lived at the “mercy of his diaphragm.” There is a profuse but somewhat turbid flow of ideas. We seem to be listening to several men each presenting a different point of view; at one moment to an admirer of Father Castel (5) and his color-clavichord; at another to a keen analyst who is striving to set objective bounds to the arts; still again to a romanticist who is interested rather in the way the arts may run together emotionally. Lessing has turned to account the keenly analytical passages and neglected the rest. This is worth noting because the Germans in general have greatly exaggerated the kinship between Diderot and Lessing. The prevailing point of view in Lessing, as I have already said, is humanistic, in Diderot, naturalistic and humanitarian. Diderot is already on his way to all the confusions of humanistic values to which naturalism in either its scientific or sentimental form has given rise. Both as a scientist and as an impressionist, Diderot is interested in the mysterious intercommunication of the senses in the depths of individual feeling. He asks of one person: “Had there grown up in the long run a sort of correspondence between two different senses?” (6) He says that the blind professor of Mathematics, Saunderson, voyait par la peau [saw with his skin]. (7) He mentions another blind person who could tell the colors of different cloths by the touch, (8) still another who distinguished the sound of voices as ‘‘blond or brunette.” (9) Diderot’s own impressionism arises from an emotional unrestraint that spurns all boundaries. “The very essence of Diderot’s criticism and of his whole understanding of art,” says M. Faguet,“ is the confusion of the genres. . . . If inclined to be a bit malicious one might say he was a good dramatic critic in the Salon and a good art critic in dealing with the drama.” (10) 

And M. Faguet goes on to praise Diderot and point out the strength as well as the weakness of his method. But both his strength and his weakness are equally remote from the strength and weakness of Lessing. Indeed, in the very pages that have furnished such important hints to Lessing, especially as to the importance of choosing the right moment in plastic art, Diderot discusses Homer in a way that anticipates not Lessing but Herder. Diderot is struck by the magic power that Homer and other great poets can confer on the slightest words and phrases so that they reverberate in the depths of our sensibility. He is interested in Homer not as a portrayer of actions but as a suggester of images. He proclaims that, though poetry cannot paint to the eye, it can and must, if it is to rise above prose, paint to the imagination. You may, he says, have clearness, purity, precision; you may show taste in your choice of words and in the careful rounding of your periods,—with all this you will have attained a good prose style, but still remain far short of poetry. “There passes into the speech of the poet a spirit that moves and vivifies its every syllable. What is this spirit? I have sometimes felt its presence, but all I know about it is that through it things are at once spoken and pictured; that at the same time that the understanding grasps them, the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, the ear hears them, and discourse is no longer a linking together of vigorous phrases that set forth the thought nobly and forcibly, but a tissue of closely crowded hieroglyphs that paint it. I might say that in this sense all poetry is emblematic.” (11) (Nowadays we should say symbolical.) 

This is that true poetical painting which Lessing would probably not have denied, but of which he has certainly said very little in the “Laokoon.” Homer especially is praised by Diderot for the number of words and phrases of magic suggestiveness that he contains,—words and phrases that are a ‘‘hieroglyphic painting,” that is, painting not to the eye but to the imagination.” (12) Diderot admits that this art of painting to the imagination is infinitely difficult: the hieroglyphs acquire their suggestiveness, as he surmises, through certain subtle combinations of long and short syllables in Greek and Latin and through certain collocations of vowels and consonants in the modern languages. These hieroglyphs (and therefore true poetry) are nearly always untranslatable. They require in the person who feels them something of the same poetical spirit that inspired them; to the unpoetical they are meaningless. 

An interesting comparison may be made between Diderot’s theory of suggestive word-painting in poetry and the theory of suggestiveness in a treatise of Rousseau’s I have already mentioned,—the “Essay on the Origin of Language.” (13) This work is perhaps less rich in ideas than Diderot’s “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” but it is also less confused. In the act of composition at least Rousseau did not live at the “mercy of his diaphragm.” In short, he is a great writer and not merely an improviser of genius. Now in this particular essay Rousseau divides as with a knife the old from the new. He repudiates the pseudo-classical efforts to get with one art the effects of another, and at the same time indicates the true means by which this double effect may be attained. The arts should not be blended outwardly and formally as Father Castel had done in his effort to paint music, but they may be blended emotionally. In attacking Castel, Rousseau anticipates the central generalization of the “Laokoon.” “I have seen,” (14) he says, “that famous clavichord on which, as it was claimed, music was produced with colors. But a man shows a very poor knowledge of the workings of natural law who does not perceive that colors are effective in virtue of their permanence and sounds through their successiveness. . . . Thus every sense has its own peculiar field. The field of music is time, that of painting, space. To multiply simultaneous sounds, or to make colors follow one another in single file, is to change their economy, is to put the eye in the place of the ear and the ear in the place of the eye,” etc. 

[To be continued.]

(1) Arte poetica (Venice, 1551). 

(2) Cf. Joubert: “Les mots s’illuminent quand le doigt du poète y fait passer son phosphore [The words light up when the poet’s finger passes his phosphorus through them].” 

(3) Erstes krit. Wäldchen (ed. Suphan), p. 139. 

(4) Ibid., p. 157. 

(5) Oeuvres de Diderot (Éd. Assezat), I, p. 356. 

(6) Ibid., p. 339. 

(7) Ibid., p. 306. 

(8) Oeuvres de Diderot (Éd. Assezat), I, p. 332. 

(9) Ibid., p. 334. 

(10) Article “Diderot” in his Dix-Huitième Siècle. 

(11) Op. cit., p. 374. 

(12) Oeuvres de Diderot (Éd. Assezat), I, p. 377. 

(13) The exact date of the composition of this work is uncertain, though scarcely later than 1754. It circulated more or less in manuscript, but was not actually published until 1781. 

(14) For Rousseau’s personal relations with Castel, see Confessions, livre vii (1742).