A Thinker Behind and Ahead of His Time
David Hill Radcliffe*
A review of Character and Culture: Essays on East and West, by
Irving Babbitt, with a new introduction by Claes G. Ryn, a bibliography
of Babbitt's writings, and an index to all of Babbitt's books. New Brunswick:
Transaction
Publishers, 1995. l+361 pp. $21.95.
[From HUMANITAS, Volume IX, No. 1, 1996 Copyright
© National Humanities Institute]
Transaction Publishers reprints Irving Babbitt's posthumous Spanish
Character and Other Essays (1940) under a new title. For the new edition
Claes G. Ryn has added a comprehensive introduction to Babbitt's life,
works, and reputation. The book collects essays, reviews, and addresses
written for various occasions during the period 1898 to 1930 and covers
the wide range of topics the new title suggests. While the writing is occasional,
Babbitt's principles, summed up in the concluding "What I Believe," are
maintained with remarkable consistency. Some essays are better than others,
and I would take issue with some of their judgments, but all bear witness
to a challenging critical mind. This timely publication led me to reflect
on Babbitt's place in history: one of this century's foremost nay-sayers
to Progress, he was both behind and ahead of his time. As an articulate
advocate for humane life and letters, he is for all times.
The literary discussions are those of a different era, written after
nineteenth-century criticism had seen its day and before twentieth-century
criticism had found its footing. Babbitt assailed the romantics' sensualism,
sentimental imagination, and cult of personality and managed to make them
less fashionable for a period. But like others of his generation, Babbitt
was profoundly influenced by Victorian writers; he delivers his judgments
in the resounding public voice of nineteenth-century social and cultural
criticism. The alternative critical mode during the years Babbitt was writing
was a philological idiom that embraced historical relativism and resisted
literary standards. Because he rejected this, his writings now seem much
less dated than those of his more progressive colleagues. The manner learned
from Ruskin and Arnold, Emerson and Lowell is still appealing, though some
humanists might prefer even older models. Babbitt did not practice the
method of close reading that would become the hallmark of twentieth-century
criticism; neither did he cultivate the detached civility characteristic
of classical humanism. His criticisms sometimes suffer from the polemical
urgency typical of culture criticism. One misses the poise of neoclassical
critics, like Dryden, that Babbitt found inadequate: cooler heads, they
were often better judges. Working in the Arnoldian mode, Babbitt often
relies on touchstones to illustrate his points. He damned critical impressionism,
but could practice it well enough when it suited his purpose, as in the
essay on the Spanish character that gave the book its original title. This
was not hypocritical: Babbitt's version of the romantic gusto was consistent
with a doctrine that emphasized the interplay of imagination and understanding.
His aim was to vivify general and public conceptions rather than particular
and private sensations.
The breadth and variety of Babbitt's reading was also characteristic
of the Victorian sage, ranging far beyond the kind of curriculum he advocated
for purposes of education. Babbitt, who ridiculed antiquarianism, discusses
court romances and minor writers left untouched even by modern specialists.
His object in these far-flung investigations was to place contemporary
experience in a proper critical perspective, reasoning from a broad base
of evidence. He strove to be discriminating without being doctrinaire,
and often succeeded. But he was perhaps too much swayed by the characterizations
of romanticism being made by American progressives, damning the writers
they praised rather than challenging their assumption that the progressive
movement originated in a romantic revolt against the classics. The evidence
was more complex and ambiguous than the disputants on either side were
inclined to allow.
As Babbitt admits, he did not in his literary judgments attempt "rounded
estimates" of authors. He usually sought to identify particular questionable
or admirable tendencies. The animus against romanticism can skew Babbitt's
judgment, as when we are told that Diderot is "so little capable, in short,
of composition, that he can scarcely be said to be a writer at all" (109).
Diderot had an exquisite formal sense, nor could the quivering wretch described
here have managed the Encyclopédie. We are told that Shaftesbury
believes that "the unconverted man is not egotistic" when the Characteristicks
laboriously insists upon the discipline necessary to overcome innate selfishness.
Thomas Gray supposedly anticipates the tribes of demotic poets, when the
Elegy
argues that without education even the exceptional genius is rendered
inglorious. Gray's opinion of style in a democracy hardly differed from
Babbitt's. Babbitt was certainly right about the vicious or silly tendencies
of romanticism in lesser practitioners, but he was too much given to judging
major figures by their lesser standard. Yet one of the virtues of Babbitt's
humanism is that it can illuminate the writings and characters of writers
he himself was too ready to concede to the other side.
Babbitt's great contribution to criticism was the recognition that the
Enlightenment and Romanticism were less opposed to each other than allied
in their opposition to humanism. But Babbitt borrowed freely from Enlightenment
and romantic writers when it served his purposes. Like many an Enlightenment
philosopher, he resisted tradition as a source of authority, preferring
appeals to "the things themselves." He was indebted to the romantics in
the way he conceives of history and culture. Babbitt's interpretation of
modernity is profoundly anti-Hegelian, and yet it is difficult to imagine
how he could have arrived at his reflections on Bacon and Rousseau without
the example of post-romantic history before him. Here, as with critical
impressionism, he proved adept at turning the tools of the enemy against
the enemy.
The debt to nineteenth-century criticism also appears in a way of characterizing
authors with reference to parts and fragments, a habit Babbitt both criticizes
and indulges. Tellingly, he suggests that for neoclassical critics style
is that "factor of a work of art which preserves in every part some sense
of the form of the whole," a formulation that may owe more to Coleridge
than to neoclassical criticism. He goes on to praise Longinus, critic of
fragments and the wellspring of the rhetorical criticism practiced by romantics
(171, 176). Babbitt suggestively identifies aesthetic fragmentation with
scientific specialization. Content to let the part stand for the whole,
is he guilty of a Longinian indifference to differentiation in his treatment
of Bacon and Rousseau as apostles of modernity? In the bulk of his writings
Francis Bacon was a thoroughgoing humanist, if not of a kind that Babbitt
could approve, and was in this respect the farthest thing from an advocate
of specialization. If Rousseau figures as a dreamer in his autobiography
and reflections, is he not elsewhere the totalitarian pragmatist? But Babbitt
argued that these apparently inconsistent orientations are in fact different
manifestations of a single view of life. In either case a more comprehensive
and discriminating treatment of the works and their place in history might
lead to a different evaluation. But that would contribute little to the
daunting rhetorical challenge of debunking progressivism, which required
a strong voice, a degree of simplification, and perhaps also a short list
of heroes and villains.
If Babbitt is not always a reliable critic or interpreter, he always
had an extremely keen sense of larger issues. His insights into the social
and intellectual consequences of the modern age do not wait upon his judgments
of particular authors or passages, nor are they dependent upon the critical
mode he found expedient and congenial. As much as from literature, they
arose out of his experience of life, and more particularly his experience
of Harvard University at the turn of the century. Where education is concerned,
Babbitt was more than just a sagacious observer. He was a prophet.
His criticism of twentieth-century education and social doctrine began
in 1897 with "The Rational Study of the Classics" and continued unstinted
in "[Harvard President Charles] Eliot and American Education" (1929), collected
here. Such essays might have been written yesterday: "if the average student
today is more interested in football than in things of the mind, one reason
may be that football, unlike the college as it has become under the new
education, has a definite goal and is frankly competitive with reference
to it" (216). Babbitt ridiculed the Rousseauvian idea that each student's
uniqueness must be accommodated within a spineless curriculum. He was equally
critical of the narrow-mindedness that typified vocational education. Again,
his fundamental insight was that "Rousseauvian" humanitarianism and "Baconian"
pragmatism are two sides of the same coin, both working to undermine the
teleology explicit in classical statements of the aims of education. These
presupposed a common understanding of the human good that has been rejected
both by scientific specialists and sentimental liberationists. Their joint
attack on standards, authority, classics, tradition, and common sense was,
in Babbitt's view, profoundly anti-liberal. The more expansive the course
offerings and the more narrow their focus on vocational specialties, the
more limited their ability to transmit knowledge and shape character. The
limitless possibilities anticipated by educational reformers denied not
only the desirability of limits, but the inherently limited nature of the
human material which was to be reformed: "What becomes of the beneficence
of the control over the forces of nature that has been secured with the
aid of the scientific imagination, should it turn out that in the unconventional
man--the man whose impulses are free to overflow--the will to power overflows
more freely than the will to service? The Great War has enlightened us
on this point" (213-14). But the First World War did not enlighten educationists
on this point, nor the Second World War, nor the War on Poverty. Successive
failures of the modernist program merely result in more drastic proposals
for reform, all in the name of progress. Babbitt's explanation for this
phenomenon is both simple and persuasive: "stubborn facts, it has been
rightly remarked, are as nothing compared with a stubborn theory. Altruistic
theory is likely to prove peculiarly stubborn, because, probably more than
any other theory ever conceived, it is flattering: it holds out the hope
of the highest spiritual benefits--for example, peace and fraternal union--without
any corresponding spiritual effort" (232-33). Given this state of affairs,
it is clear why Babbitt would supplement appeals to reason and history
with appeals to poetic imagination, ethical will, and religion; only the
most attractive and high-minded works could be expected to make the thorny
path desirable to students already predisposed to prefer pleasure to virtue.
Perhaps it is no accident that reason and history, poetry, ethics, and
religion are in such desperate straits in American education. The elective
curriculum at Harvard, which Babbitt so despised, has been extremely influential
in weakening the humanities in higher education. Recently the National
Association of Scholars has undertaken to quantify just how far the elective
system has penetrated the leading American universities, and the results
are astonishing: students can not merely omit this or that author, doctrine,
or period, but avoid literature and philosophy and history altogether.
And many have, rendering humanist criticisms of modernity utterly incomprehensible
to much of America's elite.
The present round of reforms promises to be one of the most dangerous
yet, for in recasting their disciplines as social science, humanities faculties
have courted a backlash that may deprive the universities of their best
hope for substantive reform. In 1929 Babbitt spoke of the "almost universal
suspicion" directed against "the most thoroughgoing humanitarians--for
example, our professors of pedagogy and sociology" (201); that suspicion
is now extended to academic disciplines generally, as well as the professions
and government agencies dependent upon the academy for doctrine and certification.
Institutions will certainly be downsized; whether they will be reformed
is an altogether different question. Babbitt recognized the need to discipline
the disciplines. As he saw it, the issue was less one of quantity than
of quality: "Even an editor of The New Republic may, it is true,
be modern enough to see that democracy needs discipline. In that case he
looks for this discipline to some form or other of 'efficiency,' an excellent
thing in its place, but when thus lifted out of its place, leading straight
to that Philistinism or worship of mere machinery against which Arnold
waged lifelong warfare" (58). When colleges promise to reform themselves
by redistributing resources towards "productive" departments they miss
the point. Modern educators are notoriously slow learners: serious reform,
reform that calls into question the presuppositions of modernity, is as
vigorously resisted now as it was in Babbitt's lifetime.
In spite of Babbitt's opposition to didacticism in art, his stature
rests in large part upon his status as a moralist. Morality, being part
and parcel of human nature, is common to all times and places. But it is
also a matter of manners and beliefs, and so finds different manifestations.
The task of the humanist, as opposed to the specialist, is to identify
and uphold general standards of behavior and taste. Babbitt regarded himself
as a humanist of a particular kind, however, and while he pledged allegiance
to what he regarded as the core of humanist teachings, he aspired to being
"positive" and "critical" in ways that are obviously modern and American.
Thus, "the person who refuses to accept pseudo-science or any other
substitute for standards still has to decide whether he is to secure his
standards in a critical or a purely traditional way" (220). Americans are
traditionally uncomfortable with tradition, and so with Babbitt, although
in a special way: he found mere traditionalism insufficient as a source
of standards in the modern world. In some ways similar to Emerson and William
James, he was an eclectic and pragmatic individualist, which resulted in
no small tension between himself and younger humanists like Allen Tate
or T. S. Eliot, as they sought an anchor in traditional, orthodox Christianity.
To them liberalism, which Babbitt wanted to reform and deepen, was less
attractive. Babbitt sincerely believed that the problem with most modern
thinkers is that they are not modern enough, that a truly positive and
critical examination of the evidence would vindicate what wise men had
always known about human nature.
That knowledge includes what Babbitt called the Higher Will: "this whole
dispute as to what is a real rendering of human nature reduces itself at
last to a single question: Is the 'war in the cave' artificial, after all?
Suppose it be true, as the humanist asserts, that deep down in the breast
of the individual man, far more primary and immediate than either thought
or feeling, is a power of control over thought and feeling, a something
that may be defined experimentally as the back pull towards the center.
In that case, the 'war in the cave,' so far from being artificial, the
mere prejudice of outworn dogmatisms, is a fact of formidable import. To
deny this fact in the name of 'nature' is to be guilty of a monstrous mutilation
of human nature" (119). Denying the struggle between the Higher Will and
innate tendencies towards evil and laziness, naturalists abandon morality
for sociology.
Babbitt's reflections on this point sometimes resemble those of his
contemporary Sigmund Freud. Both ransacked literature, philosophy, and
history in support of a pessimistic assessment of human nature rejected
out of hand by the social sciences: evidence, if not of original sin, at
least of innate propensities to evil. Both emphasized the vital importance
to society of disciplining the passions, made possible by a higher will
that can be discovered through reflection and self-knowledge. Both kept
confessional religion at arm's length while recognizing it as an essentially
human response to pain and desire. Neither gave an account of their doctrine
that was verifiable by hard science, though some of their grittier insights
into the human condition accord well enough with recent findings in evolutionary
biology.
Babbitt and Freud were surely correct in emphasizing the universal connection
between discipline and civilization: as moralists, Moses and Socrates,
Jesus and Buddha recognized the same human failings and advocated spiritual
discipline as the means to overcome them. Babbitt went beyond Freud in
regarding morality as having a supranatural, transcendent source. He also
affirmed the core truth of religion. But, while stressing the need for
social and individual discipline, Babbitt stopped short of endorsing a
particular moral or religious tradition. It has seemed to some Christians,
but certainly not all, that his humanism, unaided by revelation or tradition,
cannot easily supply answers to the questions, "which discipline?" "which
discriminations?" For better or worse, there is a wide degree of tolerance
but less specificity and detail in Babbitt's moral teachings. A Christian
may welcome the higher liberalism while missing the higher authority, traditionally
understood.
Babbitt's criticism of modern institutions is so very astute, one wonders
why it wasn't acted upon. He was once very widely read and his ideas had
a hearing both within the academy and without. Although swimming against
the tide, he was a distinguished Harvard professor at the time when Harvard
professors had enormous sway over public opinion. His essays, published
in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday
Review, reached a broadly literate public the likes of which no longer
exists. Babbitt had influential allies and disciples, and for a while in
the 1920s and '30s the prospects for New Humanism looked bright. Perhaps
the times were wrong: the Depression and subsequent post-war prosperity
witnessed a fifty-year's triumph of Progressivism.
In its aftermath, this is certainly the right moment to re-read Irving
Babbitt, though it would be a mistake to expect him to supply easy answers
to contemporary dilemmas. He will hardly satisfy those now who look to
traditional authority to supply the specific direction. Some may even agree
with Tate in his 1930 essay "The Fallacy of Humanism": "Believers in tradition,
reason, and authority . . . will approach the writings of Messrs. Babbitt,
More and Foerster with more than an open mind; they will have in advance
the conviction that 'the rightful concern of man is his humanity, his world
of value . . . that marks him off from a merely quantitative order;' but,
after a great deal of patient reading, they will come away with that conviction--and
with no more than that conviction. They will have got no specific ideas
about values--that is to say, they will have gained no medium for acquiring
them; and such a medium, they will reflect, is morally identical with the
values themselves. Values are not suspended in the air to be plucked."
The question of whether Babbitt's critical philosophy would benefit
from greater reliance on tradition is debatable. I'm inclined to agree
with Tate, and would point to the decline of the New Humanist movement
after Babbitt's death as an example of what was lacking: a "medium," a
tradition that over the long term would lend it the institutional authority
and private passion required to compete successfully. But sixty years on,
there is a tradition of sorts, of which this journal is a vital part. The
republication of Babbitt's works is a basic way in which his ideas acquire
a medium. Another way is to structure and develop his ideas as formal philosophy.
One can also continue the vein of criticism begun by Babbitt, fleshing
out humanist principles by applying them to literary texts and current
affairs. Finally, one can continue his program of resistance and reform
within the academy, the vital spirit behind any humanist enterprise. There
is also the possibility that Humanist convictions could be incorporated
with larger traditions--literary, philosophical, political, and religious--which
have more specific content and which would benefit from what Humanism has
to offer. Those wishing to develop Babbitt's humanism in either direction
will benefit from Claes G. Ryn's extensive introduction, which is succinctly
and masterfully written. The bibliography and comprehensive index at the
back will prove enormously helpful to anyone seeking to bring Irving Babbitt's
ideas to bear on human issues that will be with us always. As even Tate
conceded, "the best of Babbitt is still alive."
David Hill Radcliffe is Associate Professor of English
at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. [back]
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