MASTER NEGATIVE 92-80740-6 MICROFILMED 1 992 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the "Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project" Funded by the WMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code ~ concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material... Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: BABBITT, IRVING TITLE: HE NEW LAOKOON PLACE: DATE: [19101 Restrictions on Use: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Original Malcrial as Filmed - l-xisling Dibliograpliic Record fPbiloscphy |d701 tEil D701 Bll Babbitt, Irving, 18G5-1933. The new Laokoon; an essay on the confusion of the arts, r)y Irving Babbitt. Boston and New York, llougliton Mifflm companycl910 , xlll, ill. 258. ,2, p. 19-. Copy in Barnard, c 1924 3 Copy in Fine Arts. 1910. Copy in Avery, e 19103 1. Esthetics. iJTltle. r .. ,T „ iqno, 10—13464 Copy in Ware. exyiua Library of congress (Iffinued-on-nexfe-card) ^ i43pl, Master Negative # TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA FILM SIZE:__J>^^^^ REDUCTION RATIO:__ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA (llA.' IB IIB DATE FlLMED:_jZ_'y_:Z-_±.e!i INITIALS Mj_t±.L _ FILMED B\: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODDRIDGE. CT " // y^ c Association for Information and Image Management 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 Silver Spring. Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 mi 4 null m 6 iliiii 8 11 9 iiiliiii 10 12 13 hIiiiiIiiiiIii Inches 14 15 mm IHiilijiilHiil 1.0 Ui 28 Hi feiku 1.4 25 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 I.I 1.25 MflNUFfiCTURED TO RUM STfiNDflRDS BY fiPPLIED IMRGE. INC. I m 1 1 1 « ;2jt|» i \ k _»l I • 1 < . a I ^HHw^T '. ?r ,«.?». ¥. *H:r- - . i J ■ • • »-i . • • < ■»tf tt*A* ' l-il m tn-nt .'it i? '!»'l • ,«? «f ? •• :*.l*ls **«• ^i^UJietiMf j5g ( ■i T-57'0\ li tOFFIClI •*--ETBENifIVENDU| discipIinam*:^ I €aImnhtai§nU>ei«% | ' Irimrtm^nt of ^l^Ufiaiiiiiig (Sm of fir. IBrn^Hl Jl, Vttfit; / COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES This book is due on the date indicated below, or at the 'niratio of a definite period after the date of borrowinp^ ag ,p t."i«- of the Lib""' o*- b^^ ST^'•'•'?^1 - I THE NEW LAOKOON 363 AN ESSAY ON THE CONFUSION OF THE ARTS BY IRVING BABBITT BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY »-^ CONTENTS COPTRIOHT, 1910, BY IRVINO BABBITT ALL RIGHTS RSSSRVXD Published May iq/q THIRD IMPRESSION f'bilos. R. ri, To( ^ K. \ \ 1 Preface yji PART I The Pseudo-classic Confusion of the Arts I. The Theory of Imitation 3 II. Poetical Diction 20 III. Lessing and the "Laokoon" 35 PART II The Romantic Confusion of the Arts IV. The Theory of Spontaneity . . V. Platonists and Pseudo-Platonists VI. Suggestiveness in Romantic Art 1. Word-painting 2. Programme Music 3. Color-Audition VII. Conclusion 1. The Limits of Naturalism . , , 2. Form and Expression . . , , INDEX 61 87 '59 172 . 186 . 217 • 253 PREFACE The title I have taken for this book expresses my sense of what needs doing rather than what I my- self would claim to have done. I have suffered, both in selecting a title and in treating my subject itself, from a certain poverty in our English critical vo- cabulary. The word genre seems to be gaining some \ currency in English. The same can scarcely be said of the melange des genres ; and yet it is around the melange des genres and allied topics that my main argument revolves. Napoleon is reported to have said to Goethe in the course of a conversation on a problem very similar to the one I have attempted, "Je m'^tonne qu'un aussi grand esprit que vous n'aime pas les genres tranches." I have often been forced to borrow Napoleon's term and speak of the genre tramU, for lack of a suitable English~^quiva- lent. ILessing published his "Laokoon" in 1766, to- u ward the very end of the neo-classical movement. ^ The period of nearly a century and a half that has since elapsed has seen the rise of the great romantic [vii] u I PREFACE I and naturalistic movement that fills the whole of the nineteenth century and is now showing signs of ^ decrepitude in its turn. Does the " Laokoon" really meet the questions that have arisen in this period as to the proper boundaries of the arts, especially the boundaries of painting and writing ? Most Ger- mans would probably say that it does. They have surrounded Lessing, as one of their great classics, with a sort of conventional admiration. From this conventional admiration Hugo Blumner, to whom we owe the standard edition of the " Laokoon," is by no means free. Thus he says: "The tendency toward descriptive poetry . . . received through it [the * Laokoon '] its death-blow. . . . We may in- deed affirm that the law forbidding the poet to paint has nowadays become a universally accepted doc- trine." ' We doubt whether this is true even for Ger- many ; it certainly is not true for other countries. If the " Laokoon " really covers the ground as com- pletely as Blumner would have us suppose, we can only say that no teaching has ever been so wilfully disregarded. The nineteenth century witnessed the greatest debauch of descriptive writing the world * Laffkoofty ed. H. Blumner, 1880, p. 138. [ viii ] r. ) PREFACE has ever known. It witnessed moreover a general confusion of the arts, as well as of the different genres within the confines of each art. To take examples almost at random, we have Gautier*s transpositions d'art, Rossetti's attempts to paint his sonnets and write his pictures, Mallarm^'s am- bition to compose symphonies with words. Con- fusions of this kind were already rampant within a few years of Lessing's death, in the writings of Novalis, Tieck, and Friedrich Schlegel."^ I'Mow what I have tried to do is to study the A lokoon," not primarily as a German classic, but as a problem in comparative literature ; to show that the confusion with which Lessing is dealing is a pseudo-classical confusion, and that to understand it clearly we must go back to the beginnings of the whole movement in the critics of the Renais- sance ; and then, in contrast to this pseudo-classical confusion, I have traced in writers like Rousseau and Diderot the beginnings of an entirely different confusion of the arts, — a romantic confusion as we may term it, — which Lessing has not met in the " Laokoon " and has not tried to meet. I have fol- lowed out to some extent this romantic confusion [ix] «%%!« PREFACE in the nineteenth century, — especially the attempts to get with words the effects of music and painting. Finally, I have searched for principles that may be opposed to this modern confusionTj Throughout I have done my utmost to avoid the selva oscura of aesthetic theory, and have kept as close as I could to the concrete example. I hope I have at least made clear that an inquiry into the nature of the genres and the boundaries of the arts ramifies out in every direction, and involves one's attitude not merely toward literature but Ufe. It involves especially a careful defining of certain (X.4¥W%* ^%^ literary movements.'^n making his protest' against the confusion of poetry and painting, Les- sing was led to discriminate sharply between what he conceived to be the truly classic and the pseudo- j classic. Any one who makes a similar protest to-day will need rather to discriminate between the truly classic and the romantic. Taken in both its older and more recent aspects, perhaps no question calls for more careful defining of such words as classic, pseudo-classic, and romanticTjI confess that this is one of the reasons why it attracted me. A more searching definition of these words seems urgently f PREFACE needed. One of the ways in which comparative literature may justify itself is by making possible definitions of this kind that shall be at once broader and more accurate. Many people are inclined to see in the popularity of this new subject a mere univer- sity fad. They will not be far wrong unless it can become something more than an endless study of sources and influences and minute relationships. Neo - classicism and romanticism are both world- movements. It should be the ambition of the stu- dent of comparative literature to make all attempts to define these movements in terms of one literature seem one-sided and ill-informed. The trouble with most attempts to define the word romantic, in particular, is that they have been partisan as well as provincial. The makers of the definitions have been themselves too much a part of what they were trying to define. They have opposed to their idea of the romantic a notion of the classic that would scarcely be avowed by a respectable pseudo- classicist. Indeed, the classical point of view has had about as much chance of a fair hear- ing during the past century as we may suppose the romantic point of view to have had in a Queen Anne [xi] n PREFACE coffee-house, or at the court of Louis XIV. The perspectives opened up by comparative literature will make it easier to achieve a feat that was achieved by few in the nineteenth century, — that of seeing the romantic and naturalistic movement from the outside. This feat is already becoming somewhat easier of achievement, even without the help of comparative literature. It was in France, in the writings of Rous- seau, that certain romantic and naturalistic points of view first found powerful expression. It is in France, the most intellectually sensitive of modem ' nations, that we now see the beginnings of reaction against the fundamental postulates of Rousseauism. M. Lasserre, whose brilliant and virulent attack on French romanticism ' has already gone through sev- eral editions, says that his aim is not so much to attack this movement in its flowers and fruit as to pour a little poison about its roots. Unfortunately M. Lasserre's book tends to be extreme, and in the French sense reactionary. A year or so ago I chanced to be strolling along one of the narrow streets that skirt the Quartier Saint-Germain, and » Lg romantismtfranfaisy^2X P. Lasserre (1907). [xji] PREFACE came on a bookshop entirely devoted to reactionary literature; and there in the window, along with books recommending the restoration of the mon- archy, was the volume of M. Lasserre and other anti-romantic publications. Now I for one regret that a legitimate protest against certain tendencies of nineteenth-century life and literature should be thus mixed up with what we may very well deem an impossible political and religious reaction. A movement would seem needed that shall be some- what less negative and more genuinely constructive than the one M. Lasserre and his friends are trying to start in France; a movement that shall preserve even in its severest questionings of the nineteenth century a certain balance and moderation, a certain breadth of knowledge and sympathy, and so seem an advance and not a retrogression. But with this reservation we must recognize that M. Lasserre's attack on the romantic and naturalistic point of view is very timely. With the spread of impres- ^ sionisra literature has lost standards and discipline, and at the same time virility and seriousness ; it has' fallen into the hands of aesthetes and dilettantes, the last effete representatives of romanticism, who [xiii] [^ \hi PREFACE have proved utterly unequal to the task of maintain- ing its great traditions against the scientific posi- tivists. The hope of the humanities is in defenders who will have something of Lessing*s virile em- phasis on action, and scorn of mere revery, — who will not be content with wailing more or less melo- diously from their towers of ivory. Much that I have said in this book is a develop- ment of what I have already said in my book on " Literature and the American College," especially of the definition I have there attempted of the word humanism. Many of the views, again, that are ex- pressed in the following pages, on the romantic movement, will need to be more fully developed, and this I hope to do at some future time in a book to be entitled " Rousseau and Romanticism." I should add that for the last eight or ten years I have been giving the main conclusions of the pre- sent volume to the students of one of my Harvard courses. I PART I Ithe pseudo-classic confusion ^ OF THE ARTS 1 _^v Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 15, 1910. ! .1^ THE NEW LAOKOON CHAPTER I ^ THE THEORY OF IMITATION /;// t? is rare to read through a critical treatise on either art or literature, written between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century, without finding an approving mention of the Hora- tian simile, "as is painting, so is poetry " {ut pictura poesis) ■ or, if the mention is not of Horace, then it is of the equivalent saying of Simonides that V " luintingjs mute poetry, and poetry a speaking pir. jure/' •< There is no one," writes Father Mambrun in 1652, reviewing the critical literature of a cen- tury or more, " who has not been pleased with this comparison between poetry and painting/'^Toward ^, . the beginning of the neoclassical period the saying * ^ of Simonides is perhaps more in favor, toward the end, that of Horace ; but throughout the period the assimi- ■ Di,s„tatio pcripautica J< epUo carmim, p. 4,. See Iw P> 204. [3] •^ t THE NEW LAOKOON lation of poetry to painting that both sayings are supposed to justify, is insisted on as fundamental. Fundamental, however, as was the doctrine ut pictura poesis, it was only as the corollary of a doc- ^ ^^v trine still more fundamental. go understand what this doctrine is, we need to go back to the begin- ^ nings of the whole movement in the Italian Renais- sance. We can there follow the steps by which, in j a comparatively short time, two documents, Horace's S(M:alled " Ars Poetica '* and Aristotle's " Poetics," acquired a supreme authority in criticism'Tphe im- V^^ mense influence of Horace was in the main bene- "^ ficial, though it made for an excellent prose rather than an excellent poetry. It found its consummation in seventeenth-century France,' where it contributed with other influences to the creating of modem French prose, — an achievement artistically so great that other nations sometimes seem to have attained a tradition of sound prose only in so far as they have learned from the French. Not even the in genuity of a multitude of commentators succeeded * I am of course counting Boileau among the influences that made for a sound prose. Boileau was about one part Aristotle to^ nine parts Horace. [4] H THE THEORY OF IMITATION in obscuring seriously the Horatian good sense ; or if Horace was ever given a twist, it was, as in the case of the dictum ut pktura poesis, through the over-eagerness of the commentators to read into him an Aristotelian or pseud V 4 / THE NEW LAOKOON and logical structure. But even the pseudo-classicists felt the difficulty of making the theory work equally well for other literary forms, — lyrical poetry for instance : how was it possible to look on lyrical poetry as turned entirely to the painting of some outer object, and to sever the bQnd that connects it with individual emotion? "People may protest as fol- lows,** says the Abb6 Batteux: "'What! ... Is not poetry a song inspired by joy, admiration, grati- tude ? Is it not a cry of the heart, an enthusiasm (Slan) in which Nature does everything and Art nothing ? I do not see in it any painting or picture — but only fire, feeling, intoxication. So two things are true : first, lyrical poetry is true poetry ; second, it is not an imitation.' " ' We can agree with Batteux when he adds: " Here is the objection presented in all its force.*' We need not follow the process by which he gets around the objection and proceeds to prove that lyrical poetry is only imitation after all; though this process would illustrate in a very interesting way the pseudo-classic attempt to discredit the spontaneous in favor of the formal, to identify art with artificiality. « Beaux-Arts, etc., p. 244. [14] 1 THE THEORY OF IMITATION He does, however, admit that the prophets, being as they were dbectly inspired by God, did not have to imitate. This is of course to admit a great deal. The true romantic poet, the wild-eyed magus of Victor Hugo {mage effar^), feels in his inspired moments that he is at least on a level with the prophets, if | not with God himself. lAyhen Batteux published his book, R ousseau^ was on the point of bee^inninpr i^k ^^rf^. g in tl^e ^ name of feeling against every^^ ln f f i ^f n i^^ ^"j, traditional. In his exaltation of feeling, Rousseau's method was to grope his way back to beginnings and \ to use to the utmost the argument of originsjBat- teux already thinks it necessary to refer to and refute this appeal to origins. We should not, he says, go back to the first state of the arts, the mere lispings of infancy, when we are trying to define what they should be in their state of perfection.' At least pass- ing mention should be made of an earlier use against ! the Aristotelians of the argument of origins. While ^ the theory of imitation was still incubating in Italy, Patrizzi ' protested against the critics who were thus * Beaux-Arts, etc, p. 246. • See La Deca Disputata, Ferrara, 1586. [»s] 61 4«c-=^ / THE NEW LAOKOON weaving a strait - jacket for poetry, and tending ^ ^ ^ to stifle spontaneity under formalism JPoetry, says Patrizzi, took its rise in religious enthusiasm, rhythm is essential to its being ; it is not primarily an imi- tation. It would be possible to quote from him pas- sages that seem to anticipate Wordsworth's definition of poetry : " the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings " ; passages that even remind one of the more recent Rousseauists, who delve in the depths of the primitive and seek for the origins of poetry in the rhythmic beat of communal sympathy. But such passages would be misleading : Patrizzi is a Platonist rather than a precursor of Rousseauism ; that is, he associates the beginnings of poetry with what is above the reason, rather than with the region of instinct that is below it. I By his radical departure from Aristotle, Patrizzi became the arch-dissenter of Renaissance criticism. Many persons had a sort of startled admiration for his enormous heresies, but he cannot be said to have been deeply influential. On the contrary, the ten- dency was to lose sight more and more of the roots of poetry in emotion and to identify it formally with painting through the interpretations that were given [i6] THE THEORY OF IMITATION to the word imitation. Let us make this point clear by quoting still further the AbW Batteux. After re- ducing, as we have seen, all the forms of poetry, even the lyric, to imitation, Batteux goes on as fol- lows : "And so whether poetiy sings the emotions of the heart, or acts, or narrates, or sets either gods or men to speaking, it is always a portrait of general nature (la belle nature), an artificial image, a picture, the one and only merit of which consists in right selection, arrangement, true likeness: ut pktura poesis." lough the Horatian phrase thus recurs inevi- tably when the pseudo-classicist reaches a certain stage in his theorizing, the developments he gave to the phrase are evidently not to be found in the shrewd and untheoretical Horace. However Httle Aristotle himself would have countenanced the pseudo^lassic confusions of poetry and painting, the point of departure of these confusions is evi- dently not merely in the general interpretation that was given to the "Poetics," but in certain specific passages : for example, where he says that the " poet IS an imitator like a painter or any other artist." or where he proves the superior importance of plot [17] a d v THE NEW LAOKOON over other elements in dramatic poetry by remark- ing that the most beautiful colors laid on confusedly will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Plot in writing thus corresponds to design in painting. Neo-classical critics are fond of discussing the elements in the art of writing that correspond to the other elements in pictorial art, — light, color, expression, etc., — though they are not always agreed as to these correspondencies. They did, however, finally reach a fair agreement as to what constitutes the element of poetical coloring. This conception of poetical coloring, arising as We have seen from the Aristotelian doctrine of imita- tion, finally united with the other or un-Aristotelian doctrine, i. e., the imitation of models, to encourage ' the poetical diction which Wordsworth attacked in English, but the equivalent of which is found in other European languages.* Inasmuch as this impor- tant result of the pseudo- classic, or, as we may term it, formal confusion of poetry and painting, has * Poetical diction was also encouraged by the whole theory of •*omament" that had come down from classical antiquity. See B. Croce, Estetica, pp. 70-76, 450-465. * For French, see E. Barat : Le style poitiquf et la rholution romantique ( 1 904) . [18] I THE THEORY OF IMITATION not been adequately noticed by Lessing, nor so far as I am aware by any other critic, it may here re- , ceive the separate discussion for which we have I already reserved itT CHAPTER II POETICAL DICTION Something has already been said of the bad twist that was given to Aristotle's doctrine of ideal imita- , / tion as early as Daniello : poetry is to differ from prose, not as a higher from a lower truth but as fiction from fact. Inasmuch as men are always more or less the victims of words, this view of poetry was encouraged by Aristotle's word for plot (fivOosi), which was rendered " fable." At first sight this emphasis on the fabulous and fictitious seems an in- vitation to the poet to mount the hippogriff ; but the neo-classical hippogriff is tied to a tether. No sooner has the poet accepted the mvitation to in- dulge himself freely in fiction, than he is confronted •v/ with the terrible phrase " according to probability or necessity." He is to be a liar, it is true, but! a logical liar ; for, as Rymer says, " What is more vftr hateful than an improbable lie?"^^e neo-classical' theorist is not willing to recognize that the imagina- [20] POETICAL DICTION tion has its own reasons of which the reason knows nothing; that there are other ways of making a thing probable, or convincing as we should say now- adays, besides merely appealing to one's logic and sense of fact ; for this would be to recognize that region of the spontaneous and un expected in human nature which he is doing his best to eUminate. Every- thing must be deliberate and prearranged, with no break in the sharp sequence of cause and effect. To be sure, there was one obstacle to thus making poetry purely rational and formal. Ancient authori- ties whom the neo-classicist was bound to respect had declared that poetry has nothing to do with reason- ing, but is a sort of divine madness ; and so, in an age of formalism, poetic fury itself became a formal/ requirement — something to turn on judiciously, about as one might turn on a tap. Few things are more amusing than the businesslike way in which the neo-classic poet speaks of his "rages" and his "fires." Some of the critics, even though they have to Sicccpt furor poettais, strive at least to keep it within narrow limits. Thus Father Mambrun says that the epic poet must not be furious in the constitution of his plot, though he " docs not deny [21] THE NEW LAOKOON that a little poetic fury may be sprinkled in in the ^^ , f episodes." ^^ In their attempt to deny the rights of the imagi- nation the neo-classical theorists — or rather let us call them Jesuitical casuists — were led to convert the divine illusion of poetry into an agreeable falsity. Even in creating his fictions, or it might be more correct to say in manufacturing his lies, since he was supposed to do everything with malice prepense, the poet was not to imitate directly, that is, rely on his own resources ; for he might thus expose himself to being called " monstrous," the word that the neo- classicist always had in reserve for any one who was too unexpected. The poet was rather to fall back on the second main form of imitation, the imitation of models, and to copy the fictions that are already found in the ancient poets ; in other words, he was to draw freely on the wardrobe of mythological frippery, and many of the theorists demanded that he should not use even this fiction for its own sake, but merely allegorically, to inculcate some moral truth. y Trhe poet, then, is an imitator, and a painter who * op. cit, p. 269. [22] I POETICAL DICTION in drawing his design, that is, in choosing a subject and mode of treatment, is to be unspontaneous and traditional. He is also to be unspontaneous and traditional in laying on his poetical colors ; and by poetical colors the neo-classicist understands words, elegant phrases, figures of speech, and the like.' Horace already speaks of words as poetical colors » in much this sense, and the expression is found even in Wordsworth. Both words and imagery are regarded by the neo-classicist as being laid on like pigments from the outside. They are not, in Words- worthian phrase, the spontaneous overflow of power- ful feelings ; they lack the vital thrill that would save them from artificialit^lPhe result might not have been so bad if the poet had painted with his eye on the object. But at this point the other ■ Batteux says that " les mesurcs et niarmonie " constitute the coloring of poetry, " rimitation." its design {Op, cit., pp. 144, 146). The usual point of view is that of A. Donatus in his Ars poetica (Cologne, 1 63 J) : ♦' Colo res cnim poetici verba sunt et locutiones," etc. Dryden includes in poetical coloring, " the words, the ex- pressions, the tropes and figures, the versification, and all the other elegancies of sound/' etc. Essays, Ker ed., II, p. 147. • Cf. Dryden (Ker, II, p. 148) : " Operum colores is the very word which Horace uses to signify words and .elegant expret- sions," etc [233 THE NEW LAOKOON theory of imitation intervened, and in supplying his palette with poetical colors (that is, words, happy phrases, figures of speech, etc.), he must not look to nature but to models. Wordsworth ' and Coleridge v both say that the habit of regarding the language of poetry as something dissociated from personal emo- tion, and as made up rather of words and flowers of speech culled from models, was promoted by the writing of Greek and Latin verse in school. To any I one who composed by piecing together words and ' phrases he had picked out of a gradus, poetry came , to seem, even in his own tongue, an artificial process. Johnson praises Dry den as the father of poetical diction in English, and Dryden is reprobated for ! the same reason by Lowell. It is, of course, true I that poetical diction came in with the whc^e French influence abou! the time of Dryden, It is also true i • Wordsworth says that he wai Misled \n estimating words, not only By common inexperieoce of yoQth« But by the trade in classic niceties, The dangerous craft of culling tertb and phrase From languages that want the liring voice To carry meaning to the natnral heart, etc. Prtludt, tL 107 £L CI also Coleridge, Biographia Liter aria^ ch. i. [ 24 ] POETICAL DICTION that the model to whom the average poet of the eighteenth century turned when he was laying in a supply of poetical pigments, was not Dryden, but Pope, especially the translation of Homer. Evidently \/ two things were needed to rid poetry of " its gaudi- ness and inane phraseology " : first, that the poet I should write with his eye on the object and not on the models and the stock of traditional poetical colors ; second, that he should be spontaneous, so that his every word and phrase might be saved from 1 artificiality and ring responsive to genuine feeling. J The first of these two requirements was fulfilled, in England at least, before the second. For ex- ample, the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lad y Winchel - sea, which Wordsworth praises, is more remark- able for its exact rendering of certain sights and sounds of nature without false finery or flowers of speech than it is for the true romantic thrill. The same may be said of Cowper and some other eigh- ^ teenth/ etic diction than Erasmus Darwin's " Botanic Gar- den " ; unless, indeed, it be the early poems of Wil- [25] >/ THE NEW LAOKOON » liam Wordsworth, which show that the young poet already had his eye on the object ; but they are none the less filled with artificial elegancies and conven- \l tional adornments.' For Erasmus Darwin poetry is a process of painting to the eye. Both his theory* and practice are indeed merely the ultimate outcome of a confusion of poetry and painting that has its rigins in the literary casuistry of the Renaissance. i he confusion that led to poetical diction is funda- jtnental in the neo-classic movement, and the reaction /against poetical diction is equally fundamental in romanticism. The romantic movement probably did as much to compromise as it did to forward the stand- ards of sound prose ; but it had a legitimate task in emancipating the poetic imagination from its strait- jacket of artificiality and convention. It is therefore (important to note that the wave of emotion that finally swept away poetical diction in England came * Cf. Legouis's Wordsworthy p. 131 ff. • For Darwin's theory of poetry, see the " Interludes "that fol- low the cantos of his poem, especially the " Interlude " to Canto I of Part II {The Loves of the Plants, 1789). The acme of poetic artificiality was reached in France about the same time as in Eng- land, in the AbW DtViWe-'s fardins (1782), a work inspired by Thomson's Seasons. [26] POETICAL DICTION from France. " Guilt and Sorrow," the first poem in which Wordsworth attains vital directness and sin- cerity of expression, was written, not primarily under the influences of the ballads, or Milton, or Spenser, but under the emotional stress of the French Revo- lution ; and Wordsworth is the father of nineteenth- century English poetry. Certain tendencies in eigh- teenth-century England, that bulk so largely in the eyes of some critics among the causes of the Eng- lish romantic movement, still have about them some- thing that is conventional and, in the neo-classical sense, imitative. The Spenserian and Miltonian re- vivals, for example, led simply to new forms of poet- ical diction. In laying in their assortment of poetical pigments people went to Spenser and Milton instead of to Pope. My purpose, however, is not to go into a minute study of poetical diction. I have merely wanted to show how inevitably it arose from the formal iden- tification, of poetry and painting. One would have expected this identification to lead not only to poetic diction, but to a general riot of word-painting and descriptive writing ; as a matter of fact the possi- bilities of the theory in this direction were slow to [27] V IV THE NEW LAOKOON develop^nd the reason is not far to seek. Poetry, it is tft^is an imitation and a painting, but a paint- ing, the orthodox Aristotelian theorist would hasten to add, not of outer objects, but of human actions. To be sure, the critics were from the start not en- tirely agreed on this point. If we consult the liter- ary case-books of the later Renaissance and early sev- enteenth century, we shall find that grave authorities are quoted, much as they might be in the Jesuitical case-books in theology, on both sides of the question as to what the poet may imitate. Too much Aristote- lian rigor in interpreting the doctrine of imitation had some awkward consequences. If poetry could imitate only human actions, then the "Georgics" were not poetry, and yet Virgil was the supreme neo- classical model ! Was it not veneration of Virgil that led to the reversion of the Aristotelian decision in so grave a matter as the relative dignity of trag- edy and epic ? It seems strange to us that men of undoubted intellectual power, like the best of the Renaissance critics, shojjjd have conducted such A9 purely formal inquiries. VXJie subjective test is alone intelligible for us. If a thing really ** finds '* us, we do not worry much about form or the dignity of [28] POETICAL DICTION £-^re. The actual appeal of a work of art " sinks the foi-m, as of Drama or Epic," says Emerson, " out of notice. T is like making a question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written." But our sense of superiority should be tempered by the reflec- / tion that the neo-classic formalism was closely related | to a virtue — the love of clear and logical distinc- tions; and that our modern appreciativeness is often only the amiable aspect of a fault — an undue toler- ance for indeterminate enthusiasms and vapid emo- tionalism. The love of clear distinctions and sharply defined types led the neo-classic writer to avoid a mixture that his theory would otherwise have permitted, that of the poem in prose. For if the essence of po- etry is not in metre but in imitation, why not imitate poetically in prose ? That is, paint a picture of life not according to literal fact, of course, but " according to probability or necessity." F^nelon must have gone through some such reasoning when he wrote his " T^Mmaque," a genuinely neo-classic prose-poem, only remotely related to the poetical prose with which the romantic movement has made us familiar. Yet such was the prejudice in favor of the ^enre [29] THE NEW LAOKOON tranche that " T616maque " did not escape censure. In Voltaire's " Temple du Goiit " the repentant Fenelon is made to confess that there can be no ^ true poem in prose.' /^ To return to our mmn topic, we may surmise that V the comparative lack of descriptive writing during the early part of the neo-classical period was due in part to concentration on man and human action, and in part to positive critical preceptTlBoileau is only ^% ... j\ repeating previous critics when he ridicules those who interrupt the course of a narrative to indulge in a long-winded description, for example, of some palace and its grounds. " I skip twenty pages to get to the end of it all," says Boileau, " and then ^f wv» escape with difficulty through the garden."^ /Early ^ * In the article "Epopee" {Diet. philosopkique)^ Voltaire says: N"Pour les poemes en prose, je ne sais ce que c'est que ce imonstre: je n'y vois que I'impuissance de faire des vers," etc "Cf., however, the Abbe Du Bos who approves of the prose poem on good neo-classic grounds {Reflexions critiques sur la po'esie et sur la peinture, t. I, p. 510). * Cf. D'Aubignac, Pratique du thidtre, p. 51 : "Mal i propos le poete ferait une description exacte des colonnes, des portiques, des ornements . . . d*un temple," etc. Boileau had especially in mind in his satire the description of the magic palace in Canto III of Scudery's Alaric which was itself suggested by previous de- scriptions in Ariosto, etc. [30] POETICAL DICTION in the eighteenth century, however, we can ob- serve a change. There were already beginning to gather beneath the smug surface of neo-classic for- malism those emotional elements that were destined to explode toward the end of the century. The age was gradually growing less humanistic in temper, and becoming more interested, both scientifically and sentimentally, in outer naturej A notable example of the latter kind of interest is Thomson's "Sea- sons." Whatever it may be in itself, considered as an influence, Thomson's " Seasons " is a pseudo-clas- sical document. It led to a school of descriptive and pictorial poetry, but pictorial in a pseudo-classic sense, — that is, conceiving of words and phrases as pigments to be laid on from without ; and this school was not slow to justify itself by an appeal to the maxim iit pictura poesis. At the same time a somewhat different influence was also tending to confuse the standards of paint- ing and poetry. We hear a great deal in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century of the virtuosi,' m^n who collected anything from • An interesting article on the virtuoH by N. Pearson wiU be found in the Nineteenth Century for Nov., 1909. [31] !*] iH THE NEW LAOKOON coins to butterflies, and were endlessly ridiculed by the wits of the time as examples of meaningless and random curiosity. The bent thus revealed for pre- cise observation and classification may be connected directly with the founding of the Royal Society (1662), and in a more general way with the Baconian tradition. In the retrospect we can see that some of these virtuosi were on the way to become serious antiquaries, and that the antiquaries in turn pre- pared the way for Winckelmann and modem archaeo- logy. Now any one who got together a cabinet of antiques was naturally led to compare the treatment of the ancient legends, etc., in art with the treat- ment of the same legends by the poets; and at this point there intervened the inevitable ut pictura poesis, reinforced by the neo-classical notion that no one could do anything without copying from some one else. One of the first persons who encouraged this sort of thing, as Lessing complains, was Addi- son in his " Dialogues on Medals " (1702). Perhaps the most important of the other authors who developed a parallelism between pictorial and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, wereSpence in his "Polymetis*' (1747), and finally [32] POETICAL DICTION Count Caylus in his " Pictures Drawn from Ho- mer" (1757). Lessing maintains that Spence's " book is absolutely intolerable to every reader of taste." This is not flattering for the English aris- tocracy of the period, many of the most distinguished of whom appear in the list of his subscribers and patrons. The general suggestion of these books is that the standards of poetic and plastic art are inter- changeable, and that any good poetical picture may profitably be treated in the same way by the painter or sculptor. Spence, for example, becomes a fair mark for Lessing when he says (page 311)," Scarce anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture." At the same time, if we study these writers directly, we shall be surprised to find how much more sensible they are than we should ever suppose from Lessing's attacks. Caylus, indeed, anticipates Lessing in important respects. " For every idea that he has borrowed from Caylus,'' says M. Rocheblave, "Lessing bestows upon him a censure." ' (We should now be prepared to understand the conditions that led to the writing of the " Laokoon." « Essai sur U Ccmte de Caylus, par S. Rocheblave, p. 22a [33] \ ^ THE NEW LAOKOON There was the school of descriptive poetry, largely imitative of Thomson's " Seasons " ; there were also the new erudition and antiquarianism of the eigh- teenth century/ uniting with art and literature, and, like the school of descriptive poetry, making a liberal use of the maxim ut pictiira poesis. The general background was the whole theory of imitation as elaborated by the critics of the Renaissance. Of these elements the theory of imitation is by far the most important, and it is the one of which the Germans in general have said the least.^j| « For this revival of Greek in the eighteenth century and the coming together of antiquarianism and literature, see L. Bertrand La Fin du classicisme et U retour h rantique. • For the period immediately preceding Lessing, F. Braitmaier's book {Gesckichte der Poetischen Theorie und Kritik von den Dis- kursen dtr MaUrbis auf Lessing, 1888), though dull, is fairly com- plete. f CHAPTER III LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" One of the most important passages in Lessing is that in which he defends criticism — and by criti- cism he means the setting up of definite standards and a rational discipline — against those who asserted that it suppressed originality and genius. In this pas- sage Lessing declares that he felt in himself no living fountain, and had to force everything out of himself by "pipes and pressure." "I should be poor, cold, short-sighted," he continues, " if I had not learned in a measure to borrow foreign treasures, to warm my- self at foreign fires, and to strengthen my eyes by the glasses of art. I am therefore always ashamed or annoyed when I hear or read anything in dis- paragement of criticism. It is said to suppress gen- ius, and I flattered myself I had gained from it some- thing very nearly approaching genius. I am a lame man who cannot possibly be edified by abuse of his crutchr^ Lessing, then, according to his own estimate, is [35] y illllli (^ THE NEW LAOKOON more remarkable for his powers of assimilation than for his spontaneity. The more one studies the ma- terial that, from the Renaissance on, prepared the way for his work, — not to speak of the remoter classical background, — noting how much he owes not merely to those with whom he agrees, but even to the very Frenchmen, like Voltaire, whom he is striv- ing to discredit, the more one is inclined to agree with Lessing's self-estimate; the more especially one studies the " Laokoon " in this way, the less it seems to contain that is strictly original. Evidently, if the Germans are to justify the high claims they make for Lcssing as a critic, they must rest them on other grounds than his intellectual originality or the fineness of his taste. The decisive word about \ Lessing was really uttered by Goethe : We may, he said, have another intelligence like Lessing, but we shall wait long before seeing another such char- acter. Here is the point tha^ must have chief emphasis in any right praise off Lessing. He is in some re- spects the most masculine figure Germany has produced since Luther ; and without being too fan- ciful one may follow out certain analogies between [36] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" the r61e played by Luther and that played by Les- sing in an entirely different field. Luther protested against a Catholic Church that had colored the plain truth of Scripture with its own special tradition, perverted it with casuistry, overlaid it with f alse rites and ceremonies; even solLessing protested against the critical creed the fofeaations ofwhich were laid in sixteenth-century Italy, but which had been actually elaborated and imposed upon the world by the French, so as to become a sort of Catholic Church of literature, an orthodoxy which seemed to Lessing to have colored sound classical doctrine with its own special tradition, distorted it with casuistical interpretations, and turned the true spirit of the law into mere artificial rules and conventions.^ust as Luther again, in distinguish- ing true Christianity from pseudo-Christianity, was led to set up the text of the Bible as a sort of visible absolute, a true and perfect touchstone in matters religious,(^ Lessing in distinguishing be- tween the truly classical and the pseudo-classic set up Aristotle's " Poetics " as a sort of visible abso- lute, a complete criterion in everything relating to literature, especially the drama. Every one knows [37] / t. • *» sj ^ THE NEW LAOKOON the passage in which Lessing declares that the " Poetics " is as infallible in its own way as the ele- ments of Euclid^ Furthermore, just as Luther, in emancipating Germany from spiritual servitude to Rome, aimed to set up a definite discipline in place of what he had abolished, and looked with horror on those who made use of their new liberty to fall into mere antinomianism, so Lessing, in emancipat- ing Germany from intellectual and literary servi- tude to France, proposed to substitute a true code for the false code he had abrogated, and looked with disgust on the young antinomians of the Storm and Stress, who were for getting rid of all codes and setting up instead an uncharted emotionalism. Finally, just as Luther, though attacking the^form- aUsm of Rome, was himself in some sort a form- alist by his emphasis on the text of the Bible, so Lessing, in his attack on neo- classic formalism, remained more or less of a formalist himself by his insistence on an infallible AristotleTy *^rom one point of view Lessing may be defined as the last and greatest of the Aristotelian formal- ists. The underlying unity of his critical work — both the " Laokoon " and " Hamburg Dramaturgy ** [38] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" — lies in his endeavor to distinguish the truly classic from the pseudo-classical ; and in practice this nearly always means, as I have said, to discriminate be- tween true and false Aristotelianism. He disavows all claim to be systematic, but he is at least keenly , logical and analytical, hie has indeed laid himself open to the charge Cardinal Newman brings against /O V A ristotle. thaL iil^ logic as the foundation ^ of the fine arts. 1 In general he is a lover of bounda- ries and distinctions, and of the clearly defined type, though not of course in a narrow or pedantic way. He even justifies in one passage a mixture of the genres by the somewhat unexpected argument that a mule is a very useful beast, in sgite of the fact that it is neither a horse nor an ass. 1 We should add that there is one whole side of Lessing that is less humanistic and more humani- tarian, a side that connects him with the great ex- pansion of knowledge and sympathy just then begin- ning, and more specifically with the influence of a Frenchman like Diderot. Lowell, however, is very misleading when he describes Diderot as a "de- boshed " Lessing. In reality the difference is far more fundamental, iln his whole temper Lessing is [39] ti SM THE NEW LAOKOON not merely rational but disciplinary ; whereas Dide- rot, perhaps a more brilliant and certainly a more] spontaneous genius, is deficient in this guiding an( controlling judgment. Diderot, in his own phrase, lives at the " mercy of his diaphragm," tends to overstrain all boundaries of thought and feeling, and so prepares the way for the Titanism of every kind that has marked our modern emancipationTl • • ». "^ Ij^essing, on the contrary, looks in his critical method backward to the Renaissance, rather than for- ward to the nineteenth century. If we approach his critical writings without preconceived notions or conventional admiration, we shall admit that there is something about them that from our point of view is foreign, remote, and disconcerting. He usu- ally judges, not from the immediate impression, but by certain fixed laws and principles which he pro- ceeds to found upon Aristotlel In this respect, if we may be allowed to digress for a moment, he is really farther away from us than Boileau ; for Boi- leau, who under certain romantic obsessions has come to be looked on as an arch-formalist, was in reality the leader of a reaction against formalism. Few con- trasts, indeed, are more surprising than that between [40] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" ^the real Boileau and Boileau the romantic bugaboo. V/ Boileau was simply a wit and man of the world, not especially logical or imaginative or profound, but with an admirable integrity of character and an ex- traordinarily keen and correct sensibility. Literary works, and especially epics and tragedies, turned out mechanically according to the neo-classic recipes, had ended in intolerable boredom, and Boileau for one decided he could stand it no longer. It was in this spirit that he assailed and overthrew Chapelain, the chief of the Aristotelian formalists, whose per- fectly "regular" epic, "La Pucelle," had no fault Vaccording to Boileau except that nobody could read it. |Boileau's message to the authors of his time was * ' ' ' S- simple : It is proper and indeed necessary for you ^ to obey the rules, but at best the rules have only a negative virtue : the really important matter is that you should interest us. He added to his own precept his translation of Longinus " On the Sublime," with its constant measuring of literature not according to "A its formal perfection, but according to its power ^ to stir emotion. As rendered by Boileau, Longinus takes his place with Horace and Aristotle as a supreme critical authority. Henceforth the appeal [41] u) THE NEW LAOKOON is even more to taste than to the rules : in other words, what we should call the subjective test re- ceives increasing emphasis, though we may surmise that the emotional undercurrent we have already detected in the early eighteenth century, and which runs in Diderot into actual Titanic unrestraint, is something very different from the true spirit of LonginusTV Moli^reTalthough he had little faith even in the negative virtue of the rules, was with Boileau in other respects. He wrote the famous scene between Vadius and Trissotin in much the spirit in which his friend assailed Chapelain ; but like most of thei wits of the age of Louis XIV, Moli^re carried the warfare on pedantry to a point where it became a menace to sound learning and an encouragement tq polite superficiality. Vadius is laughed at because he knows more Greek than any man in France ; but, as Dr. Johnson would have told us, this is in itself the most respectable of accomplishments. Now Lessing repudiated what was artificial and superficial in the French tradition, — its conven- tions, and etiquette, and gallantries, — but at the risk of losing a real virtue, viz., the exquisite urbanity that [42] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" the French at their best had really succeeded in at- taining. The ancients, says Lessing, knew nothing about politeness; whereupon, reverting to the tone of the Renaissance polemic, he proceeds to belabor the unhappy Klotz. 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. In short, Germany failed to get the full benefit of the great French reaction against pedan- try, 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 Levi- athan 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 Ches- terfield. Lessing has little of the Longinian temper, and not enough of the new sensibility of the eighteenth century to be dominated by it. What we find in the " Laokoon " is not primarily an appeal to taste and feeling, but a mixture of Aristotelian theory and [43] ? vi THE NEW LAOKOON 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, 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, re- mote and foreign. ^ [In one of his poems Matthew Arnold relates how in the course of a walk with a friend in Hyde Park they fell to talking of " Lessing's famed Laocoon," 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** [44] I 1 I I • If M LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" 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." • The last two lines are admirable, but Arnold can \/ scarcely be said to be happy i„ his choice of iUustra- tions. 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 ir- relevant details are eliminated and in which every- thing is linked together "according to probability ■ or necessity," and subordinated to some dramatic am? 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 v j end is the chief thing of all." It is the goal of art that interests him rather than any pleasant ' Epilogue to Lesnni^s Laocoon. [45] y THE NEW LAOKOON 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, 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.' Elsewhere he says that " mere coloring and transitory expression have no ideal because Nature has proposed to her- self nothing definite in them." ^ " 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 pri - marily in expression, but in a certaininf^rnxiPg symmetry and proportion that, like t rue plo t in t ra^edy^ points the way to som ejmmaa^ndj How far Lessing is, not only from our modem use of the ^ Laokoorty ed. Bliimner, 469 (Nachlass D). * Ibid.^ 399 (Nachlass A). [46] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" word beauty, but also from our use of the word ideal, will appear from another passage. " The highest bodily beauty," says Lessing, " ex- ists 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." ' 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 ex- pression 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 * Blumner, 440 (Nachlass C). [47] 0- V / THE NEW LAOKOON 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 nc sont les oreilles. { There had grown up during the neo-classic period a Tormal 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 imi- tation. Only they use quite different means for their imitation, and from this difference the special rules for each art take their rise." ' He hasvindeed struck the keynote of his book on the very title-page, in the motto from Plutarch: " They [i. e., painting and poetry] differ both in the ' Bliimner, 353, 354 (NachJass A). [48] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" material andjnodes 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 vis- ible 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 render- ing anything that is not action he should strive to « translate it into terms of action. Thus Homer does n/ not try to paint directly the beauty of Helen, but puts the beauty of Helen in action, and show's its * effect upon the old men on the wall at Troy. In contrast to Homer, Ariosto 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 actu- [49] iWi^fiMia^-™-^^-"*'' ^• 9 ♦• THE NEW LAOKOON J ally coexist in space. The painter's limitation ap- pears 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 in- dulge in literary intentions through the use of alle- gory, 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 ac^ tion 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 paint- ing not merely in its outer means of realization, but in its effects upon the imagination. "The only fruitful moment is the one that allows the imagination free scope. The Icmger we gaze, the more must our imagination add ; and the more our imagination adds, the more we must believe we see. In the whole course of an emotion there is no mo- ment which possesses this advantage so little as its highest stage. There is nothing beyond this ; and [SO] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" the presentation of extremes to the eye clips the wings of Fancy, prevents her from soaring beyond the impressions of the senses, and compels her to occupy herself with weaker images," etc.* \In other words, the painter is confined by the limits of his art to one moment of an action, but can suggest other moments ; and his ambition should be to select the moment that has the most of this suggestiveness. Though objectively limited to im- ages, he can set the spectator to dreaming of motion and action. V Lessing can scarcely be said to have developed adequately the converse doctrine that, though the poet is objectively limited to the painting of motion and action, he can act suggestively upon the reader and set him to dreaming of images.* Lessing is so hu- manistic that even in the sort of waking dream that is the illusion of true art, he would have us dream of action. Perhaps, indeed, it is misleading to apply to Lessing at all such words as dreaming and sug- gestiveness. He does not for example concern him- » Bliimner, 165 (III>. ' The clearest allusion to tfiis dreaming of images in the Im0- koon is in xiv and the note at the rery end (Bliimner, 247, 248). [51I THE NEW LAOKOON self sufficiently, to our modern thinking, with the V suggestiveness of words. He looks on them too much as a sort of passive material, and on the poet as too conscious and deliberate in his combining of them. We are more inclined to dwell on the mys- tery and magic that words may acquire at the touch of a true poet ; on the almost hypnotic spell they may be made to cast over our feelings : — \ All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word. G. I In thus tending to dissociate language from emo- tion, to allow insufficiently for the unconscious and the spontaneous, in short, to treat art too analyti- cally, Lessing has points of contact with the very school he assailed. His ambition was simply to op- pose a true analysis to the false analysis of the pseudo-classic critics. The main result of this analy- sis — the great central generalization of the ** Lao- koon," that poetry deals with temporal, painting i with spatial relations, poetry with the successive ^and painting with the coexistent — will not, as I have already said, seem extremely original to one who is familiar with the previous literature of the subject. In his introduction Blumner gives a list of [52] LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON'' the writers who furnished hints to Lessing, and in some cases partly anticipated him. Long as this list is, it is not, as I can testify from my own read- ing, complete. For example, Blumner says nothing of a passage from Caylus in which the Count comes very near to making Lessing's main distinction.' This distinction, indeed, forced itself even on some of those who were trying hardest to confuse the arts according to the pseudo-classic formulall find a remarkable example of this fact in a writer whom Blumner has also failed to mention. Father Castel. 1^ is well known, the "Laokoon" in its present form is only a fragment, — one of three parts Les- sing had planned to write. In the third part he had intended to discuss the arts of music and danc- ing. We can only infer his ideas on these arts from his few scattered memoranda for this uncompleted portion of his work ; but in his treatment of music, as in that of poetry and painting, he would evi- dently have been chiefly interested in establishing boundaries and frontiers. We may judge from his reference to the Kapellmeister Telemann that he was no friend of musical painting, that he would * This passage is quoted in Rocheblave, op. cit., pp. 218 f. [53] V THE NEW LAOKOON have condemned any mixing up of the domain of sound with that of color and vision.j # PNow no one was more celebrated in the eigh- teenth century for confusions of this kind than Father Castel. One finds constant allusion in the literature of the period to his clavecin des couleurs or clavecin oculaire^ — in other words, a sort of instrument he had constructed to make sound visible and inter- pret it in terms of color. Father Castel set forth the theory of his color-clavichord in the " Mercure " of November, 1725. He completed the first model of the new instrument, as he tells us, on December 21, 1734. He says that he had been put on the track of his discovery by something he had read in the "Musurgia" of Kircher/ " If at the time of a fine concert," writes Kircher, " we could see the air stirred by all the vibrations communicated to it by the voices and instruments, we should be surprised to see it filled with the liveliest and most finely blended colors." ' It was CasteVs ambition to make » Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) was a German Jesuit. His Musurgia universalis^ sive ars magna cofisoni ct dissoni appeared in 1650. * See Esprit, Saillies et singularites du P. Castel (lyS^), p. 280. Castel was born in 1688 and died in 1757. [54] \ I LESSING AND THE "LAOKOON" these analogical colors visible ; to arrange a series of colors in the same harmonic proportions as sounds ; to connect them with a key-board in such wise that, when the fingers touched certain keys, the colors should appear ordered and combined in the same way as the sounds of the musical notes corresponding to these keys. But what colors are equivalent to what notes? "The green," answers Father Castel, "cor- responds to rCf and will doubtless make them [the audience] feel that this note re is natural, rural, sprightly, pastoral. Red, which corresponds to sol, will give them the idea of a warlike note, bloody, angry, tefrible. Blue, corresponding to do, will give them the impression of a note that is noble, majes- tic, celestial, divine, etc.* The deaf in this way will be able to see the music of the ears, the blind to hear the music of the eyes, and those who have eyes as well as ears will enjoy each kind of music better by enjoying both."* * Father Castel may have had a touch of color-audition to help on his pseudo-classic theorizing. Cf. the sonnet of Arthur Rimbaud I refer to later (p. 183). * Op. cit., p. 329. Father Castel is probably indebted for his theories, not only to Kircher, but to Newton (see Optics, Book I, Pt. II, Propositions 3 aihd 6). A discussion of the whole subject [55] V ^/ ) \ \ THE NEW LAOKOON But Father Castel is not satisfied with colors merely arranged in a diatonic series, and appearing and disappearing rapidly at the touch of a key-board A in imitation of musical notes. He would like to give more permanency to his color concerts, to arrive, as he says, at a still easier means of "painting music and sounds,** and he proceeds to work out a scheme for what he calls " musical and harmonic tapestries." " Can you imagine,** he asks, ** what a room will be, the walls of which are hung with rigadoons and minuets, with sarabands and passacaglias, with can- tatas and sonatas, and even, if you please, with a very complete representation of all the music of an opera ? " ' When painting has thus succeeded in re- producing analogically all the harmonic effects of music, there will be more reason than heretofore, says Castel, giving a slight twist to Simonides, for calling it a dumb music ; " but a music all \hc more will be found in Erasmus Darwin's L 357- The idea of the phrase is of course contained in the passage I quote later (p. 124) from A. W. Schlegel. * " Omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent, habent quod- dam commune vinculum, et quasi cognatione quadam inter se con- tincntur." Pro Archia Poeta. This passage is taken by Spence as motto for his Polymetis. [61] THE NEW LAOKOON vinculum not in form, but in [feeling-, even archi- 'tecture, apparently the most formal of the arts, arose originally in response to a rhythmic thrill ; is, in short, only congealed emotion.3Long before Wal- ^ ter Pater, the Germans declared that music is the ^ most artistic of the arts because it is the least for- mal ; that the other arts tend toward their perfection in proportion as they approximate to music. JNow, just as we have found that all the neo<:lassic ^/ comparing and confusing of poetry and painting is ^^^ only a corollary of something still more fundamental, namely, the doctrine of imitation, so the exaltation ^ I of music is only a corollary of something still more "^tJ \ fundamental in romanticism, namely, the _theory 'of spontaneity. By making the arts purely imi- 'tative the neo-classicist had reduced the r61e of the spontaneous, the unexpected, the original. He aimed to bring everything so far as possible under the control of the cold and deliberate understanding, to the neglect of all that is either above or below a certain rational level, — the sense of awe and mys- tery as well as the sense of wonder. He would have everything logical, conventionally correct, dryly di- dactic, able to give a clear account of itself when [62] THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY tested by the standards of common sense and or- dinary fact. By his unwillingness to allow for the unconscious and the unpremeditated, he tended to identify art with the artificial, and to turn the di- vine illusion of poetry into a sort of elegant falsehood. This is, of course, an extreme statement of the neo-classic point of view. Not even a Chapelain or a Rymer or a Gottsched would realize it in every particular/w'hen, too, we should not forget the influ- * ' cnces that, during the neo-classical period itself, were making against a pure formalism: for ex- ample, Boileau and his rendering of Longinus, and the growing emphasis from this time forth on the personal and emotional factor, — the rise, in short, of a school of taste. A closely allied influence was that of women and the drawing-rooms, and their recognition, if not of the spontaneous, at least of the undefinable element in artistic creation, of the je ne sais quoi, as they were fond of calling it. »We must also remember that the tendency to submit everything to the hard and dry light of the under- standing is by no means a purely neo-classic phe- nomenon. There were various other contributing causes to the so-called period of enlightenment [63] THE NEW LAOKOON {Atifkldmng) : for example, the philosophy of Des- cartes and the developments it received in Germany in the systems of Leibnitz and Christian Wolf. Whatever the explanation, few will deny that the early eighteenth century had arrived at an over- analytical dryness of mind, and so combined it with social convention as to repress a number of very Vn natural human instincts^ Recording to some mod- em psychologists, when an essential side of human nature is thus denied and starved, it is not elimi- nated entirely, but merely forced into the subcon- scious ; and when it has there accumulated for a \ certain time, it makes its way back to the surface in a sort of "sublimin al uj)ru sh." In an epoch of « convention and dry rationality there finally arises, in the words of Matthew Arnold, the need of " storms, passion, effusion, and relief." We can follow the gradual accumulation of such emotional elements beneath the surface of the eighteenth century as well as the subliminal uprush or overflow of emotion at the end, — an overflow that assumed forms as different as the German Storm and Stress, the Wesleyan movement in England, and the French Revolution. V [64] THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY ■^ fWe inevitably think of Rousseau as the most im- •\ portant single figure in this emotional reaction, as the great apostle of the original and the spontaneous. J That such a reaction would have taken place with- out Rousseau is certain ; but it is equally certain that he first gave powerful expression to it and pro- foundly influenced the forms that it assumed. "The root of the whole Storm and Stress movement in Germany," says Hettner, " is Rousseau's gospel of Nature." A. W. Schlegel and Madame de Stael do little more than repeat Rousseau in their onslaughts on the imitative and conventional.' Wordsworth has | given merely one special application to Rousseau's 7 message, in his dictum that poetry is the spontane- j ous overflow of powerful feelings. SchelUng attacks ->. systematically the whole theory of imitation * as we have outlined it in the first part of this book ; and this was very fitting in a philosopher who, accord- ing to a German authority, set out to romanticize * Cf., for example, the Nouvelle Hilcfiscy 2* partie, lettres xiv- xvii, with Df PAlUmagnt^ i* partie, and with A. W. Schlegel's Dramatic Art and Literature, passim. * SchelUng opposed the idea of creative spontaneity to that . of mechanical imitation in his ifber das Verhdltniss der bilden- ^ den Kiinste xur Natur (1807), an address that was influential on Coleridge. V 7 [65] t^ 1 THE NEW LAOKOON the whole universe ; but Rousseau had romanticized the universe before him.^ ^ R^eo-classicism as it developed in France might be defined as a mixture of Aristotle and the dancing- master, — Aristotle being more in evidence at the beginning of the movement and the dancing-master at the end. At first sight Rousseau seems to have a quarrel with the dancing-master rather than with Aristotle, to be more concerned with getting rid of social than of literary conventions. To the tyranny of etiquette and the artificiality of the drawing- rooms he opposes a world of freshness, naturalness, spontaneity. "I was so tired," he writes, "of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these ; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card- playing, music, silly jokes, insipid mincing airs, great suppers, that whenever I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, or in pass- ing through a hamlet snuffed the odor of a good 1/ chervil omelette, or heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherd's songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.*' ' * Confessions^ livre ix (1756). [66] \^ THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY This first appearance is, however, somewhat mis- leading. Rousseau's deeper quarrel is, after all, not with the dancing-master, but with Aristotle, espe- cially if Aristotle be taken to typify not merely the tyranny of classical imitation, but in general the ^ logical and analytical attitude toward lif^i^pfaiCsays . Rousseau, should not reason_or analyze but feel (sentio ergo sum). The activity of the intellect, in- deed, so far from being a gain, is a source of degen- eracy. The intellect has divided man against him- self, destroyed the unity of instinct, the freshness and spontaneity that primitive man enjoyed and that the child continues to enjovARousseau is an obscurantist of a new species. He sees in man's eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge the cause of his fall from Nature, much as the theolo- gian sees in the same event the cause of his fall from God. With him begins that revulsion from the rational, the attack on the analytical understand- ing, on the " false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions," which pervades the whole ro- mantic movement. T^Fwe would find our way back to the Arcadia of fresh and spontaneous feeling, we should cease to think. " The man who thinks," says [67] k/' I ••' THE NEW LAOKOON ^v Rousseau, " is a depraved animal^ a saying parallel W in its way to that of Gregory : " Ignora nce is th e mother of devotion." / yr *^ J Vv We are especially urged by Rousseau in dealing with art and Hterature to get rid of our "med- dling intellects.? Like Sterne, he is for the man who is " pleased he knows not why and cares not wherefore." T* The Frenchman," Rousseau com- plains, " does not seek on the stage naturalness and illusion, but only wit and thoughts ; he does not ask to be enchanted by a play." * // ne sesouciepas d'etre sMuit, — the whole of the modern programme is implied in that brief phrase, y'he seductivenessj)f artistic_creation, or, as we should say nowadays, its power of suggestion, was Rousseau's sole concern. If art can enthrall him, he is wiUing to waive all question of logic or rationality .jj 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." Insh ort, the on ly logic^he^ asks * NouvelU Hildise, 2« partie, Ic*'- [68] rl THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY fr om literature or from life itself is the logic of dream- landj TRousseau 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 unique- ness 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 ar- rested 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." jif neo-classical theory did not espe- cially favor the imagination, Cartesian theory posi- tively 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 Male- branche made his famous attack on the imagination. [69] 6- V THE NEW LAOKOON 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. '*^Di- vme a berrations of the reason .'* Rousseau e xclaims , "a th( t>^ s than the reason itself ! " ' His ambition is to escape from reality into a world of dreams, the only world as he tells us that is fit for habitation. *^Df course he often reasons brilliantly in his effort to discredit the rea- son, just as Malebranche, according to Voltaire, is brilliajjtly imaginative in his attack on the imagi- nation. I 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. ' A contempo- rary says that Rousseau did his best writing only when in a state of fever ; and Rousseau himself speaks of * NouvelU Hilaise^ 2* partie, lettre ii. * " Le pays des chim^res est en ce monde le seul digne d'etre habits," etc. NouvelU Hilnse^ (f partie, lettre viiL * Confessions^ livre vii [70] THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY the period of composition of his greatest books as " ten years of fever and delirium." ' Tbe frequency with which Rousseau uses the word delirium in speak- SiAA^ty {J ' ing of his own imaginative activity suggests the phrase ^ " ' that was applied to his Hterary descendants, ^Jke French romanticists, — Ics amateurs du d//trelThQ 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 \ y 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 regret- ting the absence of the strait-jacket. The neo-clas- ^ sicists, by admitting only what is probable to the un- derstanding, reduced unduly the r61e of illusion, the element of wonder and surpriseA On the other hand,\the romanticists too often, achieved their renascence of wonder by an extinc-^^ tion of common sense. They were- too prone to think wttfeb- Pi-tfcfessm Saint flbur y 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 ; ! Prtmur Dialogue. [71] • • THE NEW LAOKOON and, as Sainte-Beuve remarks, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling. fWe can afford to linger over this relation between the imaginative and the rational, or, as the Aristote- lian theorist would have said, between the wonder- ful and the probable, for it lies at the very centre of any right distinction between classic and roman- tic 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 susgensionof disbelief which, according to Coleridge, constitutes poetic faith ; who clings too rigidly to his rational standards and keeps harping on prob- ability 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." * , ^here is the opposite case of the man who yields * Preface to Rapin, [72] I I n THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY his poetic faith too readily, who does not balk at any improbability. This is evidently true of chil- dren or child-like individuals. There is, however, a carelessness of rationality and a love of the mar- velous that, instead of being child-like, is a symp- tom rather of over-refinement J 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 naive person speaking to a narve age ; in the other, with an aesthete who is simply isolating himself in his tower of ivory. In a late Latin writer like Apu- leius, again, we see the nexus of cause and effect giving way to a series of somewhat childish sur- prises. TOie 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 intellectTmie probable, says Boileau, is a great enemy of the wonderful ; and so indeed it [73] # • • J • • • O- \ THE NEW LAOKOON is. To be prosaic and sensible, and at the same time unimaginative, like many neo-classicists, is compara- tively easy ; to launch forth into a world of pure imaginative illusion, like so many of our modern ro- manticists, 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 stand- ^ ards of prose, — this is a miracle that has been achieved only by the great poetsA 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."*\rhis use of the idea of probability as a weapon of attack against mediaeval romance is common in the critical treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The follow- ing from Father Mambrun's treatise on the Epic [74] THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY (page 173) may serve as a sample: "I remember, when I was a boy, reading in a book called * Fran- cos 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 ne- reids, taken by the beauty of the youth, receive him lovingly ; but he refuses to yield to their blandish- ments, 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." M Here are stirring adventures indeed, Father Mam- )run concludes, but lacking as they do in prob- ability, they are worthy, not of serious poetry, but only of old wives' tales (fabellis anilibtis)\2iS Rymer would say, they have a " tang of the oltiWoman." But in matters of this kind there is evidently a [ 71 ] \1^" * w THE NEW LAOKOON much more delicate and difficult adjustment than Mambrun suspects between a dull fidelity to logic and imaginative illusion. He is evidently cap- able of a logical but not of a poetic faith. The adventures he rejects would have seemed less im- probable to a true poet, — for example, to the author of "Endymion.** The^end, says Aristotle, is the "chief thing of alf ; 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 under- stood 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.** "Nothing is beautiful but the truth," says Boi- leau; "the truth alone is lovely." One might urge at least as plausibly that it is easier to appeal to [76] I ) I THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY most men by the loveliness of error, — as Erasmus has in fact done in his wise book, "The Praise of Folly." Boileau's more poetical contemporary, La Fontaine, in the course of a delightful account of the creative imagination, says of man's power to enchant himself with his own dreams : — L'homme est dc glace aux v^rit^s, II est de feu pour les mensonges. Neo-classical theory recognized in a way this insa- tiable appetite of man for illusions, that he is hungry not for fact but for fiction ; only it would have the fiction doled out to him under the supervision of the cold and calculating understanding. As appears so clearly in the theory of the three unities, it conceived of the creative artist not as a magician but as a de- liberate deceiver, as one whose business it is to cheat the intellect rather than to enchant the imagination.' Literary movements often remind one of the law of physics, — action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions. The neo-classicist tried to im- * Cf. for the corresponding idea in painting, Batteux, Les B faux- Arts riduits d un meme principe (p. 258) : " A quoi se rcduisent toutes les regies de la peinture } ^ tromper les yeux par la ressemblance, 4 nous faire croire que I'objet est reel, tandis que ce n'cst qu'une image. Ccla est evident." '1 THE NEW LAOKOON pose the standards of prose upon poetry, Rousseau and the romanticists carried the standards of poetry into prose. The neo-classicist desired logic and re- ality without illusion, the romanticist would have illusion without reality. Rousseau wished to banish '* rule and pale forethought " not only from litera- ture but from Ufe. When a youth at Turin, he tells us, he had an excellent position in the household of the Count de Gouvon, a position that would have led him by assured stages to an honorable future. But all this savored for him too much of cause and effect ; or, as he puts it, he " saw no adventures in it all," and so " not without difficulty " he got him- self discharged, and wandered off one fine morning, in order that he might taste with his friend Bicle the joys of vagabondage. Later, at the Hermitage, he relates that he was rude to visitors who recalled him to earth at the moment when he was on the point of " setting out for the world of enchantment " {partir pour le monde enchant^). "The impossibility of attaining to real objects cast me into the land of dreams {le pays des chiinkres)y and seeing no actual object worthy of my delirium I nourished it in an ideal world that my [78] I THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY creative imagination had soon peopled with beings according to my heart." ■ The creative imagination IS thus for Rousseau a means of escape into a land of heart's desire, a world of sheer unreality. /Tous- seau would have sympathized with that ancient who, as Horace narrates, had the gift of witnessing gorgeous spectacles in an empty theatre, and who when restored to his senses by copious doses of hellebore, cried out to his officious friends that they had undone him and not saved him by thus bring- ing him back to a dull reality and robbing him of his delightful dreams. This ancient was, indeed, merely a romanticist born out of due season7Does not Keats in his tale pronounce his curse, n-^l upon the snake-woman, but upon "the sage, old Apol- lonius," the type of a hateful rationality that dis- pelled the magic vision (mentis gratissimus error) and made The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade? The romanticist is ready to fly into the arms even of a false enchantress rather than submit to " cold philosophy." Any vision, though it be the vision of » Con/gsshns, 2«partie, livre ix (1756). [79] «l THE NEW LAOKOON vertigo, or delirium, or intoxication, the mere fumes of opium or alcohol, is to be courted if only it bring . oblivion of prose. A^ IVoltaire says that imagination is not to be es- teemed when it is divorced from rationality and judgment. For example, fairy tales are immensely imaginative, yet we despise them because of their lack of " order and good-sense." Not many years later Novalis proclaimed fairy tales to be the highest form of art just because they lacked logical co- herency, and converted the world into a "magic dream-picture, a musical fantasy.*' ' In thus sacrific- ing the probable so completely to the wonderful, the romanticist is naturally led to exalt childhood. Dr. .» Johnson says that wonder is " a pause of reason." But for the child it is not even a pause of reason since reason can scarcely be said to have begun. Wherever children are, says Novalis, there is the golden age. For the child, life is still an adventure, a succession of beautiful moments each independent of the last, a series of ever fresh surprises ; childhood « R. Haym has brought together smd discussed the utter- ances of Novalis on this subject (Z>i> romantische SchuU^ p. 378). [80] \{ THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY is the age of unreflective happiness, of vivid and spontaneous sensation, — the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. The romanticist, we must admit, is often happily inspired by this poetry of childhoodj Rousseau was not only before everything else an apostle of spon- taneity, but, unlike many other apostles, he actually achieved what he preached. Some of the pages in which he celebrates his escape from artificiality and the " meddling intellect," and describes his Arcadian revery close to the bosom of Nature, have still an incomparable freshness and charm. No verses again are more inevitable than those of Wordsworth at his best. "Nature," as Matthew Arnold says, "seems to take the pen out of his hand and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." Some of the shorter poems of Blake, to take another ex- ample almost at random, are admirable for a naive and childlike wonder, ^t the same time we cannot scrutinize too closely this craving for a renascence of wonder ; for as I have already said, instead of being a sign of real naturalness and simplicity, it ofteni marks the last stage of over-refinement, "^alt Whit- [81] -' '' (9- f « f 7 « « « 1 / '4 THE NEW LAOKOON man, for instance, so far from being the poet of natural and simple people, is rather the poet of the over-civilized. Tjhe more one considers the question, indeed, the wider appears the gap between the primitivism of the Rousseauist and the genuinely primitive traits that reveal themselves in the child- hood of either the individual or the race. Romantic primitivism is the source of our modern confusion of the arts, as well as of many other confusions, and so we shall need to consider certain aspects of it carefully, though without any attempt to be ex- haustive. In the first place the child is not self-conscious. The romanticist on the contrary, though willing to purchase his renascence of wonder by an eclipse of reason, finds that the reason often refuses to be eclipsed in spite of his efforts to drug and narcotize it. It looks down mockingly on the part of the self that is trying to become nalfve and primitive, and there arises that conflict of the head and the heart that assumes so many forms in the romantic move- ment from Rousseau down, one form being the self- parody of so-called romantic irony. Romantic irony wUl, of course, be at its maximum in a writer like [82] THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY Heine, who is at once intensely sentimental and keenly intellectual. Childhood moreover is the period of play, and so the romanticists proclaimed that art and literature should not accept the discipline of a definite purpose but should also be merely forms of play.' But the romantic primitivist is curiously different in his ways of playing from the genuine child. Children's games have rules, some of them in fact being about as highly regulated as seven- teenth-century tragedy. By observing these outer forms children do homage in their way to the god Terminus. Children and savages indeed are in many respects the most conventional of beings. The ro - m antic primitivist on the other hand i<; i n^Qpir^H ! a bove all by the desire to escape from the con ven- tional^ In dealing with the arts and literature espe- [ormaldistinc- -for a hig her , dis^WHTwou^ got Vid of all boundaries^nd^limitations^wkUeoeverl ' The most important expression of the play theory of art is found in Schiller's ^stkitic Letters, a work written under the combined inftuence of Rousseau and Kant and of Rousseau through Kant. [83] tions, and then instead J^ ; THE NEW LAOKOON p It is the beginning of all poetry," says Fried- rich Schlegel, " to abolish the laws and method of the rationally proceeding reason, and to plunge us once more into the ravishing confusions of fantasy, the original chaos of human nature." ^Things are ^"^ V > noTonger seen analytically, "in disconnection dead and spiritless," but in a sort of emotional unity, where everything is so bound together that when one sense receives a vivid impression the other senses thrill sympathetically; where all frontiers vanish away and all firm outlines melt together in vague and voluptuous reveryTlLet us listen once more to Novalis, who, it will Ee remembered, set up r g^®^^ the fairy tale as the canon of art : " One can imagine * tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems which are melodious and full of beautiful words but destitute of meaning or connection; at most » comprehensible stanzas here and there, like fragments of perfectly unrelated things. This true poetry can of course have only a symbolical significance and an indirect effect like music." This passage does not describe the kind of art that will ever appeal to any normal child ; it does describe remarkably what many nineteenth-century [84] V^ 7f^ THE THEORY OF SPONTANEITY artists, from Novalis himself down to the French symbolists, have actually attempted. ^his type of art may be defined as illusion for the sake of illusion, a mere Nepenthe of the spirit, a means not of becoming reconciled to reality but of escaping from it. Yet many of the writers and ^^^ artists who thus take flight into dipays des chimkres dAjk^Sfr would at the same time pose as mystics or Platonic jf idealists. In fact, it is almost normal for the roman- ticist, on breaking away from the authority of Aristotle and the neo-classical rules, to put him- _^ self under the patronage of Plato.jFor example, L^^^ A. W. Schlegel sets out to show how very much "the anatomical ideas which have been stamped as rules are below the essential requisites of poetry"; how, permitting as they do of an appeal to the under- standing only, they have entirely missed the nature of true poetical illusion ; and Schlegel gives what is in many respects an admirable" account of this true illusion. " It is," he says, "a waking dream to which 1 we voluntarily surrender ourselves." He then pro- ceeds to score both Aristotle and Lessing for not having done justice to this emotional factor in art, for having been analytical where they should have been Zu^J • • THE NEW LAOKOON . imaginative, and adds : " Were I to select a guide ^ from among the ancient philosophers it should un- doubtedly be Plato, who acquired the idea of the beautiful, not by dissection which can never give it, but by intuitive inspiration," * etc. The passage is typical. We are, in fact, forced to inquire whether the romantic writers were true Platonists, just as we were led to inquire whether the neo-classic writers were true Aristotelians JThis inquiry is essential to our subject and deserves to be treated in a separate chapter. » Dramatic Art and Literature, Lecture xvil Schlegel had a rather unexpected predecessor in his ideas about true illusion — Dr. Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare). Schlegel makes proper acknowledgment to Johnson (p. 249, Bohn translation). CHAPTER V PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS " Every man,** says Coleridge, " is bom an Aristo- 1 . telian or a Platonist." In an important sense this saying is true, though actual human nature is of course not quite so simple. In the first place, there are the many persons whom it would be an extrava- gant compliment to call either Platonists or Aristo- telians ; who are, in Carlylean phrase, merely patent digesters. Then there are the pseudo- Aristotelians of whom we have already spoken, as well as the pseudo-Platonists of whom we shall speak presently, not to mention the mixed and intermediary t)q>es, or the ways in which the same man may shift from one point of view to the other according to the mood and the moment. Plato himself was not a Platonist in the meaning that is often given to the term, nor was Aristotle an Aristotelian; that is, Plato was not merely a sublime enthusiast, any more than Aristotle was content with a dry anal- ysis. Plato and Aristotle were like other sensible [8;] / THE NEW LAOKOON \ people who, whatever they may have been " born," 1 try to maintain some balance between the analytic jand the synthetic elements in their thinking. Yet when Plato is most analytic and Aristotle most synthetic, we still feel the difference of tem- per; so that Aristotle and Plato may rightly be taken after all as the supreme examples respectively of the analytic and the synthetic minds. We have therefore been justified in calling certain confusions that arose from a false analysis during the neo- classical period pseudo- Aristotelian ; we shall also be justified in calling pseudo-Platonic certain other con- fusions which have arisen from a false synthesis and which pervade not merely modern art and literature, but modern life. The taking in vain of the name of Plato is of course nothing new. For example, many of the Petrarchists of the Renaissance were as fond of posing as Platonists as any moder;i romanticist, — and with about as much reason. We cannot attempt a complete study of so vast a subject as the differ- ence between true and false Platonism. We must confine ourselves to the main distinctions that arc necessary for the present subject, and these distinc- [ 88 ] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS tions may perhaps best be reached by^omparing Plato with Rousseau, the most representative figure in European romanticism. There is a certain super- ficial likeness between the two men : each lived in an intensely self-conscious age, when analysis was dissolving traditional standards and threatening as it seemed the very foundations of conduct. Rousseau attacked the philosophes about as Plato attacked the sophists. They both look with suspicion on litera- ture and the theatre, and they both oppose to the corruption of their time a sort of ideal Sparta. But if there is some agreement in their diagnosis of the \ diseases of an advanced civilization, there is none at all in their remedies. Rousseau strolls off into the forest of Saint-Germain, and indulges in a dream of the golden age which he then asserts to be a true vision of the life of primitive man, — man still at one with himself and his fellows, before he had lost his ignorance, before the growth of intellect had weakened th^bond of sympathy and converted the peaceful selfishness tempered by "natural pity," that one finds at the origin, into a warring egoism. He therefore looks back with nostalgic longing on the ** state of nature " from which man has fallen, 1891 4 ^ i A" .■\ ^ J THE NEW LAOKOON and with corresponding distrust on the faculties of the mind that have destroyed this spontaneity of instinct, weakened the bond of communal sympathy, and brought man into conflict with himself and others. He even raises the question whether a cer- tain tribe on the Orinoco has not been wise in bind- ing up the heads of the children in planks, thus ar- resting their intellectual development and assuring them some portion of their primitive felicity. Plato on the contrary does not dream of any re- turn to nature. He sees the luxury and egoism and self-indulgence that have come with the weakening of traditional standards, and sets out in search of inner standards to take the place of the outer standards that have been lost. Instead of getting rid of discipline, like Rousseau, and hoping to over- come selfishness by reverting to the pristine warmth of sympathy, Plato would press forward, using the intellectual faculties themselves as stepping-stones, to a higher discipline which leads in turn to a new sense of unity, a sense of unity that we may term, in opposition to Rousseau's unity of instinct, the unity 6f insight. Rousseau's view of life is above all emo- ional, that of Plato supremely disciplinary (indeed [90] i PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS he may fairly be accused in a later work,Jike " Laws," of overdoing the discipline Plato is associated with a concentration of the will, that of Rousseau with an expansion of the feelings!^ A recent historian of Greek philosophy ' remarl^t that Plato would not have understood the rdle Schopenhauer assigns to pity (Schopenhauer being .j in this respect a Rousseauist), and would utterly have despised the charms of sensibility as depicted by Rousseau. These remarks go far in establishing the difference between Rousseauists and Platpnists, between those whose chief interest is in the things that are b elow the reaso n and those who are chiefly interested in the things that are above itj The radical divergence of the two classes always appears in their attitude toward the intellectual facul- ties. Socrates, according to Rousseau, praises igno- rance. Rousseau does not often indulge in such an un- blushing sophism. What Socrates actually asserted, of course, was, that though men imagine they know something they are in reality ignorant. The Ameri- can scientist who complained only the other day that nobody knows more than seven billionths of one ' See T. Gomperz, Gr^^i Thinkers^ III, p. 116. [91] THE NEW LAOKOON V K/ 6- J per cent about anything, was merely echoing what Socrates said many centuries ago at Athens. But Socrates would have men cherish preciously this frac- tion of knowledge, however infinitesimal, and the fac- ulties by which they have attained it, in the hope that they may ultimately add to it a few more billionths of a per cent. We can imagine with what irony he would have greeted any Wordsworthian or Rous- seauistic talk about " the false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions.'* On the contrary he spent his whole life in multiplying^distinctions, and may indeed be regarded as the founder of formal logic. We have here a touchstone for separating not merely Platonists from pseudo-Platonists but also true from false mystics. For \i some of our Rous- seauists have posed as Platonists, others, as I have said, have looked on themselves as mystics. But the true mystic is not much given to mere revery ; it is a historic fact that he has often shown himself remark- ably shrewd and practical ; and in any case he lives on good terms with his intellect. He is ready to fol- low it until it brings him to the point where he must intrust himself to a still higher power, — a moment [92] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS Dante has symbolized in the passage of the " Pur- gatorio'^ where Virgil ceases to be his guide and gives way to Beatrice. If we find that a man attains his vision only by a denial of rationality, we may at once suspect that we are dealing with a pseudo- mystic. Professor Santayana writes: "In castings off with self-assurance and a sense of fresh vitality the distinctions of tradition and reason a man may feel, as he sinks back comfortably to a lower level of sense and instinct, that he is returning to Nature or escaping into the infinite. Mysticism makes us proud and happy to renounce the work of intelli- gence both in thought and in life, and persuades us that we become divine by remaining imperfectly human." * But this passage is not a description of the genuine mystic at all, but merely of the Rous- seauist, and as such it is excellentTl Of course, things are not so clear-cut in concrete ^ .. human nature as they are in our formulae. The sense of what is above the reason sometimes merges bewilderingly into the sense of what is below the reason. PQiere are, for example, touches of true mys- ry tical insight in Wordsworth, along with other pa»- * Poetry and Religion^ p. 187. [93] \r- THE NEW LAOKOON sages almost equally admirable as poetry, if not equally wise, but passages at any rate that are more Rous- ^ 1 seauistic than Platonic. Thus the famous Ode is a 4 curious blend of Plato and Rousseau, — of the Pla- tonic doctrine of reminiscence of previous existence and the Rousseauistic reminiscence of childhood as the age of freshness and spontaneity. To the belief that " our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting " Plato would of course have assented ; but the as- sertion that children of six are " mighty prophets, seers blessed," would, we may fear, have seemed to him portentous nonsense ; and there are doubtless still a few persons left who would agree with Plato, f Wordsworth indeed has so mingled the things that 1 are above with the thmgs that are below the rea- \ son as not merely to idealize but to supernaturalize the child, and this probably would have dissatisfied VRousseau as well as Plato.J^ A (A man becomes un-Platonic and pseudo-mystical in direct ratio to his contempt for rationality as com- pared with the unconscious, the spontaneous, the instinctive. The speeches of all the sages, says Maeterlinck, are outweighed by the unconscious wisdom of the passing child. " L'enfant qui se tait [94] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS est mille fois plus sage que Marc AurMe qui parle." This is not the utterance of a genuine mystic, but of a Rousseauist who pays to what is below the rea- son the homage that is due only to what is above it ; who with all his glorification of the child does not attain the truly childlike, but merely the confused revery and sense of strangeness that come from emancipating the subliminal self from rational con- trol. Insight does not thus confound the subcon- scious with the superconscious and abolish all the distinctions of the intellect in the proces^. It draws with special sharpness the very line that the Rous- seauist would obliterate — that between man and nature. So far from encouraging a return to nature, it rather makes one feel, as Arnold puts it, that man and nature can never be fast friends. The more mys- tical the insight becomes, the stronger this feeling is likely to be. It may very well lead to an attitude toward outer nature, that is not simply indifferent but ascetic ; and this of course is the opposite excess from that of the Rousseauist A " There is surely a piece of divinity within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, " something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun." The new unity that the 1195] THE NEW LAOKOON sentimental naturalist or Rousseauist proclaims as- sumes the exact opposite. According to the Rous- seauist, we should overcome the sense of the sepa- rateness of man and nature of which Sir Thomas Browne speaks, and arrive rather at a " sense sub- lime " of their common essence, of a something, as Wordsworth goes on to say, " whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and in the mind of man/' Formerly not merely the Platonist and the mys- tic, but the ordinary humanist, looked on outer na- ture as alien, or at least irrelevant, to the highest interests of man. Indeed, Plato himself has ren- dered admirably at the beginning of the "Phae- drus" the humanistic attitude toward nature, — an attitude as far removed from indifference or ascetic distrust as it is from the worship of the Rousseau- ist. Socrates, we there read, so far from looking on books as a "vain and endless strife," had allowed Phaedrus to entice him out into the country by the hope of reading a book, much as " the hungry flocks are led on by those who shake leaves or some fruit before them." But once in the country Socrates feels so keenly and describes so happily its fresh- ness and charm, that Phaedrus expresses surprise [96] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS that he does not come oftener ; and Socrates re- plies: "The fields and trees will not teach me any- thing but men in the city do." If we compare the Platonic Socrates with the Wordsworthian sage whose "daily teachers had been woods and rills," we shall perceive the gap between the humanist of the old type and the modern sentimental naturalist^ ^ We have already seen how easily this humanistic point of view may be exaggerated. /Lessing's atti- 0l. tude toward landscape-painting is an example. For the purposes of art at least Lessing was not willing to grant that the landscape is a state of the soul. For Lessing, as for every true classicist, thehighest^ thjng^in art_i§ the njot or de sign and the sub ordj. nating of^everything else to its orderl y develnpmpr^f There is evidently an antinomy between this concen-' tration of the will on a definite end, and the mood of melting into nature that has been so cultivated by our modem romanticists^^hat Hazlitt says oi Raphael applies equally to Lessing : " Raphael not only could not paint a landscape ; he could not paint people in a landscape. . . . His figures have always an in-door look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary, dramatic character, arising from their own passions, [97] Y\. t t o-.-). vy THE NEW LAOKOON or a watchfulness of those of others, and want that wild uncertainty of expression which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements. He has nothing romantic about him." Th is interpenetration of nature and human nature, thi s running tocher in revery, not merely of t he differe nt planes of being but, as we shall see p re- s ently^ oL^bs , different sense- ipipressions on the physical plane, is the point of depar ture of^ U^our djslmctively modern co nlugions. The refusal to sac- rifice the firm distinctions established by the intel- lect and enforced by the will between the pl anes of being is in general the chief difference between the Platonist and the RousseauistTlThis difference comes out with special clearness at the very point where the Rousseauist usually claims to be most Platonic, — in his conception of love. Byron says that Rous- seau was a lover of " ideal Beauty," and one imme- diately thinks of Plato. But let us not be the dupes of fine phrases. In his dealings with love as with everything else Plato invariably shows himself what Wordsworth would call an " officious slave " of the " false secondary power by which we multiply dis- tinctions." He distinguishes between an earthly and [98] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS an Uranian Aphrodite, and while recognizing that the first may be a stepping-stone to the second, never actually confounds the two/^very one, on the other hand, must have been struck with the indiscriminate use of the word love in the romantic movement. Alfred de Musset, for example, does not draw any clear line between his love for God and his love for a grisette.^f any individual roman- ticist escapes from this error, he has to thank the coldness of his temperament or the accidents of his training and environment rather than his phi- losophy. The biographer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti says that Rossetti 's message to the world is summed up in such lines as — Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God. So far from separating the earthly and heavenly loves Rossetti evidently mixes them in one intoxi- cating brew. The ultimate origins of this modem mixture are doubtless mediaeval, but for the forms of it that bear- upon our subject we do not need to go behind Rousseau. Joubert is probably the first [99] 152. ''UK o'* THE NEW LAOKOON to point out how pervasive in Rousseau is this par- ticular confusion of the planes of being : " Rousseau had a voluptuous mind. In his writings the soul is always mingled with the body and never distinct from it. No one has ever rendered more vividly the impression of the flesh touching the spirit and the delights of their marriage.'* Now Joubert remarks elsewhere that spirit and matter can come into relation with one another only through the medium of illusion ; and he goes on to say some of the most penetrating things that have been said by any writer about the role of imagina- tive illusion in mediating between the lower and the higher nature of man. Joubert, we should add, was a genuine Platonist in an age when pseudo- Platonism was rife, though at times he tends to fall into excessive subtlety, to be too vaporous and ethe- real. Joubert, then, conceives it to be the role of the imagination, mediating as it does between sense and reason, to lend _its magic and glamour to the latter, to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion overjgme essential truth. Perhaps this is as fair a statement as can be made of the aim of the highest art, though it may evidently become a pretext for [ loo] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS falling into a lifeless allegory.* The imagination must be really free and spontaneous, and the truth itself must not be too precisely formulated, if we are to arrive at that vital fusing of illusion and insight with the accompanying sense of infinitude tJa at is found i n the true sym bol. his alliance of the imagination and reason, of r illusion et la sagesse, is something that transcends all rule, and is indeed so difficult that it has seemed even to great thinkers impossible. We have already mentioned Pascal's attack on the imagination. The imagination, he says, is " a mistress of error and falsity," "a proud power hostile to reason," so rein- forcing with its illusions the affections and impres- sions of sense that reason will inevitably succumb, unless it has the aid of a sort of deus ex machina in the form of a divine revelation. This theory reveals of course profound insight into the ordinary facts of human nature, and goes vastly deeper than any idle chatter about art for art's sake. Yet it has in it something morose and ascetic, inasmuch as it seems * This was the frequent result of a somewhat similar view of art in the Middle Ages. Cf. Petrarch's phrase : Veritatem rerum Pulchris velaminibus adornare. [lOl] aW .« vA THE NEW LAOKOON to deny that alliance between illusion and rationality, or, in Aristotelian parlance, between the wonderful and the probable, that is actually found in the great- I est poetry, pagan as well as Christian. In any case the theory does not hold out much hope for fifce ^ modern man. He is likely to find more to his purpose in the remarkable theory of the imagination outlined by Bacon in his "Advancement of Learning." He is discussing the r61e of rhetoric and rhetorical per- ^ suasion in a scheme of studies. " Reason," he says, k'^y V "would become captive and servile if eloquence of xV^ » persuasion did not practice and win the imagination from the affection's part, and contract a confederacy between the reason and imagination against the affections. For the affections themselves carry ever an appetite to good as the reason doth ; the differ- ence is that t/ie affection beholdeth merely tJie present ; reas oi} b^holdetk the future ^ y^ ^um of j''^^: and therefore, the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished ; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth." \ V Great poetry, as Longinus would say, does not [ 102 ] \y I. PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS act by persuasion but by ecstasy ; otherwise Bacon's theory has evident points of similarity with that of Joubert. Perhaps there are no better examples of the mingling of illusion and insight that Joubert re- quires than some of the " myths " of Plato. Plato indeed is not only one of the most imaginative and spontaneous of writers, but his spontaneity is not a denial but rather a completion of the work of reason. Just as we have distinguished therefore be- tween the Platonic unity of insight and the unity of instinct of which the Rousseauist dreams, so we may contrast with the spontaneity of Rousseau a higher spontaneity where the powers of illusion are in the service of the reason and not of the senses. Thisj whole problem of illusion may very well turn out to be the central problem of art. The neo-classical theorist affected unduly the rational element in art, and allowed as little as he could for the immeasur- able potentialities of illusion. The romanticists have given us plenty of illusion, but illusion divorced from rational purpose, and only too often a false illusion of the flesh. Rousseau, as we have seen, was ready to take flight from the real world into a world of pure illusion, but his dream-world as he describes [ 103] I THE NEW LAOKOON it is in some ways only too reminiscent of the earth. He surrounds himself in his pays des chimhrcs with a " seraglio of houris," and these voluptuous visions bear the features of women he has actually known. His "blood takes fire " at all this impassioned recol- lection. We evidently have here the very opposite of what Bacon desires. Rousseau's imagination has contracted a confederacy with his affections against the reason, and throws its golden glamour not only over present but also over past sensation, — a refine- ment that scarcely entered into Bacon's reckoning. Rousseau indeed perfected the Epicureanism that consists in intensifying and prolonging enjoyment by revery. If he can thus fuse soul and sense he is careless of the "future and sum of time." Rous- seau himself speaks of " covering with a delicious veil the aberrations of the senses " ; ' and in the very passage where Byron calls Rousseau a lover of ideal Beauty he writes that he knew How to make madness beautiful, and threw O'er erring thoughts and deeds a heavenly hue. This use of imaginative illusion in making madness * Nouvelle Hilofise, V partie, lettre L [ 104] PLATONISTS AND PSEUDO-PLATONISTS beautiful would, if traced down, bring us at last to what has been termed the phosphorescent slime of some of our modern decadents. The art of giving a heavenly hue to materialistic impulse assumes many aspects in the sham idealisms and pseudo-spirituali- ties of the nineteenth century ; we have " mystical*' and " Platonic" raptures that land one at last in a mire of sensuality ; effusions of fine sentiments about brotherly love that are only a specious mask for envy and hatred of riches and success ; " new thought " that is so lofty as to deny even the existence of matter and yet turns out somehow to be interested 7 only in the preservation of physical health, etc. But to return to the literary and artistic problem. The tendency I have just been describing seems a rather strange concomitant of Rousseau's theory of the primitive and the childlike, yet sijch in nearly every case it can be shown to be. /The breaking down of all barriers and boundaries in order to achieve the emotional and instinctive unity that the child enjoys, and that primitive man is supposed to have enjoyed, always results in a certain mingling of the flesh and spirit though it may not always go so far as what the Germans expressively but dis- [los] 3)c