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 (zoöphilpsychosis). 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"?