The New Laokoon (Part 24)

(Pictured: Ariosto.) I am happy to present the twenty-fourth 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. With this post we begin Chapter VII, the concluding chapter of the book.

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Part II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter VII

Conclusion

1. The Limits of Naturalism

The theories about art and literature that we have been reviewing in this book seem in the retrospect a sort of oscillation between extremes: we have seen the impressionistic extreme follow the extreme of formalism, the pseudo-Platonists succeed the pseudo-Aristotelians; we have seen the neo-classicists confuse the arts objectively (usually in terms of painting), and the romanticists confuse them subjectively (frequently in terms of music). “It is the privilege of the ancients,” says Lessing, “never in any matter to do too much or too little.” Man is fond of looking on himself as a lover of the truth; but in tracing historically a subject like the present we are often tempted to pronounce him rather a lover of half-truths. Of course most men cannot be said to love in any effective sense even half-truths, but are hungry above all for illusions. Nor do the illusions need to be very complicated,—the simplest illusions of sense usually suffice. A little vanity and a little sensuality, says a disdainful French moralist, is about all that enters into the make-up of the average man. Even so there is something to be said for the point of view of the average man. He often derives more satisfaction from his frank surrender to the illusions of life,—to what Erasmus would have called his folly,—than the philosopher from his painful gropings for the truth. ‘‘In Folly’s cup still laughs the bubble Joy.” 

If the philosopher does win a glimpse of something beyond the almost impenetrable veil of illusion, he is liable to take for the truth what is at best only a half-truth, and so grows one-sided and fanatical. The half-truth often gets itself formulated and imposed tyrannically upon the world, and men continue to hold fast to it long after it has served its purpose, when emphasis is needed rather on some opposite aspect of the truth. This is a chief form of that blindness in human nature that the great Greek poets saw so clearly,—the desperate tenacity with which men cling to their half-truths and fail to see the approaching shadow of Nemesis. Indeed, one might say in this sense that it would be easy enough for man to guard against his vices if he could only be saved from the excess of his virtues. 

The tenacity with which man clings to his half-truths is due not merely to conviction but also to supineness. Man has always been ready to justify his exclusive allegiance to the half-truth that happens to be in fashion by some one of the innumerable sophistries by which he has flattered his ancient indolence. In fact, as Sir Joshua Reynolds says, there is scarcely any expedient to which man will not resort in order to “evade and shuffle off real labor,—the real labor of thinking.” Sir Joshua showed that he himself was on his guard against the neoclassical supineness when he says that he avoided making copies, because making copies ‘‘requires no effort of mind” and gets one into the “dangerous habit of imitating without selecting, and laboring without a determinate object.” For the neo-classical indolence of mechanical imitation the romanticist substituted the indolence of revery—of a spontaneity that has only to let itself go. Wordsworth would have us believe that to become wise a man needs merely to sit down on an “old gray stone” and “dream his time away.” And Wordsworth of course glimpses here an important half-truth, but a half-truth at least as dangerous in itself as the neoclassic half-truth about the copying of models. Moreover, the romantic indolence resembles the neoclassic indolence in having no “determinate object” and in not being truly selective. 

Man is therefore a living paradox in that he holds with enthusiasm and conviction to the half-truth and yet becomes perfect only in proportion as he achieves the rounded view. The essence of any true humanistic method is the mediation between extremes, a mediation that demands of course not only effective thinking but effective self-discipline; and that, no doubt, is why true humanists have always been so rare. We are not to suppose that because a man has made some progress in mediating between opposite virtues and half-truths that he has therefore arrived at the truth. The Truth (with a capital T) is of necessity infinite and so is not for any poor finite creature like man. The most any man can do is to tend toward the truth, but the portion of it he has achieved at any given moment will always, compared with what still remains, be a mere glimpse and an infinitesimal fragment. If he attempts to formulate this glimpse, the danger is that it will thus be frozen into a false finality. Any one who thinks he has got the Truth finally tucked away in a set of formulae, is merely suffering, whether he call himself theologian, or scientist, or philosopher, from what may be termed the error of intellectualism or the metaphysical illusion. But though the truth cannot be finally formulated, man cannot dispense with formulae. The truth will always overflow his categories, yet he needs categories. He should therefore have formulae and categories, but hold them fluidly; in other words, he must have standards, but they must be flexible; he must have faith in law, but it must be a vital faith. [Babbitt never allows for divine revelation.]

The neo-classic theorists whom we studied in the early part of this book evidently had a faith in law that was too stark and literal; in a world of flux and relativity they tried to set up changeless formulae. Boileau, for example, speaks of the literary genres as though they were fixed from everlasting to everlasting. Lessing, again, shows too rigid a sense of law when he asserts that Aristotle’s ‘‘Poetics” is as infallible as Euclid; he should at least have allowed for the possibilities of non-Euclidean geometry. Lessing’s perception of the laws of the drama, though too rigidly formulated, is in its own way vital. . . . Under [the] influence of [earlier Aristoteleans] the conception of law ceased to be fluid and vital and was petrified into the mechanical rule. 

Most of the neo-classic rules in themselves point the way to a very important set of half-truths,—the half-truths that dawned on the men of the Renaissance when they had their glimpse of the antique symmetry. The contrast between the masterpieces of Greece and Rome and the works of the Middle Ages seemed to the Renaissance the contrast between form and formlessness. Even a Leonardo regretted his failure to recover the antique symmetry, but he at least imitated the ancients vitally; whereas many of the Aristotelian casuists held out the hope that the antique symmetry might be recovered by imitating the ancients outwardly and mechanically. 

In the name of form as they conceived it, the casuists carried on a campaign against the mediaeval romances, a campaign that deserves to be more carefully studied than it has been hitherto, by someone who is at once an exact scholar and a man of ideas. (1) The gist of this attack on the romances is that they are lacking in unity, measure, purpose, as the casuists understood these terms. The romances begin anywhere and leave off anywhere; have no art of omission or selection; no subordination of incident to some definite end. Thus Ariosto [Ludovico Ariosto, Italian poet, author of the epic Orlando Furioso; 1474-1533], instead of dealing with a single important action of one hero, promises at the beginning of his poem to sing of ladies and knights and arms and heaven knows what else,—in short, a mere jumble of romantic adventure. And so Ariosto is condemned by many of the casuists, and Tasso [Torquato Tasso, Italian poet, author of the epic Gerusalemme liberata; 1544-1595] praised as being nearer to the antique symmetry; whereas, judged by the psychological test, the only test that has value in such matters, Ariosto is, of course, very much nearer the ancients than Tasso. In other words, the casuists did not go beneath the surface; they were for having art and literature carefully restrained, highly unified, supremely purposeful; but in interpreting their restraint and unity and purpose they failed to distinguish between form and formalism. Moreover, the neo-classical creed took definite shape during a period of concentration, a concentration that was itself more formal than vital; and so in the imitation of the ancients emphasis was laid almost entirely on the virtues of concentration, and not, as might have been the case in the earlier Renaissance, on the expansive virtues as well. 

Consequently, when the forces of expansion again prevailed, the neo-classic rules came to be felt as mere artificiality and convention, as a mortal constraint on everything that is vital and spontaneous. There took place one of those violent oscillations from one set of half-truths to another that are not uncommon in the history of mankind and that Luther compares to the swayings of a drunken peasant on horseback. The romantic movement was inspired, even more than most movements, by the ambition to be the very opposite of everything that had gone before. The neo-classic school had converted the ideas of unity and measure and purpose and of law itself into mere formalism; the romanticists in getting rid of formalism were for getting rid at the same time of the ideas of unity and measure and purpose and law itself. They would be aimless and lawless and live in a perpetual paradox. For example, a play of Tieck’s, with its hashing together of different arts and its mixture of various genres epic, lyric, etc., is a deliberate defiance of all the laws that had been supposed to govern the drama; and though in theory we may grant that these laws are not absolute, in practice it is about as sensible for any one aiming at true dramatic effect to fly in the face of them in the way Tieck has done, as it would be to fly in the face of the law of gravitation, which according to the latest school of physics is not to be taken absolutely, either. 

[To be continued.]

(1) Professor Spingarn (Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, pp. 112-124) has given a summary of this debate between the partisans of epic and romance. As I have pointed out elsewhere, one of the weapons used in attacking the romances and proving their lack of purpose was the idea of “probability.”