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The Art of Letters, essay(s) by Robert Lynd |
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19. An American Critic: Professor Irving Babbitt |
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_ XIX. AN AMERICAN CRITIC: PROFESSOR IRVING BABBITT It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. Professor Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution. They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. One suspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution; for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The steps of the process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have the Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from without. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil environment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free--if his genius or natural impulses are liberated. "Rousseauism is ... an emancipation of impulse--especially of the impulse of sex." It is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh. "In the absence of ethical discipline," writes Professor Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_, "the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature--the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac." In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have been ready to take Professor Babbitt's indictment more seriously. Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live according to one's temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes the view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of himself. "If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good." Not that Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. He objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme--"the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering." It was, perhaps, in reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful announcements of his righteousness. "Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of his _Confessions_ in his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, 'Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: "I am better than that man."'" Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting "No." Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. "True classicism," he observes, "does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal." The romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. "It is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith." One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child. Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zooephilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness" instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a substitute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having. On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other "Rousseauists" whom he attacks. Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency. "The nineteenth century," he declares, "may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries." He admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working "with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law." Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that "the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature." He sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that "something abiding" on which civilization must rest. He quotes Aristotle's anti-romantic saying that "most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, "plumped for" the disorderly manner to-day. His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum--not from humility, but from subserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water. Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. The most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. He himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less noble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the "sense of sin." Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great books of the world, in _Isaiah_ and the Gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of "Consider the lilies of the field"? _ |
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