The New Laokoon (Part 9)

(Pictured: Edmund Spenser.) I am happy to present the 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.

The New Laokoon
An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts

By Irving Babbitt

Part II 

The Romantic Confusion of the Arts

Chapter IV 

The Theory of Spontaneity (continued)

We are especially urged by Rousseau in dealing with art and literature to get rid of our “meddling intellects.” Like Sterne, he is for the man who is “pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore.” “The Frenchman,” Rousseau complains, “does not seek on the stage naturalness and illusion, but only wit and thoughts; he does not ask to be enchanted by a play.” (1) Il ne soucie pas d’ etre séduit [He does not care to be seduced.],—the whole of the modern programme is implied in that brief phrase. The seductiveness of artistic creation, or, as we should say nowadays, its power of suggestion, was Rousseau’s sole concern. If art can enthrall him, he is willing to waive all question of logic or rationality. His first question about anything was not whether it was “probable,” or rather he gave to the word an entirely different meaning. “When my imagination has once caught fire at an object,” he says, “the wildest and most childish schemes I devise in order to attain it seem probable to me.” In short, the only logic he asks from literature or from life itself is the logic of dreamland. 

Rousseau remarks that no one’s conduct and points of view ever derived more completely than his from temperament alone; and he was conscious of the contrast between his own temperament and that of his contemporaries. The sense of uniqueness and singularity that he acquired by comparing himself with them was for him a source of pride, and at the same time, so far as it forced him into solitude, a source of suffering. ‘‘As for the French,’’ says Goethe, thinking especially of the French of the neo-classical period, “they will always be arrested by their reason. They do not admit that the imagination has its own laws, which can be and must be independent of the reason.” In a way, the French had recognized the imagination, but only as being, in Pascal’s words, “a superb power hostile to reason.” If neo-classical theory did not especially favor the imagination, Cartesian theory positively discountenanced it, on the ground that by its illusions it lured man away from reason and reality. It was somewhat in this spirit that Father Malebranche made his famous attack on the imagination.

Now Rousseau is like Malebranche in at least one respect: he accepts the natural opposition between imagination and reason, only he is willing to forego reason if he can but attain imaginative illusion. “Divine aberrations of the reason,” Rousseau exclaims, “a thousand times more glorious than the reason itself !” (2) His ambition is to escape from reality into a world of dreams, the only world as he tells us that is fit for habitation.(3) Of course he often reasons brilliantly in his effort to discredit the reason, just as Malebranche, according to Voltaire, is brilliantly imaginative in his attack on the imagination. As a result of Rousseau’s readiness to exalt spontaneity even at the expense of rationality, his whole theory of the imagination has a hectic flush. He tells us how he composed—but of course failed to jot down—some of his best music while lying ill of fever, and regrets that record cannot be kept of the sublime imaginings of delirium. (4) A contemporary says that Rousseau did his best writing only when in a state of fever; and Rousseau himself speaks of the period of composition of his greatest books as “ten years of fever and delirium.” (5) The frequency with which Rousseau uses the word delirium in speaking of his own imaginative activity suggests the phrase that was applied to his literary descendants, the French romanticists,—les amateurs du délire [lovers of delirium]. The Cartesians were for having no imagination at all, the Rousseauists will be satisfied with nothing short of a frenzy of the imagination. The neo-classicists were for confining the poetical faculties in a strait-jacket of rules; it is hard to read certain romantic poets, Victor Hugo for example, without at times regretting the absence of the strait-jacket. The neo-classicists, by admitting only what is probable to the understanding, reduced unduly the role of illusion, the element of wonder and surprise. 

On the other hand, the romanticists too often achieved their renascence of wonder by an extinction of common sense. They were too prone to think with Professor Saintsbury that when good sense comes in at the door, poetry and imagination fly out at the window. This is simply the neo-classical view turned upside-down or inside-out; and, as Sainte-Beuve remarks, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling. 

We can afford to linger over this relation between the imaginative and the rational, or, as the Aristotelian theorist would have said, between the wonderful and the probable, for it lies at the very centre of any right distinction between classic and romantic art. The difference is fundamental between the man who looks primarily for rationality and strict causal connection in what he reads, and the man who seeks primarily for adventure and surprise. The man who is too slow in granting that willing suspension of disbelief which, according to Coleridge, constitutes poetic faith; who clings too rigidly to his rational standards and keeps harping on probability in this sense, may justly be suspected of a lack of imagination. This, for example, is the fault with Rymer when he complains of Spenser that blindly rambling on marvelous adventures he makes no conscience of probability. All is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, without any foundation in truth; his poem is perfect fairyland.” (6) 

There is the opposite case of the man who yields his poetic faith too readily, who does not balk at any improbability. This is evidently true of children or child-like individuals. There is, however, a carelessness of rationality and a love of the marvelous that, instead of being child-like, is a symptom rather of over-refinement. Such a difference, for example, we feel between the author of a genuine old Irish saga and some modern Celtic revivalist. In the one we have to do with a really naïve person speaking to a naïve age; in the other, with an aesthete who is simply isolating himself in his tower of ivory. In a late Latin writer like Apuleius, again, we see the nexus of cause and effect giving way to a series of somewhat childish surprises. The decadent Greeks, as Lucian complains, yielded to a somewhat similar spirit, so as to efface the firm lines between the different literary genres. In short, a renascence of wonder, if not necessarily a sign of decadence, is in any case an ambiguous event. The question must always remain whether it stands for a poetical gain or a loss of rationality; whether it is a mark of imaginative vigor or of a debilitated intellect. The probable, says Boileau, is a great enemy of the wonderful; and so indeed it is. To be prosaic and sensible, and at the same time unimaginative, like many neo-classicists, is comparatively easy; to launch forth into a world of pure imaginative illusion, like so many of our modern romanticists, is also not extremely difficult; but to show one’s self a true humanist, that is, to mediate between these extremes and occupy all the space between them; to be probable or convincing to both the imagination and the understanding; to satisfy the standards of poetry without offending the standards of prose,—this is a miracle that has been achieved only by the great poets. 

Even the most hardened of the neo-classic critics recognized, at least in theory, the need of an element of wonder in creative art; but in general the men of the Middle Ages seemed to them to have enjoyed their wonder on too easy terms. The adventures and surprises with which the mediaeval romances are filled were not sufficiently linked together “according to probability or necessity.” This use of the idea of p`robability as a weapon of attack against mediaeval romance is common in the critical treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The following from Father Mambrun’s treatise on the Epic . . . may serve as a sample: ‘‘I remember, when I was a boy, reading in a book called ‘Francus Sagittarius’ how Zerbinus fell in love with the maiden Florizel, and, having lost all hope of winning her, threw himself headlong into the sea. The nereids, taken by the beauty of the youth, receive him lovingly; but he refuses to yield to their blandishments, and they, incensed, cast him out into the middle of the waves. At that very moment Queen Florizel happened to be walking on the shore. It happened moreover that fishermen caught Zerbinus in their net and laid him out on the shore, thinking him a fish. Wonderful to relate, Zerbinus gradually comes to, spitting out the water, and not knowing whether he is alive and in his senses, or whether he is still in the waves or in the palace of the nereids; and speaks many things lovingly about Florizel in her very presence.”

Here are stirring adventures indeed, Father Mambrun concludes, but lacking as they do in probability, they are worthy, not of serious poetry, but only of old wives’ tales (fabellis anilibus); as Rymer would say, they have a “tang of the old woman.” But in matters of this kind there is evidently a much more delicate and difficult adjustment than Mambrun suspects between a dull fidelity to logic and imaginative illusion. He is evidently capable of a logical but not of a poetic faith. The adventures he rejects would have seemed less improbable to a true poet,—for example, to the author of “Endymion.” The end, says Aristotle, is the chief thing of all; but Keats’s interest is not so much in the end as in the incidents and delights of the journey. He cares little for the logical linking up of his story, if only it afford him an opportunity to travel in the realms of gold. Poetry thus understood is less a progress toward a specific goal than a somewhat disconnected series of beautiful words and beautiful moments; and this, of course, is to fall into an opposite excess from that of a Mambrun or a Rymer, but an excess more in accord perhaps with the ordinary instincts of human nature. For human nature, impatient at best of the discipline of a definite purpose, is ever eager to be off on its ‘‘adventure brave and new.” 

(1) Nouvelle Héloïse, 2e partie, lettre xvii. 

(2) Nouvelle Héloïse, 2e partie, lettre viii. 

(3) “ Le pays des chimères est en ce monde le seul digne d’être habité,” etc. [The land of chimeras is in this world the only one worth living in]. Nouvelle Héloïse, 6e partie, lettre lettre viii. 

(4) Confessions, livre vii 

(5) Premier Dialogue. 

(6) Preface to Rapin.