they pour light on the subject matter of this book, the dilemmas of
liberated people today. Granted, says Chesterton: “we need a rally
of the really _human_ things; will which is morals, memory which is
tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.” But for
him “the question really is whether Humanism can perform the functions
of religion.” His reply is unequivocal. “I do not believe that Humanism
can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism.” Why? Well, “the fact
is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on
its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain
to it out of the old treasury of Christendom.” The New Humanism in
Chesterton’s judgment draws on Catholic capital, but it “has one very
wise and worthy character. It is trying to pick up the pieces; that is,
to pick up all the pieces.” Only “can it stick them together? Where
is the _cement_ which made religion corporate and popular, which can
prevent it falling to pieces in a débris of individualistic tastes and
degrees?” Chesterton makes clear his doubt that the New Humanists “have
the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity.”
Next, I should like the reader to join me in regretting that we in
America have had no G. K. Chesterton to work as an antidote to such
a popular “philosopher” as H. L. Mencken. Admit all the faults of
Chesterton, the occasional specious arguments, now and then the
patch of tawdry rhetoric, the lapses in taste and the falls into
mechanicality of style: call him, if you desire, no more than a
super-journalist. These flaws, however, are no great handicap in coping
with a popular propounder of belated nineteenth century rationalism
of the type of Mencken, when one is as playful, as pyrotechnical, as
hearty as Chesterton. By his buffooning Mencken hopes to attract the
populace to the banners of heresy: by his humor and the dazzlement
of paradoxes Chesterton aims to draw the public to orthodoxy. Thus,
the two men by their methods neutralize each other and leave the
reader free to examine coolly what it is that in all seriousness they
maintain. And in that respect Chesterton is immeasurably the larger man.
Thirdly, the history of Chesterton presents a couple of features
of special interest for the person who is reacting against the
contemporary welter of half-truths. How came Chesterton to his present
strength of conviction on so many topics toward which his foes preserve
an attitude of squeamish indecision? The startling answer is, because
his early education, like that of Cardinal Newman and of Coleridge,
consisted of fairy tales. Startling to us, that is, for many of us have
been led to conclude that there should be no place for fairy tales in
the training of the young, that the less of “fantasy” and the more of
“fact” we incorporate into education, the better developed will be the
sense of reality of our children. But this is one of the crimes against
children, the most abominable class of crimes. No one has more forcibly
stated the case for fairy tales than Coleridge. “Should children be
permitted to read romances and relations of giants and magicians and
genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my
faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a
love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same
truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses,
seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing
but _parts_, and all _parts_ are necessarily little. And the universe
to them is but a mass of _little things_.” Chesterton argues somewhat
differently, but it is apparent that he was stimulated by fairy tales
to love the inclusive, to desire to reach the center, to devote himself
to the transcendent conception. It is in the centrality and breadth of
his mind that he exceeds Mencken and the smaller fry of rationalists.
Another thing to take into account is Chesterton’s reaction to the
Yellow Nineties in England. In his youth he was immersed in Huxleyan
agnosticism and Wildean æstheticism, and he revolted vigorously from
these excesses. He found young men proud of their boredom; ennui was
taken to be a symptom of personal distinction. And he was informed
that art was divorced from morals. He replied curtly that “there is no
such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that
can exist is an uninterested person.... The bored has certainly proved
himself prosaic”--which places the blame where it should go. And to the
_l’art pour l’art_ people, he said: “A small artist is content with
art; a great artist with nothing except everything.”
Fourthly, Chesterton delighted himself as every one knows with the
pleasures of a modern heresy-hunt. The hunting ground was certainly
happy, for, as he pointed out, we are living in the decadence of the
great revolutionary period, and nowadays “we are more and more to
discuss details in art, politics, literature,” but “general theories
are everywhere contemned ... we will have no generalizations.” “When
the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies,” Chesterton
goes on to say, “their idea was that religious and philosophical
discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was
so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The
modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot
matter what any one says.”
Vague relativism was the enemy and Chesterton went slashing after it
in the essays on Shaw, George Moore, Wells, G. Lowes Dickinson, Joseph
McCabe, Whistler and other moderns included in _Heretics_. Of them
all it seems to me that Wells best typifies what Chesterton stands
against, Wells in whom is fused sentimental naturalism and scientific
naturalism, Wells the prophet of humanitarianism. Chesterton put his
finger unhesitatingly on the soft spot in Wells’s whole program when
he noticed that “in his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief
point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had
begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he
would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed
in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent
possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self,
and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the
weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty
of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account
of the overcoming of the smaller ones.”
Finally, I wish the reader to note that the “paradoxes of Christianity”
which Chesterton defends with so much gusto in _Orthodoxy_ were not
imposed on him, were not slavishly accepted by him because of their
attributed authority, but were personally rediscovered. It is often
thought, sometimes with cause, many times unjustifiably, that the
exponent of tradition is simply a timid and unoriginal man: he flees,
so it is said, to tradition for safety; he does not return to it
because his experience has taught him that a given tradition is right.
But do all men adopt traditional teachings out of fear? Chesterton sets
us right. Classicism is properly a life, and not a mere subscribing to
inherited doctrines, and Chesterton has described the spirit and result
of that life when he said: “I am the man who with the utmost daring
discovered what had been discovered before.... When I fancied that I
stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up
by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be
original, but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior
copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.... I did try to
found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I
discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
The vivacity of commonsense! That, in a phrase, describes the appeal
of Chesterton, and nothing, it seems to me, is more often lacking from
American literary journalism than commonsense in the first place and in
the second place commonsense sparkling at its vivacious best.
* * * * *
To many American critics any stick is good enough to beat Humanism
with. But it has happened several times in our literary history that
the French have been more quickly appreciative than we of a genuine
new power appearing amongst our writers: it seems almost to be a law
that an unpopular spiritual force in America should first receive its
full due in France. It is a Frenchman, Louis J. A. Mercier, who has
written the first book treating the New Humanism as a movement. _Le
Mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Unis_, which makes a study of Babbitt,
More and the late W. C. Brownell, was crowned when it appeared in 1928
by the French Academy, and it drew forth sympathetic comment from the
spokesmen for a variety of groups, from the Catholic papers to the
Action Française, from the Abbé Bremond to Baron Seillière. We can
easily understand the warmth of this reception by French critics. “Here
were American authors,” says Mercier, “who spoke their own language,
who were fully alive to all the traditions, who faced squarely the
problem of man, in the light of all these traditions, and who brought a
formula for a twentieth-century approach to a common reëxamination of
all the data involved.”
Why have we not more examples in translation of the work of the
French classical reactionaries? We have a few--Benda’s _Belphégor_
and _The Treason of the Intellectuals_, Maritain’s _Three Reformers_
and _Art and Scholasticism_, Leon Daudet’s _The Stupid Nineteenth
Century_, Henri Massis’s _The Defence of the West_--but these are
barely suggestive of the resources remaining to be exploited by our
publishers. We have--to name names--no translations of such important
works as Pierre Lasserre’s _Le Romantisme français_ and _Cinquante
Ans de Pensée française_ by which we may trace the evolution of this
former pupil of Charles Maurras, nor have we a translation of Ernest
Seillière’s _Le Mal romantique_ or of his studies of Rousseau or of his
_Philosophie de l’Impérialisme_, all efforts to “de-Rousseauize” France
by large European perspectives. Above all, we have no books in English
from the energetic pen of Charles Maurras. This is odd, since no less
discerning a critic than T. S. Eliot classes Maurras as a philosopher
of rank equal to Irving Babbitt and declares that he “has written as
fine prose as any French author living.” Moreover, he says, referring
to England, “if anything, in another generation or so, is to preserve
us from a sentimental Anglo-Fascism, it will be some system of ideas
which will have gained much from the study of Maurras.”
But perhaps before speaking of Maurras further I should give a very
general classification of the French affirmers of the classic order in
life and literature. We can divide them into three groupings: (1) those
associated with the Action Française and committed to its program of
“integral nationalism” which involves a return to royalism; (2) the
Neo-Thomists, such as Henri Massis with his bogey of Orientalism and
Jacques Maritain, “the most conspicuous figure and probably the most
powerful force in contemporary French philosophy,” according to T. S.
Eliot; (3) certain critics independent of organized groups like Julien
Benda whose recent book, _The Treason of the Intellectuals_, attacks
with great force the fomenting of political passions indulged in by
some of the French classicists, notably those of the Action Française.
Charles Maurras is the outstanding man in the Action Française. He
began as an enthusiast for Auguste Comte and Positivism. In 1890 he
joined Jean Moreas in the founding of the Ecole Romane, a literary
return from Symbolism to antiquity. He wrote fiction and verse
expressive of his admiration for Hellenism. But his life’s work has
been in political and social thought and in literary criticism. For
years “Politics first” has been his cry: he establishes his teaching
on the doctrine of Joseph de Maistre who preached a turning back to
monarchism after the French Revolution. The sifting of Maurras’s
career, however, is a rather complicated business. To many he is
an atheist, certainly an agnostic; yet for some years he and his
organization, the Action Française, were Catholic, only to be condemned
in the end by the Pope. T. S. Eliot’s explanation is that Maurras is
“an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend
to himself or to others that he does believe; if others can believe,
so much the better not only for them but for the world at large. The
peculiarity of Maurras’s agnosticism (or atheism if you like) is that
he recognizes that he has much more in common, in the temporal sphere,
with Catholics than with Protestants or atheists.”
Today Maurras directs--with the partnership of the truculent Leon
Daudet--the newspaper, _Action Française_, which flies on its mast the
following inscription: “_Chef de la Maison de France, j’en revendique
tous les droits, j’en assume toutes les responsabilités, j’en accepte
tous les devoirs_” over the name of “_Le duc de Guise, héritier des
quarante Rois qui en mille ans firent la France_.” With Maurras’s
bellicosities, his fanning of national and racial hatreds, I am not
now concerned, nor should I like in any case to defend them. It is
more germane to this book to quote from him on tradition. “Not all
traditions,” he says, “are equal.... Amongst all others one tradition
offers itself, of which the conspicuous character is its almost
complete conformity with those principles of taste which express
humanity raised to its highest point. We see it come to birth in Ionia
as from the ashes of Homer; it continues under the olive trees of
Cephisus. Roman sages who adopt it make a new home for it. The middle
ages do not banish it completely either from France or from the towns
of Italy. It reforms itself and occupies the whole of Europe; but it
is Paris now, as Athens once, that preserves it. From the middle of
the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, humanism and the
classical spirit, refined to an Attic point of taste, never lacked
representatives among us, or an élite worthy of understanding and
loving it.” This Græco-Latin classical tradition, which belongs to
France, Maurras goes on to say, “surpasses all others. It reveals, in
fact, a force of life equal in flame, in coloring, in simple brutality
or refined delicacy to whatever the rest of the world can show, from
the steppes of Russia to the shores of Guinea; and as no other popular
tradition can vie with it in sensibility, it defies forever all its
rivals, in the order and luminosity of its writings, in the great
generality of their style. The works of this tradition are rightly
called Humane Letters, in that they interest the whole world.” Finally,
he exclaims: “But the pursuit of the classical tradition includes
other things than gods and goddesses. It authorizes a scrupulous and
passionate criticism. Far from freezing the senses, it excites, begets
creation. Even among ourselves, above all among ourselves, there is
much to be done. We can dream of tragedies nearer to nature, more
direct and simple than those of Racine. The heroic vein of Corneille
leaves room for a poet who should be wiser than he. The reader will
be surprised if I add that what we lack especially is lyric poetry!
Consider how little can be preserved from the romantic lumber-room.
We must bring things back to Malherbe. There was once a literary
criticism, there can be again, yet finer, and lead our literature to
its renascence.”
Turning to the Neo-Thomists, it seems to me that Jacques Maritain is
the dominant figure. He began as a student of Bergson but shortly
afterwards joined the Catholic Church and today holds the position of
professor of modern history and philosophy at the Institut Catholique
of Paris. He grounds himself entirely on the doctrine of St. Thomas
Aquinas and his whole effort is to translate it into terms of modern
life, to make it serviceable and illuminating to the man of the
twentieth century. For a few years Maritain associated himself with
the Action Française but withdrew when in 1927 the Pope proscribed the
journal of Maurras, Daudet and Pujo.
Maritain writes with an austere clarity. A fiery faith burns in the
depths of his thought and makes his most abstract pages strangely
intense. He is an utterly ruthless opponent of what he conceives to
be modern errors, and, like the American Humanists, he considers
Romanticism as the source of many of these illusions. “The word
romanticism,” he notes and I recommend his definition to the reader,
“may give rise to many confusions. I am aware that there have been
all kinds of things, even very good things, in the complex movement
classed under this name. But nothing is so idle as to argue about
words and recast their definition to suit your subject; and in spite
of everything usage has adequately settled the meaning of this one. In
so far as it signifies a religious eviction of reason and its works,
the sacred unbridling of sensation, the holy parade of self and the
adoration of primitive natural instinct, pantheism as theology, and
emotional stimulus as the rule of life, it must be confessed that
Rousseau, by his mystical naturalism, is at the direct source of such a
spiritual evil.”
Again, like the New Humanists, Maritain attacks the ubiquitous sway of
modern science on the ground that science, unconfined to its proper
rôle, dehumanizes man. In his essay on Descartes, who to Maritain
founded the principle of the deep inhumanity of modern science, we may
read: “In the higher order of Cognition the Cartesian reformation gave
the irretrievable stability of the things of the spirit to the moral
attitude of turning towards perishable goods. See what the great name
of Science has become. It is today hardly applied to anything but the
knowledge of matter, and science, _par excellence_, is regarded by
most modern thinkers as belonging to a museum. In the modern world,
reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature.
It rates the mathematics of phenomena above wisdom. From the mountain
of its excellence it has descried all the kingdoms of the material
universe and the glory of them, and it goes down to possess them.”
And now we come to the freelances of the classical revival, to proud
polemicists like Julien Benda who never tire in the exposure of
romantic follies. Benda, novelist and essayist, tenacious opponent of
Bergson, has invented a name for the disease of pan-lyricism which
rages in America as well as in France. He calls it “belphégorism,”
for it is in his argument the worship of a false god, Belphégor or
Baal-Peor as it is written in the Bible. Belphégorism briefly is the
requirement of modern society that works of art should be _exclusively_
productive of emotions and sensations, that history should be written
as a series of heart-throbs, that philosophy and science should give
thrills. Belphégorism is the love of the indistinct, of the novelty
purely for its own sake, of subjectivity carried as far as possible.
Conversely, belphégorism hates the mind, hates discipline, hates
form. Benda makes it clear that he is no objector to the lyrical in
itself, but rather to the invasion by lyricism of all provinces of the
intellectual life. To the softness in taste of modern French society he
opposes the plastic sensibility of the great seventeenth century, the
period of Descartes and Pascal, of Corneille, Molière and Racine, of
Bossuet, of La Fontaine, of Madame de La Fayette.
By a plastic sensibility Benda means a sensibility, whose principal
modes are sight and touch, which organizes itself about the idea
of form. It loves precision and firmness. This sensibility is
localized, perhaps because it involves the more highly specialized and
developed nerves. It is, Benda declares, a centralized and correlated
sensibility, the source of poise. In contrast he places the musical
sensibility whose principal modes are hearing, taste and smell. This
is a disquieting sensibility, for it consists in sensation without
contour, it overflows the whole being with scattered and diffused
sensation. The consciousness is decentralized. The result is the
opposite of poise, being intoxication and vertigo. Modern society tends
toward a musical sensibility, a tendency Benda has become seasoned in
combating.
This distinction between two types of sensibility is very usable, and I
shall come back to it when we take up Nietzsche’s great interpretation
of the Apollo-Dionysus conflict in the final chapter. But now this
exhibit of the friends of order abroad must be closed by a longish
quotation from Benda’s _The Treason of the Intellectuals_ illustrating
the difference between two types of humanitarianism (or more properly
between Humanism and humanitarianism), a difference our New Humanists
constantly insist upon. In addition Benda brings out very well a point
usually overlooked by people who, perceiving the aristocratic leanings
of the New Humanists, accuse them of being too disdainful of their
fellow men.
“In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have
denounced humanitarianism[3] as a moral degeneration, nay, as an
intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of
practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the
measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks.’
“I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean
it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to
Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is
usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human
beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more
accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a
pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is
quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what
is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is
the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the
mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it
appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their
neighbors. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and
therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists
when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way
to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly
with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet,
Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental
form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form
explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished
minds, who disavow two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of
political ideology. One of them is the ‘patriotic bore’ and the other
‘the universal embrace.’
“The humanitarianism[4] which holds in honor the abstract quality of
what is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men.
Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably
find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and
we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man,
_more or less_ the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should
be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that
there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is
the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary
vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.
“Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with
internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national
egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another
egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain
category of men--laborers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across
frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only
oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those
interests.
“In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an
idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also
something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple
desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures,
and is generally exempt from moral dogmatism.”
* * * * *