V THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD

“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.”—G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy.

However, before fulfilling the promise made at the close of the preceding chapter, it seems well to take a cursory view of the classical revival in England and France. Recent experience has shown that American critics with only two or three exceptions cannot be trusted to situate a comprehensive movement like the New Humanism in its proper climate of sentiment, opinion and idea. On the contrary, many of them regarded or affected to regard the New Humanist group as a quaint local phenomenon sprung up miraculously without atmosphere and totally unrelated to similar groups anywhere else. This delusion embraced by the majority of the opponents of American Humanism badly distorted their sense of perspective: to the broad challenge of the followers of More and Babbitt they replied with singularly inappropriate defiances. The plain truth is that a stiff parochial frame of mind simply cannot make much sense of the application of Babbitt’s criticism to current American literature and life. The obvious remedy is wider travel in the countries of the mind.

More and Babbitt are spokesmen for classicism on the ground that it contains a wisdom superior to modernism. They uphold the longer traditions of the human race against the newly formed traditions of the last fifty, seventy-five or one hundred years. They believe in a profound vital conservatism, not in the contemporaneous versions of radicalism. They are, when one reviews European history in a large way, orthodox, not heterodox. In England and France we shall find distinguished writers who like Babbitt and More are classicists, traditionalists, conservative, orthodox, men who oppose with all their might and intellect the drift of modern civilization and seek to renew our sense of time-tested standards. In this chapter I intend merely to point out some of these men, to quote from each of those designated only a few characteristic words on the modern crisis: that will be enough to show on the one hand the many sides and the diversity that living classicists everywhere manifest, and on the other hand their unanimity on the errors of modernity and the need for standards and discipline will be enough to destroy the silly notion that the classical party in America is engaged in a unique reaction. I cannot here attempt rounded estimates, however brief, of the individuals mentioned, but I shall try to transfer to the intellectual situation in America, which is our center of interest, several useful hints they offer. We must expect to find conservative force in England to be sui generis, and likewise in France, but for that and many other reasons an acquaintance with them, even though but a bowing one, makes for that suppleness of mind necessary to comprehend the home movement. We may even rid ourselves of senseless fears of certain words: the reader whose object is the freeing of his mind must soon overcome any horror he feels for the word, “revolutionary,” or for the word, “reactionary.” The free mind goes everywhere and tries to judge without prejudice the thing itself and not the name.

One thing we shall be immediately struck by is that it is purely an accident that in America the conservative attitude should temporarily be expressing itself almost entirely in the form of ideas and criticism, for this is, of course, by no means an inevitable outlet for the conservative temper. Tories, as witness Swift, can be great artists: art was never the monopoly of the Whigs, but has always been common to men of all hues of conviction. American Humanism therefore does not inculcate an uncreative attitude. It cannot, it is true, make creative ability in the arts where such ability does not exist, but neither, for that matter, can such a theory as self-expression produce creative ability. The Humanist attitude is a check on bad art: self-expression, unfortunately, is a release of bad art. On this score, which is to be preferred? No; it is a mere happenstance that at present Humanism’s representatives are of a critical turn, men of ideas rather than men of pronounced sensibility. Hence, their relative unpopularity. They advocate ideas, and ideas—it is a truism—always must fight against more inertia than emotions. An initial prejudice exists against ideas as such, whereas some one’s strong feelings directly affect us either to sympathy or to resistance: emotions convey themselves almost as swiftly as actions do, but ideas, being quite the weakest element in psychology, have a much harder time travelling from person to person. Nor does one need to enlarge on the enmity felt toward criticism itself, the disparagement constantly cast on this necessary function of literary life, a habit of dispraise which, it should be noted, grew up in the romantic period. The New Humanists are mostly critics, and because of that many people conclude that their doctrine, their conservatism, is sterile in the practice of the arts. It does not follow, for it is the person who is or is not an artist, not the doctrine which is responsible. Look abroad and you will see how fertile in the arts of fiction and verse a classical reaction may be, and no doubt yet will be in our own country.

Here is a gallery of brief portraits of anti-romantic writers in England.

Philip S. Richards:—

One of the youngest English critics and probably the closest in spirit and theory to American Humanism. In the pages of the famous review, The Nineteenth Century and After, he has expounded very faithfully to the English reader the ideas of Babbitt and More. No one has better described the precise effect of Babbitt’s main principle on those who come to accept it. “Only by following it up in all its ramifications, as Babbitt works it out in his books with a wealth of illustrative evidence, is it possible to realize its amazing fruitfulness, and its universal applicability to the intellectual and moral problems which we have inherited from the nineteenth century. When once its import is fairly grasped, its influence is like that of a new principle of classification in one of the descriptive sciences. New and natural lines of cleavage or affiliation at once appear, introducing order and interdependence into a mass of chaotic or misrelated facts. A simple criterion is put into the reader’s hands, which he cannot help using, even though it mean the abandonment of secret loyalties and the dethronement of long-cherished ideals.... We may regard him (Babbitt) as a pathologist who traces the romantic malady from its origin in Rousseau, through its mild and chronic stage in Wordsworth, to its acute and delirious phases in Tolstoy or the expressionist drama.” (The italics are mine.)

T. S. Eliot:—

The prestige of this erstwhile American citizen among the younger generation has caused the same generation to be particularly attentive to his views on American Humanism. Eliot’s poems, so exquisite in workmanship, subtle in perception, almost Dantean in the clarity and power of the individual image, contain the poignant suffering of a sensibility tortured by the ugliness, crassness and lowness of modern civilization. His earlier criticism dealt accurately with the effects of literary masterpieces upon his sensibility. In recent years he has broadened his basis as a critic and introduced a religious note into his poetry. His general point of view he now describes “as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,” and wisely adds, “I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.”

Eliot holds that we should come “to the conclusion that the humanistic point of view is auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point of view. For us, religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity implies, I think, the conception of the Church. It would be not only interesting but invaluable if Professor Babbitt, with his learning, his great ability, his influence, and his interest in the most important questions of the time, could reach this point.” But on the other hand Eliot has written an essay “to call attention to the danger of the other extreme: the danger, a very real one, of religion without humanism.”

Herbert Read:—

A close co-worker with T. S. Eliot in the field of literary criticism, this author is severe in his condemnation of the flatness of modern life. “For Froissart,” Read declares, “glory was the measure of all things, the crown of all virtues. For us it has become something remote and elusive; even something romantic and literary. We have lost the sense of glory because we have lost the habit of faith. We neither love deeply enough, nor feel deeply enough, nor think deeply enough, to enjoy life’s most impressive sanction.” Read follows the path of T. E. Hulme, whose Speculations he edited, back to pre-Renascence philosophy: he has disciplined himself on the pages of the Summa Theologica and has caught fire from the complex splendor of the Middle Ages.

A champion of orthodoxy, he is critical of any particular form of orthodoxy, such as American Humanism, as his essay in the Criterion on Humanism and the Absolute reveals. This paper discussing the views of Norman Foerster and Julien Benda was sub-titled The Texts of a Debate, and I hope it is not lost ink to refer again to the higher standard of controversy observed in England by writers who deal with the New Humanists and to regret that our critics of Foerster’s American Criticism were, as a rule, unable to reach up to the mark set by Read. In the essay mentioned, Read maintains that unlike Julien Benda, “Mr. Foerster, on behalf of the New Humanists, nowhere makes it clear that he accepts this absolute severance of things divine and things human. He admits that ‘the ethical will’ is ‘a power above the ordinary self, an impersonal reality in which all men may share despite the diversity of personal temperament, and toward which their attitude must be one of subjection.’ But he also says that ‘the value of supernatural intuition must be tested by the intellect,’ and rejects any formal theology on these grounds. But the greatest of all formal theologies, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, was precisely such a ‘testing’ of supernatural intuition by the intellect or reason. If religious intuitions must be submitted to rational inspection, then surely the result is a theology. Mr. Foerster cannot have it both ways: to hesitate ‘to pass beyond’ experimental knowledge to dogmatic affirmation is merely to sit on the fence: once admit the mediation of reason and you are involved in the necessity of dogma.”

This point, the reader will recognize, is connected with Hulme’s argument for radical discontinuities in the universe, which was injected into our first chapter and to which I pledged myself to return.

Wyndham Lewis:—

He has dramatized himself as an Ishmaelite in Occidental culture, the sworn and ferocious enemy of “Time-cults” and “Time-philosophies,” of which Bergsonism is a typical specimen. Before the Great War, he was a radical painter and associated with Ezra Pound to propagate an artistic cult baptized Vorticism. Since the War he has turned social philosopher, and possibly may be a first rate Tory mind in the making. I say in the making, for up to the present Lewis is still a chaotic personality, given to extravagances, and not yet sufficiently trained in metaphysics to cope with A. N. Whitehead, S. Alexander, and some of his other bêtes noires. But the New Humanist can second him in many of his theses. He and Lewis are at one in their scorn for the contemporary cult of the child and the primitive and in their hostility to the modern feminization of man.

In his book, The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis maintains—I cannot better Montgomery Belgion’s succinct restatement in the Bookman—that “what happens in a ‘liberal democracy’ is that rule by the few is not banished, but concealed. And it is this concealment which is, Mr. Lewis holds, responsible for so many of our contemporary ills, the greatest of these being, perhaps, mass suggestion. In a democracy the actual rulers are not the best rulers, but those who are most cunning in obtaining power, and, furthermore, since their rule has to be secret, it becomes necessary for these rulers to hypnotize the ruled into acquiescence, to discredit the old standards of existence through the agency of Science, and to organize the populace, to mechanize it, to pump it full of a destructive fatalism while it is kept imagining itself its own master.” Therefore let us have again an authority that is an open authority. On Lewis’s analysis of pseudo-liberty the New Humanist will agree even more heartily. “The present decay of Europe,” I quote from Belgion again, “Mr. Lewis ascribes directly to the notion of freedom. Since people cannot be free and in any case do not want to be free, but only to be irresponsible, the notion of freedom has been thought to be the notion of irresponsibility, and, thus misunderstood, has been steadily weakening Europe. To this wasteful and disorganizing notion of irresponsibility he opposes the notion of ‘working together’ under a central control, which, he points out, gives the comfort and strength of solidarity.”

Hilaire Belloc:—

As a Catholic, this versatile man—politician, poet, storyteller, essayist, historian, biographer—can naturally not regard American Humanism as more than a half-way house. This would be in general the Catholic position: however, both the New Humanist and the Catholic intellectual are anti-naturalistic and pro-classical and this sets vibrating a certain bond of sympathy for each other’s efforts to infuse into modern literature something of what Belloc calls “the poise, the fulness, the solemnity, the disdain of sharp effect, the glory in control, the magic of proportion” which marked the productions of the great classical periods.

“The classical spirit,” observes Belloc, “has not fallen into disrepute among us: it has been forgotten. It has become alien and strange, so that men coming across it today, in our society, are like rustics coming across some marble of the ancients. It does not repel them, but it hardly attracts them at all—they can make nothing of it.... It is said that men who drink spirits lose their taste for wine and certainly men who use violent sauces lose their taste in cooking. Under the effect of the romantic extravagance, the general sense of the classic died. But the last extravagances of that extravagance were left for our time to suffer.”

I pass now from Belloc, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-puritan, to the brilliant debater he has so greatly influenced and to whom I shall give more space than has been devoted to the other members of this little gallery of English champions of high tradition.

Gilbert K. Chesterton:—

First, I will show at once his views on the New Humanism because they pour light on the subject matter of this book, the dilemmas of liberated people today. Granted, says Chesterton: “we need a rally of the really human things; will which is morals, memory which is tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.” But for him “the question really is whether Humanism can perform the functions of religion.” His reply is unequivocal. “I do not believe that Humanism can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism.” Why? Well, “the fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom.” The New Humanism in Chesterton’s judgment draws on Catholic capital, but it “has one very wise and worthy character. It is trying to pick up the pieces; that is, to pick up all the pieces.” Only “can it stick them together? Where is the cement which made religion corporate and popular, which can prevent it falling to pieces in a débris of individualistic tastes and degrees?” Chesterton makes clear his doubt that the New Humanists “have the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity.”

Next, I should like the reader to join me in regretting that we in America have had no G. K. Chesterton to work as an antidote to such a popular “philosopher” as H. L. Mencken. Admit all the faults of Chesterton, the occasional specious arguments, now and then the patch of tawdry rhetoric, the lapses in taste and the falls into mechanicality of style: call him, if you desire, no more than a super-journalist. These flaws, however, are no great handicap in coping with a popular propounder of belated nineteenth century rationalism of the type of Mencken, when one is as playful, as pyrotechnical, as hearty as Chesterton. By his buffooning Mencken hopes to attract the populace to the banners of heresy: by his humor and the dazzlement of paradoxes Chesterton aims to draw the public to orthodoxy. Thus, the two men by their methods neutralize each other and leave the reader free to examine coolly what it is that in all seriousness they maintain. And in that respect Chesterton is immeasurably the larger man.

Thirdly, the history of Chesterton presents a couple of features of special interest for the person who is reacting against the contemporary welter of half-truths. How came Chesterton to his present strength of conviction on so many topics toward which his foes preserve an attitude of squeamish indecision? The startling answer is, because his early education, like that of Cardinal Newman and of Coleridge, consisted of fairy tales. Startling to us, that is, for many of us have been led to conclude that there should be no place for fairy tales in the training of the young, that the less of “fantasy” and the more of “fact” we incorporate into education, the better developed will be the sense of reality of our children. But this is one of the crimes against children, the most abominable class of crimes. No one has more forcibly stated the case for fairy tales than Coleridge. “Should children be permitted to read romances and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little. And the universe to them is but a mass of little things.” Chesterton argues somewhat differently, but it is apparent that he was stimulated by fairy tales to love the inclusive, to desire to reach the center, to devote himself to the transcendent conception. It is in the centrality and breadth of his mind that he exceeds Mencken and the smaller fry of rationalists.

Another thing to take into account is Chesterton’s reaction to the Yellow Nineties in England. In his youth he was immersed in Huxleyan agnosticism and Wildean æstheticism, and he revolted vigorously from these excesses. He found young men proud of their boredom; ennui was taken to be a symptom of personal distinction. And he was informed that art was divorced from morals. He replied curtly that “there is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.... The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic”—which places the blame where it should go. And to the l’art pour l’art people, he said: “A small artist is content with art; a great artist with nothing except everything.”

Fourthly, Chesterton delighted himself as every one knows with the pleasures of a modern heresy-hunt. The hunting ground was certainly happy, for, as he pointed out, we are living in the decadence of the great revolutionary period, and nowadays “we are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature,” but “general theories are everywhere contemned ... we will have no generalizations.” “When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies,” Chesterton goes on to say, “their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says.”

Vague relativism was the enemy and Chesterton went slashing after it in the essays on Shaw, George Moore, Wells, G. Lowes Dickinson, Joseph McCabe, Whistler and other moderns included in Heretics. Of them all it seems to me that Wells best typifies what Chesterton stands against, Wells in whom is fused sentimental naturalism and scientific naturalism, Wells the prophet of humanitarianism. Chesterton put his finger unhesitatingly on the soft spot in Wells’s whole program when he noticed that “in his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.”

Finally, I wish the reader to note that the “paradoxes of Christianity” which Chesterton defends with so much gusto in Orthodoxy were not imposed on him, were not slavishly accepted by him because of their attributed authority, but were personally rediscovered. It is often thought, sometimes with cause, many times unjustifiably, that the exponent of tradition is simply a timid and unoriginal man: he flees, so it is said, to tradition for safety; he does not return to it because his experience has taught him that a given tradition is right. But do all men adopt traditional teachings out of fear? Chesterton sets us right. Classicism is properly a life, and not a mere subscribing to inherited doctrines, and Chesterton has described the spirit and result of that life when he said: “I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.... When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original, but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.... I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”

The vivacity of commonsense! That, in a phrase, describes the appeal of Chesterton, and nothing, it seems to me, is more often lacking from American literary journalism than commonsense in the first place and in the second place commonsense sparkling at its vivacious best.

To many American critics any stick is good enough to beat Humanism with. But it has happened several times in our literary history that the French have been more quickly appreciative than we of a genuine new power appearing amongst our writers: it seems almost to be a law that an unpopular spiritual force in America should first receive its full due in France. It is a Frenchman, Louis J. A. Mercier, who has written the first book treating the New Humanism as a movement. Le Mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Unis, which makes a study of Babbitt, More and the late W. C. Brownell, was crowned when it appeared in 1928 by the French Academy, and it drew forth sympathetic comment from the spokesmen for a variety of groups, from the Catholic papers to the Action Française, from the Abbé Bremond to Baron Seillière. We can easily understand the warmth of this reception by French critics. “Here were American authors,” says Mercier, “who spoke their own language, who were fully alive to all the traditions, who faced squarely the problem of man, in the light of all these traditions, and who brought a formula for a twentieth-century approach to a common reëxamination of all the data involved.”

Why have we not more examples in translation of the work of the French classical reactionaries? We have a few—Benda’s Belphégor and The Treason of the Intellectuals, Maritain’s Three Reformers and Art and Scholasticism, Leon Daudet’s The Stupid Nineteenth Century, Henri Massis’s The Defence of the West—but these are barely suggestive of the resources remaining to be exploited by our publishers. We have—to name names—no translations of such important works as Pierre Lasserre’s Le Romantisme français and Cinquante Ans de Pensée française by which we may trace the evolution of this former pupil of Charles Maurras, nor have we a translation of Ernest Seillière’s Le Mal romantique or of his studies of Rousseau or of his Philosophie de l’Impérialisme, all efforts to “de-Rousseauize” France by large European perspectives. Above all, we have no books in English from the energetic pen of Charles Maurras. This is odd, since no less discerning a critic than T. S. Eliot classes Maurras as a philosopher of rank equal to Irving Babbitt and declares that he “has written as fine prose as any French author living.” Moreover, he says, referring to England, “if anything, in another generation or so, is to preserve us from a sentimental Anglo-Fascism, it will be some system of ideas which will have gained much from the study of Maurras.”

But perhaps before speaking of Maurras further I should give a very general classification of the French affirmers of the classic order in life and literature. We can divide them into three groupings: (1) those associated with the Action Française and committed to its program of “integral nationalism” which involves a return to royalism; (2) the Neo-Thomists, such as Henri Massis with his bogey of Orientalism and Jacques Maritain, “the most conspicuous figure and probably the most powerful force in contemporary French philosophy,” according to T. S. Eliot; (3) certain critics independent of organized groups like Julien Benda whose recent book, The Treason of the Intellectuals, attacks with great force the fomenting of political passions indulged in by some of the French classicists, notably those of the Action Française.

Charles Maurras is the outstanding man in the Action Française. He began as an enthusiast for Auguste Comte and Positivism. In 1890 he joined Jean Moreas in the founding of the Ecole Romane, a literary return from Symbolism to antiquity. He wrote fiction and verse expressive of his admiration for Hellenism. But his life’s work has been in political and social thought and in literary criticism. For years “Politics first” has been his cry: he establishes his teaching on the doctrine of Joseph de Maistre who preached a turning back to monarchism after the French Revolution. The sifting of Maurras’s career, however, is a rather complicated business. To many he is an atheist, certainly an agnostic; yet for some years he and his organization, the Action Française, were Catholic, only to be condemned in the end by the Pope. T. S. Eliot’s explanation is that Maurras is “an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend to himself or to others that he does believe; if others can believe, so much the better not only for them but for the world at large. The peculiarity of Maurras’s agnosticism (or atheism if you like) is that he recognizes that he has much more in common, in the temporal sphere, with Catholics than with Protestants or atheists.”

Today Maurras directs—with the partnership of the truculent Leon Daudet—the newspaper, Action Française, which flies on its mast the following inscription: “Chef de la Maison de France, j’en revendique tous les droits, j’en assume toutes les responsabilités, j’en accepte tous les devoirs” over the name of “Le duc de Guise, héritier des quarante Rois qui en mille ans firent la France.” With Maurras’s bellicosities, his fanning of national and racial hatreds, I am not now concerned, nor should I like in any case to defend them. It is more germane to this book to quote from him on tradition. “Not all traditions,” he says, “are equal.... Amongst all others one tradition offers itself, of which the conspicuous character is its almost complete conformity with those principles of taste which express humanity raised to its highest point. We see it come to birth in Ionia as from the ashes of Homer; it continues under the olive trees of Cephisus. Roman sages who adopt it make a new home for it. The middle ages do not banish it completely either from France or from the towns of Italy. It reforms itself and occupies the whole of Europe; but it is Paris now, as Athens once, that preserves it. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, humanism and the classical spirit, refined to an Attic point of taste, never lacked representatives among us, or an élite worthy of understanding and loving it.” This Græco-Latin classical tradition, which belongs to France, Maurras goes on to say, “surpasses all others. It reveals, in fact, a force of life equal in flame, in coloring, in simple brutality or refined delicacy to whatever the rest of the world can show, from the steppes of Russia to the shores of Guinea; and as no other popular tradition can vie with it in sensibility, it defies forever all its rivals, in the order and luminosity of its writings, in the great generality of their style. The works of this tradition are rightly called Humane Letters, in that they interest the whole world.” Finally, he exclaims: “But the pursuit of the classical tradition includes other things than gods and goddesses. It authorizes a scrupulous and passionate criticism. Far from freezing the senses, it excites, begets creation. Even among ourselves, above all among ourselves, there is much to be done. We can dream of tragedies nearer to nature, more direct and simple than those of Racine. The heroic vein of Corneille leaves room for a poet who should be wiser than he. The reader will be surprised if I add that what we lack especially is lyric poetry! Consider how little can be preserved from the romantic lumber-room. We must bring things back to Malherbe. There was once a literary criticism, there can be again, yet finer, and lead our literature to its renascence.”

Turning to the Neo-Thomists, it seems to me that Jacques Maritain is the dominant figure. He began as a student of Bergson but shortly afterwards joined the Catholic Church and today holds the position of professor of modern history and philosophy at the Institut Catholique of Paris. He grounds himself entirely on the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and his whole effort is to translate it into terms of modern life, to make it serviceable and illuminating to the man of the twentieth century. For a few years Maritain associated himself with the Action Française but withdrew when in 1927 the Pope proscribed the journal of Maurras, Daudet and Pujo.

Maritain writes with an austere clarity. A fiery faith burns in the depths of his thought and makes his most abstract pages strangely intense. He is an utterly ruthless opponent of what he conceives to be modern errors, and, like the American Humanists, he considers Romanticism as the source of many of these illusions. “The word romanticism,” he notes and I recommend his definition to the reader, “may give rise to many confusions. I am aware that there have been all kinds of things, even very good things, in the complex movement classed under this name. But nothing is so idle as to argue about words and recast their definition to suit your subject; and in spite of everything usage has adequately settled the meaning of this one. In so far as it signifies a religious eviction of reason and its works, the sacred unbridling of sensation, the holy parade of self and the adoration of primitive natural instinct, pantheism as theology, and emotional stimulus as the rule of life, it must be confessed that Rousseau, by his mystical naturalism, is at the direct source of such a spiritual evil.”

Again, like the New Humanists, Maritain attacks the ubiquitous sway of modern science on the ground that science, unconfined to its proper rôle, dehumanizes man. In his essay on Descartes, who to Maritain founded the principle of the deep inhumanity of modern science, we may read: “In the higher order of Cognition the Cartesian reformation gave the irretrievable stability of the things of the spirit to the moral attitude of turning towards perishable goods. See what the great name of Science has become. It is today hardly applied to anything but the knowledge of matter, and science, par excellence, is regarded by most modern thinkers as belonging to a museum. In the modern world, reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature. It rates the mathematics of phenomena above wisdom. From the mountain of its excellence it has descried all the kingdoms of the material universe and the glory of them, and it goes down to possess them.”

And now we come to the freelances of the classical revival, to proud polemicists like Julien Benda who never tire in the exposure of romantic follies. Benda, novelist and essayist, tenacious opponent of Bergson, has invented a name for the disease of pan-lyricism which rages in America as well as in France. He calls it “belphégorism,” for it is in his argument the worship of a false god, Belphégor or Baal-Peor as it is written in the Bible. Belphégorism briefly is the requirement of modern society that works of art should be exclusively productive of emotions and sensations, that history should be written as a series of heart-throbs, that philosophy and science should give thrills. Belphégorism is the love of the indistinct, of the novelty purely for its own sake, of subjectivity carried as far as possible. Conversely, belphégorism hates the mind, hates discipline, hates form. Benda makes it clear that he is no objector to the lyrical in itself, but rather to the invasion by lyricism of all provinces of the intellectual life. To the softness in taste of modern French society he opposes the plastic sensibility of the great seventeenth century, the period of Descartes and Pascal, of Corneille, Molière and Racine, of Bossuet, of La Fontaine, of Madame de La Fayette.

By a plastic sensibility Benda means a sensibility, whose principal modes are sight and touch, which organizes itself about the idea of form. It loves precision and firmness. This sensibility is localized, perhaps because it involves the more highly specialized and developed nerves. It is, Benda declares, a centralized and correlated sensibility, the source of poise. In contrast he places the musical sensibility whose principal modes are hearing, taste and smell. This is a disquieting sensibility, for it consists in sensation without contour, it overflows the whole being with scattered and diffused sensation. The consciousness is decentralized. The result is the opposite of poise, being intoxication and vertigo. Modern society tends toward a musical sensibility, a tendency Benda has become seasoned in combating.

This distinction between two types of sensibility is very usable, and I shall come back to it when we take up Nietzsche’s great interpretation of the Apollo-Dionysus conflict in the final chapter. But now this exhibit of the friends of order abroad must be closed by a longish quotation from Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals illustrating the difference between two types of humanitarianism (or more properly between Humanism and humanitarianism), a difference our New Humanists constantly insist upon. In addition Benda brings out very well a point usually overlooked by people who, perceiving the aristocratic leanings of the New Humanists, accuse them of being too disdainful of their fellow men.

“In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have denounced humanitarianism⁠[3] as a moral degeneration, nay, as an intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks.’

“I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean it here—a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’—and the feeling which is usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet, Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished minds, who disavow two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of political ideology. One of them is the ‘patriotic bore’ and the other ‘the universal embrace.’

“The humanitarianism⁠[4] which holds in honor the abstract quality of what is human, is the only one which allows us to love all men. Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is more or less a man, more or less the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.

“Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain category of men—laborers, bankers, industrialists—who unite across frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those interests.

“In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures, and is generally exempt from moral dogmatism.”

Such, briefly indicated, is the general field of contemporary thought in which American Humanism fits. I deem it, however, premature and over-enthusiastic to perceive in this field the beginnings of a new renascence, and likewise I do not think the parallel between the living asserters of classical ideals and the Humanists of the Renascence should be stressed. True enough, the modern revivalists have entered into a gigantic battle to overthrow the preëminence of the dogma of Naturalism, just as the Renascence men assaulted the preëminence of petrified theological dogma, and true enough the moderns catch their vision, as did their brothers in the fifteenth century, from the ancient literatures. But it is yet to be seen whether they can do more than defend the ancestral treasures, whether they can be more than a corrective force to the excesses and barbarisms of our era. Have they the potency to initiate a real transformation of modern society? Can they even arrest its downward plunge, let alone reverse its direction? Have they the hidden strength to work a miracle? The questions discourage all desires to prophesy. The only thing that can be said is that the traditionalist thinkers are making a supremely important contribution to the thought of today, that by their contribution they tend to improve the general intellectual situation, and the first step is the production of a more favorable situation, in itself a huge task, for diamond ideas about the “good life.” Meanwhile, the most that can be said about any notion of a coming renascence is that it may have the energizing value of a myth: it is perhaps akin in its tonic effect on the spirit to the conception of the general strike which Georges Sorel proclaimed should be the heroic myth of the proletariat in its long struggle.

Now if we compare the theory of American Humanists with the theories or partly worked out theories of their allies in Europe, we shall see that we have at home not the least developed and least positive form of conservatism. The Europeans either come to rest on Catholicism (Chesterton, Belloc, Massis, Maritain), which for many Americans seems impossible, involving an act of too much faith, and furthermore they feel too psychologically distant from Rome; or the Europeans dedicate themselves to some political movement such as French royalism (Maurras and his disciples) which to some extent perverts their classical attitude; or finally they fall back on some personal philosophy, scarcely more than a strong predisposition in favor of the disinterested activity of the mind (Benda) or else very much in the forming and full of idiosyncrasies (Wyndham Lewis). American Humanism has not complicated itself by theological alliances, nor subordinated itself to the pursuit of definite political aims. What is striking is the extent to which it has freed itself from the personal and idiosyncratic. It exists apart from the personalities of More and Babbitt. Here is a body of general ideas, substantial yet pliable, to which all who seize the few underlying principles may resort and from which all may take a working experimental outlook on the problems of their own lives. Here is a system for the guidance of one’s thought, not for its repression and confinement. Here is an ideology too definite to be treated whimsically, but not so rigid as to be unadaptable to the taste of the individual. It has a completeness wanting in the personal philosophies of Lewis and Benda, and it does not appear to many so arbitrary as the doctrines of the Church. Its great recommendation is that it is founded on the positive critical experimental spirit of modern times. This in the remainder of the book I shall try to demonstrate.