The New Laokoon (Part 30)

(Pictured: Rodin) I am happy to present the thirtieth 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 [Continued.]

Expression can never become form or form expression any more than expansion can become concentration or the centrifugal the centripetal. But though form and expression can never be actually merged, it is plain from all that has been said that they should stand toward one another not as clashing antinomies but as reconciled opposites. In his essay on “Beauty” Coleridge gives an abstract definition of beauty that does not especially concern us, and then adds: “In the concrete beauty is the union of the shapely and the vital”; and this is very much to our purpose. Though in one sense the shapely must also be vital, as I have tried to show, yet Coleridge’s phrase remains a fair statement, perhaps the best in English, of the necessary dualism of beauty. The problem of mediating between the two terms—on the one hand, the outward push of expression, and on the other the circumscribing law—is one that may be solved in innumerable ways, but solved in some way it must be, if beauty is to be achieved that is really relevant to man. This problem has always been present to those who have thought correctly about art. For instance, Horace was thinking of some such contrast when he wrote, “It is not enough for poems to be polished, let them also have charm and lead the mind of the reader wherever they will.” (1) Nowadays, if a poem enthralled us in the way Horace describes, we should call it beautiful without any more ado; but Horace was too civilized to be guilty of any such one-sidedness. For extremes are barbarous, and if an artist lean too one-sidedly toward either the shapely or the vital, he is in danger of ceasing to be humane. There is no doubt as to the extreme toward which we are inclining to-day. One of the English reviews recently praised as the greatest work of genius of the last quarter-century Thomas Hardy’s “Dynasts,”—a drama in three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes, and at the same time a medley of prose and verse (and very bad verse at that). Now “The Dynasts” is a work of genius no doubt, but of undisciplined genius surely. Though vital it is certainly not shapely. In fact, a few more such performances might reconcile us to a little Aristotelian formalism. To take an example from another field, Rodin’s “Belle qui fut Heaulmière” [She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife] may be vital but can scarcely be regarded as shapely. In general, Rodin and other impressionistic sculptors are straining so hard to be vital and expressive that they are in danger of overstepping the bounds of their art, of violating its special form and symmetry, (2) and so of failing to temper their rendering of life and motion with a sufficient suggestion of repose. The whole world seems to be growing increasingly barbaric in this matter of symmetry. I have actually heard the epithet beautiful applied to sky-scrapers. Now sky-scrapers may be picturesque, or vital, or what you will, though they are usually not much more than a mixture of megalomania and commercialism. But even though they did express fully the race of industrial and financial Titans that now has us in its grip, they would still fall short of being beautiful. For Titanism is too unmeasured and unrestrained to represent at best more than one of the two terms that must be reconciled in true beauty. Contrast with lower New York the perspectives that open up from the Place de la Concorde at Paris. The Parisian symmetry is perhaps not sufficiently subtle; it is still too reminiscent of the kind that may be constructed with a rule and compass, yet by virtue of it this part of Paris makes a vastly closer approach to the beautiful than anything in lower New York.

But it is vain to talk of form and symmetry to the pure expansionist. As I have said, he tends to identify repose with inertia and concentration with narrowness. He would have us believe that art must aim exclusively at the vital and expressive, or else be fatally condemned to remain in a rut of imitation and go on repeating the same stereotyped forms. This is the fallacy at the bottom of a very celebrated piece of writing of Renan’s,—his “Prayer on the Acropolis.” Renan here expresses, in language that is itself a model of form, ideas that are a denial of all the formal virtues. He begins after the romantic wont by an outburst of sympathy and comprehension for the Parthenon and the Athenians and Pallas Athene; and then enthusiasm gives way to the reflection that the followers of Athene and of classical perfection would after all confine the human spirit in the pinfold of some special form; they would neglect the infinite expressiveness and suggestiveness of other varieties of art. They would know nothing beyond reason and good sense. But the world is greater than they suppose, and so some day they will come to be regarded as the “disciples of ennui.” “If thou hadst seen the snows of the pole and the mysteries of the austral sky,” says Renan to Athene, “thy brow, O goddess ever calm, would not be so serene, thy head more capacious would embrace divers kinds of beauty.”

One could not wish a better example of the romantic tendency to regard as an outer form what is in reality an inner discipline, in other words to confuse form with formalism. If the Parthenon has value, it is only as an adumbration of something higher than itself or any number of particular forms, of the law of unity, measure, purpose. Having got rid of the outer form, Renan would at the same time be rid of the inner discipline and of everything that opposes itself to expansion, to an infinite and indeterminate vagabondage of intellect and sensibility. He arrives, as every consistent naturalist must, at pure transformism; that is, he sees everything passing over into everything else by almost insensible gradations. There is no place in the process for the sharply drawn line of demarcation, for the firm and fast distinction. Definite standards are swallowed up in a universal relativity. “A philosophy doubtless perverse,” says Renan, “has led me to believe that good and evil, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, reason and madness, are transformed into one another by shades as imperceptible as those on the neck of a dove.” Thus Renan’s motto in dealing with ideas is like that of Verlaine in dealing with sensations, la nuance, la nuance toujours. Dr. Johnson says we should “neglect the minuter discriminations” and “not number the streaks of the tulip.” But that is just what the whole modern school has been doing. This has meant in practice the exaltation of the feminine over the masculine powers of personality, and so the exercise of faculties in themselves necessary and legitimate has assumed the aspect of a decadence, of what M. Lasserre calls “an integral corruption of the higher parts of human nature.”

Thus the “Prayer on the Acropolis,” probably the most brilliant piece of prose written during the second half of the nineteenth century, turns out, when examined from the humanistic point of view, to involve a fallacy. We may note here, as closely related to Renan’s fallacy, the incalculable harm that is done to art and literature by a certain conception of progress. The doctrine of progress is often interpreted to mean that man grows by moving in one direction, whereas man actually grows by moving in different directions simultaneously; that is by mediating between various half-truths and partial glimpses of reality. For example, it is proclaimed that the music of Richard Strauss is an advance over that of Wagner, that it has still greater expressiveness and stands for a still ampler freedom. At these glad tidings the innumerable army of faddists hastens to join the procession. But there may be still a few persons who are not content merely to keep up with the procession but who would also like to know where the procession is going,—whether it is headed toward some humane goal or is simply getting farther and farther out toward the extreme tip of what Sainte-Beuve calls the romantic Kamchatka [Kamchatka, a 777-mile-long peninsula in the Russian Far East]. Now our present subject is a sort of watch-tower from which we can sweep a wide horizon and so form some conjecture as to the contemporary movement and its direction.
[To be continued.]

(1) Non satis est pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto,
Et quocumque volent, animum auditoris agunto.

Pulcher refers in Latin to the formal virtues.

(2) There is still something to be said after Lessing and so many others on the boundaries that are imposed on each art by its own special technique, the material in which it works, its relations to time and space, etc. I am of course approaching the subject from an entirely different angle. Those who are interested in the other avenue of approach will find good material in Ludwig Volkmann’s Grenzen der Künste (1903), a book that turns to account the conclusions of other recent German theorists (especially A. Hildebrand and A. Schmarsow). Volkmann attacks Rodin (pp. 81 ff.) for confusing at times the standards of painting and sculpture. This impressionistic confusion of painting and sculpture often resembles the pseudo-classic confusion of the two arts in producing (at least on the eye that is untrained technically) an effect of writhing theatricality.