The New Laokoon (Part 19)

(Pictured: Rudyard Kipling.) I am happy to present the nineteenth 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.)

In his essay on Édouard Bertin [French painter; 1797–1871], Taine expresses his regret that the romantic landscape-painters were more intent on the rendering of minute local impressions than on the broad intellectual purpose and total effect. And he notes how the special sensitiveness of the eye that they thus developed tended toward what I have called in a previous chapter hyperaesthesia [abnormal sensitivity to sense stimulation]. “Toward the end,” he says, “the nervous and mental equilibrium was no longer intact even in the masters.” In their successors the balance was still more completely lost and always in favor of “sensation, absorbing, physical, personal. Now that the experiment has been tried, the pathway that we have been following since 1830 is seen to have descended swiftly and by a steep declivity; we are stumbling along it to-day, and that is even truer of painting with words than of painting with the brush.” The reason is evident: for if a painter errs in taking a purely retinal view of painting, a poet errs still more grievously in taking a purely retinal—or auricular—view of poetry. This is plainly the case with Gautier when he praises as the finest in the French language certain verses of Hugo that are found on examination to be made up entirely of proper names! In no great poet of the past do we have to lay primary stress, as we do in Hugo, on the special structure of the eye. He had an almost miraculous vision, at once telescopic and microscopic. But the extraordinary abundance and precision of his picturesque details are only too often the sign of the predominance of matter over spirit. In Hugo the idea if not absent altogether is usually the mere shadow of the image and not, as it should be, the soul. No other poet ever gave so tremendous an orchestration to such trifling themes. If not intellectual, Hugo’s verse is at least emotional as well as pictorial. Gautier’s verse, on the contrary, is almost purely pictorial. Perhaps more than any other writer ancient or modern he deliberately attempted to effect a transposition d’art, to rival with words the palette of the painter. He says of one of his short poems that only a frame is needed, and a hook to hang it on, to make of it a complete picture. His verse is as extraordinary for its visual suggestiveness as it is for its intellectual nullity. 

The assertion has been made that Gautier’s word-painting proves that Lessing was mistaken in the main thesis of the “Laokoon.” This assertion can be only partially allowed. Lessing certainly does not do justice to one important side of the problem,—the role of imaginative illusion. He was interested less in the attenuated hypnosis that art may produce, than in art as related to intellect and action. Yet his main argument does not entirely lose its validity even in the case of the suggestive word-painter. The suggestive word-painter can merely stir into activity images that are already present consciously or subconsciously in the mind of another; even then it will be only a kindred image, not the same image as that of which the word-painter is himself dreaming or which he has actually before his eyes. For example, if the word-painter describes suggestively a mountain, a mountain may flash on the inner eye of the reader, though it will not be the same mountain as was before the actual or inner eye of the describer. If the word-painter describes suggestively some specific mountain, for instance Mont Blanc, and the reader has also seen Mont Blanc or a picture of it, then the visions in the minds of the word-painter and of the reader may come nearer to being identical. On the other hand, if a man were a good artist, but had never been in China or seen pictures of Chinese objects, would all the verbal magic of Loti’s “Last Days of Peking” enable him to paint anything that really resembled the Summer Palace? Let us suppose, again, that A wishes to paint suggestively, with words, an actual woman to B who has never seen her. He will succeed at most in evoking before the inner eye of B a dream-woman. Let us suppose also that B is a good artist and proceeds to paint his vision. Is it not evident that the painting will be no true likeness of the real woman? Frequently the word-painter will not even succeed in evoking a dream-image, but will lay himself open to the charge that Lessing brought against Ariosto’s portrait of Alcina.* [“What picture does this crowd of words leave behind? How did Helen look? No two readers out of a thousand would receive the same impression of her.” —Lessing]

In writing about the Goncourts [the brothers, Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Jules de Goncourt (1830–1870), collaborative writers of the French naturalist school] and their descriptive virtuosity Sainte-Beuve remarks on the objections that might be made to “this formidable encroachment of one art on another, this outrageous invasion of prose by pure painting.” He cites as an example the description by the Goncourts of six women filing one after the other into a ball-room. In spite of the efforts of the writers to paint distinctly and separately these six heads, Sainte-Beuve complains that they do not succeed in making him see them. “I confuse them in spite of myself; six—it’s too much for my somewhat feeble imagination; prose is not equal to the task. I should need to have the objects themselves before my eyes. There is plainly a confusion here between the means of expression of one art and those of another.” (1) 

To take an illustration from another order of sensations: when Kipling speaks of “the lift of the great Cape combers, and the smell of the baked Karroo,” the first part of the line may suggest an image to any one who is familiar with the sea. But the smell of the baked Karroo [arid to semiarid geographic region of South Africa], though no doubt a very intense local impression for Kipling himself, will not really suggest anything to one who has not been in South Africa. At best the art of verbal suggestion is, as Diderot already remarked, infinitely subtle and uncertain, and doubly subjective. An expression may have for some particular reader a suggestiveness that it did not have for its writer and may not have for other readers. Think of the gorgeous visions that the simple phrase Consul Romanus suggested to Thomas De Quincey—with the aid of opium. The “hieroglyphs” again, which the writer meant to charge with suggestiveness, may fail, and then instead of words that appeal to two senses at once, words, that as Rostand says, “you read with your ears and listen to with your eyes,” (2) you merely have words that follow one another inertly and are no better than the word-painting Lessing condemns. In short, even those who possess verbal magic are often unsuccessful, and for one true magician there are twenty pretenders. 

[To be continued.]

*Orlando Furioso, canto vii, stanzas 11-15: 

Her shape is of such perfect symmetry,

As best to feign the industrious painter knows;

With long and knotted tresses; to the eye

Not yellow gold with brighter lustre glows.

Upon her tender cheek the mingled dye

Is scattered of the lily and the rose.

Like ivory smooth, the forehead gay and round

Fills up the space and forms a fitting bound.

Two black and slender arches rise above

Two clear black eyes, say suns of radiant light, 

Which ever softly beam and slowly move; 

Round these appears to sport in frolic flight, 

Hence scattering all his shafts, the little Love, 

And seems to plunder hearts in open sight. 

Thence, through ’mid visage, does the nose descend. 

Where envy finds not blemish to amend.

As if between two vales, which softly curl, 

The mouth with vermeil tint is seen to glow;

Within are strung two rows of orient pearl, 

Which her delicious lips shut up or show, 

Of force to melt the heart of any churl, 

However rude, hence courteous accents flow; 

And here that gentle smile receives its birth. 

Which opes at will a paradise on earth.

Like milk the bosom, and the neck of snow; 

Round is the neck, and full and round the breast; 

Where, fresh and firm, two ivory apples grow, 

Which rise and fall, as, to the margin pressed 

By pleasant breeze, the billows come and go. 

Not prying Argus could discern the rest. 

Yet might the observing eye of things concealed 

Conjecture safely from the charms revealed.

To all her arms a just proportion bear, 

And a white hand is oftentimes descried, 

Which narrow is and somedeal long, and where 

No knot appears nor vein is signified. 

For finish of that stately shape and rare, 

A foot, neat, short, and round beneath is spied. 

Angelic visions, creatures of the sky. 

Concealed beneath no covering veil can lie.

(1) Nouveaux Lundis, t. x, pp. 407, 408. 

(2) La merveille 

Du beau mot mysterieux, 

C’est qu’on le lit de l’oreille, 

Et qu’on l’écoute des yeux. 

[The wonder

Of the beautiful mysterious word

Is that we read it with the ears

And listen to it with the eyes.]