The New Laokoon (Part 27)

(Pictured: Bergson.) I am happy to present the twenty-seventh 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 (Concluded.)

Of course, the diminishing faith in scientific intellectualism may simply lead to an oscillation toward the Rousseauistic pole. This as a matter of fact is what we see in contemporary philosophers like Professor James [William James, American philosopher, historian, and psychologist; 1842-1910] and M. Bergson [Henri Bergson, French philosopher;1859–1941]. M. Bergson’s point of view is a protest against the hard and cramping determinism that certain scientific dogmatists would impose upon the human spirit; it is at the same time a plea for creative spontaneity. But M. Bergson does not himself overstep the bounds of naturalism. His spontaneity is Rousseauistic, not Platonic; that is, it aims at vital expansion and not at vital concentration. The very phrases of M. Bergson that are most current are significant in this respect,—phrases for instance like élan vital [life force] and poussée intérieure [inner thrust]. The main concern of a Platonist would have been with that something that seems to proceed from the innermost recesses of man’s being, and that makes itself felt, not as impulse, but rather as a norm and check upon impulse,—not as an élan vital but rather as a frein vital [vital restraint]. M. Bergson’s revolt from the stark determinism in which a certain over-analytic and mechanical conception of scientific truth would imprison nature and human nature reminds one of some of the German romantic philosophers. Only we may note among other differences, that the Rousseauistic element in M. Bergson’s thinking, his exaltation of the vital and the spontaneous, does not, as it so often does in a Schelling [Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, German Idealist philosopher; 1775-1854] or a Schleiermacher [Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, German Reformed theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar; 1768-1834], assume a pseudo-Platonic mask. The world has grown so “tough-minded” in the interval that it is willing to put up with a philosophy that has laid aside even the pretext of unity. 

The reaction we have been describing against certain exaggerations of the scientific spirit is evidently not one that can altogether satisfy the humanist. This point will become clear if we consider for a moment the bearing of exaggerated science, or as we may term it, pseudo-science, upon our present problem regarding the nature of the genres and the proper boundaries of the arts. Science, we should add, may become false either by holding its own law too dogmatically, or else by trying to set up this law as a substitute for the human law. I have already mentioned a book that is an egregious example of both kinds of pseudo-science, Haeckel’s “Riddle of the Universe.” Books like that of Haeckel suggest that nowadays we are as prone to err by interpreting human nature in terms of physical nature as men once were by doing the exact opposite. Thus the ancients had a theory that when the giant Enceladus, who was pinioned under Mount Etna, tried to turn over, the whole of Sicily trembled. Some of Haeckel’s theories are about as near to accounting for human nature as was this ancient theory to accounting for earthquakes. Milton, again, speaks of the comet that from “his horrid hair shakes pestilence and war.” But the comet is now related to laws that are independent of human hopes and fears, and so it has ceased to be a portent and is entered in the “dull catalogue of common things”; and this is a gain, but not an unmixed gain if we are thus led to suppose that we can compute the orbit of human nature by methods similar to those employed for the comet. 

Naturalists, both sentimental and scientific, tend to reduce everything to terms of motion, to see everything passing over into everything else by almost insensible gradations, to refuse to accept any firm line of demarcation. We have already seen how the German romanticists felt emotionally this running over of every art into every other art. The scientific naturalists have the same point of view. “Everything,” says Diderot, who was both a scientific and sentimental naturalist, “is a perpetual flux; every animal is more or less man; every animal is more or less plant; every plant is more or less mineral; there is nothing precise in nature.” Because the genera and species evolve and run together in this way on the physical plane, it is easy to take the next step and assume that the literary genres evolve and run together in the same way. This is what is known as the biological analogy. But any one who would make of this comparison between the natural genus and the literary genre anything besides a more or less useful metaphor, at once falls into pseudo-science. Brunetière, for example, is pseudo-scientific in his literary Darwinism or évolution des genres. The reason is obvious: the genres are related not merely to the natural law, but in a vastly higher degree to the “law for man.” The whole matter is summed up in a pregnant phrase of Aristotle’s: (1) “Tragedy after passing through many transformations finally found its true nature and there it stopped.” This true nature, the point of pause and perfection, can be judged only with reference to the human law and its demands for unity, measure, purpose, and not with reference to the physical law which in itself can give only an endless flux and relativity. Nature is the region of the Many. If art is to be humanized, it must not simply flow with nature but be checked and tempered by some perception of the One. That is why, from the humanistic point of view, there is no particular gain in oscillating between the extremes of the naturalistic movement, in opposing the Rousseauistic extreme to the scientific and analytical extreme, or vice versa. The confusions with which we are troubled may be traced to two main sources, emotional unrestraint and pseudo-science; and both these sources of confusion take their rise in an excess of naturalism. Therefore, if we are to escape these confusions we need, while retaining the naturalistic virtues, to assert also the human law and transcend in important respects the whole naturalistic point of view. In other words, a humanistic revival to be effective, must imply some degree of reaction against both romanticism and science, against both the impressionism and the dogmatism that were peculiar to the last century. 

It remains for me to establish a closer connection between the theory I have just outlined regarding the limits of naturalism and the specific problems I have been discussing in this book. I hope at the same time to give the theory itself something of the definiteness and concreteness it still lacks. 

(1) Poetics, iv.