Irving Babbitt the Aestheticians

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adequately with the truth-value of music. It is not just “expression,” she says, mean- ing an immediate outburst of feeling-a theory which she erroneously attributes to Croce. Music, she says, is not as simple as that, for it gives knowledge as well: It expresses the composer’s knowledge of human feelings. Music is the formulation and repre- sentation of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolution-a source of insight. It makes emotive contents conceivable so that we can envisage and understand them. A composer articulates subtle com- plexes of feeling that language cannot even name. Musicality is often regarded as an essentially unintellectual trait. Perhaps that is why musicians, who know it is the prime source of their mental life and the medium of their clearest insight into humanity, so often feel called upon to despise the more obvious forms of understanding. Insight is the gift of music; in very naive phrase, a knowledge of “how feelings go.” She has also an explanation of the truth- value of music. The tones are arranged in dynamic patterns that are isomorphic with the dynamic patterns of vital energies in our practical life. Hence music may serve as a symbolic picture. But she does not mention that the dynamic pattern of musi- cal energies may be that of an ethical soul controlling expansive forces. Irwin Edman has a great deal to say about the truth of dees, they put into canvas a vision of what life essentially meant to them. But are all interpretations of what life means equally profound? Are imaginative visions of life always equally true? No answer. Edman continues: A mood half articulate and half rec- ognized in its confused recurrence be- comes, as it were, clarified forever in a poem or a novel or a drama. But how far into reality does that mood take us? Edman does not raise the ques- tion. Susanne Langer also has a good pas- sage about the truth of literature: The “livingness” of a story is really much surer, and often greater, than that of actual experience. Life itself may, at times, be quite mechanical and unper- ceived by those who live it. And Edman is perhaps even more lucid when, speaking about a well-known poem, he expresses the same idea as follows: Thousands of inarticulate men and women have felt that emotion about their beloved, but in that sonnet of Shake- speare’s they find their common emotion rendered with uncommon and vital- izing felicity. A poem of love may teach them by its own instant and luminous reality what the reality of their own love is. This is excellently said. But, in the name of common sense, cannot poetry give people largely illusory ideas about their own emotions? Emma Bovary was more imaginative than most people, but her imagination hardly reached down to the works of art: deeper strata of reality. It is strange - that all modern, supposedly scientific, aestheti- One hears more than an arrangement cians should still follow in the wake of the of sounds in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. one hears he comment of a nineteenth century Romantics, thus forgetgreat spirit on the world in which it ting the obvious fact that the imagination lives. In Rembrandt’s pictures of old may also give US superficial notions about rabbis, or El Greco’s of Spanish gran- life. And it is even more strange that they 398 Fall 1960
are perfectly well aware of it in other con- nections. Susanne Langer is surprised that such an imaginative creature as man should have been able to survive on this earth. Modern aestheticians, following Croce, interpret the term “catharsis” as referring merely to the act of expression or intuition, quite apart from what is expressed or in- tuited. As Cassirer puts it : Our passions are no longer dark and impenetrable powers; they become, as it were, transparent. . . But the image of a passion is not the passion itself. . . . If we accept this view of art we can come to a better understanding of a problem first encountered in the Aristo- telian theory of catharsis. . . . In this world all our feelings undergo a sort of transubstantiation with respect to their essence and their character. According to Babbitt, on the other hand, LL catharsis” refers to our experience when the imagination penetrates the moral substance of reality. All art does not result in this catharsis, he holds. As Babbitt pointed out, the notion that all products of the imagination have an equal amount of poetic truth is of fairly recent origin; it goes back to the early Romantics. Before that there had been a distinction between unrestrained imagination (which was at best regarded as idyllic play, at worst as foolish “conceit”) and an imagination governed by “reason.” The Classical critics, Babbitt held, were right in insisting upon the necessity of a distinction, though wrong in their manner of stating it. And whereas the Classical revival in twentieth century France remained entangled in the old intellectualist error-you will find it in Maurras, SeilliGre, Lasserre, Benda-Irving Babbitt avoided it by completely abolishing the old idea of a “reason” controlling the imagination. The truth of art is poetic, and not intellectual. The imagination as such lays hold of the moral substance of life. Art is neither intellect nor moral will; art is intuition, nothing else, but intuition as such may have varying degrees of depth. Thus Babbitt furnishes a complement to modern aesthetics that will disengage it definitively from the untenable elements of Romanticism, while retaining what is valid in Romantic thought. The significance of this contribution to aesthetic theory has hardly been fully appreciated, even by those who have best understood Babbitt. Louis J. A. Mercier failed to deal with it adequately in his account of Babbitt’s philosophy, and in a recent important essay Austin Warren endorsed Mercier’s misinterpretation : “Comparing Babbitt’s terms with those of Catholic Scholasticism, Mercier rightly glosses the ‘higher imagination’ as ‘intellect’-that which apprehends universals.” Yet Babbitt was very explicit in pointing out that his C< imaginative perception of the universal” (i.e., of the Moral Law) is not conceptual thought. The imagination is sometimes thought of as a combination of a passive sensuous element and an active rational element which, by being fettered to sense, is not yet reason proper-rather some sort of caterpillar stage in the growth of reason which, when it reaches its full development, will leave its sensuous envelope and soar like a butterfly in the pure air of conceptual thought. This was definitely not Babbitt’s view of the imagination. As he pointed out in an important note to Rousseau and Romanticism, the error of Greek philosophy was its notion of the imagination as a passive power: “In its failure to bring out with sufficient explicitness this creative r6le of the imagination and in the stubborn intellectualism that this failure implies is to be found, if anywhere, the weak point in the cuirass of Greek philosophy.,’ In this context the word “creative” refers to the power of the imagination to Modern Age 399
Page 1 and 2: A penetrating reappraisal of Babbit
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Irving Babbitt the Aestheticians

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