Irving Babbitt
(1865-1933) and Paul Elmer More were the two chief proponents of the New
Humanist movement in the first half of the twentieth century.
Babbitt and the New
Humanists perceived that Western culture had been negatively impacted by the
naturalism of eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
which was, in turn, perpetuated by the reliance on intuition and emotion in the
works of the nineteenth-century Romantic era. Instead, Babbitt prescribed a
thorough background in the literature that he believed instilled classical
ethics, morality, and disciplined reason divorced from contemporaneous
political and materialistic ideology and focused on universal conservative
values. This conservatism in an era increasingly concerned with modernism made
Babbitt and the New Humanists lightning rods for derision from the prevailing
cultural critics, including Sinclair Lewis, who allegedly named the repressed
title character of his 1922 novel Babbitt after him, and openly
denounced the New Humanists in his Nobel Prize acceptance address. As a result
of the popular novel, the name Babbitt became synonymous for a type of
philistine individual who is mired in the past and rejects anything new out of
fear. Babbitt had many supporters, however, including his former student T. S.
Eliot, who adopted many of Babbitt's views on classical literature and the
decline of cultural values, as well as his teachings on the Oriental belief
systems Confucianism and Buddhism in his poem The Waste Land. Eliot
and Babbitt remained lifelong friends but differed on Babbitt's belief in
humankind's possession of an internal ethical will, an "inner check"
with which Eliot disagreed on the grounds that it did not allow for the
consideration of the existence of a higher spiritual power. Chief among his
cultural concerns, Babbitt identified the notion of individuality as advanced
by democratic approaches to education: "One is inclined, indeed, to ask,
in certain moods, whether the net result of the [commercialism] movement that
has been sweeping the Occident for several generations may not be a huge mass
of standardized mediocrity; and whether in this country in particular we are
not in danger of producing in the name of democracy one of the most trifling
brands of the human species that the world has yet seen." Babbitt is
credited also with creating a national forum to discuss literature as a means
to shape and influence political and moral thought. In his book The
Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote that Babbitt "joined the broken
links between politics and morals, and that is a work of genius. He knew that
the conservation of the old things we love must be founded upon valid ideas of
the highest order, if conservatism is to withstand naturalism and its political
progeny."
Babbitt was born in Dayton,
Ohio, to Edwin Dwight and Augusta Darling Babbitt. His mother died when he was
eleven years old. His father, a physician and businessman father, was engaged
in several get-rich-quick schemes, including founding the New York College of
Magnetics and publishing several health manuals with such titles as "Vital
Magnetism: The Life Fountain." Historians conjecture that Babbitt's
father's socialist politics and outlandish schemes served to encourage Babbitt's
later outspoken conservatism. As a young man, Babbitt sold newspapers in New
York City; lived for a time with relatives in Ohio; worked as farmhand; worked
on a ranch in Wyoming; and was a police reporter in Cincinnati, Ohio. With
financial assistance from his uncles, he attended Harvard College in 1885,
where he earned a four-year degree in classics. Upon graduation, he accepted a
position as a classics instructor at the College of Montana, earning enough
money to enroll in Sanskrit and Pali
classes held in Paris, France. He returned to Harvard, earning a graduate
degree in 1893. He was appointed professor of Romance languages at Williams
College, but returned to Harvard to teach French and comparative literature
until his death in 1933. In his writings and lectures, Babbitt disparaged
sentimentality, materialism, and a disregard for the past, while advocating
self-restraint and personal discipline. He married one of his former students,
Dora May Drew, in 1900, and the couple produced two children. In 1926, he was
named a corresponding member of the Institute of France. In 1930, he was
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received an honorary
degree from Bowdoin College in 1932.
Babbitt was among the first
literary critics to gain a wide audience by publishing essays in such
mass-circulation periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly and the Nation.
Several of these essays are included in his first book, Literature and the
American College: Essays in Defense of the
Humanities, which was published in 1908. In such essays as "The
College and the Democratic Spirit" and "Literature and the Doctor's
Degree," Babbitt negatively criticized the academic policies of Harvard
president Charles William Eliot that allowed students to establish their own courses
of study rather than enforce a rigid academic regimen emphasizing
self-discipline. Babbitt argued that allowing students to elect their own
course of study reduces the universal authority of the academy in favor of the individual. Among the chief culprits against a
wide-ranging cultural education, Babbitt believed, was the influence of the
French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Babbitt, the wide
acceptance of Rousseau's theories in Western culture resulted in the blurring
of lines between natural laws for humans and laws for things. Agreeing with
Ralph Waldo Emerson that the two laws remain separate, Babbitt believed that
Rousseau and the Romantics endangered classical intellectual and rationalist
humanist standards by replacing them with a sentimental and emotional
attachment with nature. Such was his vehement attacks on Rousseau that his
Harvard students joked that Babbitt checked under his bed for Rousseau each
night before going to sleep.
In his second book, The
New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts,
published in 1910, Babbitt attacked the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, believing it to be a logical extension of
Rousseau's philosophy of naturalism. By emphasizing powerful emotion, Babbitt
believed, the Romantics negated form as a restraining mechanism necessary to
raise art from the temporal to the universal. Borrowing the phrase "inner
check" from Emerson—who had borrowed it from Eastern
philosophy—Babbitt believed that a degree of
self-discipline was necessary to temper what he perceived to be the excessive
emotional and individualistic nature of nineteenth-century literature.
According to Russell Kirk: "Those checks are supplied by reason— not the private rationality of the Enlightenment, but by the higher
reason that grows out of a respect for the wisdom of one's ancestors and out of
the endeavor to apprehend the character of good and
evil." In his next volume, The Masters of Modern French Criticism,
published in 1912, Babbitt establishes a lineage of like-minded critics to
support his belief that literature since Rousseau had been in steady decline.
One critical measure of a literary work's merit, he wrote, was its historical
perspective.
Following World War I,
Babbitt widened his attacks on modernism, romanticism, and democracy, which he
perceived to expediting the decadence of Western culture through materialism
and unlimited growth. The resulting democratic aims of equality he believed
resulted in the anarchy of proletarian art in place of high art. In Democracy
and Leadership, he furthered his attacks on the democratization of
literature and, by extension, society. Russell Kirk wrote: Democracy and
Leadership is perhaps the most penetrating work on politics ever written
by an American—and this precisely because it is not
properly a political treatise, but really a work of moral philosophy."
Among the philosophers and social critics Babbitt interpreted in this work was
Edmund Burke, who advocated an adherence to the permanence of traditional
values, which Babbitt called "imaginative conservatism." Babbitt's
views were controversial, coming under attack for his authoritarian refusal by
writers in such publications as The New Republic and the Hound and
Horn. These writers faulted Babbitt's refusal to consider literature from
the previous century, and his authoritarian approach to political and social
beliefs. Babbitt argued his points to an audience of more than three thousand
at New York City's Carnegie Hall, as well as in the pages of The Bookman
and The Forum, as well as receiving support from T. S. Eliot in the Criterion.
Eliot, however, rejected the secular nature of the humanist "inner
check" because he felt it advocated ethics without religion. Paul Elmer
More, perhaps the most ardent supporter of Babbitt's beliefs, also rejected the
secular nature of the inner check.
Adams, Hazard, Critical
Theory since Plato, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1971.
Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vol. 63: Modern American Critics, 1920-1955, Gale Group, Detroit, Michigan,
1988.
Eliot, T. S., "The
Humanism of Irving Babbitt," in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,
1975.
Kirk, Russell,
"Critical Conservatism: Babbitt, More, Santayana," in The
Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Regenery
Publishing, Inc., Washington, D. C., 1985.
Kirk, Russell, Eliot
and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century,
Sherwood, Sugden & Company Publishers, Peru, Illinois,
1984.
Nevin, Thomas, Irving Babbitt: An
Intellectual Study, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, 1984.
The New Republic, June 17, 1985, p. 36.
Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2000. □