The New Laokoon (Part 16)

(Pictured: Titian.) I am happy to present the sixteenth 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 VI

Suggestiveness in Romantic Art 

1 Word Painting (Continued.)

The pictures that music cannot paint directly it can however paint suggestively. “One of the great advantages of the musician,” says Rousseau, “is to be able to paint things that are inaudible, whereas it is impossible for the painter to depict things that are invisible. (1) And the greatest miracle of an art that acts only through movement is its power to present images of everything, even the image of repose. Sleep, the calm of night, solitude, silence itself, enter into the pictures of music.” Music, Rousseau goes on to say, achieves these paintings, ‘‘by arousing through one sense emotions similar to those that are aroused by another, . . . by substituting for the inanimate image of an object the emotions that its actual image stirs in the heart of the beholder. Music can render not merely the agitation of the sea, the roaring of flames in a conflagration, the flowing of brooks, the falling of rain, or swollen torrents; but it can paint the horror of a frightful desert, darken the walls of a dungeon, quiet the tempest, make the air clear and calm, and diffuse from the orchestra a new freshness over the groves. It does not represent these objects directly, but awakens in the soul the same sentiments we experience on seeing them.”

The theory of suggestiveness is already fairly complete in such passages as those I have just been quoting from Rousseau and Diderot. Like Diderot and Rousseau, and unlike Lessing, the romantic critics are going to be less interested in the analytical and formal bounding and delimiting of the arts than in the new synthesis,—in the way the arts may melt together and interpenetrate in emotion. The following passage from the “Athenäum” is typical for Germany: ‘‘We should once more try to bring the arts closer together and seek for transitions from one to the other. Statues perhaps may quicken into pictures, pictures become poems, poems music, and (who knows?) in like manner stately church music may once more rise heavenward as a cathedral.” (2)

In England Coleridge and Hazlitt write very much to the purpose on suggestiveness, though in substance they do not go much beyond Rousseau and Diderot. Coleridge begins by repudiating the kind of word-painting that Lessing has condemned in the “Laokoon.” “The presence of genius,” he says, “is not shown in elaborating a picture: we have had many specimens of this sort of work in modern poems, where all is so dutchified, if I may use the word, by the most minute touches, that the reader naturally asks why words, and not painting, are used. . . . The power of poetry is, by a single word, perhaps, to instil energy into the mind, which compels the imagination to produce the picture. Prospero tells Miranda,— 

One midnight, 
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open 
The gates of Milan; and i’ the dead of darkness, 
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence 
Me, and thy crying self. 

Here, by introducing a single happy epithet, ‘crying,’ in the last line, a complete picture is presented to the mind, and in the production of such pictures the power of genius consists.” (3) Elsewhere he connects his theory of suggestive word-painting with his distinction between the imagination and fancy. “The poet,” he says, “should paint to the imagination not to the fancy, and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties.” After citing an example of the former mode of poetic painting from Milton he adds: “This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia [common footsteps] of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penna duplex [double feather], the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound,” (4) etc. *

Hazlitt arrives at conclusions very similar to those of Coleridge in his essay on “Gusto,” though he applies them especially to painting. Hazlitt sums up in the word gusto what we should variously call vitality, expression, suggestiveness. Gusto is the ‘‘inner principle,” the living passion, the subtle pervading power that overleaps all formal barriers and acts synthetically on the senses and imagination of the beholder. In landscape-painting, as appears from a passage I have already quoted, the synthesis is between man and outer nature. “In a word,” says Hazlitt in language closely parallel to that of Rousseau, “gusto in painting is where the impressions made on one sense excites by affinity those of another.” However, in attributing so much suggestiveness, even musical suggestiveness, to painting, Hazlitt goes beyond Rousseau. For example, he writes that ‘‘Titian’s landscapes have a prodigious gusto both in the coloring and forms. We shall never forget one that we saw many years ago in the Orleans Gallery of Actaeon hunting. It had a brown, mellow, autumnal look. The sky was of the color of stone. The winds seemed to sing through the rustling branches of the trees, and already you might hear the twanging of bows resound through the tangled mazes of the wood.” Of Claude’s landscapes Hazlitt complains that “they give more of nature as cognizable by one sense alone [than those of any other painter, but] they do not interpret one sense by another; . . . that is, his eye wanted imagination, it did not strongly sympathize with his other faculties. He saw the landscape but he did not feel it,” etc. 

In this passage Hazlitt is estimating Claude, not objectively by his intellectual breadth and excellent design, but from the point of view of a certain subtle emotional appeal. Under this romantic influence the artist comes to be chiefly esteemed, not for the careful and coherent working out of a rational whole, but for his power to enthrall the individual sensibility. Instead of being an imitator in the Aristotelian sense he becomes a “weaver of magic and spells.” Art and literature pass more and more from the domain of action into the region of revery. Art is reduced to suggestion, and suggestion is defined as an ‘‘attenuated hypnosis.” (5) In the words of M. Bergson: “Art aims to lull to sleep the active powers of our personality and bring us to a state of perfect docility in which we realize the idea that is suggested to us, in which we sympathize with the sentiment expressed. In the methods of art we find under a refined and in some sort spiritualized form the methods by which hypnosis is ordinarily obtained.” (6) 

Suggestive power, of the kind M. Bergson describes, should indeed be at the artist’s command. Unfortunately the romanticist only too often does not go any further. He rests in the hypnosis for the sake of the hypnosis, or, as I have said elsewhere, in illusion for the sake of illusion. He is interested in art only as it is related to the senses and not as it is related to the intellect and character and will. The pure aestheticism of Keats was perhaps a legitimate reaction from the dryness and didacticism of certain pseudo-classicists, who, so far from knowing how to act suggestively on several senses at once, did not even know how to make a right appeal to any one sense. But to accept this aestheticism as final would be to turn poetry into a sort of lotus-eating. The great poets of the past have practiced suggestiveness, but only as one element of their art and with infinitely greater sobriety than our modern romanticists. It is doubtful if any one of them can rival in this respect the “fine excess” of Keats; whether any one of them devised so many ‘‘subtle hieroglyphs,” to use Diderot’s term,—so many words or phrases that evoke some object before the inner eye, or charm the ear by an unheard melody; that invite, in short, to intense aesthetic contemplation. There are probably more expressions of this kind, as Matthew Arnold says, in the tale of “Isabella” alone than in all the extant plays of Sophocles. “But the action, the story?” Arnold asks; and he goes on to show how inferior the story is in Keats to the same story as told by Boccaccio, “who above all things delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express.” The deflecting of literature from either rational or dramatic purpose to suggestive word-painting, which so marked one whole side of the romantic movement, is closely related to what I have defined as primitivism; to the contempt of the reason and the things that are above the reason, joined with a desire to return to nature and so recover the unity of instinct. The prime virtue for the romanticist is to have fresh and spontaneous sensations, or else to revive in memory the freshness and vividness of past sensations and then convey them suggestively to others. Romantic word-painting, we should recollect, is not merely the art of suggesting images to others, but first of all of suggesting them to one’s self. Wordsworth, for example, begins by seeing the ‘‘host of golden daffodils,” and then later— 

They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude; 

finally he succeeds in conveying the vision in all its freshness to us. 

[To be continued.]

(1) Rousseau, of course, very much underestimates, from our modern point of view, the suggestive power of painting. See Walter Pater’s essay on “Giorgione,” and the passage from Hazlitt quoted later. 

(2) A. W. Schlegel: “Die Gemählde” [“Paintings”] (Athenäum, Zweiter Band, pp. 49, 50). Diderot’s influence on Schlegel is marked in many of the Fragmente, for example in the following: “Im Styl des ächten Dichters ist nichts Schmuck, alles nothwendige Hieroglyphe.” [In the style of the true poet, nothing is ornament, everything is necessary hieroglyph.] “Die Poesie ist Musik für das innere Ohr, und Mahlerey für das innere Auge; aber gedämpfte Musik, aber verschwebende Mahlerey.” [Poetry is music for the inner ear and painting for the inner eye; but muffled music, but floating painting.] —“Mancher betrachtet Gemählde am liebsten mit verschlossnen Augen, damit die Fantasie nicht gestört werde.” [Some prefer to look at paintings with closed eyes so that the imagination is not disturbed.] (Ibid., Ersten Bandes, Zweites Stück, p. 45.) Schlegel would no doubt have preferred to the actual picture Diderot’s musically suggestive description of it: “Hierin ist Diderot Meister. Er musizirt viele Gemählde wie der Abt Vogler.” [In this, Diderot is a master. He made music in many paintings like Abbot Vogler.” (Georg Joseph Vogler, German composer, organist, and theorist; 1749–1814)] And again: “Sich eine Gemähldeaustellung von einem Diderot beschreiben lassen, ist ein wahrhaft kaiserlicher Luxus.” [Having a Diderot describe an exhibition of paintings is a truly imperial luxury.] (Ibid., pp. 46, 47.)

(3) Lectures on Shakespeare (Bohn Edition), p. 138. 

(4) Biographia Literaria, ch. xxii.

* Imagination is “able to achieve the romantic ambition of reuniting the subject and the object; the world of the self and the world of nature. . . .” Fancy is “inferior to imagination. It is according to him (Coleridge) a creative power. It only combines different things into different shapes, not like imagination to fuse them into one.” In: https://kheralatika.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/critical-analysis-of-coleridges-imagination-and-fancy/; 2014.

(5) For a working out of this point of view, see P. Souriau: La suggestion dans l’art. 

(6) Les données immédiates de la conscience [The immediate data of consciousness], p. 11.