The New Laokoon (Part 20)

(Pictured: Leconte de Lisle.) I am happy to present the twentieth 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. This post concludes Babbitt’s treatment of word-painting.

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 (concluded)

I have not distinguished very sharply thus far between pictorial and musical suggestiveness; yet the art of suggesting colors or images is evidently very different from that of suggesting sounds. Though the two arts may coexist in one writer, they are more commonly found separate. The prose of Chateaubriand, for example, has both kinds of suggestiveness; but as we come down to more recent French writers we usually find that a sort of specialization has taken place. Thus Lamartine’s soul “exhales itself like a sad and melodious strain,” to use his own phrase. His poetry is comparatively poor in visual suggestiveness. Leconte de Lisle on the other hand, and most of the so-called Parnassiens, following more or less the lead of Gautier, carve or paint their verses and achieve an amazing degree of plastic precision. “The first concern of the man who writes in prose or verse,” says Leconte de Lisle, “should be to set in relief the picturesque side of outer objects.” Perhaps Heredia [José-Maria de Heredia, Cuban-born French Parnassian poet; 1842–1905] is the last distinguished figure in this group of ciseleurs [chiselers]. And then, after this precise evocation of forms and colors by the great virtuosos of description, there arises a craving for the infinitude of musical revery that finds expression in the symbolistic movement, in writers like Verlaine or Mallarmé (“music above all,” says Verlaine, in the first line of the poem that is taken to be the credo of the school). Mallarmé indulges in confusions of music and poetry that rival in extravagance what one finds a century earlier in Germany in the theory of Novalis and the practice of Tieck. (1) 

An interesting problem arises at this point: what is the difference between the legitimate music of verse and the music it attains by trespassing on the domain of a sister art? In one sense no poets ever strove harder to write harmoniously than the neo-classic poets in France, beginning with Malherbe [François de Malherbe, poet, critic, and translator; 1555-1628]. In his commentary on Desportes [Philippe Desportes, French poet; 1546-1606], Malherbe shows himself an extraordinarily minute technician, and in nothing more than in this very matter of poetical harmony. He not only attacks hiatus, but rules out various combinations of vowels and consonants as being unmusical. The third-rate Waller [Edmund Waller, English poet and politician; 1606-1687] enjoyed an almost first-rate reputation for having done for English poetry, as it was supposed, what Malherbe did for French, (2) for having polished English numbers and taught them to “flow sweetly.” La Fontaine, one of the most consummate technicians in verse who ever lived, profited by Malherbe’s teachings. The best English example of verse that is musical in the sense I have just been defining, musical, that is, by the subtle blending of vowels and consonants so as to avoid even the suspicion of cacophony, is probably Gray’s “Elegy.” Evidently the poet can do more than Gray has done, that is, transcend the special harmony of his own art and attain the harmony of the musician, only by superinducing revery, by resorting to all the arts of suggestion. In “The Bells,” for example, the iteration is intended to cast an almost hypnotic spell (3) upon the mind. In this poem Poe is already standing on the dangerous outer edge of what poetry can safely do. Mallarmé, and other French admirers of Poe, attempted to push on still further toward the Eldorado of musical suggestiveness, and in the attempt tumbled into chaos. (4) 

We should perhaps add that so-called poetical prose may arise not only from confusing prose with poetry, but also from a reaching out of prose toward the domains of painting or music. One of the first examples of poetical prose in English, as something distinct from imaginative prose, is “Ossian,”* where this effect is attained by a somewhat crude mixture of the diction and cadences of poetry with those of prose. Far more truly romantic is the poetic prose of De Quincey, with its striving to suggest the harmonies of music. Leslie Stephen remarks that “the most exquisite passages in De Quincey’s writing are all more or less attempts to carry out the idea expressed in the title of the dream-fugue. They are intended to be musical compositions, in which words have to play the part of notes.” 

Other writers of prose might be mentioned who are poetical by their intense pictorial suggestiveness. Poetic prose of the romantic type arises, like all other romantic confusions, from a stress of emotion that tends to overflow all formal boundaries; in its more refined forms it is the direct outcome of what I have called the dalliance of soul and sense in the tower of ivory. “Who of us,” says Gautier, “has not dreamed of the miracle of poetic prose, (5) musical without rhythm and rhyme, sufficiently flexible to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of revery?” And he finds this miracle realized in the “Petits poèmes en prose” of Baudelaire, which, in their power to produce upon us “the sensation of a magnetic sleep that transports us far away from the real world,” are comparable to the music of Weber. (6) 

We have thus far been chiefly studying the way in which the literature of the last century has turned to account all the resources of suggestion, in its attempts to do the work of music and painting. Something should be said at this point of the eagerness that music has displayed during the same period to become poetical and pictorial. For music, so far from showing a humdrum and homekeeping spirit, has kept pace with the other arts in its restless striving away from its own centre toward that doubtful periphery where it is on the point of passing over into something else. 

(1) Cf., for example, the symphony in words published by Mallarmé in the defunct review Cosmopolis, vol. vi, pp. 417-427, with the “overture” to Tieck’s comedy Die verkehrte Welt [The Topsy Turvy World]. 

(2) In Soame’s translation of Boileau’s Art poétique (revised by Dryden) Waller is substituted for Malherbe and praised for having “changed hard discord to soft harmony.” 

(3) In attempting to cast this spell the musically suggestive poet may fall into what from the point of view of ordinary poetical harmony is horrible cacophony. A good example is Tieck’s U-Romance of Sir Wulf, who is carried off by the devil. As Brandes says (Romantic School in Germany, p. 119): “When the reader’s nerves have been narcotized for half an hour [by this repetition of one vowel], when nothing but u-tu-tu is sounding in his ears, he has reached the climax, language has become music, and he floats off on the stream of an emotional mood.” 

(4) One should not overlook the encouragement that both the theory and practice of Wagner gave the French decadents in their confounding of music and poetry. Cf. J. Combarieu, Les rapports de la musique et de la poésie, pp. 341-343. 

* “The narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James MacPherson, originally as Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), and later combined under the title The Poems of Ossian. Macpherson claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in Scottish Gaelic, said to be from ancient sources, and that the work was his translation of that material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a legendary bard who is a character in Irish mythology. . . . Samuel Johnson . . . was convinced that Macpherson was ‘a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud,’ and that the poems were forgeries.” —Wikipedia.

(5) We should note that Rousseau’s Pygmalion, one of the earliest examples in French of poetic prose in the modern sense, is a product of musical revery. 

(6) Introduction to Les Fleurs du mal of Baudelaire.