America_, edited by Norman Foerster with the assistance of P.
H. Houston, G. R. Elliott and Robert Shafer. It provoked a new
“battle of the books” but thus far no Swift has arisen to lash the
gross stupidities committed by the majority of the modernists. The
controversy in general was a repetition on a much wider scale of the
unscrupulous Chicago onslaught on Sherman’s book in 1917. Issues
were obscured, prejudice appealed to, meanings distorted: literary
careerists rushed in, trying to outshout each other, and the low
estate of criticism in America became painfully clear. I need only
cite the testimony of an observer not on the Humanist side who was
finally driven to write: “I confess to impatience with the row about
Humanism, because in the course of it, in the past half year or so, I
have seen the powerful principles laid down by Irving Babbitt, being
confused and cheapened.” The words are by Gilbert Seldes. Finally, an
opposition symposium, _The Critique of Humanism_, was hastily organized
and hurriedly despatched to the book shops three months after _Humanism
and America_ saw the light on the counters. With what seem to me the
cogent objections to the standpoint of Babbitt and More advanced in
_The Critique of Humanism_, I shall deal by and by.
But shall we let the unsavoury episode just narrated pass without
recording the full harshness of judgment it deserves? I conceive it
the strict duty of a historian and lover of letters to say that the
cause of Romanticism is not so poor that it needs to be defended by
poor reasons and mob-appeals and that there is in fact a high standard
of argument already set in this controversy by the writings of the
English critics, Hugh l’Anson Fausset and J. Middleton Murry, _against_
the classicists’ position. One’s first desire is to see, regardless
of one’s party sympathies, the steady advancement, the heightening of
literary excellence, of all schools--let us have everything at its
highest point--and it is just this desire for _quality_ of controversy
that was ungratified by the outpourings of the American modernists.
Really, they should have done better! I can only say that if we imagine
that criticism has a deity, as love was once fabled to have, then we
shall have to invent two forms of it, even as the Greeks conceived of
Aphrodite Uranus and Aphrodite Pandemos. We shall have to say that
there is presiding over the labors of critics Polite Criticism and
Vulgar Criticism, and that it was Vulgar Criticism which ruled most of
the pens attempting to deface the New Humanism in the spring of 1930.
No fierce Tory with the genius of Swift arose, it is true, to wither
the present-day worshippers of Vulgar Criticism, but we can turn back
to Swift himself for the necessary scathing words.
“Meanwhile, Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient
prophecy, which bore no very good face to his children the Moderns
bent his flight to the region of a malignant deity, called criticism.
She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus
found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes,
half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband,
blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in
the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister,
light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy, and perpetually
turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness
and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners. The goddess
herself had claws like a cat; her head, and ears, and voice, resembled
those of an ass; her teeth fallen out before, her eyes turned inward,
as if she looked only upon herself; her diet was the overflowing of her
own gall; her spleen was so large, as to stand prominent, like a dug
of the first rate; nor wanted excrescencies in form of teats, at which
a crew of ugly monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful
to conceive, the bulk of spleen increased faster than the sucking
could diminish it. ‘Goddess,’ said Momus, ‘can you sit idly here while
our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a
cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies?
Who, then, hereafter will ever sacrifice, or build altars, to our
divinities?’”
* * * * *
Unlike the quarrels that were the occasion for Swift’s writing _The
Battle of the Books_, the new “battle of the books” caused by the
advent of American Humanism involves issues that far transcend the
ordinary interests of scholars and professional literary men. So far as
the present controversy is literary, it is pretty much the case of the
warm dispute in Æsop’s Fable between the Bee and the Spider as to which
was the better artist. This fable Swift rewrote in _The Battle of the
Books_ and then made Æsop draw out its application in words that cover
almost equally well the respective arguments of the Modernists and the
New Humanist today, for it will be seen that the modernistic spider
makes a cult of originality and tends toward science-worship while the
humanistic bee objects to the kind and impermanency of the modernist’s
materials and extols wide ranging and “sweetness and light.”
“The disputants,” Swift has Æsop say, “have admirably managed the
dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to
be said on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument
_pro_ and _con_. It is but to adjust the reasonings of both to the
present quarrel, then to compare and apply the labors and fruits of
each, as the bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the
conclusion fall plain and close upon the Moderns and us. For, pray,
gentlemen, was ever anything so modern as the spider in his air, his
turns, and his paradoxes? He argues in behalf of you his brethren and
himself, with many boastings of his native stock and great genius;
that he spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any
obligation or assistance from without. Then he displays to you his
great skill in architecture, and improvement in the mathematics. To all
this the bee, as an advocate, retained by us the Ancients, thinks fit
to answer--that, if one may judge of the great genius or inventions
of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have
countenance to bear you out, in boasting of either. Erect your schemes
with as much method and skill as you please; yet if the materials be
nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern
brains) the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb, the duration
of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their
being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner. For anything else of
genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I cannot recollect; unless it
be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance
with the spider’s poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly
out of themselves, is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the
insects and vermin of the age. As for us the Ancients, we are content,
with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and
our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language. For the
rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite labor and search,
and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that,
instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives
with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of
things, which are sweetness and light.”
More quickly than anything else, and that is why I have invoked it, the
potent breath of Swift ought to lift the battle-smoke that now obscures
the literary quarrel between the New Humanist and the ultra-modernist
and permit us to see the essentials of the doctrine of More and
Babbitt. What are they? What importance and meaning and utility have
they for the lay reader not afraid to look _everywhere_ for guidance in
facing the alternatives that life is so ingenious in forcing constantly
upon man? I propose now to consider the very center of humanist
teaching, the duality of human consciousness so uncompromisingly
affirmed by the two leaders.
V
THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD
_“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy
as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so
perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane
is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man
behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway
that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the
accuracy of arithmetic.... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy
to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head;
the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be
a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.”_--G. K. Chesterton in
_Orthodoxy_.
However, before fulfilling the promise made at the close of the
preceding chapter, it seems well to take a cursory view of the
classical revival in England and France. Recent experience has shown
that American critics with only two or three exceptions cannot be
trusted to situate a comprehensive movement like the New Humanism in
its proper climate of sentiment, opinion and idea. On the contrary,
many of them regarded or affected to regard the New Humanist group as
a quaint local phenomenon sprung up miraculously without atmosphere
and totally unrelated to similar groups anywhere else. This delusion
embraced by the majority of the opponents of American Humanism
badly distorted their sense of perspective: to the broad challenge
of the followers of More and Babbitt they replied with singularly
inappropriate defiances. The plain truth is that a stiff parochial
frame of mind simply cannot make much sense of the application of
Babbitt’s criticism to current American literature and life. The
obvious remedy is wider travel in the countries of the mind.
More and Babbitt are spokesmen for classicism on the ground that
it contains a wisdom superior to modernism. They uphold the longer
traditions of the human race against the newly formed traditions of
the last fifty, seventy-five or one hundred years. They believe in a
profound vital conservatism, not in the contemporaneous versions of
radicalism. They are, when one reviews European history in a large
way, orthodox, not heterodox. In England and France we shall find
distinguished writers who like Babbitt and More are classicists,
traditionalists, conservative, orthodox, men who oppose with all
their might and intellect the drift of modern civilization and seek
to renew our sense of time-tested standards. In this chapter I intend
merely to point out some of these men, to quote from each of those
designated only a few characteristic words on the modern crisis: that
will be enough to show on the one hand the many sides and the diversity
that living classicists everywhere manifest, and on the other hand
their unanimity on the errors of modernity and the need for standards
and discipline will be enough to destroy the silly notion that the
classical party in America is engaged in a unique reaction. I cannot
here attempt rounded estimates, however brief, of the individuals
mentioned, but I shall try to transfer to the intellectual situation
in America, which is our center of interest, several useful hints they
offer. We must expect to find conservative force in England to be _sui
generis_, and likewise in France, but for that and many other reasons
an acquaintance with them, even though but a bowing one, makes for
that suppleness of mind necessary to comprehend the home movement. We
may even rid ourselves of senseless fears of certain words: the reader
whose object is the freeing of his mind must soon overcome any horror
he feels for the word, “revolutionary,” or for the word, “reactionary.”
The free mind goes everywhere and tries to judge without prejudice the
thing itself and not the name.
One thing we shall be immediately struck by is that it is purely an
accident that in America the conservative attitude should temporarily
be expressing itself almost entirely in the form of ideas and
criticism, for this is, of course, by no means an inevitable outlet
for the conservative temper. Tories, as witness Swift, can be great
artists: art was never the monopoly of the Whigs, but has always been
common to men of all hues of conviction. American Humanism therefore
does not inculcate an uncreative attitude. It cannot, it is true,
make creative ability in the arts where such ability does not exist,
but neither, for that matter, can such a theory as self-expression
produce creative ability. The Humanist attitude is a check on bad
art: self-expression, unfortunately, is a release of bad art. On this
score, which is to be preferred? No; it is a mere happenstance that
at present Humanism’s representatives are of a critical turn, men of
ideas rather than men of pronounced sensibility. Hence, their relative
unpopularity. They advocate ideas, and ideas--it is a truism--always
must fight against more inertia than emotions. An initial prejudice
exists against ideas as such, whereas some one’s strong feelings
directly affect us either to sympathy or to resistance: emotions convey
themselves almost as swiftly as actions do, but ideas, being quite
the weakest element in psychology, have a much harder time travelling
from person to person. Nor does one need to enlarge on the enmity felt
toward criticism itself, the disparagement constantly cast on this
necessary function of literary life, a habit of dispraise which, it
should be noted, grew up in the romantic period. The New Humanists are
mostly critics, and because of that many people conclude that their
doctrine, their conservatism, is sterile in the practice of the arts.
It does not follow, for it is the person who is or is not an artist,
not the doctrine which is responsible. Look abroad and you will see how
fertile in the arts of fiction and verse a classical reaction may be,
and no doubt yet will be in our own country.
Here is a gallery of brief portraits of anti-romantic writers in
England.
Philip S. Richards:--
One of the youngest English critics and probably the closest in spirit
and theory to American Humanism. In the pages of the famous review,
_The Nineteenth Century and After_, he has expounded very faithfully
to the English reader the ideas of Babbitt and More. No one has better
described the precise effect of Babbitt’s main principle on those who
come to accept it. “Only by following it up in all its ramifications,
as Babbitt works it out in his books with a wealth of illustrative
evidence, is it possible to realize its amazing fruitfulness, and its
universal applicability to the intellectual and moral problems which
we have inherited from the nineteenth century. _When once its import
is fairly grasped, its influence is like that of a new principle of
classification in one of the descriptive sciences. New and natural
lines of cleavage or affiliation at once appear, introducing order
and interdependence into a mass of chaotic or misrelated facts._ A
simple criterion is put into the reader’s hands, which he cannot help
using, even though it mean the abandonment of secret loyalties and the
dethronement of long-cherished ideals.... We may regard him (Babbitt)
as a pathologist who traces the romantic malady from its origin in
Rousseau, through its mild and chronic stage in Wordsworth, to its
acute and delirious phases in Tolstoy or the expressionist drama.” (The
italics are mine.)
T. S. Eliot:--
The prestige of this erstwhile American citizen among the younger
generation has caused the same generation to be particularly attentive
to his views on American Humanism. Eliot’s poems, so exquisite in
workmanship, subtle in perception, almost Dantean in the clarity and
power of the individual image, contain the poignant suffering of a
sensibility tortured by the ugliness, crassness and lowness of modern
civilization. His earlier criticism dealt accurately with the effects
of literary masterpieces upon his sensibility. In recent years he has
broadened his basis as a critic and introduced a religious note into
his poetry. His general point of view he now describes “as classicist
in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,”
and wisely adds, “I am quite aware that the first term is completely
vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second
term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what
is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the
third term does not rest with me to define.”
Eliot holds that we should come “to the conclusion that the humanistic
point of view is auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point
of view. For us, religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity
implies, I think, the conception of the Church. It would be not only
interesting but invaluable if Professor Babbitt, with his learning, his
great ability, his influence, and his interest in the most important
questions of the time, could reach this point.” But on the other
hand Eliot has written an essay “to call attention to the danger of
the other extreme: the danger, a very real one, of _religion without
humanism_.”
Herbert Read:--
A close co-worker with T. S. Eliot in the field of literary criticism,
this author is severe in his condemnation of the flatness of modern
life. “For Froissart,” Read declares, “glory was the measure of all
things, the crown of all virtues. For us it has become something remote
and elusive; even something romantic and literary. We have lost the
sense of glory because we have lost the habit of faith. We neither
love deeply enough, nor feel deeply enough, nor think deeply enough,
to enjoy life’s most impressive sanction.” Read follows the path of
T. E. Hulme, whose _Speculations_ he edited, back to pre-Renascence
philosophy: he has disciplined himself on the pages of the _Summa
Theologica_ and has caught fire from the complex splendor of the Middle
Ages.
A champion of orthodoxy, he is critical of any particular form of
orthodoxy, such as American Humanism, as his essay in the _Criterion_
on _Humanism and the Absolute_ reveals. This paper discussing the
views of Norman Foerster and Julien Benda was sub-titled _The Texts
of a Debate_, and I hope it is not lost ink to refer again to the
higher standard of controversy observed in England by writers who deal
with the New Humanists and to regret that our critics of Foerster’s
_American Criticism_ were, as a rule, unable to reach up to the mark
set by Read. In the essay mentioned, Read maintains that unlike Julien
Benda, “Mr. Foerster, on behalf of the New Humanists, nowhere makes
it clear that he accepts this absolute severance of things divine and
things human. He admits that ‘the ethical will’ is ‘a power above
the ordinary self, an impersonal reality in which all men may share
despite the diversity of personal temperament, and toward which their
attitude must be one of subjection.’ But he also says that ‘the value
of supernatural intuition must be tested by the intellect,’ and
rejects any formal theology on these grounds. But the greatest of all
formal theologies, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, was precisely such a
‘testing’ of supernatural intuition by the intellect or reason. If
religious intuitions must be submitted to rational inspection, then
surely the result is a theology. Mr. Foerster cannot have it both ways:
to _hesitate_ ‘to pass beyond’ experimental knowledge to dogmatic
affirmation is merely to sit on the fence: once admit the mediation of
reason and you are involved in the necessity of dogma.”
This point, the reader will recognize, is connected with Hulme’s
argument for radical discontinuities in the universe, which was
injected into our first chapter and to which I pledged myself to return.
Wyndham Lewis:--
He has dramatized himself as an Ishmaelite in Occidental culture, the
sworn and ferocious enemy of “Time-cults” and “Time-philosophies,”
of which Bergsonism is a typical specimen. Before the Great War, he
was a radical painter and associated with Ezra Pound to propagate an
artistic cult baptized Vorticism. Since the War he has turned social
philosopher, and possibly may be a first rate Tory mind in the making.
I say in the making, for up to the present Lewis is still a chaotic
personality, given to extravagances, and not yet sufficiently trained
in metaphysics to cope with A. N. Whitehead, S. Alexander, and some
of his other _bêtes noires_. But the New Humanist can second him in
many of his theses. He and Lewis are at one in their scorn for the
contemporary cult of the child and the primitive and in their hostility
to the modern feminization of man.
In his book, _The Art of Being Ruled_, Lewis maintains--I cannot better
Montgomery Belgion’s succinct restatement in the _Bookman_--that
“what happens in a ‘liberal democracy’ is that rule by the few is not
banished, but concealed. And it is this concealment which is, Mr.
Lewis holds, responsible for so many of our contemporary ills, the
greatest of these being, perhaps, mass suggestion. In a democracy the
actual rulers are not the best rulers, but those who are most cunning
in obtaining power, and, furthermore, since their rule has to be
secret, it becomes necessary for these rulers to hypnotize the ruled
into acquiescence, to discredit the old standards of existence through
the agency of Science, and to organize the populace, to mechanize it,
to pump it full of a destructive fatalism while it is kept imagining
itself its own master.” Therefore let us have again an authority that
is an open authority. On Lewis’s analysis of pseudo-liberty the New
Humanist will agree even more heartily. “The present decay of Europe,”
I quote from Belgion again, “Mr. Lewis ascribes directly to the notion
of freedom. Since people cannot be free and in any case do not want to
be free, but only to be irresponsible, the notion of freedom has been
thought to be the notion of irresponsibility, and, thus misunderstood,
has been steadily weakening Europe. To this wasteful and disorganizing
notion of irresponsibility he opposes the notion of ‘working together’
under a central control, which, he points out, gives the comfort and
strength of solidarity.”
Hilaire Belloc:--
As a Catholic, this versatile man--politician, poet, storyteller,
essayist, historian, biographer--can naturally not regard American
Humanism as more than a half-way house. This would be in general the
Catholic position: however, both the New Humanist and the Catholic
intellectual are anti-naturalistic and pro-classical and this sets
vibrating a certain bond of sympathy for each other’s efforts to infuse
into modern literature something of what Belloc calls “the poise, the
fulness, the solemnity, the disdain of sharp effect, the glory in
control, the magic of proportion” which marked the productions of the
great classical periods.
“The classical spirit,” observes Belloc, “has not fallen into disrepute
among us: it has been forgotten. It has become alien and strange, so
that men coming across it today, in our society, are like rustics
coming across some marble of the ancients. It does not repel them, but
it hardly attracts them at all--they can make nothing of it.... It is
said that men who drink spirits lose their taste for wine and certainly
men who use violent sauces lose their taste in cooking. Under the
effect of the romantic extravagance, the general sense of the classic
died. But the last extravagances of that extravagance were left for our
time to suffer.”
I pass now from Belloc, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-puritan, to the brilliant debater he has so greatly influenced
and to whom I shall give more space than has been devoted to the other
members of this little gallery of English champions of high tradition.
Gilbert K. Chesterton:--