IV THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

“Our ‘intellectual atmosphere,’ however, is now rapidly changing, is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons, oppressed with the stale skepticism of the post-war period, are beginning to grow skeptical of that skepticism, and are looking for a new set of controlling ideas capable of restoring value to human existence. Certain forces are making for order and for new objectives.... One of these forces is known as ‘humanism,’ which is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with.”—Norman Foerster in Humanism and America.

Before I can treat the grounds of the New Humanist doctrine, I must turn historian and present, briefly at least, correct information about the origin and course of the movement which acknowledges Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More as masters. I am forced to this by the amount of misinformation and crude misrepresentation already widely disseminated concerning More and Babbitt and their colleagues. How this spreading of erroneous information, which now stands in our view, has come about is easily explained. American Humanism has had a quiet development for thirty-five years, making its way chiefly in academic channels and in scholarly books. Not until very recently, and then principally because of the spirited campaign waged in behalf of Babbitt and More by the Bookman, has this body of thought made any strong infiltration into popular literary journalism.

Now the roving eye of the literary journalist-at-large seldom glances at anything growing up in the universities, and it missed altogether the New Humanist movement until it emerged in force in the winter of 1929–1930. Then, to his surprise, the literary journalist found himself expected by his public to say something about Humanism. He was totally unprepared to do so, but experience has given him a cynical attitude toward his public. He is the lazy tutor who does not study one lesson in advance of his pupil, but he has learned how to divert the mind of his charge, should he be asked an inconvenient question. He then makes a great play on non-essentials, he bluffs it out until the hour is over, knowing well that his pupil will soon forget both the question and the mystifying answer. To send the public off on false scents was the shift, not always adopted dishonestly, of the unprepared literary journalist when Humanism became no longer an avoidable topic. For literary journalists, it seems, are never pen-tied because of ignorance: no difficulty was experienced in promptly delivering opinions having no bearing on the facts, lacking logic, missing the real issues,—wrong opinions, in short. Myths about the New Humanism were quickly generated, giving delight to connoisseurs in the absurd, but decidedly misleading to gentleman-readers wishing simply for plain light on the new trend. However, to dispel these myths, which obstruct thought, nothing more is needed than some bald information.

It is dramatic contrast, in view of the international attention his teachings have won, to begin with a picture of Irving Babbitt⁠[1] in his classroom, working obscurely, as befits an underminer of an age’s basic assumptions, at his task of moulding the mind of a generation. Among the many professional writers and brilliant teachers who have come out from his courses—one may mention as a catholic selection T. S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Norman Foerster, Gilbert Seldes, Newton Arvin—was the late Stuart P. Sherman, who has left us a roughly drawn description of his early master’s wealth of mind and strength for destruction and construction.

“I knew Professor Babbitt as a graduate teacher in the History of Literary Criticism and in his Rousseau and His Influence. At that time he had very small classes—meeting around a table. He came in with a bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he arranged around him. Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon one of them, and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or some line of poetry,—‘to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly show’—Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal, Milton, etc.—etc.

“He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a reconstruction of your entire intellectual system. He was at you day after day like a battering ram, knocking down your illusions. He was building up a system of ideas.

“You never felt for a moment that he was a pedagogue, teaching pupils. You felt that he was a Coleridge, a Carlyle, a Buddha, pouring out the full-stuffed cornucopia of the world upon your head. You were no longer in the elementary class. You were with a man who was seeking through literature for illustrations of his philosophy of life. You were dealing with questions on the answer to which the welfare of nations and civilization depended. He himself seemed to know the right answer and was building a thoroughfare of ideas from the Greeks to our own day.

“You went out of the room laden down with general ideas that he had made seem tremendously important.... He related for you a multitude of separate and apparently disconnected tendencies to the great central currents of thought. You carried away also a sense of the need for immense reading. He had given you theses about literature, about life, which you would spend a lifetime in verifying.”

A battering ram knocking down illusions ... myself, I like to think of Irving Babbitt as a dogmatist of the Dr. Johnson type, burly in his judgments, masculine in his sentiments, downright in manner, an unyielding hater of sophistry, a stalwart upholder of commonsense. What is remarkable, in view of the extent of his system, is that he should have laid out at the age of thirty the ground-plan for his whole impressive structure of ideas. “The characteristic thought of Irving Babbitt,” as Norman Foerster observes, “was already adumbrated in 1895 in an address at the University of Wisconsin on ‘The Rational Study of the Classics,’ published two years later in the Atlantic Monthly and in 1908 included in his book on Literature and the American College.” Since then he has steadily developed his original thesis: confident of his foundations, he has put up a heavy, many-fronted, turreted fortress for the modern mind to retire into and survey across a moat of commonsense the giddy wheelings of the “modernists,” those, that is, who make a cult of change and take change to be “progress.”

But what were Babbitt’s sources? His mind is powerfully assimilative and very muscular in its operations. He has applied it to world literature, east and west, ancient and modern, and naturally therefore his sources are varied. He is more Aristotelian than Platonic, however, and he takes more from Confucius than from Buddha. He feels himself at home with the rugged conservatism of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke, and he stands with Matthew Arnold as an urger of more Hellenism in Anglo-Saxon culture.

His more immediate stimulators in American literature seem to be Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton. Emerson as a volatile literary force arose from many elements, one of them assuredly humanistic, and from this fortifying element in Emerson Babbitt has drawn much aid to his own spirit. It was the element which Emerson expressed in the didactic poem quoted on the flyleaf of Babbitt’s first book, Literature and the American College, and which no American Humanist since has apparently been able to refrain from quoting some place or other in his writings. I also succumb to the poem’s epigrammatic appeal and concision.

In respect to that man of truly mellow culture, Charles Eliot Norton, friend of Carlyle, co-editor with Lowell of the North American Review, professor of fine arts at Harvard, and celebrated Dantean scholar and translator, to him Babbitt acknowledged his indebtedness in the preface to Literature and the American College, written in 1907 shortly before Norton’s death.⁠[2] “Those who,” Babbitt wrote, “during the past generation have felt the need of a more humane scholarship are indebted to him, many for direct aid and encouragement, and all for an example.”

By 1910 Babbitt had found strong fellowship in the direction his mind was working, notably the fellowship of Paul Elmer More. More had been born in St. Louis, Missouri, a year earlier than Babbitt: he graduated from Washington University in 1887 and took his master’s degree from Harvard in 1893, the same date as Babbitt. In the college year of 1894–1895 the two men were thrown together again, More as an instructor in Sanskrit at Harvard and Babbitt as an instructor in the French department. In the intervening year Babbitt had taught in the Romance Languages department of Williams College and there he had met a young instructor, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., who was destined to figure importantly in the growth of American Humanism. But not for long were Babbitt and More to work together as university colleagues, for from Harvard More went to Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed two years teaching Sanskrit and classical literature. Then in 1901, after his retreat to Shelburne, New Hampshire, for meditation, he joined the staff of the Independent as literary editor. Mather too gave up academic work at this time and entered journalism as an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post: he was for various terms in the future to be its art critic as well as assistant editor of the Nation and American editor for the Burlington Magazine. More’s future included the literary editorship of the New York Evening Post from 1903 to 1909, and the editorship of the Nation, then the supreme organ of American scholarship, from 1909 to 1914. In the meantime he had begun to write his well known series of literary studies, the Shelburne Essays.

More and Babbitt complement each other extraordinarily. If Babbitt inclines to Aristotle, More inclines to Plato. If Babbitt writes on literary trends, using particular authors only in so far as they illustrate trends, More studies the individual genius, somewhat in the sinuous fashion of Sainte-Beuve, and then points out the trend. Babbitt, speaking roughly, is a critic of culture, More a critic of authors. Their area of agreement is very wide: they unite against Romanticism, agree substantially on Humanism, and diverge only when it comes to the kind of interest and the warmth of interest they feel in Religion. In short, More is more religious by temperament than Babbitt.

After his retirement from the Nation in 1914, More devoted himself to an enterprise of scholarship and criticism which well deserves an adjective to be used with care, an adjective which has several times been applied to it by men who do not write lightly, I mean the adjective, monumental; and for the wonderful completion of this enterprise he has occasionally been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. The undertaking was The Greek Tradition in five volumes, an impressive and inspiring account of the relation of Platonic and Hellenistic thought to early Christian thought; it is a work, incidentally, that has not yet even begun to be digested by American criticism.

There are those who believe More to be the best literary critic in the history of American literature. I think that is so: he appears to me an American counterpart to Cardinal Newman in his grasp at once of the ways of men, the subtle arguments of materialism, and reasoned belief in the spiritual life. But be that as it may, he is today the doyen of American critics, and as such a cause for national pride. Agree or not with their teachings, we must all feel pride that America presents to Europe as, respectively, her doyen of critics and as her master-spokesman for classical literary ideas two men of the resolution, deep scholarship, elevated thought, ripeness of judgment and wide sweep of purpose which characterize Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt.

Possibly the future of American Humanism will be dramatic. Already it has enough adherents of a polemical turn of mind, sharp controversialists like Robert Shafer and Seward Collins, to make things hot for their natural opponents, the Liberals, and the Liberals are certainly not going to relinquish their leadership of present-day American literature and thought before resorting to every device of literary dispute. Perhaps in the next decade Humanist and Liberal will pamphleteer against each other with all the zest and pungency and fierceness of the verbal warfare waged between Tories and Whigs in eighteenth century England. But up till now the New Humanists have been mainly perfecting their viewpoint, gathering strength, and preparing for action.

I distinguish three generations of New Humanists and divide, very arbitrarily, the rise of American Humanism thus far into three brief periods, the first from 1900 to 1917, when Stuart P. Sherman’s On Contemporary Literature appeared, the second from 1917 to the publication of Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership in 1924, and the third from 1924 to the present.

From 1900 to 1917 the first generation of New Humanists was teaching and writing out of its maturity. Babbitt was publishing his views on educational reform, on modern confusion in the arts, and on literary criticism. More was brilliantly editing the Nation and composing volume after volume of carefully thought out and gracefully written studies of literature. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was making a name as an exacting but sympathetic critic of the fine arts, a calling of which in America he is now the dean. In passing, it may be noted that Mather was a pioneer in the work of advancing the books of Herman Melville to a front place in our literature. At the University of Nebraska, Prosser Hall Frye and Sherlock Bronson Gass were teaching, thinking and writing. Perhaps most prominent of all was the late W. C. Brownell, of whom more than mere mention is required.

Brownell, More and Babbitt—the names often formed a triad, and yet Brownell never held explicitly the general ideas worked out by More and Babbitt. The bond was sympathetic, but intellectually not clearly established. I once ventured to call Brownell a Victorian standpatter. Perhaps this was too harsh. Objection was taken by a critic who nevertheless declared that Brownell’s “senses never felt a concrete situation freshly, unmediated by the anticipation of habit. His mind, acute in distinguishing things, rarely attained any ideas and never a general philosophy. And his feeling for life seldom drove him to remove the blinkers of convention.” It will be seen that these defects lead to standpattism, however, and Brownell resisted change and stood in general for the Mid-Victorian temper and standards. His mind and tastes were typically nineteenth century: he did not have the freedom of the centuries so arduously won by Babbitt and More. But he was loosely united to them in the low opinion he entertained of many forms of modernism and in his insistence on critical standards.

Knowledge of the work these men—Brownell, Gass, Frye, Mather, More and Babbitt—were performing in the early years of this century relieves a little the oppressive feeling of dearth we have in regarding that time in America. In Their Day in Court, an out-of-print book by a forgotten impressionistic critic, Percival Pollard, we may get an excellent picture of this brief period of literary dearth. Pollard fought against the dry rot of the professors, the genteelness of editors like Hamilton Wright Mabie, the commercialism of most that passed for criticism, and the overwhelming mediocrity of the period’s books. Rather sadly he said in 1908: “It does not seem to me as if there were, on our side of the Atlantic, any longer such a thing as the art of letters; it is merely a trade.” In that same year a gifted young poet, Ezra Pound, fled our country, and later in his poem, L’Homme Moyen Sensuel, expressed his disgust for the quietism of the times more violently than even Pollard did.

So it was up to about 1912. There were certain giants looming over the scene—Howells and Henry James and Mark Twain—but they had no great animating effect upon it. James seemed too remote, Howells too selective and genteel in his realism, and Mark Twain too given to compromises. According to Pollard, the one American of literary genius then alive was almost completely neglected. He meant Ambrose Bierce.

Pollard and Pound were right. The period in spite of James, Howells and Mark Twain and, if you will, Bierce, was low in creative vitality, and the bulk of its criticism was feeble,—Huneker flashing the cheap jewelry of his style, Mabie composing his “White Lists” of books: both extremists can without a second’s reluctance be dispensed with. But looking back, now that the transient criticism of 1900–1912 has been swept away, we see that there were more independent critics at work than Pollard recognized and that they were doing extremely hard thinking amidst the plague of mediocre books. They continued to elaborate their thought as American literature entered upon a new and more fertile phase between 1912 and 1915.

Some of the multiplying signs of the coming of a new order were the founding of Poetry magazine in Chicago, the establishment of the New Republic, the beginnings of the Little Review and Others, the blooming of Greenwich Village, and the generative center for fresh art impulses set up at “291,” the art gallery of Alfred Stieglitz. Soon a new group of authors began winning laurels: Masters, Dreiser, Mencken, Brooks, Bourne, were on the rise. The ferment worked faster ... little theatres ... the Masses and the Liberator ... Coady’s Soil magazine ... the Seven Arts ... the Nation under Villard ... the Dial as a libertarian fortnightly. American participation in the war only made the new ventures bubble more furiously: they flourished, when not strangled by official censorship, on dissent. Finally, in 1919 came Waldo Frank’s Our America, the distillation of this time of ferment from 1912.

Frank in this book took no cognisance, as his confrère Van Wyck Brooks did, of the critical activities of the first generation of the New Humanists. Nor did he pause to examine the work of Stuart P. Sherman, the forerunner of the second generation of American Humanists. But Sherman in 1917 had brought about the first spectacular duel between the New Humanists and the naturalists represented by H. L. Mencken. Sherman had been trained at Harvard under Babbitt: as a contributor to the Nation, he had been groomed by Paul Elmer More. In 1917 he published a book, On Contemporary Literature, in which he played the part of the younger spokesman for classicism.

It is the best of Sherman’s books. Nine-tenths of his work is mediocre, but in On Contemporary Literature he surpassed himself. His insights into such authors as Synge, George Moore, Anatole France, H. G. Wells, Theodore Dreiser were sharp, deep and excruciating to those who admired them. Of George Moore, he wrote: “Purely intellectual initiative he had none: but he has been swiftly responsive to every new influence in art and literature. All his life he has lurked in the purlieus of schools and insinuated himself into movements, solicitating, like the barren Calpurnia, the fructifying touch of some fleet clear eyed runner ... Mr. Moore does not think: he muses.” Of Anatole France, he observed: “He loves above all else the luxury of philosophic despair ... The skepticism of M. France is largely a literary pose. It is his justification for unlimited intellectual self-indulgence.” And here is an excellent working distinction between realism and naturalism in fiction: “Both are representations of the life of man in contemporary or nearly contemporary society, and both are presumably composed of materials within the experience and observation of the author. But the realistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of human conduct. If the theory of human conduct is adequate, the representation constitutes an addition to literature and to social history. A naturalistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of animal behavior. Since a theory of animal behavior can never be an adequate basis for a representation of the life of man in contemporary society, such a representation is an artistic blunder.”

Little wonder such thrusts as these produced an outcry, and there is now no doubt that Sherman was vilified on the strength of this acute book. We may look forward to the sober correction of the partisan denunciations he called forth. In the meantime let us hear a Humanist version of Sherman’s duel with Mencken, as an offset to the much better known story given out by the sympathizers with Mencken. I quote from Seward Collins writing in the Bookman:

“Until after the war the main force of his (Sherman’s) work lay in the brilliant application of the point of view he had learned from Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More, carrying into the enemy’s camp their warfare against naturalism and deliquescent romanticism. With the publication of On Contemporary Literature at the end of 1917 he became the recognized spokesman for tradition and authority against the ‘liberating’ and ‘innovating’ efforts of the latest generation. The effectiveness of his campaign may be judged from the shrieks, hoots and curses which greeted his book in the radical magazines and in some of the newspapers, notably in Chicago, where the new men occupied most of the reviewing media. The Chicago outburst, characterized by unanimous, simultaneous and extreme virulence, makes very amusing reading in retrospect. Several records in this kind of criticism must have been hung up during the onslaught, which went on for weeks.

“Participants in the Chicago attack have explained that factors aside from the book itself entered into the reception of On Contemporary Literature. The cause most frequently given is the review of Mencken’s A Book of Prejudices which Sherman published in the Nation of November 29, 1917—just a month before his own book appeared—under the title Beautifying American Literature. The review might well explain any amount of rage among Mencken’s friends and disciples: it was one of the most completely devastating slatings of a book and of a man ever penned....

“This encounter was really an historic occasion in American letters and thought. On the one side, for a number of years Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More had brought supreme qualities of intellect, scholarship, and literary skill to the perennial task of restating the case for tradition in literature, morals, politics and philosophy. The result was a series of powerful books providing almost a new basis for the traditionalist cause, but one related at every point to the earlier American traditionalists, to the main stream of European culture, and to the great classical traditions of both the West and the East. In Stuart Sherman these men had found a young disciple and champion whose gifts, while not qualifying him to advance their work along all of the extremely broad front on which they were engaged, yet enabled him to make immediate and effective application of their views in their own country and among the writers of the day.

“On the other side, the disruptive, anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional tendencies, which America had for the most part resisted even when in the ’nineties they took England by storm, after their successful tour of the continent, had from the beginning of the century been gathering strength. As the century got into its teens, the new forces found a vigorous, infectious spokesman in H. L. Mencken, who had spent his youth soaking up all the prevalent forms of the heretical doctrines—Huxleyan agnosticism and science-worship, Pater’s æstheticism with trimmings by Wilde, the hedonism and routine mockery of Anatole France, the inverted sentimentality of Nietzsche, Ibsen, and the other shrunken giants of fifty years ago, and so on. To all this Mencken had added a Bohemian individualism from various sources (given aristocratic airs by talk of Federalism, the civilized minorities, etc.), a smart up-to-dateness, and a talent for the violent buffoonery of American provincial journalism. To many this rich mixture proved irresistible.

“These two antagonistic tendencies developed side by side for years without clashing: the new men were restricted to shady magazines, fleeting-tendency journals, and infrequent books which remained outside channels of discussion. But in Mencken had arrived a personality who could not be overlooked. And in Sherman the traditionalists had a representative so sensitive to the forceful figures of his day that he must have his say on them. The two men, who had been born a few months apart, had entered upon literary criticism within a few weeks of each other in 1908, and now at the end of 1917 published almost simultaneously their first significant books. The result was the episode which we have recounted. The old had met the new in open conflict, and the fight was on.”

I take this episode which Collins has described so vividly to mark the end of the first period of American Humanism. This, as stated before, is quite arbitrary, but it is a temporary convenience. For in this first brush Sherman and his friends suffered defeat. Not defeat on intellectual grounds, but defeat when it came to making their ideas and standards prevail. On Contemporary Literature was given a black name as a puritan castigation of modern writers which even today keeps it out of the hands of young people. Sherman himself underwent a metamorphosis. He coarsened his style and vulgarized his thought and within a few years was on the side of the very Liberals he had once scorned. From the Liberal point of view, Sherman had advanced, escaping from a rigid system of ideas, to a more genial play of his sympathies and a greater openness of mind. From the Humanist viewpoint, he disintegrated. Losing him, the New Humanists lost their one champion who at this time was willing to employ his energies cutting off the latest heads sprouted by the hydra of naturalism. The Naturalists, the Liberals, the Romanticists, were to have things their own way for the next few years.

1920 was their year of jubilation, for in this year their spirit of revolt, hitherto nourished in the intelligentsia and among the artists, suddenly became popular. It was spread abroad by the success of such realistic novels as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Floyd Dell’s Moon Calf, and Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett. Eugene O’Neill conquered Broadway at last with Beyond the Horizon, and in the same season Emperor Jones was produced in Greenwich Village. The Dial became an advanced monthly of the arts, the Freeman launched itself on a four years’ voyage of philosophic anarchism, Art Young conducted his short-lived Good Morning, contributing his laughter to dissolve the capitalist régime. Such books as The American Credo by Mencken and Nathan, Poor White by Sherwood Anderson, The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, The Ordeal of Mark Twain by Van Wyck Brooks, and The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank made the year seem splendid with revolt, with energy, with novelty. The Red ’Twenties had dawned. In this tumult the New Humanists were lost from sight, and mouse-valiant book reviewers in droves echoed the words of J. E. Spingarn without bothering to read the men they were condemning. “These men,” said Spingarn of Babbitt and More in the Freeman Pamphlet entitled On American Books, “have the learning and culture of the best academic critics of France; but what avails their petulant erudition if it serves no other purpose than to whine over the irrevocable past and to sneer at the aspirations of modern men?” Spingarn was floating with the new current and it seemed to carry all the old barriers before it.

Practically every one in the new movement agreed that the objects of attack were Puritanism and industrialism. In fiction, realism and naturalism came in as the fashion. Psycho-analysis attained its greatest vogue. Lyricism, emotionalism, were valued chiefly, and intellectualism suffered a decline in esteem. The star of the new America was heralded rising out of the Middle West. An American renascence has begun, the prophets declared, and now we shall create an indigenous culture. Expansion was in the air. Who would pay heed in all this excitement to Babbitt and More who stressed the opposite mood, concentration?

They, however, continued to swim against the swirling current of Romanticism. More was at work on his magnum opus, The Greek Tradition, and in 1918, the year after Sherman’s On Contemporary Literature had been blackened, Babbitt published his remarkable study of the use and misuse of the imagination, Rousseau and Romanticism. They were putting the last touches on their system of ideas, and had the satisfaction while so engaged of beholding a small second generation of New Humanists begin to come forward: Stanley P. Chase at Bowdoin College, G. R. Elliott at Amherst, Robert Shafer at the University of Cincinnati, and Norman Foerster at the University of North Carolina. In 1924 appeared Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership, a study of modern political thought which conducted the author at its conclusion back in a great circle to his starting point in his first book, the need for collegiate reform in our study of the humanities. We may say, for convenience’ sake, that Democracy and Leadership closed the second period of American Humanism. The New Humanism’s edifice of ideas was now virtually complete.

In the next period, from 1924 to the present, the humanistic party gathered adherents and momentum as a distinct counter-movement to the still triumphant naturalistic movement. T. S. Eliot, who has made no secret of his partial indebtedness to Babbitt, was instrumental in interesting various young critics in the ideas of More and Babbitt. Two brief notes in The Sacred Wood had the effect, even early in the Red ’Twenties, of raising a doubt about the correctness of the current adverse judgments on Babbitt and More delivered by men like Spingarn, Mencken and Brooks. Later articles by Eliot and the opening of the pages of his review, The Criterion, to discussions of the New Humanism did much to make Humanism a chief topic of distinguished conversation. The Forum also undertook in a series of articles pro and con to advance Humanism to the forefront of the intellectual world. A third generation of New Humanists—prominent among them being Alan Reynolds Thompson and Harry Hayden Clark—was formed: the Hound and Horn, an organ of les jeunes edited by a former student of Babbitt, for a time flirted with the ideas of the counter-movement. Finally, in 1929 under the slashing leadership of Seward Collins the Bookman took up arms for the cause of More and Babbitt.

Meantime, the main naturalistic movement in American letters was slackening. In increasing numbers people were growing weary of Menckenism. Two popular books in 1929 showed the hour was striking for fresh ideas: one, Krutch’s The Modern Temper, was a confession of impotence and gloom over the loss of the romantic hopes that had been so dazzling in 1920, the other, Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals, recognized the need for a new discipline in living and made effort towards a formulation of one. Two prominent magazines of artistic revolt suspended and each gave a curiously significant reason. The Dial said that “although a magazine can get along somehow without readers it cannot exist without contributors.” And Margaret Anderson said in the farewell number of the Little Review: “As this number will show, even the artist doesn’t know what he is talking about. And I can no longer go on publishing a magazine in which no one really knows what he is talking about.” Verily, times were changing! We come to 1930, and hand-to-hand fighting at last between the New Humanists and the Liberals or Naturalists or Romantics, as you choose to call them.

The occasion was the publication of the symposium, Humanism and America, edited by Norman Foerster with the assistance of P. H. Houston, G. R. Elliott and Robert Shafer. It provoked a new “battle of the books” but thus far no Swift has arisen to lash the gross stupidities committed by the majority of the modernists. The controversy in general was a repetition on a much wider scale of the unscrupulous Chicago onslaught on Sherman’s book in 1917. Issues were obscured, prejudice appealed to, meanings distorted: literary careerists rushed in, trying to outshout each other, and the low estate of criticism in America became painfully clear. I need only cite the testimony of an observer not on the Humanist side who was finally driven to write: “I confess to impatience with the row about Humanism, because in the course of it, in the past half year or so, I have seen the powerful principles laid down by Irving Babbitt, being confused and cheapened.” The words are by Gilbert Seldes. Finally, an opposition symposium, The Critique of Humanism, was hastily organized and hurriedly despatched to the book shops three months after Humanism and America saw the light on the counters. With what seem to me the cogent objections to the standpoint of Babbitt and More advanced in The Critique of Humanism, I shall deal by and by.

But shall we let the unsavoury episode just narrated pass without recording the full harshness of judgment it deserves? I conceive it the strict duty of a historian and lover of letters to say that the cause of Romanticism is not so poor that it needs to be defended by poor reasons and mob-appeals and that there is in fact a high standard of argument already set in this controversy by the writings of the English critics, Hugh l’Anson Fausset and J. Middleton Murry, against the classicists’ position. One’s first desire is to see, regardless of one’s party sympathies, the steady advancement, the heightening of literary excellence, of all schools—let us have everything at its highest point—and it is just this desire for quality of controversy that was ungratified by the outpourings of the American modernists. Really, they should have done better! I can only say that if we imagine that criticism has a deity, as love was once fabled to have, then we shall have to invent two forms of it, even as the Greeks conceived of Aphrodite Uranus and Aphrodite Pandemos. We shall have to say that there is presiding over the labors of critics Polite Criticism and Vulgar Criticism, and that it was Vulgar Criticism which ruled most of the pens attempting to deface the New Humanism in the spring of 1930. No fierce Tory with the genius of Swift arose, it is true, to wither the present-day worshippers of Vulgar Criticism, but we can turn back to Swift himself for the necessary scathing words.

“Meanwhile, Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient prophecy, which bore no very good face to his children the Moderns bent his flight to the region of a malignant deity, called criticism. She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes, half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy, and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners. The goddess herself had claws like a cat; her head, and ears, and voice, resembled those of an ass; her teeth fallen out before, her eyes turned inward, as if she looked only upon herself; her diet was the overflowing of her own gall; her spleen was so large, as to stand prominent, like a dug of the first rate; nor wanted excrescencies in form of teats, at which a crew of ugly monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful to conceive, the bulk of spleen increased faster than the sucking could diminish it. ‘Goddess,’ said Momus, ‘can you sit idly here while our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies? Who, then, hereafter will ever sacrifice, or build altars, to our divinities?’”

Unlike the quarrels that were the occasion for Swift’s writing The Battle of the Books, the new “battle of the books” caused by the advent of American Humanism involves issues that far transcend the ordinary interests of scholars and professional literary men. So far as the present controversy is literary, it is pretty much the case of the warm dispute in Æsop’s Fable between the Bee and the Spider as to which was the better artist. This fable Swift rewrote in The Battle of the Books and then made Æsop draw out its application in words that cover almost equally well the respective arguments of the Modernists and the New Humanist today, for it will be seen that the modernistic spider makes a cult of originality and tends toward science-worship while the humanistic bee objects to the kind and impermanency of the modernist’s materials and extols wide ranging and “sweetness and light.”

“The disputants,” Swift has Æsop say, “have admirably managed the dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to be said on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument pro and con. It is but to adjust the reasonings of both to the present quarrel, then to compare and apply the labors and fruits of each, as the bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the conclusion fall plain and close upon the Moderns and us. For, pray, gentlemen, was ever anything so modern as the spider in his air, his turns, and his paradoxes? He argues in behalf of you his brethren and himself, with many boastings of his native stock and great genius; that he spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any obligation or assistance from without. Then he displays to you his great skill in architecture, and improvement in the mathematics. To all this the bee, as an advocate, retained by us the Ancients, thinks fit to answer—that, if one may judge of the great genius or inventions of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have countenance to bear you out, in boasting of either. Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains) the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb, the duration of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner. For anything else of genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I cannot recollect; unless it be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance with the spider’s poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly out of themselves, is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us the Ancients, we are content, with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite labor and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”

More quickly than anything else, and that is why I have invoked it, the potent breath of Swift ought to lift the battle-smoke that now obscures the literary quarrel between the New Humanist and the ultra-modernist and permit us to see the essentials of the doctrine of More and Babbitt. What are they? What importance and meaning and utility have they for the lay reader not afraid to look everywhere for guidance in facing the alternatives that life is so ingenious in forcing constantly upon man? I propose now to consider the very center of humanist teaching, the duality of human consciousness so uncompromisingly affirmed by the two leaders.