The New Laokoon (Part 25)

(Pictured: André Chénier.) I am happy to present the twenty-fifth 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.

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 (Continued.)

A great deal has been said about the lawlessness and aimlessness of the German romanticists in particular, but in this respect as in many others they were anticipated by Rousseau, who already expresses, and with a more consummate art than that possessed by many of his disciples, the mood of vagabondage, the joy of emancipation from any definite purpose that is so pervasive in modern literature. “I love,” says Rousseau, “to busy myself with mere nothings; to begin a hundred things and finish no one of them; to go and come as the whim takes me; to change my plans every instant; to follow a fly in all its movements; to turn up a stone to see what is under it; to undertake ardently a task that would require ten years and give it up without regret at the end of ten minutes; in fine, to muse all the day long without order and sequence, and to follow in all things only the caprice of the moment.” If we contrast with this passage Aristotle’s saying that the end is the chief thing of all, we shall have the two most divergent views imaginable of life and art. 

Rousseau, as he never tires of telling us, has a horror of every constraint upon his emotional impulse. He does not spurn merely certain special barriers and limitations but all barriers and limitations whatsoever. When he speaks of liberty, he does not mean, as a typical Englishman (let us say Burke) would mean, liberty defined and limited by law, but an undefined liberty that is tempered only by sympathy, which in turn is tempered by nothing at all. An undefined liberty and an unselective sympathy are the two main aspects of the movement initiated by Rousseau—the poles between which it oscillates. Some Rousseauists have exalted sympathy almost to the exclusion of liberty, others have exalted liberty almost to the exclusion of sympathy, and others again have exalted both sympathy and liberty. At the very sound of the words love and liberty they would have us swept off our feet by a wave of enthusiasm, and indeed look on it as almost sacrilegious to submit these words to a cool examination. But what are we to think of love and liberty that would set themselves above every law, especially the highest law of which man has finite knowledge, the law of measure? This conception of love and liberty may very well cease to be a virtue and become a disease. Inasmuch as the word anarchy has come to have a somewhat special connotation, we may call this disease, for lack of a better term, eleutheromania. 

Eleutheromania may be defined as the instinct to throw off not simply outer and artificial limitations, but all limitations whatsoever. For example, Friedrich Schlegel is an eleutheromaniac when he says that the “caprice of the poet will suffer no law above itself.” To any great poet of the past, to Dante for instance, such an utterance would have seemed a horrible blasphemy, and Dante would not have been far mistaken. Tolstoy, again, is an eleutheromaniac in his notion of sympathy; Nietzsche, in his notion of liberty. These two men, indeed, stand at what I have defined as the opposite poles of Rousseauism. Of course, it is an infinitely delicate task to determine how far any particular man has fallen into excess in his emphasis on love or liberty. There is plainly eleutheromania in Byron’s idea of liberty, as there is in Shelley’s idea of sympathy; but this eleutheromania had at least some justification as a protest against a counter-excess of Toryism in the society of their time. Nowadays the excess is of a very different kind: society is plainly suffering from a lack rather than a superabundance of discipline and restraint. Many of the greatest of our modern artists, Hugo, Wagner, Ibsen, etc., have been eleutheromaniacs. For over a century the world has been fed on a steady diet of revolt. Everybody is becoming tinged with eleutheromania, taken up with his rights rather than with his duties, more and more unwilling to accept limitations. We all know how perilous it is to suggest to the modern woman that she has any “sphere”; and, indeed, if man is to be an eleutheromaniac it is hard to see why woman should be denied the same privilege. The present prospect is that society will get its fingers badly burned before it learns to distinguish between true freedom and brotherhood and the freedom and brotherhood that are only a special form of the Rousseauistic art of making madness beautiful.

We should have the courage to affirm in the face of most contemporary opinion that a man may throw off the outer law only in the name of a higher law, and not in the name of universal sympathy. We should note the difference in this respect between the art of Richard Wagner and the art of the Greeks, the spirit of which he claims to be reviving. According to Wagner, as we have seen, the arts are to melt voluptuously together, inspired by the spirit of freedom. What we actually have in the Greek drama is a flexible interplay of the different arts and genres that is governed by an exquisite restraint. As André Chénier says in speaking of Greek art, “No genre escaping from its prescribed boundaries would have dared to trespass on the frontiers of another.” (1)

Wagner shows something akin to effrontery in his attempt to turn the story of Antigone into a humanitarian symbol. (2) Antigone, says Wagner, opposes to the harsh laws of the state, a love for all mankind. But in reality if Antigone violates the edicts of Creon it is only, as she asserts, that she may obey laws still higher and more sacred,—

Unwritten laws, eternal in the heavens. 
Not of to-day or yesterday are these, 
But live from everlasting, and from whence 
They sprang, none knoweth. (3) 

In short, as depicted by Sophocles, Antigone is not an eleutheromaniac but a civilized woman. The sense one has of vital law as something distinct from either outer authority or the impulses of temperament may be taken in general as the highest, perhaps the only true, test of civilization. 

Of course, I should not assert that a deliberate revolt against both the inner and the outer law has marked the whole of the modern movement. Only one side of this movement—the side I have associated with Rousseau—has been deliberately anarchistic, and the movement has been too vast to be completely represented by any one man or set of men. Yet we should not overlook certain consequences of the drift toward a naturalistic conception of life that has been visible during the past hundred years, and indeed more or less since the Renaissance. One of these results has been a weakening of the idea of a law for human nature as something distinct from the law for physical nature. “There are two laws, discrete, not reconciled,” says Emerson,— “Law for man, and law for thing.” But for the pure naturalist there is only one law, the law for thing. Now any one who thus identifies man with phenomenal nature, whether scientifically or sentimentally, is almost inevitably led to value only the virtues of expansion; for according to natural law, to grow is to expand. Diderot’s contemporaries spoke of him as an expansive man; in this respect Diderot, like Rousseau, was a true ancestor of the nineteenth century. All the men who were typically of the nineteenth century were expansive men. Think, for example, how purely expansive Dickens was in his view of life, and how in spite of his undoubted genius his art suffers from this excess of expansiveness. The sentimental naturalist wishes to expand emotionally, and is averse to anything that would set a bound to emotion. The scientific naturalist would go on increasing forever in knowledge and power, and eyes askance anything that seems to fix limits to this increase. 

Yet in spite of the naturalists, scientific and sentimental, we must insist not only that there is a law for man as well as a law for thing, but that the actual reason may be given why the two laws are discrete and unreconciled. If man as a natural phenomenon grows by expanding, man as man grows by concentrating. He proves that he is set above nature, not so much by his power to act, as by his power to refrain from acting. According to Emerson, God himself is defined by the Orientals as the “inner check.” I do not happen to know of any oriental book in which this precise phrase occurs, but the idea is found in almost every truly religious book that was ever written in either the East or West. 

The chief use of any widening out of knowledge and sympathy must be to prepare man more fully for the supreme moment of concentration and selection, the moment when he exercises his own special faculties. Now, to select rightly a man must have right standards, and to have right standards means in practice that he must constantly set bounds to his own impulses. Man grows in the perfection proper to his own nature in almost direct ratio to his growth in restraint and self-control. The neo-classic humanists were right after all in looking on the highest law as a law of concentration,—a law of unity, measure, purpose. Only they were wrong in turning this law into mere formalism. The sentimental naturalists, however, erred still more gravely when in getting rid of the formalism they got rid at the same time of unity, measure, purpose, and gave themselves up to mere emotional expansion. This meant in practice getting rid of the very idea of a special law for human nature. For the word law means in practice the establishing of a causal sequence between a certain number of isolated facts or phenomena; and any one who seriously sets out to establish a causal sequence between the facts of human nature will speedily come to recognize other forces besides those of expansion. Furthermore all the experience of the past, cries, as though with a thousand tongues, through the manifold creeds and systems in which it has been very imperfectly formulated, that the highest human law is a law of concentration. Therefore the sentimental naturalist wants none of this experience; he would live as though “none had lived before him,” and, in his attempt to remain purely expansive, try to set up the things that are below the reason as a substitute for the things that are above it. I have actually heard Sophocles called romantic because of the “Oedipus at Colonus.” But what relation is there between the wonder of the child and the religious awe that broods over all the latter part of this play? To lose sight of such distinctions is to show one’s self, not childlike, but childish. 

(1) La nature dicta vingt genres opposés, 
D’un fil léger entre eux, chez les Grecs, divisés. 
Nul genre, s’échappant de ses bornes prescrites, 
N’aurait osé d’un autre envahir les limites. 

[Nature dictated twenty opposed genres,
Divided up by the Greeks with a light thread between them.
No genre escaping from its prescribed boundaries
Would have dared to trespass on the frontiers of another.]
L’ Invention.

(2) Opera and Drama (Ellis’s translation), pp. 183 ff. 

(3) Antigone, 453 ff. Cf. also Oedipus Rex, 865 ff.