Arts and Letters

From time to time men rise up full of purpose to make the good life more accessible to all men; some of them act from ambition, conscious or unconscious, some from coiled energy within, some from the stimulus of serving a large cause, and most plunge headlong into action; only a few set themselves apart to study, to think, to reason, only a very few consecrate themselves by a long vigil, as it were, beside their arms. Without the incentive of religious belief such self-discipline is rare. Of this scanty band Irving Babbitt was one. He believed that there were deteriorating forces in the world—in the United States, in democracy, in Harvard University—and that it was his business to combat them; and, as we all know, his formula of battle was the great tradition of Humanism.

During the long flow of European history many high causes have come and gone, leaving behind them as their most abiding monument the memory of the zeal and generous purpose by which they were upheld and defended, and I think that we may be sure that, whatever fate befall this doctrine of Humanism, the name of Irving Babbitt will be remembered as that of a man who bore himself like a crusader. "One should not be moderate," he says, "in dealing with error." His books are so many combats, all full of honorable contention, Literature and The American College (1908), The New Laocoon (1910), The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Democracy and Leadership (1924); and in his chair at Harvard College for nearly forty years he manifested the same zeal, the same generous purpose.

These books, I am ashamed to say, I had never read till lately, and I was hardly well in them when, following that tendency that a truant mind too readily follows, my thoughts became more absorbed in the spirit behind the ideas than in the ideas themselves, and there flashed into my mind the memory of the charming verses in the Hartsreise in which Heinrich Heine describes his visit to a charcoal burner's hut. The old people have withdrawn themselves, and the poet sits talking in front of the fire with their little daughter. His emotions have been touched by the quiet of the mountain top, by the solemn forest, by the pious simplicity of these mountain folk, and he is troubled because the little girl suspects his Christian piety. So he explains to her that even as a little boy he believed in God the Father, and later on in God the Son, and at last also in God the Holy Ghost. You remember the scene. The girl gazes at him with wondering eyes, while he tells her how the Holy Ghost is engaged in the hard task of purifying the world and how thousands of knights ride forth to fight under His command. And as the poet's emotions rise at the thought of the Holy Ghost he bids the girl look at him, and not be afraid, for he himself is one of the knights of the Holy Ghost.

Nun, so schau mich an, mein Kindchen,
Küsse mich und schaue dreist!
Denn ich selber bin ein solcher
Ritter von dem heil'gen Geist!

From what I hear of Irving Babbitt, he always acted as if he, too, were a knight in the service of a great power for good, which he would not have called the Holy Ghost, but "Our Higher Intuitions," "The Higher Will," or to quote his own words, "Positively one may define it as the higher immediacy that is known in its relation to the lower immediacy—the merely temperamental man with his impressions and emotions and expansive desires—as a power of vital control (frein vital)." This definition is admirably expressive of his own self-controlled, puritanical character.

I use the word puritanical, and yet I do not wish to be misunderstood. A Puritan Irving Babbitt appears in his books, very serious, a little stern, but those that knew him personally did not find him so. In conversation he allowed himself a freedom which he denied himself when writing; then, he let himself run into picturesque exaggerations, he was witty, humorous, brilliant, full of ideas, stimulating. Young men delighted to go for a walk with him and hear him talk. But to that side of him I cannot do justice, as I did not have the honor to know him, and so I return to his achievement.

As I have said, Irving Babbitt was troubled at heart by the deficiencies and failures and misbehaviour of poor, wayward humanity, and he went to work to put right the matters that seemed to him the most out of joint. Some of us, I speak it to our shame, are content to stand aside and watch these human waywardnesses, as we do the course of tortuous rivers, with a sort of amused indifference. Not so he. He was a scholar, a profound scholar, one of the most erudite that America has produced, he stalked familiarly through ancient, mediaeval, and modern literatures, seeking, selecting, analyzing, defining, and compacting the ideas that he wove into his doctrine of Humanism, in order to provide all those that would accept it a high and healing philosophy of life.

The doctrine of Humanism varies to a certain degree, I suppose, according to the predilections of those that entertain it. It hails from the scholars of the Renaissance who interested themselves in the classical civilization, with its comparative indifference to the supernatural and its emphasis upon the dignity of man. Aristotle had laid stress upon the line of separation between the rational man, who recognizes the authority of reason, and the instinctive man who obeys his impulses, and he had asserted that man's chief good does not lie in mere animal existence, but in the recognition of the lordship of reason, in the supremacy of intellect and will. After long ages, this rational man of Aristotle's reviving during the Renaissance, and continuing on, gradually evolved into the Humanist with his Aristotelian qualities, enlarged and elaborated. As I understand it, this doctrine lays down three categories. The category to the right includes those who believe in a supernatural order, who tend to subordinate reason to faith, and diminish man's human importance by regarding his life on earth as a mere fragment of a larger existence. The category to the left contains a more varied company. It includes those who disregard the cleavage which Aristotle marked between man the human being and man the animal, those who disregard Emerson's pronouncement that there is a law for man and a law for thing, those who, absorbed in scientific specialties, look upon humanity as of the same stuff as the substances they study in their laboratories, and all those who treat man as part and parcel of the natural order; it includes humanitarians, who pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin to men's physical needs and neglect the weightier matters of the will and intellect; it includes romanticists, who give loose rein to sensation, sentiment, sympathy, instinct, temperament, and in general all one-sided people who float along on the flux of phenomena.

In the path between these two categories walk the Humanists, head erect, creatures of will and intellect; they believe in a well-rounded life, in discipline and self-restraint, in the golden mean; they avoid the excess of supernaturalism to the right and of naturalism to the left, they value form, measure, proportion, discrimination, selection; they seek the permanent in the whirl of change, reality in the mists of illusion, unity in multiplicity; and, more than all else, as the foundation stone of their philosophy, they believe that there is in man "a restraining, informing and centralizing power that is anterior to both intellect and emotion," and that this power, this Higher Will, should hold a tight rein over man's loose, wandering, uncharted desires, should be a law-enforcing policeman to all such physical rowdies. And they claim that the best traditions of the world are with them, that Confucius was one of them, that Sophocles, Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, Erasmus, were of them. In short the humanist stands on the dignity of human nature, on the creed that intuition reveals to him a Higher Will, and that he is capable of self-dedication to that Higher Will. But in order to do this men need standards that are set above individual caprice and the flux of phenomena. "We must (to quote his words) strive to get at standards positively and critically, and such striving might best be defined as Socratic, Aristotelian, and Christian, and should put prime emphasis on definition, for the sake of clear thinking, on habit, for the sake of character, on humility, which is measuring oneself by high standards." And so, in this manner, he looks out beyond the little horizon that bounds the sight of ordinary men, up at high encircling mountains that he could see beyond.

I am sorry, I am no philosopher, I flounder in the flux of multitudinous impressions, and perceive no patterns but those of human experience, and, as you see, I cannot do this high ethical theory justice. Yet, as I look beneath the rich brocaded drapery of erudition with which Irving Babbitt presents his theory, what I do understand is this, that the humanist is very similar to what the Greeks called Καλός Κ' αγαθός and the English call an honorable gentleman. Babbitt himself says, "After all to be a good humanist is merely to be moderate and sensible and decent."

I repeat that through ignorance, or mental or moral indolence, or lack of intelligence, I do not go along with all that Babbitt says, but his teaching reminds me of the words spoken by Socrates to Charmides, and I seem to hear Irving Babbitt saying in his kind, dogmatic way, these same words to me: "Wisdom or temperance I believe to be really a great good… and I would advise you… to rest assured that the more wise and temperate you are, the happier you will be."

Humanism may, or may not, lead us into a promised land but the austere, firm, upright, puritanical personality of Irving Babbitt will always be a burning and a shining light.