was working, notably the fellowship of Paul Elmer More. More had
been born in St. Louis, Missouri, a year earlier than Babbitt: he
graduated from Washington University in 1887 and took his master’s
degree from Harvard in 1893, the same date as Babbitt. In the college
year of 1894-1895 the two men were thrown together again, More as an
instructor in Sanskrit at Harvard and Babbitt as an instructor in the
French department. In the intervening year Babbitt had taught in the
Romance Languages department of Williams College and there he had met
a young instructor, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., who was destined to
figure importantly in the growth of American Humanism. But not for
long were Babbitt and More to work together as university colleagues,
for from Harvard More went to Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed two
years teaching Sanskrit and classical literature. Then in 1901, after
his retreat to Shelburne, New Hampshire, for meditation, he joined
the staff of the _Independent_ as literary editor. Mather too gave
up academic work at this time and entered journalism as an editorial
writer for the New York _Evening Post_: he was for various terms in
the future to be its art critic as well as assistant editor of the
_Nation_ and American editor for the _Burlington Magazine_. More’s
future included the literary editorship of the New York _Evening Post_
from 1903 to 1909, and the editorship of the _Nation_, then the supreme
organ of American scholarship, from 1909 to 1914. In the meantime he
had begun to write his well known series of literary studies, the
_Shelburne Essays_.
More and Babbitt complement each other extraordinarily. If Babbitt
inclines to Aristotle, More inclines to Plato. If Babbitt writes on
literary trends, using particular authors only in so far as they
illustrate trends, More studies the individual genius, somewhat in
the sinuous fashion of Sainte-Beuve, and then points out the trend.
Babbitt, speaking roughly, is a critic of culture, More a critic of
authors. Their area of agreement is very wide: they unite against
Romanticism, agree substantially on Humanism, and diverge only when it
comes to the kind of interest and the warmth of interest they feel in
Religion. In short, More is more religious by temperament than Babbitt.
* * * * *
After his retirement from the _Nation_ in 1914, More devoted himself
to an enterprise of scholarship and criticism which well deserves
an adjective to be used with care, an adjective which has several
times been applied to it by men who do not write lightly, I mean
the adjective, monumental; and for the wonderful completion of this
enterprise he has occasionally been mentioned as a candidate for the
Nobel Prize in literature. The undertaking was _The Greek Tradition_
in five volumes, an impressive and inspiring account of the relation
of Platonic and Hellenistic thought to early Christian thought; it is
a work, incidentally, that has not yet even begun to be digested by
American criticism.
There are those who believe More to be the best literary critic in
the history of American literature. I think that is so: he appears to
me an American counterpart to Cardinal Newman in his grasp at once of
the ways of men, the subtle arguments of materialism, and reasoned
belief in the spiritual life. But be that as it may, he is today the
_doyen_ of American critics, and as such a cause for national pride.
Agree or not with their teachings, we must all feel pride that America
presents to Europe as, respectively, her _doyen_ of critics and as
her master-spokesman for classical literary ideas two men of the
resolution, deep scholarship, elevated thought, ripeness of judgment
and wide sweep of purpose which characterize Paul Elmer More and Irving
Babbitt.
* * * * *
Possibly the future of American Humanism will be dramatic. Already
it has enough adherents of a polemical turn of mind, sharp
controversialists like Robert Shafer and Seward Collins, to make things
hot for their natural opponents, the Liberals, and the Liberals are
certainly not going to relinquish their leadership of present-day
American literature and thought before resorting to every device of
literary dispute. Perhaps in the next decade Humanist and Liberal will
pamphleteer against each other with all the zest and pungency and
fierceness of the verbal warfare waged between Tories and Whigs in
eighteenth century England. But up till now the New Humanists have been
mainly perfecting their viewpoint, gathering strength, and preparing
for action.
I distinguish three generations of New Humanists and divide, very
arbitrarily, the rise of American Humanism thus far into three brief
periods, the first from 1900 to 1917, when Stuart P. Sherman’s _On
Contemporary Literature_ appeared, the second from 1917 to the
publication of Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_ in 1924, and the
third from 1924 to the present.
From 1900 to 1917 the first generation of New Humanists was teaching
and writing out of its maturity. Babbitt was publishing his views on
educational reform, on modern confusion in the arts, and on literary
criticism. More was brilliantly editing the _Nation_ and composing
volume after volume of carefully thought out and gracefully written
studies of literature. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was making a name as
an exacting but sympathetic critic of the fine arts, a calling of which
in America he is now the dean. In passing, it may be noted that Mather
was a pioneer in the work of advancing the books of Herman Melville
to a front place in our literature. At the University of Nebraska,
Prosser Hall Frye and Sherlock Bronson Gass were teaching, thinking and
writing. Perhaps most prominent of all was the late W. C. Brownell, of
whom more than mere mention is required.
Brownell, More and Babbitt--the names often formed a triad, and yet
Brownell never held explicitly the general ideas worked out by More
and Babbitt. The bond was sympathetic, but intellectually not clearly
established. I once ventured to call Brownell a Victorian standpatter.
Perhaps this was too harsh. Objection was taken by a critic who
nevertheless declared that Brownell’s “senses never felt a concrete
situation freshly, unmediated by the anticipation of habit. His mind,
acute in distinguishing things, rarely attained any ideas and never
a general philosophy. And his feeling for life seldom drove him to
remove the blinkers of convention.” It will be seen that these defects
lead to standpattism, however, and Brownell resisted change and stood
in general for the Mid-Victorian temper and standards. His mind and
tastes were typically nineteenth century: he did not have the freedom
of the centuries so arduously won by Babbitt and More. But he was
loosely united to them in the low opinion he entertained of many forms
of modernism and in his insistence on critical standards.
Knowledge of the work these men--Brownell, Gass, Frye, Mather, More and
Babbitt--were performing in the early years of this century relieves
a little the oppressive feeling of dearth we have in regarding that
time in America. In _Their Day in Court_, an out-of-print book by a
forgotten impressionistic critic, Percival Pollard, we may get an
excellent picture of this brief period of literary dearth. Pollard
fought against the dry rot of the professors, the genteelness of
editors like Hamilton Wright Mabie, the commercialism of most that
passed for criticism, and the overwhelming mediocrity of the period’s
books. Rather sadly he said in 1908: “It does not seem to me as if
there were, on our side of the Atlantic, any longer such a thing as the
art of letters; it is merely a trade.” In that same year a gifted young
poet, Ezra Pound, fled our country, and later in his poem, _L’Homme
Moyen Sensuel_, expressed his disgust for the quietism of the times
more violently than even Pollard did.
Still I’d respect you if you could bury
Mabie, and Lyman Abbott and George Woodberry,
For minds so wholly founded upon quotations
Are not the best of pulse for infant nations.
So it was up to about 1912. There were certain giants looming over
the scene--Howells and Henry James and Mark Twain--but they had no
great animating effect upon it. James seemed too remote, Howells too
selective and genteel in his realism, and Mark Twain too given to
compromises. According to Pollard, the one American of literary genius
then alive was almost completely neglected. He meant Ambrose Bierce.
Pollard and Pound were right. The period in spite of James, Howells
and Mark Twain and, if you will, Bierce, was low in creative vitality,
and the bulk of its criticism was feeble,--Huneker flashing the cheap
jewelry of his style, Mabie composing his “White Lists” of books:
both extremists can without a second’s reluctance be dispensed with.
But looking back, now that the transient criticism of 1900-1912 has
been swept away, we see that there were more independent critics
at work than Pollard recognized and that they were doing extremely
hard thinking amidst the plague of mediocre books. They continued to
elaborate their thought as American literature entered upon a new and
more fertile phase between 1912 and 1915.
Some of the multiplying signs of the coming of a new order were the
founding of _Poetry_ magazine in Chicago, the establishment of the _New
Republic_, the beginnings of the _Little Review_ and _Others_, the
blooming of Greenwich Village, and the generative center for fresh art
impulses set up at “291,” the art gallery of Alfred Stieglitz. Soon a
new group of authors began winning laurels: Masters, Dreiser, Mencken,
Brooks, Bourne, were on the rise. The ferment worked faster ... little
theatres ... the _Masses_ and the _Liberator_ ... Coady’s _Soil_
magazine ... the _Seven Arts_ ... the _Nation_ under Villard ... the
_Dial_ as a libertarian fortnightly. American participation in the war
only made the new ventures bubble more furiously: they flourished, when
not strangled by official censorship, on dissent. Finally, in 1919 came
Waldo Frank’s _Our America_, the distillation of this time of ferment
from 1912.
Frank in this book took no cognisance, as his confrère Van Wyck Brooks
did, of the critical activities of the first generation of the New
Humanists. Nor did he pause to examine the work of Stuart P. Sherman,
the forerunner of the second generation of American Humanists. But
Sherman in 1917 had brought about the first spectacular duel between
the New Humanists and the naturalists represented by H. L. Mencken.
Sherman had been trained at Harvard under Babbitt: as a contributor
to the _Nation_, he had been groomed by Paul Elmer More. In 1917 he
published a book, _On Contemporary Literature_, in which he played the
part of the younger spokesman for classicism.
It is the best of Sherman’s books. Nine-tenths of his work is mediocre,
but in _On Contemporary Literature_ he surpassed himself. His insights
into such authors as Synge, George Moore, Anatole France, H. G. Wells,
Theodore Dreiser were sharp, deep and excruciating to those who admired
them. Of George Moore, he wrote: “Purely intellectual initiative he
had none: but he has been swiftly responsive to every new influence
in art and literature. All his life he has lurked in the purlieus of
schools and insinuated himself into movements, solicitating, like
the barren Calpurnia, the fructifying touch of some fleet clear eyed
runner ... Mr. Moore does not think: he muses.” Of Anatole France, he
observed: “He loves above all else the luxury of philosophic despair
... The skepticism of M. France is largely a literary pose. It is his
justification for unlimited intellectual self-indulgence.” And here
is an excellent working distinction between realism and naturalism in
fiction: “Both are representations of the life of man in contemporary
or nearly contemporary society, and both are presumably composed of
materials within the experience and observation of the author. But
the realistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of human
conduct. If the theory of human conduct is adequate, the representation
constitutes an addition to literature and to social history. A
naturalistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of animal
behavior. Since a theory of animal behavior can never be an adequate
basis for a representation of the life of man in contemporary society,
such a representation is an artistic blunder.”
Little wonder such thrusts as these produced an outcry, and there is
now no doubt that Sherman was vilified on the strength of this acute
book. We may look forward to the sober correction of the partisan
denunciations he called forth. In the meantime let us hear a Humanist
version of Sherman’s duel with Mencken, as an offset to the much better
known story given out by the sympathizers with Mencken. I quote from
Seward Collins writing in the _Bookman_:
“Until after the war the main force of his (Sherman’s) work lay in
the brilliant application of the point of view he had learned from
Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More, carrying into the enemy’s camp
their warfare against naturalism and deliquescent romanticism. With
the publication of _On Contemporary Literature_ at the end of 1917 he
became the recognized spokesman for tradition and authority against the
‘liberating’ and ‘innovating’ efforts of the latest generation. The
effectiveness of his campaign may be judged from the shrieks, hoots and
curses which greeted his book in the radical magazines and in some of
the newspapers, notably in Chicago, where the new men occupied most of
the reviewing media. The Chicago outburst, characterized by unanimous,
simultaneous and extreme virulence, makes very amusing reading in
retrospect. Several records in this kind of criticism must have been
hung up during the onslaught, which went on for weeks.
“Participants in the Chicago attack have explained that factors aside
from the book itself entered into the reception of _On Contemporary
Literature_. The cause most frequently given is the review of Mencken’s
_A Book of Prejudices_ which Sherman published in the _Nation_ of
November 29, 1917--just a month before his own book appeared--under the
title _Beautifying American Literature_. The review might well explain
any amount of rage among Mencken’s friends and disciples: it was one of
the most completely devastating slatings of a book and of a man ever
penned....
“This encounter was really an historic occasion in American letters
and thought. On the one side, for a number of years Irving Babbitt and
Paul E. More had brought supreme qualities of intellect, scholarship,
and literary skill to the perennial task of restating the case for
tradition in literature, morals, politics and philosophy. The result
was a series of powerful books providing almost a new basis for the
traditionalist cause, but one related at every point to the earlier
American traditionalists, to the main stream of European culture, and
to the great classical traditions of both the West and the East. In
Stuart Sherman these men had found a young disciple and champion whose
gifts, while not qualifying him to advance their work along all of the
extremely broad front on which they were engaged, yet enabled him to
make immediate and effective application of their views in their own
country and among the writers of the day.
“On the other side, the disruptive, anti-authoritarian,
anti-traditional tendencies, which America had for the most part
resisted even when in the ’nineties they took England by storm, after
their successful tour of the continent, had from the beginning of the
century been gathering strength. As the century got into its teens, the
new forces found a vigorous, infectious spokesman in H. L. Mencken,
who had spent his youth soaking up all the prevalent forms of the
heretical doctrines--Huxleyan agnosticism and science-worship, Pater’s
æstheticism with trimmings by Wilde, the hedonism and routine mockery
of Anatole France, the inverted sentimentality of Nietzsche, Ibsen, and
the other shrunken giants of fifty years ago, and so on. To all this
Mencken had added a Bohemian individualism from various sources (given
aristocratic airs by talk of Federalism, the civilized minorities,
etc.), a smart up-to-dateness, and a talent for the violent buffoonery
of American provincial journalism. To many this rich mixture proved
irresistible.
“These two antagonistic tendencies developed side by side for years
without clashing: the new men were restricted to shady magazines,
fleeting-tendency journals, and infrequent books which remained outside
channels of discussion. But in Mencken had arrived a personality
who could not be overlooked. And in Sherman the traditionalists had
a representative so sensitive to the forceful figures of his day
that he must have his say on them. The two men, who had been born a
few months apart, had entered upon literary criticism within a few
weeks of each other in 1908, and now at the end of 1917 published
almost simultaneously their first significant books. The result was
the episode which we have recounted. The old had met the new in open
conflict, and the fight was on.”
I take this episode which Collins has described so vividly to mark the
end of the first period of American Humanism. This, as stated before,
is quite arbitrary, but it is a temporary convenience. For in this
first brush Sherman and his friends suffered defeat. Not defeat on
intellectual grounds, but defeat when it came to making their ideas
and standards prevail. _On Contemporary Literature_ was given a black
name as a puritan castigation of modern writers which even today
keeps it out of the hands of young people. Sherman himself underwent
a metamorphosis. He coarsened his style and vulgarized his thought
and within a few years was on the side of the very Liberals he had
once scorned. From the Liberal point of view, Sherman had advanced,
escaping from a rigid system of ideas, to a more genial play of his
sympathies and a greater openness of mind. From the Humanist viewpoint,
he disintegrated. Losing him, the New Humanists lost their one champion
who at this time was willing to employ his energies cutting off the
latest heads sprouted by the hydra of naturalism. The Naturalists, the
Liberals, the Romanticists, were to have things their own way for the
next few years.
1920 was their year of jubilation, for in this year their spirit of
revolt, hitherto nourished in the intelligentsia and among the artists,
suddenly became popular. It was spread abroad by the success of such
realistic novels as Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_, Floyd Dell’s _Moon
Calf_, and Zona Gale’s _Miss Lulu Bett_. Eugene O’Neill conquered
Broadway at last with _Beyond the Horizon_, and in the same season
_Emperor Jones_ was produced in Greenwich Village. The _Dial_ became
an advanced monthly of the arts, the _Freeman_ launched itself on a
four years’ voyage of philosophic anarchism, Art Young conducted his
short-lived _Good Morning_, contributing his laughter to dissolve the
capitalist régime. Such books as _The American Credo_ by Mencken and
Nathan, _Poor White_ by Sherwood Anderson, _The Brass Check_ by Upton
Sinclair, _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ by Van Wyck Brooks, and _The Dark
Mother_ by Waldo Frank made the year seem splendid with revolt, with
energy, with novelty. The Red ’Twenties had dawned. In this tumult the
New Humanists were lost from sight, and mouse-valiant book reviewers in
droves echoed the words of J. E. Spingarn without bothering to read
the men they were condemning. “These men,” said Spingarn of Babbitt
and More in the Freeman Pamphlet entitled _On American Books_, “have
the learning and culture of the best academic critics of France; but
what avails their petulant erudition if it serves no other purpose than
to whine over the irrevocable past and to sneer at the aspirations of
modern men?” Spingarn was floating with the new current and it seemed
to carry all the old barriers before it.
Practically every one in the new movement agreed that the objects
of attack were Puritanism and industrialism. In fiction, realism
and naturalism came in as the fashion. Psycho-analysis attained its
greatest vogue. Lyricism, emotionalism, were valued chiefly, and
intellectualism suffered a decline in esteem. The star of the new
America was heralded rising out of the Middle West. An American
renascence has begun, the prophets declared, and now we shall create
an indigenous culture. Expansion was in the air. Who would pay heed in
all this excitement to Babbitt and More who stressed the opposite mood,
concentration?
They, however, continued to swim against the swirling current
of Romanticism. More was at work on his magnum opus, _The Greek
Tradition_, and in 1918, the year after Sherman’s _On Contemporary
Literature_ had been blackened, Babbitt published his remarkable study
of the use and misuse of the imagination, _Rousseau and Romanticism_.
They were putting the last touches on their system of ideas, and
had the satisfaction while so engaged of beholding a small second
generation of New Humanists begin to come forward: Stanley P. Chase
at Bowdoin College, G. R. Elliott at Amherst, Robert Shafer at the
University of Cincinnati, and Norman Foerster at the University of
North Carolina. In 1924 appeared Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_,
a study of modern political thought which conducted the author at its
conclusion back in a great circle to his starting point in his first
book, the need for collegiate reform in our study of the humanities. We
may say, for convenience’ sake, that _Democracy and Leadership_ closed
the second period of American Humanism. The New Humanism’s edifice of
ideas was now virtually complete.
In the next period, from 1924 to the present, the humanistic party
gathered adherents and momentum as a distinct counter-movement to the
still triumphant naturalistic movement. T. S. Eliot, who has made no
secret of his partial indebtedness to Babbitt, was instrumental in
interesting various young critics in the ideas of More and Babbitt.
Two brief notes in _The Sacred Wood_ had the effect, even early in
the Red ’Twenties, of raising a doubt about the correctness of the
current adverse judgments on Babbitt and More delivered by men like
Spingarn, Mencken and Brooks. Later articles by Eliot and the opening
of the pages of his review, _The Criterion_, to discussions of the
New Humanism did much to make Humanism a chief topic of distinguished
conversation. The _Forum_ also undertook in a series of articles pro
and con to advance Humanism to the forefront of the intellectual world.
A third generation of New Humanists--prominent among them being Alan
Reynolds Thompson and Harry Hayden Clark--was formed: the _Hound and
Horn_, an organ of _les jeunes_ edited by a former student of Babbitt,
for a time flirted with the ideas of the counter-movement. Finally, in
1929 under the slashing leadership of Seward Collins the _Bookman_ took
up arms for the cause of More and Babbitt.
Meantime, the main naturalistic movement in American letters was
slackening. In increasing numbers people were growing weary of
Menckenism. Two popular books in 1929 showed the hour was striking
for fresh ideas: one, Krutch’s _The Modern Temper_, was a confession
of impotence and gloom over the loss of the romantic hopes that had
been so dazzling in 1920, the other, Lippmann’s _A Preface to Morals_,
recognized the need for a new discipline in living and made effort
towards a formulation of one. Two prominent magazines of artistic
revolt suspended and each gave a curiously significant reason. The
_Dial_ said that “although a magazine can get along somehow without
readers it cannot exist without contributors.” And Margaret Anderson
said in the farewell number of the _Little Review_: “As this number
will show, even the artist doesn’t know what he is talking about. And I
can no longer go on publishing a magazine in which no one really knows
what he is talking about.” Verily, times were changing! We come to
1930, and hand-to-hand fighting at last between the New Humanists and
the Liberals or Naturalists or Romantics, as you choose to call them.