The New Laokoon (Part 28)

(Pictured: Benedetto Croce.) I am happy to present the twenty-eighth 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. We here begin part 2 of Chapter VII.

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

2. Form and Expression

If the foregoing analysis is correct, the nineteenth century was a period of naturalistic excess, and therefore inclined to favor too exclusively the virtues of expansion. All the formal boundaries and limits that the past had set up were felt only as fetters to be snapped asunder in order that the human spirit might expatiate at liberty. We need to consider for a moment the effect of these expansive tendencies on the idea that must underlie more or less all creative efforts in either art or literature,—the idea of beauty. Far be it from me to attempt any abstract definition of beauty. This, to judge from the vast majority of works on aesthetics, is a temptation of the enemy. But we may draw certain interesting conclusions if we study what men have actually meant at different epochs when they spoke of a thing as beautiful; if we note the curious ways in which the word beauty has been warped to make it conform to the half-truth that happened to be in vogue at any particular time. 

Thus for a certain type of neo-classicist beauty resided almost entirely in symmetry and proportion. But the symmetry and proportion, as he conceived them, were not vital but mechanical. If we took some of the theories of the Renaissance at their face value we should have to conclude that beauty in the plastic arts is something that can be constructed with a rule and compass. We have studied elsewhere this constant neo-classical tendency to confound form with formalism. As we approach the nineteenth century we find that there is a diminishing emphasis on the formal element in beauty and a growing emphasis on the element that is described by such epithets as vital, characteristic, picturesque, individual,—in short, on the element that may be summed up by the epithet expressive. In painting, color grows in favor as compared with line; in all the arts the principle of motion prevails increasingly over the principle of repose, the suggestive detail over design and composition. In brief, expression triumphs over form. Indeed, if we follow down the attempts that men have made during the past two or three centuries to define beauty, we shall find that the formal element has vanished away more and more, until nothing has been left but pure expression. (We may note in passing that this is exactly what happened to the Cheshire cat.) The ultra-romanticists go still further. Beauty is not only reduced to expression, but the expression itself is swallowed up in revery. Beauty becomes a sort of pursuit of the Chimera. Thus for Poe the highest beauty is the fugitive glance of a woman’s eye, and a dream woman at that:—

And all my days are trances, 
And all my nightly dreams 
Are where thy gray eye glances 
And where thy footstep gleams—
In what ethereal dances, 
By what eternal streams. 

Beauty, as conceived by Poe and at times happily achieved in his verse, may be defined as a musical nostalgia. If we connect this conception with Poe’s definition of poetry, “the rhythmical creation of Beauty,” (1) we shall have an interesting contrast with the Renaissance notion that the essence of poetry is the imitating of human actions “according to probability or necessity.”

As a matter of fact the most extreme of modern aesthetic theories are merely an attempt to formulate what Poe and many other writers and artists have actually been putting in practice for the past hundred years. We may take, as an example, the aesthetic theorist who is perhaps most prominent in Germany just now,—Professor Theodor Lipps. (2) Lipps carries to what we may hope is its ultimate exaggeration the Rousseauistic view of art,—the exaltation of motion over repose, the emphasis on trance-like illusion and pure suggestiveness. He tends to reduce beauty to a mere process of “infeeling,” (3) and virtually eliminates any over-arching law of symmetry that would set bounds to all this subjectivity. The sense of law, indeed, as something distinct either from the outer rule or individual impulse is, as I have already said, conspicuously absent from the whole modern movement. For example, the neo-classicists tended to turn the laws of verse into a set of narrow precepts, (4) and as a result of these precepts metre became, especially in the hands of the smaller men, mechanical, inflexible, inexpressive. We are familiar in English with the “see-saw” of the couplet. In their reaction from this formalism many of the partisans of the vers libre [free verse] have gone to the opposite extreme and fallen into sheer lawlessness. They have been unwilling to allow even the semblance of a barrier to their spacious dreams, and have made verse so flexible to all the sinuosities and windings of their revery, that they have often made it shapeless. They have succeeded in producing something that, in spite of M. Jourdain’s classification, is neither verse nor prose; something that is not so much a confusion of the genres as the absence of any genre; ‘‘an indescribable something,” says M. Lemaître, applying Bossuet’s phrase about the human corpse after it has reached a certain degree of decomposition, “an indescribable something that no longer has a name in any language.” (5) Such is the last stage of eleutheromania [obsession with freedom]. The eleutheromaniacs of poetry are in the same class as the painters who, in order that they may do justice to their “vision,” are forced, as they would have us believe, to violate the most indubitable laws of design; or with the dramatists who dismiss lightly, as mere conventions, what are in reality convenient summings-up of the universal experience of mankind. 

We should never have done if we tried to notice all the ways in which the idea of beauty has been corrupted by those who would make it purely impressionistic or expressive. One of the most interesting attempts of this kind is that of the Neapolitan critic, Benedetto Croce, whose work on aesthetics (6) has gone through several editions in Italian, and has just been translated into English. He has indeed been hailed by certain enthusiasts as the long-awaited Messiah of aesthetics. Signor Croce reduces beauty to pure expression, (7) not so much by eliminating form as by giving the word form a meaning of his own, (8)—neither the Aristotelian and scholastic meaning, nor, again, that of common usage. As he defines it, form is a mere aspect, the inevitable result, as it were, of true expression. Art has to do solely with the fresh intuitions of sense. (9) Interference with these intuitions on the part of the intellect is to be deprecated. The higher, or so-called intellectual intuitions, Signor Croce denies. (10) He discountenances the idea of selection in art. The process by which the impressions one receives are transmuted and finally emerge as original expression, is purely intuitive and spontaneous, and beyond the control of the will. (11) 

In short, Signor Croce is an apostle of spontaneity, but it is the lower spontaneity,—the spontaneity of instinct and not that of insight. His point of view is closely related to that special form of reaction against dogmatic and mechanical science of which I have already spoken. He shows himself one of the keenest of intellectualists in his attacks on scientific intellectualism. He makes many a trenchant distinction of just the kind that we need at present. I therefore regret that I must disagree with him so gravely in fundamentals. I regret that he has adopted a theory of beauty that almost necessarily lays him under the suspicion of belonging to the class of people of whom Dryden speaks, who are ready to put the fool upon the whole world. The conception of beauty as pure expression is really very modern. In order to maintain it, Signor Croce has to part company with Plato and Aristotle, and in general rule out the Greeks as incompetent in the theory of beauty. It is only when he gets down to comparatively recent times that he finds the first glimmerings of the vast illumination that has dawned upon himself. (12) With his expansive view of beauty he looks upon the whole attempt to set up literary and artistic genres as an unwarranted meddling of the intellect with aesthetic spontaneity. (13) All the talk that has gone on in the past about the proper boundaries of the arts, and the confusion of the arts, is, as he would have us believe, a mere logomachy. (14)

A tempting doctrine plausible and new! 
What fools our fathers were if this be true. 

(1) For Poe’s definition of both beauty and poetry, see his essay on The Poetic Principle. 

(2) Aesthetik: Psychologie des Schönen [Aesthetics: the Psychology of Beauty]; Teile I, II, 1903, 1906. 

(3) Lipps’s process of Einfühlung is closely related to that melting of man into outer objects in a sort of revery which I have discussed in another chapter. An article on Lipps and the whole tendency he represents will be found in the Edinburgh Review (Oct., 1908) under the title, “Beauty and Expression.” 

(4) Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (Third Edition, 1708) is usually taken to be the extreme expression of this tendency in English. 

(5) In their metrical experiments, as in so many other respects, the French symbolists were anticipated by the German romanticists. Hettner [Hermann Hettner; German literary historian and museum director; 1821-1882] remarks in his book on German romanticism [Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert [History of German Literature in the Eighteenth Century]; 1869/70] that “the poems in so-called free verse, into which Tieck especially was misled, are absolutely unendurable.” 

(6) Estetica come scienza dell’ espressione e linguistica generale [Aesthetics as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics], 1902. My references are to the first edition. 

(7) Estetica, p. 81: “noi possiamo definire la bellezza come l’ espressione riuscita, o meglio, come l’ espressione senz’ altro [we can define beauty as successful expression, or rather, as expression only],” etc. 

(8) Ibid., p. 98. (9) Ibid., p. 137 and passim. (10) Ibid., p. 68. (11) Ibid., p. 54

(12) The first person, according to Signor Croce, who “penetrated the true nature of poetry and art ” (Estetica, p. 228) was his fellow Neapolitan, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). In some of his ideas about the spontaneous and primitive Vico may be regarded as a precursor of Rousseau and Herder. 

(13) Estetica, pp. 38-41, 147, 465-480. 

(14) Ibid., p. 115.