The New Laokoon (Part 26)

(Pictured: Ernest Renan.) I am happy to present the twenty-sixth 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.)

By no means all the romanticism of the past century has been of the Rousseauistic type. A great deal of it has simply been what one is tempted to call the normal romanticism of the human spirit, its propensity for fiction, for wonder, adventure, surprise, rather than for the tracing of cause and effect. But all the forms of romanticism have received an immense stimulus from the naturalistic movement. Professor Santayana speaks of the ‘‘romantic drama, where accidents make the meaningless happiness or unhappiness of a supersensitive adventurer.” Now the romantic drama has ceased to be an important genre, but Professor Santayana’s phrase may in most cases be applied with equal appropriateness to the only literary form that has in these latter days retained vigor and vitality,—the novel. 

The novel is the one genre that the neo-classicists had not regulated, partly, no doubt, because they had not thought it worth the trouble. It had no formal laws and limits, and so was admirably adapted, as Rousseau showed in the “Nouvelle Héloïse,” to free emotional expansion. The novel is not only the least purposeful of the literary forms, the one that lends itself most naturally to all the meanders of feeling, to a vast overflow of “soul” in the romantic sense, but it also admits most readily a photographic realism,—that is, an art without selection. The triumph of the novel has been, if not the triumph of formlessness over form, at least the triumph of diffuseness over concentration. Friedrich Schlegel was right from his own point of view in exalting the novel as a sort of confusion of all the other literary forms, (1) the visible embodiment of that chaos of human nature of which he dreamed. 

The relation between sentimental naturalism and the prodigious development of fiction in the nineteenth century is obvious. This development is also related, though less obviously, to scientific naturalism; for the nineteenth century was not merely the most romantic, it was also the most analytic of centuries. So far from taking life purely as an adventure, it was engaged most actively in following out causes and effects and so arriving at the notion of law; but the law that it was thus tracing was the law of phenomenal nature, “the law for thing.” This scientific investigation of nature and the sentimental communion with nature of the Rousseauist seem at first sight to diverge radically, especially if we remember the attacks on science by many of the romanticists (beginning with Rousseau himself). But this divergence is more apparent than real. In the first place the scientist has never taken any too seriously the lamentations of the romanticist over the disenchanting effects of analysis. He knows that his own hegemony is not threatened by any number of romanticists, that he is a stronger and more masculine individual. Then, too, he recognizes an element of truth in the romantic contention. Analysis is desiccating and takes the bloom off things, he admits. He feels the need of recovering this bloom, of plunging into the spontaneous and the unconscious, of cultivating the naïve and the primitive, in due subordination of course to analysis. It was in this spirit that John Stuart Mill read Wordsworth’s poetry. (2) It is indeed the normal relation not only of the scientist but of the modern man in general, toward art and literature. He is feverishly engaged in the conquest of matter and in following out the strict causal sequences that are necessary to this end. When he comes to literature he has already had his fill of analysis, of cause and effect, and aspires rather to something that loosens and relaxes the mind, to something that is naïve and illogical and unexpected. He is willing to look on life for a while from the angle of Alice in Wonderland; or subside into the Peter Pan point of view; or even become one of the Babes in Toyland. He is ripe for the light novel, or the extravaganza, or the musical comedy; and the romanticist stands ready to supply him with these things. To be sure, the romanticist often claims to be a sublime idealist. But having lost all sense of a definite human law and of the standards and discipline it implies he is in reality reduced to the role of catering to those who wish relaxation from analysis—to the tired scientist, and the fagged philologist and the weary man of business. We have here the explanation of the enormous vogue of fiction in these latter days as well as the reason why art and literature are appealing more and more exclusively to women, and to men in their unmasculine moods. 

One cannot hope to understand the nineteenth century without tracing this curious interplay of scientific and sentimental naturalism. Let us illustrate concretely from one of the great representative figures of the century, perhaps the most representative of modern philologists, Ernest Renan. “The more a man develops intellectually,” says Renan, “the more he dreams of the contrary pole, that is to say of the irrational, of repose in complete ignorance, of the woman who is only woman, the instinctive being who acts only on the impulse of an obscure consciousness. The brain scorched by reasoning thirsts for simplicity as the desert thirsts for pure water,” etc. In other words, intellectual unrestraint is to be tempered by an unrestrained emotionalism. The “debauches of dialectic” that produce ‘‘moments of dryness, hours of aridity” are to be offset by the “kisses of the naïve being in whom nature lives and smiles.” (3) This is the dream of a nineteenth-century Titan who hopes to scale heaven by piling the emotional Ossa on the intellectual Pelion; who will do anything rather than recognize a law that imposes measure on all things—even the libido sciendi [lust of knowledge]. One is tempted to add, at the risk of being thought flippant, that all this talk of the “kisses of the naïve being” as a substitute for religious restraint smacks of decadence. Besides, the woman who is only woman in Renan’s sense is a genre tranché [clearcut genre] that promises to be increasingly rare. Not every Rousseauist can hope to be as fortunate as the master and find a Thérèse Levasseur [Rousseau’s mistress]. 

Possibly the dryness and aridity Renan associates with the study of the natural law is due at least in part to the interpreting of this law too strictly. For one remarkable point is to be noted about the men of the nineteenth century: if they held the law for man loosely or not at all, they often made up for it by holding too rigidly the natural law. In other words, during this period man was an impressionist about the law of his own being and a dogmatist about the law of physical nature. For however different the law for man and the law for thing may be in other respects, they have one important resemblance: neither law can be finally formulated, for the simple reason that each law takes hold upon the infinite,—the one upon the infinitely large, the other upon the infinitely small. These are the two infinitudes of which Pascal speaks. Man thinks, says Pascal, that he has found firm foundations on which he can rear himself a tower even to the infinite; but at the very moment when his hopes are highest, the foundations begin to crack, and yawn open even to the abyss. The scientific dogmatists of the nineteenth century imagined that they had reared a tower of this kind. Some of them are as good examples of what I have termed the error of intellectualism or the metaphysical illusion, as was any theologian of the Middle Ages. Did any theologian ever carry further what one may call the intoxication of the formula than Taine? (4) Many of the speculations of science merely represent the desperate strainings of the human spirit to grasp in its essence and formulate what must forever elude it,—the final truth of the infinitely small,—just as a certain type of theology is an equally futile attempt to grasp in its essence and formulate the infinitely great. We must note, however, one fortunate difference: no one is likely to be burned at the stake for not holding right views about ions and electrons, as men once were for not being orthodox about the Trinity. 

Furthermore, a less dogmatic temper is becoming apparent among the scientists themselves. The foundations of their tower of intellectualism that seemed so firm to the men of the mid-nineteenth century, are already beginning to crack visibly. In practice this means that the scientists are coming to hold the idea of law more fluidly. For example, M. Poincaré says in his book on the “Value of Science,” which has been selling in France like a popular novel, that science can never arrive at essences; at most, scientific laws “can be only a provisional and approximate expression of relationships.” (5) If we compare M. Poincaré’s book with a book like Haeckel’s “Riddle of the Universe” we shall be conscious of a certain decrease in scientific dogmatism though there is still room for improvement. If the perception gains ground that man’s knowledge of physical, like his knowledge of human nature, is destined always to remain a mere glimpse and infinitesimal fragment, there may be hope of reaction against what one may call scientific Titanism. There might even be some recovery of that true humility—the inner obeisance of the spirit to something higher than itself—that has almost become one of the lost virtues. 

[To be continued.]

(1) Schlegel set out deliberately to confuse the genres in his own novel Lucinde. 

(2) Cf. Höffding’s History of Modern Philosophy, vol. ii, p. 399. 

(3) For all the passages I have quoted, see Préface to Souvenirs d’enfance et de Jeunesse. I have discussed Renan more fully as a type of the nineteenth-century naturalist in the introduction to my edition of the Souvenirs (D. C. Heath & Co., Boston). 

(4) We may note as an extreme example the passage in which Taine derives the whole of Roman history from one sharply formulated law: “Oubliez l’immense entassement des details innombrables. Possédant la formule, vous avez le reste. Ils tiennent au large dans une demi-ligne; vous enfermez douze cents ans et la moitié du monde antique dans le creux de votre main”[Forget the immense pile of innumerable details. Having the formula, you have the rest. They boil down to a half line; you lock twelve hundred years and half of the ancient world in the palm of your hand] (Philosophes classiques du XIX‘ siecle, pp. 367, 368). This book ends with the vision of a single gigantic scientific Formula that is to contain the whole truth of nature. 

(5) La Valeur de la Science, par H. Poincaré; p. 267 and passim.