“Every artist is a moralist, though he need not preach.”
—George Santayana

Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature on December 12, 1930, Sinclair Lewis used the occasion to attack academic traditionalists, who, he said, “like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.” And among that group he singled out the New Humanists, charging that they taught “a doctrine of the blackest reaction introduced into a stirringly revolutionary world.” Lewis’ attack has little value as a critique of the New Humanism, for he obviously understood little about it. When he calls it “an astonishing circus,” a “nebulous cult,” and “this doctrine of death, this escape from the complexities and dangers of living into the secure blankness of the monastery,” he is simply applying his stock satiric rhetoric to create a caricature. His attack is significant, however, as an index of literary-intellectual opinion in 1930. That year marked the apex of the controversy generated by the New Humanism, a literary battle that cleaved deep, penetrating beyond surface layers of taste to moral and cultural nerve centers.

Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, the principal architects of the New Humanism, had been publishing books since the turn of the century, laying an intellectual foundation for American conservatism by a wideranging moral approach to literary and cultural criticism. It was not until about 1928, however, that the New Humanism became highly visible as a kind of movement, the result of more than a decade of protesting liberal criticism synchronized to the bass drumbeat of H.L. Mencken. The New Humanists were alarmed by the erosion of traditional moral values and the deterioration of critical standards combined with an unprecedented hedonism and materialism in American life. The editors of Bookman and Forum, leading literary journals of the time, opened their pages to the Humanists. T.S. Eliot, as editor of Criterion, encouraged articles reflecting the movement’s perspective, thus providing an audience in England.

The result was America’s “battle of the books,” a war of criticism capturing the attention of the American reading public in a way that seems remarkable from our viewpoint in the 80’s. Fashionable literary criticism at present has become so specialized and technical, so divorced from the general reader’s natural and inevitable interest in the relation of literature and life, that even many professors of literature have only a hearsay acquaintance with the theoretical intricacies of structuralism and poststructuralism. In view of the increasingly abstruse and esoteric nature of literary theory, it seems incredible that in May of 1930, 3,000 people attended a Carnegie Hall debate on humanism by Babbitt, Henry Seidel Canby, and Carl Van Doren.

The battle peaked in 1930, when Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilization, edited by Norman Foerster, appeared. The subtitle itself suggests the wide implications the contributors saw in literary matters. This collection of essays, representing a sort of New Humanist manifesto, was vigorously answered by young liberals the same year in The Critique of Humanism: A Symposium, edited by Hartley Grattan. Also that year, Paul Elmer More came very close to receiving the Nobel Prize that went to Lewis.

As a movement, the New Humanism went into eclipse early in the 30’s. The Depression directed literary attention to the left, and Babbitt and More, the most brilliant spokesmen, had really said what they had to say even before the 30’s began and were dead by 1933 and 1937 respectively. But as Austin Warren emphatically insisted in 1958, “It is a ‘VULGAR ERROR’ that, with the deaths of Babbitt and his ally, P.E. More, in the 1930’s, the ‘New Humanism’ movement became extinct. An error.” It “went underground.” Although Lionel Trilling was accurate in noting in 1970 that “at the present time the idea that literature is to be judged by its moral effects has virtually no place in critical theory,” this is not to say that the moral approach is dead in practice. Individual professors on campuses across the country have continued, despite vogues in critical theory, to teach their students to respond to literature as a criticism of life, to examine its moral implications and judge its expression of human values. And wherever there has been a commitment to the inextricable relationship between art and life, ethics and aesthetics. Babbitt and More have been appreciated as persuasive expounders and defenders of the great tradition of moral criticism.

In our century, people advocating restraint, discipline, decorum, and adherence to standards risk being misunderstood. Their principles are readily distorted and caricatured as puritanical, elitist, reactionary, or repressive. “Every doctrine of genuine worth is disciplinary,” noted Babbitt, “and men in the mass do not desire discipline.” Both Babbitt and More labored under a sense of going against the grain of the literary and social values of their day. More considered himself the least read and most despised man within his sphere of activity. Babbitt was haunted by a feeling of isolation, that frustrating sense perhaps common to men of discernment and principle who are deeply convinced of truths the world about them ignores or rejects.

Naturally the New Humanists were caricatured. They were discredited by what Seward Collins in 1932 called the “Myth of the Nasty, Mean, Horrid Old Man,” which asserted that the Humanists were “hard-hearted old men determined to maintain their authority against aspiring youth . . . fixed in ancient ways and petulantly annoyed with novelty . . . arrogantly trying to elevate their own narrow preoccupations into universal edicts.” In an almost Pythagorean set of alternatives—critical/creative, repressive/liberating, old/new, cold/warm, narrow/broad, dogma/choice, and reaction/progress—the Humanists were always placed on what was considered the negative side.

Myths can be persistent. This one, nurtured by Sinclair Lewis’ Nobel Prize speech, has stigmatized Babbitt and More for over 50 years. As a doctoral candidate in the late 60’s, I asked a distinguished specialist in criticism to direct my dissertation on More. “I wouldn’t touch that stuffed shirt with a ten-foot pole,” was his reply. Later I learned that he actually had no firsthand acquaintance with More’s work.

But despite the myth, Babbitt and More continue to find an audience of appreciative readers, and a trickling of books and articles about them has continued since the 30’s. Several selected collections of their writings have appeared: Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne Essays on American Literature, edited by Daniel Aaron in 1963; The Essential Paul Elmer More: A Selection of His Writings, edited by Byron C. Lambert in 1972; and Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings, edited by George A. Panichas in 1981. Russell Kirk, who has done a great deal to promote interest in Babbitt and More, of course includes them in The Portable Conservative Reader (1982).

More has received more booklength attention than Babbitt. Arthur Hazard Dakin’s excellent biography Paul Elmer More (1960) was the product of many years of research and volumes of correspondence with those acquainted with More. Robert M. Davies’ The Humanism of Paul Elmer More (1958) focuses on More’s philosophical and religious writing. Francis X. Duggan’s Paul Elmer More (1966) is a brief but informative critical biography in the Twayne United States Authors Series. (My own study of the literary criticism, Paul Elmer More: Literary Criticism as the History of Ideas, is in press.) The New Humanism as a movement usually receives a chapter in the histories of American literary criticism, but finally received the more extensive consideration it deserves in J. David Hoeveler Jr.’s The New Humanism: A Critique of Modern American, 1900-1940 (1977).

Recently, a renewed interest in Babbitt is manifesting itself In November 1983 a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death was held at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. The papers presented are scheduled to appear as a book. Meanwhile, three of them recently appeared in Modern Age.

Thomas R. Nevin’s Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study, is the first booklength study of this major but neglected figure. Brief but authoritative, and using hitherto unpublished material, this book displays thorough research and perceptive analysis. Nevin calls his study “a history of Babbitt’s mind,” and in addition to tracing the development of Babbitt’s thought, he provides extensive comparisons with More’s thought.

Such comparisons are useful because the two men were for many years the kind of friends who embrace essentially the same values and principles. From the time they were graduate students of Sanskrit together at Harvard in the 1890’s, until Babbitt’s death in 1933, they corresponded regularly and met whenever the occasion presented itself They were fundamentally one in their opposition to excessive and dehumanizing forms of romanticism, naturalism, humanitarianism, scientism, and rationalism. Together they championed “the inner check,” the “law of measure,” the importance of discipline and standards, the values of classicism, the importance of common sense and experience as a check to rationalistic abstraction—all these as corollaries of their fundamental dualistic tenet.

Babbitt and More were generalists of a kind rarely, if ever, encountered today. Our culture and systems of education simply do not produce such minds. In an age of academic specialization, we do not look for a man like More, who knew Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Pali, and apparently some Hebrew, not to mention several modern languages; who edited The Nation; who wrote six volumes on Greek philosophy and early Christian history; who published 13 volumes of literary and social criticism on topics ranging from Greek romance to Walt Whitman; who translated Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, several of Plato’s dialogues, and a collection of Indian epigrams; who wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin, a novel, a book of poems, a book of religious philosophy, an intellectual autobiography, and collaborated on an anthology of Anglicanism and a literature text. And this list is not exhaustive, though perhaps exhausting to reflect upon. Babbitt’s erudition breadth of interests are similarly impressive.

Such breadth of learning and concerns partly accounts for the lasting appeal of these two men, whom T.S. Eliot identified as the wisest he had known. It also helps to explain the present renewed interest in them. Both literary theory and philosophy have turned away from the large questions of how men should live and what they should value. Evaluation and judgment have been replaced by analysis for its own sake and interpretation functioning outside the sphere of traditional values. Richard Gilman represents the conventional “wisdom”: “The old Mediterranean values—the belief in the sanctity of the individual soul, the importance of logical clarity, brotherhood, reason as arbitrary political order, community—are dead as useful frames of reference or pertinent guides to procedure; they are even making some of us sick with a sense of lacerating irony.” We have come a long way from Babbitt and More, and some would like to see us retrace our steps.

Given the chaotic fragmentation of contemporary experience and the tawdry blandishments of a consumer culture; given the essential poverty of so much of what today passes for thought and feeling; given the weakness of our institutions, the confusion of our values, the enfeeblement (or default) of social authority; given, finally, our diminished sense of personal connectedness and the notorious frailty of our communal ties, Babbitt and More’s bold defense of restraint, discipline, standards, and tradition is a bracing and salutary thing to sample. And its current relevance is increased by the startlingly accurate predictions these two men made in consequence of their analyses of cultural and spiritual trends.

They were not without their blind spots. No critic is ever right in the sense that he says all that could or should be said on a particular subject or that his emphasis is definitive. As Lionel Trilling observed in connection with Matthew Arnold (a figure important to both Babbitt and More), “We properly judge a critic’s virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself—he has in mind the demands he makes upon life; and those critics are most to be trusted who allow these demands, in all their particularity, to be detected by their readers.” There is never any doubt about what Babbitt and More demand of life. Their mistakes are in the open, but so are the lively principles by which they made them. And those principles are as vital in the 80’s as they have ever been.

 

[Irving Babbitt: An Intellectual Study, by Thomas R. Nevin (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press) $20.00]