The New Laokoon (Part 22)

(Pictured: E. T. A. Hoffmann.) I am happy to present the twenty-second 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 the section “Programme Music” and initiates the section “Color-Audition.”

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

Besides, musical suggestiveness is even more uncertain and subjective than suggestiveness in literature. We read of two persons who, on hearing one of Schubert’s marches, had an almost identical vision of eighteenth-century Spain. But it is exceptional for music, unless accompanied by a very detailed programme, to suggest similar images to different individuals. The constant menace that hangs over the whole ultra-impressionistic school is an incomprehensible symbolism. Many persons will sympathize with the man who waxed enthusiastic over the way Richard Strauss had reproduced in one of his tone-poems the whistling of the wind through the arms of a mill, but was told that what the master had really tried to render in this passage was the bleating of a flock of sheep! In general, primary emphasis on suggestiveness in music plunges one into an abyss of subjectivity. A piece of music that is meaningless for one, may be for another the magic key that unlocks the palace of dreams. Mozart is intrinsically beautiful; but Gérard de Nerval declares that he would give the whole of Mozart, and Rossini and Weber into the bargain, for a certain old tune that conjured up before his inner eye a seventeenth-century chateau and the woman he had perhaps seen there in a former existence. (1) 

It would be easy enough to show that music has always been more or less programmatic and suggestive. The romanticists developed infinitely the art of musical suggestiveness, using it especially to relate man to outer nature, but they did not by any means invent it. The great musicians of the past were not pedants and formalists, and only pedants and formalists would desire music so “absolute” as to exclude entirely poetical and pictorial suggestion. In itself suggestion in music, though even more difficult than in literature, is, if successful, delightful and legitimate. But even if successful the question remains with what measure it is employed and to what purpose. Many modern musicians have laid themselves open to the charge of being expressive but aimless. They are in danger of resembling the writer of whom it was said that he could express anything he wished,—unluckily he had nothing to express; or they may be likened to a painter who is an accomplished colorist but has no design. Too often they have reveled in their colors and impressions without trying to subordinate them to anything higher. They have displayed the same intemperance in this respect as the romantic word-painters, and exposed themselves to the same criticism; they have dwelt too much in an outlying province of their art instead of at its centre. As Sainte-Beuve would say, they have transferred the capital of music from Rome to Byzantium; and when the capital of an empire is thus pushed over to its extreme frontier it is very close to the barbarians. Moreover, the barbarism that menaces modern music as well as the other arts is often the most dangerous kind—that which rises from over-refinement. 

3. Color-Audition 

The more extreme forms of romantic word-painting and programme music, indeed most of the more extreme forms of suggestiveness, are closely allied to color-audition. For example, the famous tone-picture of the dawn in Félicien David’s “Le Desert” would, we may suppose, be more fully appreciated by one who instinctively relates light and sound,—for whom habitually “the sun comes up like thunder.” (2) The hero of a recent novel, (3) to whom everything, including the moral law and its mandates, suggests sounds arrayed in analogical colors, appropriately engages in composing programme music. Certain suggestive word-painters again assert that the vowels have for them distinct colors, and write for readers like themselves,—readers in the depths of whose sensibility these vowels will reverberate in musical iridescences. The colored drawings exhibited in Boston not long ago of portions of Schumann’s and Beethoven’s music (4) also appear to imply color-audition in an acute stage if they really live up to their titles. Color-audition indeed seems to give a definite physiological basis to that running together of all the different impressions, that mystical synthetic sense, of which the modern aesthete dreams,—the sense that ‘‘sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, all in one.” (5) It is this sense, no doubt, that one will need to enjoy Wagner’s “art work of the future,” his Gesammtkunst, in which all the separate arts are to melt together voluptuously. 

The latest dictionary of music dismisses color-audition curtly by the remark that “Rousseau’s ‘Essay on the Origin of Language,’ . . . gives the germ of subsequent absurdities regarding the alleged analogies between tones and colors.” (6) Rousseau says in this essay, it is true, that “sounds are never more effective than when they produce the impression of colors”; and he is evidently on the way, like Diderot, to all our modern confusions. Yet I for one should hesitate to say in this particular matter, c’est la faute à Rousseau. Locke speaks of a blind person for whom the sound of a trumpet was scarlet, and there are very likely earlier references that have escaped me. Indeed, if color-audition has as firm a physiological basis as is sometimes asserted, it may well be as old as human nature itself. Whatever we may think of color-audition in general, it begins to have literary importance only with the advent of modern impressionism. The question naturally arises how far it is connected with the hyperaesthesia that is so often found in this whole movement. I do not care to maintain that color-audition is always a sign of an abnormally heightened sensibility. This is a question I prefer to leave to the specialists. So far as my own observation goes, I should say that the habit of interpreting sounds in terms of color may exist without any special hyperaesthesia, but that the habit of interpreting light or color in terms of sound is nearly always a sign of nervous disorder. But as I have already said, color-audition has found literary expression only in those who belong to what we may term the neurotic school. It manifests itself in connection with the melomania of the German romanticists, their tendency not only to worship music but to reduce to music all the other arts. The writings of Tieck, for example, already exhibit it in a very acute form. In “Zerbino,” he writes of flowers, ‘‘their colors sing, their forms resound, . . . color, fragrance, song, proclaim themselves one family.” In his ‘‘Magelone,” the music dies away “like a stream of blue light.” In E. T. A. Hoffmann we have a confusion of the sense-impressions that is still more plainly pathological. These confusions came to him especially in the state between sleeping and waking. On such occasions, he writes, “particularly when I have heard a great deal of music, there takes place in me a confusion of colors, sounds, and perfumes. It is as though they all sprang up mysteriously together from the same ray of light and then united to form a marvelous concert. The perfume of dark red carnations acts upon me with extraordinary and magic power. I fall involuntarily into a dream state, and then hear as though at a great distance the sound of a horn rising and dying away.” In his sketch entitled “Kreisler’s Musical, Poetical Club,” he has attempted to work out the correspondencies between sounds and colors. ‘‘The fragrance” [i. e., of the music], he says in one passage in this sketch, “shimmered in flaming, mysteriously interwoven circles.” 

Hoffmann, we may note in passing, was an avowed Rousseauist. He writes in his journal when only twenty-nine (13 February, 1804): “I am reading the ‘Confessions’ of Rousseau possibly for the thirtieth time.” (He had read them for the first time at the age of fourteen.) “I find that I am very much like him.” Hoffmann, indeed, and other Germans drew the extreme consequences from Rousseauism and thus anticipated the French decadents. 

[To be continued.]

(1) The lines in which Gérard de Nerval describes the suggestive power of music are worth quoting for their poetical charm and suggestiveness:— 

Fantaisie 

Il est un air pour qui je donnerais 
Tout Rossini, tout Mozart, tout Weber, 
Un air très vieux, languissant et funèbre, 
Qui pour moi seul a des charmes secrets. 

Or, chaque fois que je viens à l’entendre, 
De deux cents ans mon âme rajeunit; 
C’est sous Louis treize . . . et je crois voir s’étendre 
Un coteau vert que le couchant jaunit. 

Puis un château de brique à coins de pierres, 
Aux vitraux teints de rougeâtres couleurs, 
Ceint de grands parcs, avec une rivière 
Baignant ses pieds, qui coule entre les fleurs. 

Puis une dame à sa haute fenêtre. 
Blonde, aux yeux noirs, en ses habits anciens . . . 
Que dans une autre existence, peut-être, 
J’ai déjà vue! . . . et dont je me souviens. 

[Fantasy

There is a melody for which I would give
All Rossini, all Mozart, all Weber,
An ancient, languid and funereal air,
Which for me alone has secret charms.

Sure, each time I hear it
My soul is rejuvenated by two hundred years;
It is under Louis XIII . . . and I think
A green hillside appears, yellowed by the setting sun.

Then a brick castle with stone corners,
Its windows tinted with reddish colors,
Surrounded by large parks, with a river
Bathing his feet, flowing between the flowers.

Then a lady at her high window,
Fair-haired and dark-eyed, in antique garb. . .
That in another existence, perhaps,
I have seen! . . . and that I remember.]

(2) Compare with Kipling’s phrase Baudelaire’s description of the rising sun “comme une explosion nous lançant son bon jour” [like an explosion hurling its good morning at us]. It is curious to discover traces of advanced Rousseauistic sensibility in a writer who has often been taken as a type of Anglo-Saxon sturdiness. 

(3) Violetta by the Baroness von Hutten. 

(4) No. 20 in the catalogue I have of this collection is appropriately entitled “This way madness lies.” 

(5) Sidney Lanier [American musician, poet, and author; 1842-1881].

(6) Stokes’ Encyclopcaedia of Music, by L. J. de Bekker, p. 567.