The New Laokoon (Part 32)

(Pictured: Irving Babbitt.) I am happy to present the thirty-second—and final—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

2. Form and Expression [Concluded.]

The revival of the firm and masculine distinction can alone save us from the confusions that have crept into modern life and literature and that I have traced to two main sources,—emotional unrestraint and pseudo-science. To take an illustration almost at random, think how much of both enters into Zola’s theory and practice of the novel. The pseudo-scientist sees only flux and motion, not only on the physical but also on the human plane, with no clearly defined frontiers anywhere. He thus co-operates in a way with the romantic eleutheromaniac [one having a frantic zeal for freedom] who wants unlimited emotional expansion. But, as I have already said, if emotion is to be humanized it must become selective, and in direct proportion as it becomes selective it ceases to be indeterminate: it acquires aim and purpose, form and proportion. The mere outward push of expression does not by itself suffice. The object on which expression expends itself must be intrinsically worth while, and this is a point that must be determined on other and higher grounds than individual feeling. We have here the truth that underlies what is apparently one of the worst of the neo-classic pedantries,—the hierarchy of the genres. The genre is to be ranked according to the intrinsic value and importance for man of the matter it treats. Because the neo-classicists turned this truth into mere conventionality there is no reason, let me repeat, why we should be like them. The essential thing, says Aristotle speaking of tragedy, is to get a good plot, and good plots are not easy to come at. According to the romanticists almost any outer incident will do if we only feel strongly enough about it. If the emotional reaction is right, we shall, as Wordsworth admonishes us, ‘‘find a tale in everything.” An old man hacking vainly at a root with his mattock will then seem to us as fit a subject for poetry as

Thebes, or Pelops’ line,
Or the tale of Troy divine.

Wordsworth’s paradox, like many other paradoxes, has its own truth and usefulness, but the man who holds it is prone to fall into what M. Lasserre calls l’ emphase romantique, romantic fustian; which may be defined as the enormous disproportion between emotion and the outer object or incident on which it expends itself. Victor Hugo abounds in fustian of this kind. A good example of musical fustian is Richard Strauss’s “Domestic Symphony.” The disproportion here between expression and what is expressed is so obvious that one critic charitably hints at mental derangement. I read in one of the accounts of this composition that there are required for its performance, in addition to the usual strings, “two harps, four flutes, two oboes, one oboe d’amore, four clarinets, one bass clarinet, four bassoons, one double bassoon, four saxophones, eight horns, four trumpets, three trombones, one bass tuba, four kettle-drums, triangle, tambourine, glockenspiel, cymbals and big drum,”—and all to describe the incidents of baby’s bath ! (1)

After all, there is no great mystery about this question of the genres and the boundaries of the arts if we consider it vitally and not formally. It reduces itself to this: a clear-cut type of person, a person who does not live in either an emotional or an intellectual muddle, will normally prefer a clear-cut type of art or literature. Thus he is not likely to care for a theatrical sermon or a play that preaches. In many historical novels he will feel that history is travestied without any corresponding gain for fiction. He will be partial to music that is first of all music and to poetry that is above all poetry. He will distrust a symphony that becomes intelligible only with reference to some picture or poem. He will not ordinarily care for a painting that is merely a symbolical transposition of a sonnet, or a sonnet that is a symbolical transposition of a painting. He will desire each art and every genre to be itself primarily, and to give, as Aristotle says of tragedy, its own special pleasure. This is the one serious argument against tragi-comedy, that in trying to give the special pleasure of both tragedy and comedy it may fail of the fullest unity of impression. A unified impression cannot be obtained without some degree of concentration, relevancy, purpose. This chief emphasis on the masculine elements in art need not imply any disdain for the feminine virtues, or lead to an academic excess of gray design. Right design is the first requirement, but there should be added color and movement and illusion, and, in general, expressiveness—the more the better. Each art genre may be as suggestive as it can of other arts and genres, while remaining true to its own form and proportion. But to set color above design, illusion above informing purpose, suggestiveness above symmetry, is to encourage that predominance of the feminine over the masculine virtues that has been the main cause of the corruption of literature and the arts during the past century,—what one may in fact term the great romantic, or it might be more correct to say Rousseauistic, error.

Though the clear-cut type of person will incline toward the clear-cut type of art, the genre tranché,—he will be guided in deciding what is sufficiently clear-cut and what is an unjustifiable hybrid, by tact and a sense of measure and not by any rule of thumb. Matthew Arnold, commenting on the mess Wordsworth made of his attempt to classify his poetry on a new plan, remarks that the Greeks displayed an almost infallible tact in making distinctions of this kind; and we may add that they showed their tact not only in genres they established, but in holding these classifications fluidly. In Greek tragedy, for example, there is a free interplay and cooperation of the different arts and genres; they are separated only by a slender and sinuous thread, as André Chenier says, but a thread that is never broken.

In short, the Greeks at their best had humane standards and held them flexibly. They thus effected in some degree that mediation between the One and the Many that is the highest wisdom of life. This is an achievement so difficult for a lover of half-truths, like man, that we still have to look to Greece for our chief evidence that it is possible at all. The actual forms in which the Greek embodied his mediation between extremes are relative and need not be literally revived; but though relative, as particular forms must always be, they point the way to laws that are absolute. The man of our own time who really learned the lesson of Greek life might produce work that had little outer likeness to the Parthenon or a play of Sophocles or a dialogue of Plato, but his work would resemble these Greek forms in having vital unity, vital measure, vital purpose. I am not of course urging any blind worship of the Greeks or undervaluing all that has amplified and enriched human life since classical antiquity. As a whole Greek life may serve as a warning at least as much as an example, but the warning is no less relevant to our contemporary world than the example. The critical moment of Greek life was, like the present, a period of naturalistic emancipation, when the multitude was content to live without standards, and the few were groping for inner standards to take the place of the outer standards they had lost. The Greek problems were like our own, problems of unrestraint; for what we see on every hand in our modern society, when we get beneath its veneer of scientific progress, is barbaric violation of the law of measure. Greek society perished, as our modern society may very well perish, from an excess of naturalism; but Greek art at its best is a triumph of humane restraint. Therefore both in its failures and its success, Greece, especially the Greece of Socrates and Plato and the Sophists, is rich in instruction for us,—more so, I am inclined to think, than any other period of the past whatsoever. This is the very moment that we are choosing to turn away from the study of Greek. One might suppose that before deserting the exemplaria graeca [Greek models] it would be wiser to wait until the world has another age that proves as clearly as did the great age of Greece that man may combine an exquisite measure with a perfect spontaneity, that he may be at once thoroughly disciplined and thoroughly inspired.

I trust that I have at least justified in this book the statement I made at the beginning, that an inquiry into the nature of the genres and the boundaries of the arts is far-reaching and involves one’s attitude not merely toward literature but toward life. To treat the question exhaustively would require a grasp of general principles and at the same time a knowledge of each separate art and its history to which I for one make no claim. I have not even tried to be exhaustive in this sense. I have aspired at most to be a humble imitator of Lessing in his endeavor, not to achieve a complete and closed system, but to scatter the fermenta cognitionis [the leaven of knowledge].

(1) I should add that all the admirers of Strauss are not agreed about this describing of baby’s bath. The Domestic Symphony can scarcely be so interpreted however as to affect my main thesis,—that there is a great deal of expression here compared with the intrinsic importance of what is expressed.