THE HARVARD MANNER
Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss,
not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt,
professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has
set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence
of Rousseau and “Rousseauism”--by which he means the whole modern
cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, “Rousseau and
Romanticism,” three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three
pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and
citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and
monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any
time during the past hundred and seventy-five years ever thought a new
thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially
intense emotion in art form.
It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by
the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The
pendulum of life swings to one extreme, and then it swings to the other.
Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop;
and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these
extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and
so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought
never to have been set free; it was a violation of “decorum.” That is
his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of
America has another name for it; we call it “the Harvard manner.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you have to do up a Harvard Tory--that is
fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical
movement--not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful
beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises
sung by a man who has lived for twenty years by seducing young girls
and getting their money.”
Says Ogi: “If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to
make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by
perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets,
and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this
volume devoted to Harvard University--see ‘The Goose-Step,’ pages 62 to
91.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college
professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred
and fifty years ago.”
“The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell
him--because Rousseau’s revolution is only half completed. The political
part happened, and gave us--world capitalism! We aren’t satisfied, and
we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world’s
Tories are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig
out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint
them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even
Voltaire’s ‘l’Infame’! There is a clerical party in every country in
Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called ‘Christian Socialist,’ to
cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of
Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up
Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such
a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are
not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately
volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner.
The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life.”
“The persecution complex?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what
evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate
this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall
streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building;
and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war
supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United
States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan’s French and
British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee,
Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies;
and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of
Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the
election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred
band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard
‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the
Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played
on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the
days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police
strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding
the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they
found there--”
“The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in
office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where
they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same
anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor--I mean our Professor
Babbitt--with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in
the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every
artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has
ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of
literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’--by such examples
as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly
convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau
and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense--that is
they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What
is one going to do with a man like that?”
“What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband.
“I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your
readers. But I’ll tell you this--the professor sounds exactly like you,
except that he’s on the other side!”