The New Laokoon (Part 29)

(Pictured: Aristotle.) I am happy to present the twenty-ninth 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 continue 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

We should not fail to note an important resemblance between the pseudo-classicists and modern theorists of the kind I have been discussing. They all agree in reducing beauty to some one thing. The pseudo-classicists were for having only form, and so fell into formalism. Many of the moderns, on the other hand, discover the whole of beauty in those expressive elements that the pseudo-classicist either minimized or denied. The Abbé Batteux and Signor Croce are both aesthetic monists, the difference being that Batteux would see in all art only imitation, and Croce only expression. But let us have a wholesome distrust of aesthetic monists as well as of monists of every kind. Monism is merely a fine name that man has invented for his own indolence and one-sidedness and unwillingness to mediate between the diverse and conflicting aspects of reality. If romanticists and naturalists, no less than pseudo-classicists, have been unable to distinguish between form and formalism, and so have tried to reduce beauty to some one thing, there is no reason why we should be like them. Any sound analysis of beauty will always recognize two elements,—an element that is expansive and vital and may be summed up by the term expression, and in contrast to this an element of form that is felt rather as limiting and circumscribing law.

But though form thus limits and circumscribes, we should not therefore regard it as something inert, mechanical, external; we should not, after the pseudo-classic and romantic fashion, make concentration synonymous with narrowness and contraction, with tame acquiescence in tradition and routine. The law of human nature as distinct from the natural law is itself a law of concentration; only this law should be held flexibly and not formally, and this feat, though difficult, is not impossible with the aid of those higher intuitions at which Signor Croce sneers. Art of course cannot thrive solely, or indeed primarily, on the higher intuitions; it requires the keenest intuitions of sense. But if art is to have humane purpose, these intuitions of sense must come under the control of the higher intuitions. Otherwise art is in danger of falling into aimless expression, into what Lessing calls der wilde Ausdruck [wild expression]. With true purpose and selection, on the other hand, art may achieve form and essential symmetry. Emerson speaks of the instantaneous dependence of form upon soul, and Spenser says in a somewhat similar vein that ‘‘soul is form and doth the body make.” We may agree with Emerson and Spenser if soul is taken to refer to the region of the higher intuitions; but it is evident that nowadays not only “soul” but “ideal ” and other similar words have been strangely transformed, that they have come to be associated, not with the things that are above the intellect, but with the things that are below it, with what I have called the lower spontaneity. We have seen that for Lessing an ideal implied a somewhat stern process of selection and self-discipline with reference to definite standards. Since Rousseau, ‘‘soul” and “ideal” do not connotate much more than emotional expansion. A man may prove that he has “soul” by indulging in a gush of feeling, and pass as an idealist simply by letting loose his enthusiasm. In short, the words “soul” and “ideal” have already been so feminized that they can be used only with caution and may ultimately become impossible. Indeed, with their elimination of the principle of restraint the sentimental naturalists may finally discredit all the higher values of human nature and the words that describe them, until nothing is left erect but a brutal positivism.

Both Spenser and Emerson in the phrases I have just quoted are consciously Platonizing; and I myself have associated the higher intuitions with Plato. But I might just as well have associated them with Aristotle; for it is a fact that should give us pause that the master of analysis no less than the master of synthesis puts his final emphasis on these intuitions. Indeed, the form this insight assumes in Aristotle is often more to our purpose, especially in all that relates to art and literature, than the form it assumes in Plato. For example, in describing the region that is above the ordinary intellect Aristotle says that though itself motionless it is the source of life and motion, [1] a conception practically realized one may say in Greek sculpture at its best, which perfected nearly all the arts of suggesting motion and at the same time gave to this motion a background of vital repose. Aristotle’s phrase is not only admirable in itself, but it puts us on our guard against another of the main romantic and naturalistic confusions. For just as the romanticists would make concentration synonymous with narrowness and contraction, so they would see in repose only lifelessness and stagnation. Thus Herder complains that Lessing in setting such sharp bounds to expression would make “art dead and soulless; it would be lost in an inert repose that could please only a friar of the Middle Ages,” [2] etc. Now I for one should not deny that Lessing’s conception of repose is in some respects too academic. Yet if art is to be complete, it must have not only expression but form that circumscribes this expression; and in direct proportion as the form is genuine, it will be suggestive of repose, of a something that without being in the least inert and soulless is nevertheless raised above the region of motion and change. This perfect union of form and expression is of course rare; but there is evidence in the art and literature of the past that it is not impossible. Mozart, for example, obeys musical law spontaneously, being in this respect at the opposite pole from some of our modern artists who, under pretext of being original and expressive, merely succeed in violating law laboriously. If true art consists in having something to say and then saying it simply, the characteristic of this modern art is to have nothing to say and then to say it in a mysterious and complicated manner.

[1] Κινει oυ κινoυμενoν [thus moving] (Met., xii (xiii), 7). The idea is of course found in many other passages of Aristotle.

[2] Erstes kritisches Wäldchen (ed. Suphan), p. 76.