The New Laokoon (Part 6)

(Pictured: La Fontaine.) I am happy to present the sixth 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 I

The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts

CHAPTER III 

LESSING AND THE “LAOKOON” [Continued.]

Now Lessing repudiated what was artificial and superficial in the French tradition,—its conventions, and etiquette, and gallantries,—but at the risk of losing a real virtue, viz., the exquisite urbanity that the French at their best had really succeeded in attaining. The ancients, says Lessing, knew nothing about politeness; whereupon, reverting to the tone of the Renaissance polemic, he proceeds to belabor the unhappy Klotz. [Christian Adolph Klotz, German Latinist and literary critic who attacked the Laokoon; 1738-1771.] Thus it has come about that in their exchanges of amenities German scholars even at the present day often make us think of Vadius and Trissotin [a pedantic scholar and a wit, respectively, in Molière’s Femmes Savantes]. In short, Germany failed to get the full benefit of the great French reaction against pedantry, and still suffers from this failure. Lessing, indeed, is constantly reminding us of the type of scholar that flourished before the school of taste and urbanity, the type that we may define as the Leviathan of learning. Two other great figures of the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson and Bayle, also seem in some respects survivors of this earlier period. The antipathy Lessing felt for the French wit and courtier was not unlike that of Johnson for Chesterfield. 

Lessing has little of the Longinian temper, and not enough of the new sensibility of the eighteenth century to be dominated by it. [Dionysius Longinus, Greek literary critic; first century A.D.] What we find in the “Laokoon” is not primarily an appeal to taste and feeling, but a mixture of Aristotelian theory and precise linguistic and antiquarian research. That is why a course of reading in the Renaissance critics is so immensely helpful in understanding him. Like virtually all these critics, except Patrizzi [a Platonist], he insists that art, including poetry, is an imitation. Like the most orthodox of them, he regards it not only as an imitation but as an imitation of human action. To action in the sense of plot or general purpose he would subordinate all other elements in poetry, such as character, sentiments, diction, etc., just as in painting he would subordinate all other elements—light, color, expression, etc.—to design. Some of the consequences of this Aristotelian orthodoxy make him seem to us, as I have already said, remote and foreign. 

In one of his poems Matthew Arnold [English poet and cultural critic; 1822-1888] relates how in the course of a walk with a friend in Hyde Park they fell to talking of “Lessing’s famed Laocoön,” the doctrine of which Arnold sums up in part as follows:—

“Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere! 
The limits of his art appear. 
The passing group, the summer-morn, 
The grass, the elms, that blossom’d thorn—
Those cattle couch’d, or, as they rise, 
Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes—
These, or much greater things, but caught 
Like these, and in one aspect brought! 
In outward semblance he must give 
A moment’s life of things that live; 
Then let him choose his moment well, 
With power divine its story tell.” [1]

The last two lines are admirable, but Arnold can scarcely be said to be happy in his choice of illustrations. What are cows and elms and grass to one like Lessing, who is interested only in the painting of human action, and not of ordinary human action at that, but of ideal action in the Aristotelian sense of the word ideal, that is, action from which all irrelevant details are eliminated and in which everything is linked together “according to probability or necessity,” and subordinated to some dramatic aim? He is impatient of everything that does not help forward this higher unity and converge toward the total effect. No one ever interpreted more strenuously Aristotle’s great sentence: “The end is the chief thing of all.” It is the goal of art that interests him rather than any pleasant vagabondage of fancy or sensibility on the way thither. He will have no expression for the mere sake of expression, no color for the pure delight of color. If the path is beautiful, says Anatole France [French poet, journalist, and novelist; 1844-1924], let us not ask where it is leading us. Lessing would not have even understood such a use of the word beautiful. In one passage he raises the question whether it would not have been better if painting in oil had never been invented, because of the tendency of color to scatter and distract the painter and keep him from concentrating on the end. [2] Elsewhere he says that “mere coloring and transitory expression have no ideal because Nature has proposed to herself nothing definite in them. [3] “Mere coloring and transitory expression” have of course become for many of our modern schools of poetry and painting the whole of beauty; but for Lessing, as for the classicist in general, beauty does not consist primarily in expression, but in a certain informing symmetry and proportion that, like true plot in tragedy, points the way to some human end. How far Lessing is, not only from our modern use of the word beauty, but also from our use of the word ideal, will appear from another passage. 

“The highest bodily beauty,” says Lessing, “exists only in man, and even in him only by virtue of the ideal. 

“This ideal already finds less scope in the beasts, and in the world of plants and inanimate objects has no place at all. 

“We can infer from this the rank of the flower and landscape painter. He imitates beauties that are capable of no ideal. He works therefore simply with his eye and hand; and genius has little or no share in what he does.” [4] 

Lessing goes on to say that even so he prefers the landscape painter to the historical painter who does not direct his main purpose toward beauty but is willing to display his cleverness in mere expression without subordinating this expression to beauty. 

Such a view of the ideal and of beauty would evidently not allow a high rank to the imitators of Thomson’s “Seasons,” even if they had been successful in painting their poetical landscapes; and Lessing would not admit that they had. He is as willing as any critic of the Renaissance to grant that poetry is a painting and an imitation, but this is as far as he is willing to carry ut pictura poesis. He is not willing to take the next step, and establish a formal resemblance between words and figures of speech in poetry and colors in painting. In fact, Lessing has done little more than develop the lines of La Fontaine:—

Les mots et les couleurs ne sont choses pareilles 
Ni les yeux ne sont les oreilles. 
[Words and colors are not similar things
Nor are eyes ears.]

There had grown up during the neo-classic period a formal confusion of poetry and painting; Lessing proposes to show that they are formally distinct. In his own words:—

“Both are arts of imitation and have all the rules in common which follow from the conception of imitation. Only they use quite different means for their imitation, and from this difference the special rules for each art take their rise.” [5] 

He has indeed struck the keynote of his book on the very title-page, in the motto from Plutarch [Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (c. A.D. 46–120), Greek historian, biographer, and essayist]:

“They [i. e., painting and poetry] differ both in the material and modes of their imitation.” Now the material with which the poet works is words, and words necessarily follow one another in time; any one who would paint directly with words some visible object is forced to enumerate one after the other the different parts of it, and a blurred and confused image must necessarily result from this piecemeal enumeration of details, from this attempt to render the coexistent by means of the successive. What the poet can really paint are actions, and in rendering anything that is not action he should strive to translate it into terms of action. Thus Homer does not try to paint directly the beauty of Helen, but puts the beauty of Helen in action, and shows its effect upon the old men on the wall at Troy. In contrast to Homer, Ariosto [Ludovico Ariosto, Italian poet; 1474-1533] devotes whole stanzas to describing feature by feature the charms of Alcina, but all these descriptive details do not coalesce for us into the distinct image of a living woman; and the lines in this description that are most successful are the ones that contain an element of action. 

All the details with which the poet can deal only disconnectedly, the painter can render as they actually coexist in space. The painter’s limitation appears when he tries to paint action; his art has at its command but a single moment; if he attempts to paint two moments of an action, he is guilty of bad painting; if again he tries to tell a story or indulge in literary intentions through the use of allegory, he falls into an obscurity that corresponds to the blurred and confused image of the poetical word-painter. The moment, then, is all-important for the plastic artist; as Lessing puts it, he must select ‘‘the most pregnant moment,”—the one that throws the most light on the past stages of the action and points the way most clearly to what is still to come. At this point Lessing seems to relax the objective rigor of his method and to consider painting not merely in its outer means of realization, but in its effects upon the imagination.

[1] Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön. 

[2] Laokoon, ed. Blümner, 469 (Nachlass D). 

[3] Ibid., 399 (Nachlass A). 

[4] Ibid., 440 (Nachlass C). 

[5] Ibid., 353, 354 (Nachlass A).