The New Laokoon (Part 17)

(Pictured: Victor Hugo.) I am happy to present the seventeenth 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 inward eye of which Wordsworth speaks was comparatively dormant in men before the last century; since then it has been so developed as to become a sort of new sense that brings the objects of outer nature into contact with the soul through the medium of imaginative illusion, refining them in the process, and attuning them to human emotion. This new sense is in itself delightful and legitimate, and the revery with which it is associated has its own uses. The romantic error has been to make of this revery the serious substance of life instead of its occasional solace; to set up the things that are below the reason as a substitute for those that are above it; in short, to turn the nature cult into a religion. 

We should note that in its more advanced forms the nature cult leads to a new symbolism. According to Coleridge the imagination is the great unifying power, and what it unifies through the agency of the new sense of which I have just been speaking, is man and physical nature. Outer objects no longer seem foreign and alien to man, but akin to something in his own mind. “The world is a universal trope of the spirit,” says Novalis. ‘‘Every object of which the wood is composed,” writes Hugo, “corresponds to some similar object in the forest of the soul.’’ (1) The deeper a man dives down into the subrational region where such intuitions occur, the more he has this feeling not merely of correspondencies between himself and outer nature but between the different senses within himself. He finally attains that ‘‘tenebrous and profound unity” of which Baudelaire speaks, where ‘‘perfumes and colors and sounds correspond to one another.” (2)

The most striking thing about the romantic symbol is its subjective character. A man may discover any number of correspondencies between himself and outer nature, without thereby developing correspondencies between himself and other men. Quite the contrary: the more he yields to this symbolizing mood, the farther he is likely to get off into some dim realm, some “mystic mid-region of Weir,” where no one can penetrate but himself. We may indeed say of the whole tendency in its extremer forms, “that way madness lies.” The romantic symbol which is vague and shadowy in literature becomes doubly so in painting. Certain ultra-romantic painters (Rossetti for example) have indulged in a symbolism that may well match for obscurity the pseudo-classic allegories of which Lessing complains. (3)

We should not, however, allow the romanticists to put us entirely out of humor with the symbol. The imagination is the great unifying power, but it may be used to help forward and symbolize man’s union with the truths of reason or the truths above the reason, as well as with outer nature. There is, in short, a humanistic as well as a naturalistic use of the imagination. Even Wordsworth could not fail to be struck by the two types of imagination, one of which he terms the ‘‘enthusiastic and meditative,” and the other the ‘‘human and dramatic.” We may take as a concrete instance of the humanistic imagination and the symbol it may create, the Chariot of the Soul in Plato’s “Phaedrus”; of the naturalistic imagination and its symbolizing, Victor Hugo’s poem “Le Satyre” in “La Légende des Siecles” [“The Legend of the Centuries”]. Plato’s symbol, dealing as it does with the things that are above the ordinary reason, inspires to awe and reverence and restraint. Hugo’s “Satyre” on the other hand is related so closely to the whole modern movement we are studying that we can afford to linger over it a moment. 

A hideous and hirsute satyr so offends against decency that he is finally dragged by Hercules before Jupiter and the other Olympians; but he sings a mysterious song that sends a sympathetic thrill through the whole of creation, and as he sings he keeps expanding and at the same time melting into the outer world, until at last he is revealed as the god Pan and Jupiter cowers before him. The poem symbolizes the running together and unifying of all things (especially of flesh and spirit) through the power of the primal love working in the depths of the primitive, the unconscious, the instinctive; it invites to vast emotional expansion, and at the same time to revolt, not merely against every form of authority and discipline, but against all boundaries and limitations whatsoever, as synonymous with evil. 

Symbolism is no necessary concomitant of romantic suggestiveness. It has appeared most frequently, though not exclusively, in connection with that side of modern art which has aimed to be musically rather than pictorially suggestive. The kind of word-painter who has flourished during the past century has usually been content to paint vividly to the imagination either present impressions or else past impressions that have flashed upon his inward eye in revery. Rousseau contains remarkable examples of this latter kind of description. “I see distinctly,” he says, “only what I remember”; and what he remembers with most pleasure is his youthful years when sensations were freshest and most spontaneous. “The slightest circumstances of that time please me,” he says of his boyhood experiences at Bossey, ‘‘for the very reason that they belong to that time. . . . I still see a swallow darting in through the window, a fly alighting on my hand while I recited my lesson; I see the arrangement of the room where we sat; the study of M. Lambercier at our right, an engraving representing all the popes, a barometer, a great calendar;—raspberry-bushes which, growing in a garden slanting steeply up from the back of the house, shaded the window and sometimes trailed even into the room.” 

The whole scene rises before us “as from the stroke of the Enchanter’s wand.” Here is a somewhat different word-painting from that of the imitators of Thomson’s “Seasons.” No one before Rousseau, at least no one of whom we have literary record, had ever shown such preternatural keenness either in receiving or recalling impressions. This sensitiveness of Rousseau extended to all his impressions, especially those of sight, smell, and hearing. (According to Diderot, [4] Rousseau had thought of starting a school to teach the flower-girls of Paris how to sort the colors in their bouquets.) “Not only do I remember,” he says in describing another scene of his youth, “the time, the place, the persons, but all surrounding objects,— the temperature of the air, its odor, its color, a certain local impression felt only there, the vivid recollection of which carries me back anew”; and he proceeds to paint another word-picture of rare intensity and suggestiveness. “Local impression” would in some respects have been a more fortunate phrase than the term local color that the romanticists finally borrowed from the technical vocabulary of the painter. A rendering of the various sensations can in some cases (e. g., in the case of taste or smell) be called local color only by a forced metaphor; whereas to call these sensations and the art of rendering them suggestively “local impressions,” would relate the whole tendency to that modern impressionism of which it is only one aspect. 

The poet Gray says that he took to botany to save himself the trouble of thinking. This remark might apply at least equally well to many romanticists who took to local color. In one of his tales (“Le Merle Blanc” [“The White Blackbird”]), Alfred de Musset insinuates that all this minute lingering over the scenes of childhood was a convenient way of producing the maximum amount of “copy” with the minimum expense of intellect. In this tale Musset makes fun of his fellow romanticists, whom he disguises as birds. The “white blackbird,” when turned out of the nest that his mother had built in an old wooden porringer in the depths of a sequestered garden, decides to set up as romantic poet and publishes a poem in forty-eight cantos the subject of which was—himself. “In this poem I related my past sufferings with charming fatuity. I informed the reader of a thousand domestic details of the most piquant interest. The description of my mother’s porringer took up no less than fourteen cantos; I had counted its grooves, its holes, its bumps, its nicks, its splinters, its nails, its spots, its different tints and shimmers ; I exhibited the inside, the outside, the rim, the bottom, the sides, the inclined planes, the perpendicularities; passing to the contents, I had studied the wisps of grass and straw, the dry leaves, the tiny bits of wood, the gravel, the drops of water, the remains of flies, the broken cockchafers’ legs that were in it; it was a ravishing description, but don’t think that I would have printed it all at once; there are impertinent readers who would have skipped it. I had skillfully cut it up and mingled it with the story in order that none of it should be lost; so that at the most interesting and dramatic moment there suddenly came in fifteen pages of porringer.” 

[To be continued.]

(1) Tout objet dont le bois se compose répond
A quelque objet pareil dans la forét de l’ âme. 

Voix Intérieures, xix. 

(2) Baudelaire’s sonnet has been so influential on more recent French writers and artists (especially the symbolists) that it deserves to be quoted:—

CORRESPONDANCES 

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers 
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles 
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. 

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent 
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. 

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies; 
Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, 
Comme l’ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l’encens, 
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens. 

[Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as meadows
—And others are corrupt, and rich, triumphant,

With power to expand into infinity,
Like amber and incense, musk, benzoin,
That sing the ecstasy of the soul and senses.

—Translated by William Aggeler (https://genius.com/Charles-baudelaire-correspondances-english-version-annotated).]

(3) As an example of the mysterious symbolizing that may arise from the confusion of plastic art with music we may take Max Klinger’s statue of Beethoven. See Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3e Période. [See http://kulturkompasset.no/max-klinger-in-leipzig-art-museum/.]

(4) Diderot, Oeuvres, I, p. 332.