The New Laokoon (Part 18)

(Pictured: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.) I am happy to present the eighteenth 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.)

What appears in such a passage [Alfred de Musset’s insinuating that the minute lingering over the scenes of childhood was a convenient way of producing the maximum amount of copy with the minimum expense of intellect. (See the previous post, Part 17)], quite apart from the desire to turn out copy, is the drift of romantic writing away from ideas toward sensations, from action toward revery. For the romanticist, life is no longer a drama with a definite purpose, but a dream the moods of which are reflected in outer nature, so that to portray outer nature is only another form of self-portrayal. As man thus melts into nature, his vocabulary melts into nature with him and takes on all its variegated hues. The French language had become too abstract and intellectual, says Sainte-Beuve; Rousseau “put green” into it. Such a phrase as “The gold of the broom and the purple of the heather” [1] marked an epoch in French prose. The charm of this descriptive writing of Rousseau’s is that it still retains a certain sobriety; there is still a balance between the intellectual and the sensuous elements in his style. In Rousseau’s immediate disciple, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre [French writer and botanist; 1737-1814], the intellectual element yields to a more abundant and more precise use of the picturesque descriptive epithet; at the same time exoticism makes its appearance. From Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to Loti [Pierre Loti, French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories; 1850-1923] [2] the whole globe has been ransacked for “local impressions.” The ambition of this modern descriptive school has been to render every object in its ultimate differences from every other object. To this end it has resorted to an ever finer and more delicate shading; it has tried to seize the shimmer and the half-tint; its motto has been la nuance, la nuance toujours! Bernardin de Saint-Pierre complained of Chateaubriand, his immediate successor in the art of word-painting, that he had too strong an imagination. “I,” said Saint-Pierre, “apply my colors delicately, he lays on his with a broad stroke of the brush.” But Chateaubriand is as remarkable for his fine shading as he is for the splash of color. He already speaks of the “pearl-gray light of the moon,” though this nuance itself would no doubt seem too vague and approximate to later writers like the Goncourts, who developed the lust of the eye to its ultimate refinements. 

Chateaubriand deserves a central place in any discussion of the modern forms of descriptive writing. He is the eldest son of Jean-Jacques, and at the same time the father of nineteenth-century French literature. He was a Breton, and one may perhaps without being too fanciful see in his art something of the magic of the Celt. He is a master of the hieroglyphic painting of which Diderot speaks, of the word or phrase of mysterious and compelling charm that usually eludes analysis and defies translation. Stendhal says that duels were fought in his regiment over one of these phrases: la cime indéterminée des forêts [the indeterminate top of the forests],—a phrase chosen by Matthew Arnold as an example of descriptive magic. We can well understand that a Frenchman of the old school who was looking for rationality rather than for word-painting, suggestive or not, should have found a predominance of such phrases a scandal. And indeed it is plain that the equilibrium is already disappearing in Chateaubriand between the intellectual and sensuous elements in style. This is one of the main reasons why Sainte-Beuve pronounced Chateaubriand the first great writer of the decadence. Possibly nothing better has ever been written on the proper limits of descriptive writing than some of the passages in which Sainte-Beuve discusses this side of Chateaubriand. 

“Poetic and picturesque prose,” says Sainte-Beuve, “is, so to speak, only an outlying province of prose, its richest and most brilliant province, an Asia Minor, as the ancients would have said. If language fixes and concentrates itself in this province entirely, it runs the risk of becoming corrupt and losing its true character.” Sainte-Beuve goes on to say that a really great prose-writer dwells, in some sort, at the very source and centre of thought, and from there, as occasion arises, he moves in any direction desired. “If there is need of narration, he narrates; of reasoning and discussing, he discusses; of describing and painting, he has colors; he is present everywhere and almost simultaneously at every point of the vast empire. The prose of Buffon or Jean-Jacques is noble, just, vigorous, supple, and brilliant, equal to all uses, preeminent in several, and not appearing out of place or embarrassed wherever used. Can we say as much of the prose of Chateaubriand or even of that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre? Through the very fact that they have become fixed and as it were acclimated in the region of pure picturesqueness, when the subject invites or forces them to leave this region, they do not do so naturally or with ease; they have farther to go. . . . Every language has its genius, its scope, its limits. It is perilous to try to displace its centre, to venture to change its capital, even though one were Constantine. Chateaubriand was somewhat like the great emperor he celebrated; he transferred the centre of prose from Rome to Byzantium. . . . Now the capital of a language thus pushed over to its extreme frontier is very near the barbarians.” [3] 

Here is something that satisfies our modern sense of the problem more nearly than anything in Lessing. Suggestive word-painting is, within proper bounds, an entirely legitimate art; when it oversteps these bounds, when images are offered as a substitute for ideas, when words are turned to purely voluptuary uses and divorced from rational purpose, the result is not a real advance but rather the beginning of decadence. Keats prayed in his more callow days for a “life of sensations rather than thoughts.” Many modern romanticists have aspired to live this life, and often with considerable success. We can trace with special clearness in the romanticism of nineteenth-century France this tendency toward a hypertrophy of sensation and an atrophy of ideas, toward a constantly expanding sensorium and a diminishing intellect. Judged by any standard Rousseau is a man of intellectual power, and he seems especially great in this respect when compared with Chateaubriand. Chateaubriand in turn appears an intellectual giant compared with Lamartine. Lamartine’s ideas begin to look serious when compared with those of Hugo; Hugo himself strikes one as intellectually active compared with Paul Verlaine. Traces of cerebration may be discovered even in Verlaine compared with some of the later symbolists. In these last anaemic representatives of the school we arrive at something approaching a sheer intellectual vacuum,—the mere buzzing of the romantic chimera in the void. Such is the result of divorcing literature from rational purpose and reducing it to the quest of sensation; for it is the quest of sensation that is at the bottom of the whole movement, however much this quest may at any times assume the guise of a heavenly idealism. Sainte-Beuve distinguishes two main forms of sensuality in French writers of the nineteenth century. “The ones,” he says, “disciples of René, have as it were concealed their sensuality behind a cloud of mysticism; the others have frankly unmasked it.” [4] 

But I have already spoken of the peculiar use the romanticists made of imaginative illusion. It is a natural sequel to Rousseau’s special conception of the original and the spontaneous joined to his contempt for rationality. The writer of the Rousseauistic type is no longer a thinker or a purposeful agent who is trying to give an account of his thoughts or his purpose to others, but an exquisitely organized mechanism for registering impressions and conveying them suggestively. Unfortunately the more successful the writer is in this pursuit of sensation for its own sake, the more intense and local his impressions become, the more closely they are likely to be related to the side of man and outer nature that is fugitive and evanescent, and the farther they are likely to be from what is of permanent appeal, from the normal, the representative, the human. We have curious testimony on this point from a writer who himself belongs to the school of sensation, though he did not achieve in his own style the refinements of what the French call l’écriture artiste. “The worst of it is,” says Émile Zola, “that I have arrived at the conviction that the jargon of our period will be known as one of the most atrocious of the French language. . . . Look at Voltaire, with his dry style, his vigorous period, destitute of adjectives, which relates and does not paint; he remains eternally young. Look at Rousseau, who is our father—look at his imagery, his passionate rhetoric; he has written pages which are perfectly intolerable. . . . A cheerful fate awaits us who have outbidden Rousseau, who on the top of literature pile all the other arts—paint and sing our periods, chisel them as if they were blocks of marble, and require words to reproduce the perfume of things. All this titillates our nerves: we think it exquisite, perfect. But what will our great-grandchildren say to it?” 

This passage does not altogether hit the mark. There are pages of Rousseau that are at least as assured of immortality as any of Voltaire’s, and are at the same time filled with color and imagery. Art can stand plenty of fresh and vivid impressions, and indeed requires them, only they must be subordinated to something higher than themselves. What we have in the great artists is the intellectualizing of sensation, and not, as in the writers to whom Zola refers, the sensualizing of intellect. 

[1] “L’or des genêts et la pourpre de la bruyère” (Lettre à M. de Malesherbes, 26 janvier, 1762). 

[2] In her life of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre . . . Arvède Barine makes an interesting comparison between the description of a storm by Saint-Pierre and a similar description by Pierre Loti. She concludes: “Apres les pages qu’on vient de lire, il ne reste plus de progrès à faire. Le seul à tenter serait de revenir à la simplicité puissante d’Homère, de Lucrèce et de Virgile, et de procurer les mêmes émotions en deux ou trois lignes.” [“After the pages we have just read, there is no further progress to be made. The only thing to try would be to return to the powerful simplicity of Homer, Lucretius and Virgil, and to provide the same emotions in two or three lines.”] 

[3] Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, t. i. 

[4] Causeries du lundi [“Monday Chats”], ii. Sainte-Beuve was himself a “disciple of René” in his novel Volupté. “Dans Volupté” he says, “je me suis donné l’illusion mystique pour colorer et ennuager l’épicurisme.” [“I gave myself to mystical illusion so as to color and cloud over Epicureanism.”] (Ibid., xvi.)