The New Laokoon (Part 23)

(Pictured: Mallarmé.) I am happy to present the twenty-third 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 Chapter VI.

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Part II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter VI [Concluded.]

3. Color Audition

Color-audition and allied phenomena do not appear to any great extent in the earlier French romanticists. We learn almost by chance that Alfred de Musset associated colors with sounds, a peculiarity that can scarcely be said to have affected his poetry; though his poetry contains, of course, abundant evidence of hyperaesthesia. In a letter to Madame Jaubert he writes that he very much regretted having to argue with his family to prove that fa was yellow, sol red, a soprano voice blonde, a contralto voice brunette. He thought that these things went without saying. But it is only with Baudelaire that this confusion of the sense-impressions assumes importance. Baudelaire dreams of a “mystical metamorphosis of all his senses fused into one,” and comes within measurable distance of attaining it. For instance, in the sonnet I have already quoted he says: “There are perfumes fresh as the flesh of babes, sweet as hautboys, green as meadows, and others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant, having the expansiveness of infinite things, like amber, musk, benjamin, and incense, which sing the transports of the spirit and senses.” It is a pity that Baudelaire did not also taste the perfumes in this passage, for then he would have arrived at a complete jumble of all the five senses, and of flesh and spirit into the bargain. Baudelaire was always on the outlook for the symbolizing of sound in color. Thus we are told, when Wagner in person was striving to conquer Paris, Baudelaire, who was in full sympathy with the new music, was invited to hear him play the piano. Wagner began in a blue dressing-gown; after a time he changed to a yellow gown; and finally to a green one. When he had finished Baudelaire expressed sincere satisfaction but added diffidently that he would like to ask a question. Did the change of color in the dressing-gown symbolize anything in the music? Wagner looked sharply to see if the Frenchman were making fun of him. But when persuaded of his good faith, he explained that playing so warmed him up that he had a change of gowns from heavier to lighter ready to hand; the colors were mere accident. (1) 

Baudelaire would almost seem to have arrived at the “ultimate dim Thule” [Thule: the northern-most land, as mentioned in ancient Greek and Latin literature] of refined sensation; but some of his disciples pushed on still further into the region of the rare and the remote. We may take as representing this last stage of the movement, J. K. Huysmans, [Joris-Karl Huysmans: French decadent novelist and art critic; 1848-1907] and his novel “A Rebours” [“Against Nature”] (1884). In writing this novel Huysmans was evidently influenced strongly, not only by Baudelaire, but by Poe. It makes clear to us indeed why Poe is the only American author who has had an important influence in France: he was the only American author who was not merely romantic, but ultra-romantic, who had the type of sensibility we have been studying in Rousseau and his descendants. How could Baudelaire and his group fail to be fascinated by such passages as the one in the “Colloquy of Monos and Una” where Poe describes the experience of a person who has already ceased to breathe without as yet having ceased entirely to feel. “The senses, indeed,” says the spirit who relates this experience, speaking of course from another state of being, “the senses were unusually active although eccentrically so, assuming each other’s functions at random. The taste and smell were inextricably confounded and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense. The rays of light of the candles set in the death-chamber affected me only as sound. Issuing from the flame of each lamp, for there were many, there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone.” 

Huysmans then, as I have said, was inspired to write “A Rebours” not only by Baudelaire, but by Poe,—especially by the tale entitled “The Imp of the Perverse,” and by the account Poe gives of the habits of M. Auguste Dupin. The title of the novel, “A Rebours,” means that its hero, Des Esseintes, is exactly opposed in all his opinions and behavior to the rest of the world. His twofold passion is first, to make faces at the bourgeois; second, “to enwrap himself,” as Poe puts it, “in an exquisite sense of the strange.” He reduces life to art, and art to sensation, and sensation itself to an endeavor to achieve in revery a sort of musical synthesis of the various sense-impressions. To this end he arranges for himself in a lonely suburb of Paris “a bower of dreams,” so organized that he may play symphonic variations on his different senses and extract from them the maximum of refined enjoyment. For example, Des Esseintes built into the wall of his dining-room a cupboard containing a series of small kegs arranged side by side, and each having a little silver spigot at the bottom. He connects these spigots with one another so as to form a kind of key-board on which he can play his mouth-organ. “The organ happened to be open. The little drawers labeled flute, horn, voix céleste were drawn out ready to be operated. Des Esseintes drank a drop here and there, played inner symphonies for himself, succeeded in procuring for himself in his throat sensations analogous to those that music pours into the ear.” Furthermore, every liqueur corresponds in taste, according to Des Esseintes, to the sound of a musical instrument. Curaçao corresponds to the clarinet; kiimmel to the nasal oboe; mint and anisette to the flute, both peppery and sweet; kirsch to the fierce blast of a trumpet; gin and whiskey to strident cornets and trombones, etc. Moreover, tonal relations exist in the music of liqueurs. Thus the benedictine stands as the relative minor of that major of alcohols known as green chartreuse. 

“These principles once admitted, Des Esseintes had succeeded, thanks to erudite experiments, in playing upon his tongue silent melodies, mute funereal marches grandly spectacular; in hearing in his mouth solos of mint, duos of vespétro and rum.” But that evening, Huysmans concludes, Des Esseintes had no desire to ‘‘listen to the taste of music.” He does, however, indulge himself later in a concert of perfumes; each perfume evoking for his inner eye its appropriate vision. Des Esseintes speaks confidently of these correspondencies as being generally valid. But is this the case? Can the same perfume be counted on to suggest the same vision to any two persons, or indeed to suggest anything at all? This is the crux of the whole matter. In 1902 there was given at New York in the Carnegie Lyceum the “first experimental perfume concert in America,” which included among its attractions “a trip to Japan in sixteen minutes,” conveyed to the audience by a series of odors. But any attempt of this kind to arrive at a collective bower of dreams, to have a whole audience respond in a similar manner to olfactory suggestiveness is foredoomed to failure. It is likely to appeal not to the audience’s sense of smell, but to a far more wholesome sense,—its sense of humor. And this I understand is what happened in the New York experiment. 

A like attempt to suggest colors by sounds or vice versa would have the same fate. These supposed correspondencies are involved in hopeless subjectivity. If we go through the testimony of people in the habit of seeing sounds and hearing colors, we shall find that to one the flute seemed red, to another sky-blue; for one the trumpet was scarlet, for another green, and so on. In his celebrated sonnet Arthur Rimbaud [French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes; 1854-1891] declares that the vowel a is black, e white, i red, u green, o blue. (2) To René Ghil [René François Ghilbert, French modernist poet; 1862-1925], however, the vowels suggest very different colors, o, as he maintains, being not blue but red; a point disputed by these ‘‘exquisite invalids,” as Anatole France calls them, “under the indulgent eye of M. Mallarmé.” Here as elsewhere the last stage of romantic suggestiveness is an incomprehensible symbolism. Attempts such as were made at Paris a few years ago to found a school of art on color-audition must remain forever vain. Color-audition and similar phenomena have little bearing on the higher and more humane purposes of art. For the critic of art and literature they are interesting and curious, but scarcely anything more. They concern more immediately the student of psychology and medicine, and in some cases the nerve-specialist. 

As a matter of fact the hero of Huysmans, after all his “erudite experiments” on himself, finally collapses at the close of the book into the arms of a nerve-specialist. In himself Des Esseintes is, as M. Lemaître [Jules Lemaître, French critic, dramatist, and nationalist; 1853-1914] remarks, only a “very complicated ass”; but he is more than usually significant in his asininity. Des Esseintes is a suitable symbol of the end of an art that refuses to go beyond the quest of sensation, and seeks to enhance this sensation by throwing over it the glamour of imaginative illusion. As marking the supreme exaggerations of his school, his mouth-organ is equally symptomatic, as I have said elsewhere, with the color-clavichord of Father Castel. In reducing everything to suggestion Des Esseintes merely expresses in his own way what is more and more a universal tendency. We are living in an age that has gone mad on the powers of suggestion in everything from its art to its therapeutics. Even the art of dancing has caught the contagion, and is not content to count simply as dancing but must needs be a symbol and suggestion of something else, of a Greek vase, for example, or a Beethoven symphony. If all the arts are thus restless and impressionistic, the reason is not far to seek: it is because the people who practice these arts and for whom they are practiced are themselves living in an impressionistic flutter. If the arts lack dignity, centrality, repose, it is because the men of the present have no centre, no sense of anything fixed or permanent either within or without themselves, that they may oppose to the flux of phenomena and the torrent of impressions. In a word, if confusion has crept into the arts, it is merely a special aspect of a more general malady, of that excess of sentimental and scientific naturalism (3) from which, if my diagnosis is correct, the occidental world is now suffering. It remains, therefore, for us to consider whether there is any means by which we may react in just measure against this naturalism,—by which we may recover humanistic standards without ceasing to be vital and spontaneous, or in any way reverting to formalism. 

(1) I borrow this anecdote from the Nation (New York), 17 December, 1908. 

(2) A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes, etc. [A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels. Some day I will tell your latent births.] 

[One of Ghil’s poems:

oû, ou, oui (ll), iou, oui
Browns, blacks to reds
F, L, N, S
Long, primitive flutes
Monotony, doubt, simplicity.
—Instinct to be and to live.

Traité du Verbe (1904)]

(3) I have attempted a definition of these terms in Literature and the American College. (Essay on “Bacon and Rousseau.”) 

[End of Chapter VI.]