The New Laokoon (Part 21)

(Pictured: Franz Liszt.) I am happy to present the twenty-first 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 inaugurates the section on program music.

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 

2. Programme Music

I take up with some trepidation the subject of programme music partly because of my own incompetence, partly because of the atmosphere of controversy that surrounds the whole subject. There is no agreement even in the definitions. Thus the “Oxford History” defines programme music (especially as developed by Berlioz and Liszt) as “a curious hybrid, i. e., music posing as an unsatisfactory kind of poetry.” (1) Another authority makes his definition so broad as to conclude that “programme music is the only high-class music.” (2) However defined, programme music enters into our present subject because it shows most clearly the drift of music along with the other arts toward impressionism. Indeed, the development of music during the last century has simply followed, usually at a considerable interval, the literary development. For example, much of the music of Richard Strauss and Debussy reflects moods that would already seem somewhat antiquated if expressed in literature. In music as elsewhere the nineteenth century was a period of vast and confused expansion. The virtues that were in request were the expansive virtues, not those of concentration. 

We can easily trace the connection between modernism in music and the type of emotional expansion I have associated with Rousseau; all the more easily in that Rousseau was a composer and a theorist about music, as well as a man of letters. In music, as in other fields, we can see him making his protest, in the name of freshness and spontaneity, against everything formal and disciplinary. In music, as in other fields, we can see the gradual yielding of the humanistic and religious points of view to the point of view of the sentimental naturalist; the same growing emphasis on the individual, the characteristic, the expressive; the same tendency to confuse the original with the bizarre, the paradoxical, the eccentric. Just as the romantic writer seeks to preserve the innocence of the mind, and the romantic painter the innocence of the eye, so the romantic musician strives to preserve the innocence of the ear, which often means in practice an ignorance of the great traditions of his art and an absence of serious reflection. Perhaps no one pushed this notion of originality farther than certain Russian composers. In his eagerness to get away from the conventional and the artificial, the romantic musician runs the same risk as the romantic writer of getting away at the same time from the normal, the representative, the human. There is the same complacent inbreeding in music as in literature, not only of personal but of local and national peculiarities. When Grieg was advised to make his next sonata less Norwegian, he replied defiantly, “On the contrary, the next shall be more so.” Local color triumphed both in the nationalist form (as in Weber’s “Freischütz,” [“Marksman”] 1821), and in the quest of the strange and exotic (as in Félicien David’s “Le Désert,” 1844). Above all music has set itself to rendering the modern mood par excellence,—the mood of melting into outer nature. Music also reflects the suggestive interaction of all the sense-impressions upon one another. Schumann sought to give musical expression to Cologne Cathedral; Richard Strauss to Nietzsche’s philosophy; Liszt to a poem of Hugo’s or Schiller’s; Huber set out to orchestrate one of Arnold Böcklin’s pictures. Böcklin in turn had aimed in this picture to write with colors a “pantheistic nature-poem.” We can thus follow the impressionistic ricochet from one art to the other. Music comes to be less interested in its own proper harmonies than in working miracles of suggestiveness,—in painting tone-pictures, in writing tone-poems, or symphonic odes and ballads, in telling instrumental tales. 

The common element in all the musical tendencies just enumerated may be summed up with sufficient accuracy as an increasing emphasis on musical expression as compared with musical form. Every one would probably agree that as a result of this modern movement music has become vastly more expressive; it has attained in full measure the kind of spontaneity I have defined in speaking of Rousseau—whether this spontaneity appear in the rendering of the elementary moods of the folk, as often in Grieg, or in the rendering with lyrical intensity of the moods of the individual, as in Schumann and Chopin, who were as spontaneous in their own way as Heine and Shelley in theirs. As I have already said, in following out their spontaneity the romantic musicians were led, like the romantic writers, to a confused emotional synthesis, to feel correspondencies between man and outer nature, as well as between the different sense-impressions among themselves; and therefore to interpret everything in terms of everything else through suggestion. The increased expressiveness of modern music has largely meant in practice that music has become more suggestive; and both the use and abuse of this new suggestiveness appear most clearly in programme music. 

It is a striking fact not sufficiently noticed by historians of music that, in a passage I have already quoted,* Rousseau not only emphasizes the suggestive power of music as no one perhaps had done before him, but gives a definition of programme music that is possibly still unsurpassed, adding concrete examples of the things that music may suggest. In view of Rousseau’s great influence in Germany the programmatic symphony entitled “Portrait musical de la nature,” published by J. H. Knecht in 1784, may have been an attempt to put in practice some of Rousseau’s ideas; and Knecht’s programme in turn probably had some influence on Beethoven in the composition of his “Pastoral Symphony.” Rousseau aimed to express the dream of pastoral simplicity in both his music and his writing, but it is only in his writing that he was fully successful. The Arcadian revery that is the soul of all that is most poetical in Rousseau does not attain full musical expression until Beethoven’s ‘‘Pastoral Symphony,” or full expression in painting until the landscapes of Corot. In rendering suggestively the sights and sounds of outer nature Beethoven apparently had some uneasiness as to the peril of thus working away from the centre of his art—from absolute music—toward its frontiers. He wrote in the sub-title of one of the copies of the “Pastoral Symphony”: “Expressive of feeling rather than painting.” And in one of his note-books we read: “All painting in instrumental music if pushed too far is a failure.” We may agree with him, however, that he has not overstepped the proper bounds in the “Pastoral Symphony.” But it could hardly be expected that the Titans of the romantic movement would preserve this balance between musical form and the yearning for an ampler expression. They tend to run together emotionally music and the other arts, after the fashion we have already observed in literature. 

We may take as an example of this emotional unrestraint and at the same time of the romantic personality par excellence, Hector Berlioz, who happens also to be, with the possible exception of Liszt, the most important figure in the history of programme music. We should note, first of all, the weakness of Berlioz and in general of the whole modern school in devotional music, in the expression of what is above the reason with the accompanying sense of awe and elevation and restraint. Thus the “Requiem Mass,” composed by Berlioz in 1836-37, is mainly noise and sensationalism. According to Dannreuther, ‘‘no such volume of sound had been heard in Paris since the taking of the Bastille,” (3)—enough to raise the dead instead of contributing to their repose. 

What we evidently have in Berlioz is not an illumination from above, but an insurrection from below, and he is most himself in what may be termed insurrectional music,—for instance, the Orgy of Brigands (allegro frenetico) in his “Harold en Italie.” Berlioz has the true romantic instinct for attitudinizing: he pushes himself to the front of the stage, and proceeds to paint and act what was most intense in his own emotional life. He was thus led to compose the most famous of his pieces of programme music, the ‘‘Symphonie fantastique” (Épisode de la vie d’ un artiste [Episode in the Life of an Artist]). What the episode was we may infer from the passages in his journal where he supplements his musical confession. He there tells of his “infernal passion” for the English or rather Irish actress, Miss Henrietta Smithson, that led to the following scene between them:—

“She reproached me with not loving her. Thereupon, tired of all this, I answered her by poisoning myself before her eyes. Terrible cries of Henrietta. Sublime despair! Atrocious laughter on my part. Desire to revive on seeing her terrible protestations of love. Emetic!” 

Like his contemporary Hugo, Berlioz has been accused of a partiality, if not for the ugly, at least for the colossal and the misshapen. To both the poet and the composer the epithet “Polyphemish” has been applied. What is plain is that in many of these modern composers the laws of structure are relaxed, and musical harmony and proportion sacrificed to a stormy impressionism. The same disregard for beauty as compared with expressiveness which we have found in Berlioz is likewise seen in Liszt. The strain that they both put upon musical form is due to their desire to render things that do not come directly within the domain of music. We read in Dannreuther: “In pieces such as the first and last movements of Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique,’ the first and last movements of his symphony ‘Harold en Italie,’ Liszt’s Poèmes symphoniques, ‘Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne,’ [‘What one hears on the mountain’] after a poem by Victor Hugo, and ‘Die Ideale,’ [‘The Ideal’] after a poem by Schiller, the hearer is bewildered by a series of startling orchestral effects which are not explicable on any principle of musical design.” (4) This is so, because in producing these effects the composer was not primarily intent on musical design: he was really devising “hieroglyphs,” or symbols, that are not to be estimated first of all for their value as music, but rather for their power to set one dreaming of poetry or pictures, or history or drama, or even philosophy. For example, what is the musical value of the crash of sound with which Berlioz symbolizes the fall of the axe on the neck of the victim in his “Marche au supplice” [“March to Torture”] (“Symphonie fantastique”); or of the piercing, dissonant, high trumpet note by which the fatal sword thrust is represented in the tone-poem of Richard Strauss, “Don Juan”? To ask such questions is to answer them. 

(1) Oxford History of Music, vol. vi (by E. Dannreuther), p. 111. 

(2) Programme Music, by Frederick Niecks, p. 537. 

* “One of the great advantages of the musician . . . is to be able to paint things that are inaudible, whereas it is impossible for the painter to depict things that are invisible. 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.” 

(3) Oxford History of Music, vol. vi, p. 174. 

(4) Oxford History of Music, vol. vi, p. 11.