The New Laokoon (Part 31)

(Pictured: George Bernard Shaw) I am happy to present the thirty-first—the penultimate—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.]

It is plain from all I have said that I myself would conclude from a survey of this kind that what we are now seeing in nearly all fields of human endeavor, in art and philosophy and education, is a violent extreme,—the extreme of scientific and sentimental naturalism. Of course the present movement may continue indefinitely. We may have theories about education still more undisciplinary than the radical forms of the elective system, a still more pathological outpouring of fiction to the exclusion of the other literary genres, sculpture still more impressionistic than that of Rodin and his disciples, music still more given up to the pursuit of overtones and iridescences than that of Debussy, philosophy even more careless of rationality than that of the pragmatists, ideas about art still more subversive of the element of symmetry in beauty than those of Lipps and Croce. In short, the process of dehumanizing life and literature may go on forever;—it may, but we should not count on it, especially if the French saying be true, that good sense is the genius of humanity. In the past reactions have been known to occur against extremes of this kind, and they have occasionally been sudden. Even the faddist should therefore temper his eagerness to keep up with the procession with some thought of the danger of coming in at the very end of any movement; as the Spanish proverb says, the last monkey gets drowned. For over a century now there has been an almost exclusive play of centrifugal forces; of exploration into the remote and outlying regions of nature and human nature. Some day, perhaps not remote, there may be a counter-movement toward the centre. In short, to revert to a psychological theory I have already used, the world may now be menaced by a “subliminal uprush” of common sense—however alarming this prospect may be to Mr. Bernard Shaw and his followers.

But all such prophecy is vain; everything depends on leadership, and one can never say whether the right persons will take the trouble to be born. In this sense we may agree for once with Victor Hugo, that the future belongs to God. It is of course far from certain that the world will ever see another humanistic era. For example, Sainte-Beuve, who was eminent both as a humanist and a naturalist, inclined to think that France had already had her classic age and was now on the descending slopes of decadence, where it was already difficult and might soon become impossible to have any glimpse of true beauty. (1) Sainte-Beuve was perhaps too much haunted by this notion of the classic age,—the notion that a country like an individual has its period of childhood, and adolescence and full maturity and senile decay. This is another “biological analogy” that I for one distrust profoundly. If we must have a theory, the theory of the saving remnant might be more to our purpose than that of the classic age. Any one who makes a stand for a humane and vital concentration may perhaps, with somewhat less than the normal amount of illusion, look on himself as belonging to the saving remnant; he may at least be sure that he belongs to an infinitesimal minority. What Matthew Arnold would call the “elephantine main body” seems more convinced than ever that man, to become perfect, has only to continue indefinitely the programme of the nineteenth century,—that is, to engage in miscellaneous expansion and back it up if need be with noisy revolt against all the forms of the past. Any one who holds a different view is set down at once as a mere laggard and reactionary. But the man who is urging humane concentration may rather regard himself as a pioneer and leader of a forlorn hope, whereas the true laggard—and a dangerous laggard at that—may turn out to be the apostle of everlasting expansion, the kind of man who may be defined as the nineteenth century that is unwilling to complete itself. For this kind of man is rendering inevitable a concentration that will not be humane, but of the military and imperialistic type peculiar to epochs of decadence. When the traditional checks and inhibitions finally disappear and élan vital [vital momentum] gets under way on a grand scale, with no countervailing frein vital [vital restraint], the only law that can decide which nation or which individual is to expand vitally and unrestrained is the law of cunning or the law of force. (2) Such is the inevitable upshot of a pure naturalism.

Dark as is the outlook for the humanist, there are nevertheless some signs that the crest of the naturalistic wave has already been reached and that from now on we may expect some subsidence. On the sentimental side the naturalistic movement first found significant expression in the theory of the spontaneous and the primitive, and in one quarter, at least, the origin of the epic, romantic primitivism is plainly waning. We have seen that the neo-classic exaggeration in regard to the epic, as well as the other genres was to turn it into a cold and deliberate concoction of the intellect. Buckingham [George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (?), English statesman; 1628-87], for instance, was convinced that Le Bossu [René Le Bossu, French literary critic; 1631-80], the chief neo-classic authority on the epic, had explained the “mighty magic” of Homer. The counter-exaggeration of the romanticists was to eliminate the element of conscious and deliberate art and make of the Homeric poems an almost unconscious emanation of the folk-soul. The opinion is now gaining ground that the Iliad and Odyssey are not primitive but works of consummate art, though the word art, of course, is not understood in quite the same sense as by Le Bossu. We can even see the beginnings of reaction against primitivism in the latest theories as to the origin of the mediaeval epic.

The decay of the romantic theory of the primitive and the spontaneous has important possibilities. This theory is responsible in no small measure for the mortal debility of intellect and character and will that is so evident in one whole side of the modern movement. We all know what this Rousseauistic side of romanticism has come to in its last pitiful representatives,—an Oscar Wilde or Paul Verlaine. The latest romanticists have discredited themselves, which is not perhaps a serious matter; but they have also thrown a certain discredit on art and literature, and this is far more serious. Think of the meaning that is coming to be attached in popular usage to the phrase “artistic temperament.” The most urgent task just now is to react against the comparative neglect of the intellect and of what is above the intellect, which assumes so many forms in Rousseauism. The man of letters should not be so modest as to leave all the analytical keenness and intellectual virility to the scientist. Art cannot live on intellectualism, yet the pathway to the kind of creative art we need lies through the intellect. So far from fighting shy of the ‘‘false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions,” we should make as many and as clear distinctions as possible and then project them like vivid sunbeams into the romantic twilight. That indeed should be the function of criticism at the present hour,—to bring once more into honor the broad, masculine, and vigorous distinction. We might then have a type of writing that is not intended primarily for women and men in their unmasculine moods,—for the tired scientist and the fagged philologist and the weary man of business.

(1) For Sainte-Beuve’s ideas on this subject, see especially Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, passim. The first influential application of the idea of the classic age to France is that of Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV (chaps. i and xxxii). Voltaire himself was probably influenced by the Abbé Du Bos, who sets forth the whole theory at great length, translating the inevitable passage at the end of Velleius Paterculus [Roman historian, soldier, and senator; 19 b.c.-a.d. 31.] (Reflexions Critiques, 2° partie, sects. 12-14).

(2) The humanitarian will of course reply that all this expansion will be sufficiently tempered by an increase in altruism. Unfortunately the evidence is as yet rather scanty that the human nature of the future is going to differ so radically from the human nature of the past. To illustrate concretely, the growth of international good will does not seem to reassure the English entirely regarding the vital expansion of Germany.