The Consistency
of Irving Babbitt
(Part One)
Milton Hindus
WHILE OTHER WRITERS pride themselves on
their inconsistency and self-contradic-
tion as inevitable failings, or as signs of
incorruptible honesty, Irving Babbitt
more modestly strives for and achieves
consistency from his first publications
to his last almost four decades later.
Long before the appearance of his first
little book (Literature and the American
College) in 1908,when he was approach-
ing his mid-forties and still not a full
professor at Harvard, he had become
the contributor of essays and book re-
views to The Atlantic Monthly. Such was
their maturity of style and substance
that they lost little of their force when
reprinted later, and there is an unbroken
continuity between them and his contri-
butions of essays, letters to the editor,
and book reviews decades later to such
magazines as The Nation and The Forum,
from which many of them were collected
into his other books, including one (Span-
ish Characterand otheressays) published
in 1941, eight years after his death.
In 1897,there appeared in The Atlantic
an essay entitled “The Rational Study of
the Classics,” which is in no sense infe-
rior to or more callow than Rousseau and
Romanticism, published more than
twenty years later:
Romanticism may not mean the Com-
mune, as Thiers said it did, but we may at
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least say that literature of the romantic
type, compared with that of the classical
tradition, is so deficient in certain quali-
ties of sobriety and discipline as t o make
us doubt its value as a formative influ-
ence upon the minds of the young.. . .
Romanticism, at that stage of his think-
ing, was already characterized by its
extreme subjectivity, even violent sub-
jectivity in some cases, while its oppo-
site was distinguished by its objectivity
and by its appeal to our higher reason
and imagination, which enabled young
men, who were in many instances little
more than troubled adolescents, to rise
above their own personal concerns in
order to participate in a larger universal
life:
[Classical literature] is thus truly educa-
tive in that it leads him who studies it out
and away from himself. The classical
spirit, in its purest form, feels itself conse-
crated t o the service of a high, imper-
sonal reason. Hence the sentiment of re-
straint and discipline, its sense of propor-
tion and pervading law. By bringing our
acts into an ever closer conformity with
this high, impersonal reason, it would
lead us, although along a different path,
t o the same goal as religion. . . .
But if Babbitt was anatural admirer of
the ancient languages and literatures
(despite the fact that it was his own fate
to profess their modern offspring-his
Winter 1992
field of expertise was French), he was
hardly pleased with the “scientific”way
they were coming to be studied by what
he described as the “philological syndi-
cate”:
As the field of ancient literature is more
and more completely covered, the vision
of the special investigator must become
more and more microscopic. The present
generation of classical philologists, in-
deed, reminds one of a certain sect of
Japanese Buddhists which believes that
salvation is to be attained by arriving at a
knowledge of the infinitely small. Posi-
tions, it is said, have recently been given
in American colleges t o men who have
shown their assimilation of the classical
spirit by writing on the ancient horse-
bridle and on the Roman door knob.
Underneath this jocularity (reminis-
cent of the humor of Matthew Arnold),
there is aserious concern with the devel-
opment of “lopsided specialization,”
which finds expression in one of his late
essays in The Forum in 1929on aspects of
the baneful influence exercised by
Charles W. Eliot, who had presided over
Harvard for forty years (1869-1909) and
had died in 1926. More pertinent to the
subject of the present discussion is
Babbitt’s essay a year later in The Forum
(1930) entitled “What I Believe: Rous-
seau and Religion.” In this essay, he re-
views some of the recent literatureabout
Rousseau, notes the differences between
some of the interpretations and his own,
and grants that, with a writer as prolific
as Rousseau, virtually any point of view
which a critic brings with him can be
sustained with enough selected evidence
to make it plausible and persuasive.
Yet Babbitt is astonished by one writer,
who claims simply to set forth Rousseau’s
meaning but manages, in his hundreds of
pages, to miss the doctrine that Rous-
seau himself regarded as central t o his
own thought. This was the exciting vi-
sion he experienced on the road from
Paris to Vincennes in 1749, which in-
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spired the initial composition that won
him an academic prize and made him
famous: “Amongthe multitude of ‘truths’
that flashed upon Rousseau in the sort of
trance into which he was rapt at this
moment, the truth of overshadowing
importance was, in his own words, ‘that
man is naturally good and that it is by our
institutions alone that men become
wicked.”’
Here, for Babbitt, is the real conver-
sion-experience of Rousseau, supersed-
ing completely his earlier conversion to
Catholicism, which confessedly was ve-
nal in motivation and nominal only. The
vision on the road to Vincennes is not
only the key t o the rest of Rousseau’s life
but to the whole heresy (or choice) of
modernity, which makes it proper for
him to serve as the emblematic figure to
represent the ages that followed him.
Granted that “there are conservative and
even timid elements in his writings, but
as a result of the superior imaginative
appeal of the new dualism based on the
myth of man’s natural goodness, the role
he has actually played has been that of
the arch-radical.” The new dualism was
heretical in the root sense not only be-
cause it was opposed to orthodoxCatho-
lic doctrine and calculated to create a
maximum of dissension, but also because
it was opposed to any other version of
the older dualism, humane or religious,
which insisted upon personal responsi-
bility as more important than societal
responsibility.
It was the visionary Rousseau that
Madame de Stael had in mind when she
said: “Rousseau invented nothing but set
everything on fire.” And it was his influ-
ence that Gustave Lanson described: “It
exasperates and inspires revolt and fires
enthusiasms and irritates hatreds;...it
launches the simplesouls who give them-
selves up to its strange virtue upon the
desperate quest of the absolute, an abso-
lute to be realized now by anarchy and
now by social absolutism.”
107
 According to Babbitt, we are all con-
fronted with an unavoidable choice “be-
tween a dualism that affirms a struggle
between good and evil in the heart of the
individual and a dualism which, like that
of Rousseau, transfers the struggle to
society.” Humanitarians of all types “are
hopelessly superficial in their treatment
of the problem of evil. The social dualism
they have set up in its ultimate develop-
ment tends to substitute the class war
for what Diderot termed in his denuncia-
tion of the older dualism the ‘civilwars in
the cave.”’
Against the false prophecy of Rous-
seau and the fanatical extremes which it
has encouraged for several centuries,
Babbitt arrays “the humanistic virtues-
moderation, common sense, and com-
mon decency-[which], though much
more accessible than those of the saint,
still go against the grain of the natural
man-terribly against the grain, one is
forced to conclude from a cool survey of
the facts of history.” And, as everywhere
in his writings, most notably in Democ-
racy and Leadership (1924), he discovers
no more potent antisepsis t o the infec-
tion of Rousseau, which spread from the
French Revolution in the eighteenth cen-
tury to the Russian and Chinese Revolu-
tions in the twentieth and perhaps even
to the unexampled homicidal reactions
these inspired in Germany, Italy, and
Japan, than the writing of Edmund Burke,
whose summary judgment he cites with
approval: “Nothing is more certain than
that our manners, our civilization, and
all the good things that are connected
with manners and with civilization, have,
in this European world of ours, depended
for ages upon two principles, and were
indeed the result of both combined; I
mean the spirit of a gentleman and the
spirit of religion.”
It was only appropriate and just, there-
fore, that Babbitt’s compliments be re-
turned eventually t o himself by The Brit-
ish Weekly when it observed that “for
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anything comparable to Rousseau and
Romanticism and Democracy and Lead-
ership for knowledge and passion and
social gravity. . . we have to go as far
back as Burke.”
The consistency of Babbitt manifests
itself not only in the choice of subjects to
which to address his attention but in his
style and manner of approach t o these
subjects. Thus he generally sets out in
Socratic fashion with an attempt to limit
and define an abstraction and to distin-
guish it from another abstraction often
confused with it. In Literature and the
American College, his first object was to
separate the notions of humanitarian-
ism from humanism. In doing so, he pro-
duces a passage which seems to me to
bear an unmistakable resemblance to a
passage in the Introductory chapter of
Rousseau and Romanticism. The first
passage hinges on the role which sympa-
thy should play:
Aulus Gellius [a late Latin author], who
was a man of somewhat crabbed and
pedantic temper, would apparently ex-
clude sympathy almost entirely from his
conception of humanitas and confine the
meaning to what he calls cura etdisciplina,
and h e cites the authority of Cicero. Ci-
cero, however, seems to have avoided
any such one-sided view, Like the admi-
rable humanist that he was, he no doubt
knew that what is wanted is not sympathy
alone, nor again discipline and selection
alone, but a disciplined and selective sym-
pathy. Sympathy without selection be-
comes flabby, and a selection which is
unsympathetic tends to grow disdainful.
It is a distinctive style of thinking that
produces a parallel passage in the open-
ing pages of Rousseau and Romanticism:
“Lifedoes not give here an element of
oneness and there an element of change.
It gives a oneness that is always changing.
The oneness and the change are insepa-
rable. . . . Moreover man does not ob-
serve t h e oneness that is always chang-
ing from the outside; he is himself a
Winter 1992
oneness that is always changing. . .
and finally the human oneness that is
always changing seems to vanish away
entirely. . . .”Thisstriking phenomenon
does not lead Babbitt t o nihilism but to
t h e best-known q u o t a t i o n from
Shakespeare’s Tempest, which he de-
scribes as the most critical account of
man in modern literature:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little
life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Babbitt comments upon this apothegm:
“But though strictly considered, life is
but a web of illusion and a dream within
a dream, it is a dream that needs to be
managed with the utmost discretion, if it
is not to turn into a nightmare.”
It is little wonder that Babbitt was
moved to complain that his concept of
Humanism, which became a fighting
word in 1930, was often misunderstood.
The year 1930, which marked the onset
of the most famous of American eco-
nomic Depressions, was also the annus
mirabilis of Babbitt’s career, which saw
the publication of two essay collections
(Norman Foerster’s Humanism and
America and C. Hartley Crattan’s Cri-
tique Of Humanism) that centered their
attention on Babbitt and made him, for a
brief season, almost a household name
among American intellectuals, merging
insensibly with the identical name of
Sinclair Lewis’s fictional character of a
decade before. The confusion was com-
pounded by the award during the same
year of the Nobel Prize for Literature to
Sinclair Lewis (the first American to be
so honored), who chose the world po-
dium for an attack on the American Hu-
manists. The ensuing journalistic excite-
ment produced an invitation for Babbitt
to address a throng of 3,000 persons in
New York‘s Carnegie Hall, confounding
those Harvard wiseacres who had once
mocked him as a local campus luminary
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when they announced gravely that
“Babbitt’s fame is spreading round the
world; it has already left Harvard Yard!”
If Babbitt was misunderstood, it is
because he is, despite his surface sim-
plicity and clarity, an extremely subtle
writer, whose profound complexities
sometimes seem to require an almost
Hegelian cast of mind to unravel. His
complexity is hardly less than the one
which confronts us in T.S. Eliot’s early
and unsurpassed essay Tradition and
the Individual Talent, which has some
stylistic resemblance t o such passages
as I have quoted and presses his point of
view perhaps too far but in a direction in
which it was already leaning.
The soundness of Babbitt’s work and
the honest value it continues to give
readers after almost a century are what
have made it outlast the objections of
most of its critics. Rousseau and Roman-
ticism has never been allowed to go out
of print. Its latest edition makes it part of
The Library of Conservative Thought
under the imprint of Transaction Pub-
lishers. It is introduced by Professor
Claes G. Ryn of The Catholic University
of America, who has written several times
sympathetically about Babbitt before.
He finds Babbitt peculiarly prescient and
pertinent to a present situation, which
can only be depicted in primary colors:
The further deterioration anticipated by
Babbitt has come about much as he ex-
pected. If some worrisome social trends
are to be expected in the best of times,
the signs of decay in the Western world at
the end of the twentieth century are
myriad and pervasive. Self-indulgenceand
irresponsibility, lack of discipline; decline
of family life; crime and other dishonesty;
political opportunism and a demagogu-
ery; obtrusive commercialism; financial
manipulation; indiscriminate deficit-
spending and borrowing; political and
economic corruption; drug abuse; sexual
promiscuity; sexually transmitted dis-
ease; academic superficiality,ideologizing
109
 and intolerance; low and sinking educa-
tional standards; religious sentimental-
ism; vulgarity, cruelty and debauchery in
art and entertainment; abuse of nature-
in their glaring and epidemic proportions
these phenomena all point in the same
direction. In spite of the multiplying evi-
dence of a precipitous decline of civiliza-
tion, many,especially in the United States,
hail present-day Western “democracy”
as a model and want to bestow it upon all
humanity.
No doubt there is a feeling of elation at
the lifting (however tentative and uncer-
tain) of the oppressive Soviet nightmare
I
from humanity. But in 1919, too, when
Rousseau and Romanticism appeared,
there was a feeling of relief at the Armi-
stice ending the Great War, which Bab-
bitt describes in Rousseau and Romanti-
cism a s “the crowning stupidity of the
ages.. . . N o more delirious spectacle
I has ever been witnessed than that of
hundreds of millions of human beings
using a vast machinery of scientific effi-
ciency to turn life into a hell for one
another. . . .The dissolution of civiliza-
tion with which we are threatened is
likely t o be worse in some respects than
that of Greece or Rome in view of the
success that has been attained in ‘per-
fecting the mystery of murder.”’
The war, instead of realizing the lib-
eral Wilsonian dream of “making the
world safe for democracy,” made the
world safe for the monstrous tyrannies
of Bolshevism in Russia and National
Socialism in Germany. For a brief time in
the early 1920s, Italy seemed to present
a less malignant alternative, so that Bab-
bitt in 1924 in Democracy and Leadership
could write:
Though the triumph of any type of impe-
rialistic leader is a disaster, especially in
a country like our own that has known the
blessings of liberty under the law, never-
I
theless there is a choice even here. Cir-
cumstances may arise when we may es-
teem ourselves fortunate if we get the
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American equivalent of a Mussolini; he
may be needed to save us from the Ameri-
can equivalent of a Lenin. Such an emer-
gency is not to be anticipated, however,
unless we drift even further than we have
thus far from the principles that underlie
our unionist tradition.
History has not been kind to this pas-
sage, and it did much to compromise
Babbitt’s reputation, especially among
such left-leaning intellectuals of the 1930s
as Sidney Hook (who later became a
leading anti-Communist but supported
the Communist ticket in the election of
1932), Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley,
Kenneth Burke, MaxLerner, Harold Laski,
and others, whose journalistic prognos-
tications fared even worse than Babbitt’s.
There is little justification for singling
out such a passage, however objection-
able, and using it as a shibboleth to
reject the generally sound conservatism
of Babbitt, any more than there would be
for using some of the barbed allusions of
Burke against Jewish stockbrokers to
reject the main thrust of his powerful
philippics against the French Revolu-
tion. Surely, the basic attitude of Babbitt
towards all leaders like Mussolini is the
one expressed in a passage of Rousseau
and Romanticism in which he speaks of
“the most dangerous of all the sham
religions of the modern age-the reli-
gion of country, the frenzied nationalism
that is now threatening to make an end of
civilization itself.”
More telling than the criticism of ad-
versaries entirely out of sympathy with
Babbitt’s point of view are the occa-
sional reservations of friends who feel
they have learned much from him but
are not convinced about the accuracy of
his terminology. Thus we find Russell
Kirk, who cites a passage in T.S. Eliot,
questioning the definition of so impor-
tant a word to Babbitt a s “romanticism.”
The passage from Eliot is in his 1934
lecture After Strange Gods:
Winter 1992
 It is true that from time to time writers
have labelled themselves “romanticists”
or “classicists,”just as they have from
time to time banded themselves together
under other names. These names which
groups of writers and artists give them-
selves are the delight of professors and
historians of literature, but should not be
taken very seriously; their chief value is
temporary and political-that, simply, of
helping to make the authors better known
to a contemporary public.. . .”
Reflecting on the difficulty of classify-
ing such pillars of established institu-
tions as Sir Walter Scott and Coleridge
alongwith subverters of them likeShelley
and Godwin under t h e same rubric,
Russell Kirk regretfully concludes that
“perhaps Babbitt should have chosen
some otherword with which to label the
literary and artistic enthusiasts for over-
throwing the established order-politi-
cal, moral, economic, and cultural-in
order to shape the world nearer to their
heart’s desire.”
It is a weighty objection, but I am not
convinced by it. Nor am I altogether
convinced that Eliot’s words were inten-
tionally aimed in the direction of his old
mentor; they may have been aimed at
some of his associates with whom some
of Babbitt’s insights had turned into cant
terms with which to belabor their oppo-
nents. Despite its difficulties, it is not
easy to find a replacement for the word
romanticism that would be equally use-
ful in describing a wide variety of related
phenomena. Babbitt himself was not
unaware that his b e s t efforts t o
deglamorize the word would not suc-
ceed in depriving it of its honorific sound
and associations, especially in America,
which takes pride in being virtually syn-
onymous with the romantic dream. It is
not for nothing that, at the very outset,
Babbitt should reassure his reader some-
what facetiously: “Those who look with
alarm on recent attacks on romanticism
should becomforted. All children, nearly
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all women, and the vast majority of men
always have been, are and probably al-
ways will be romantic. This is true even
of a classical period like the second half
of the seventeenth century in France.”
To be romantic in this almost univer-
sal sense is evidently what comes natu-
rally to mankind; to become something
else requires self-conscious effort and/
or instruction to which we are averse.
Only one in thousands would seem ca-
pable of satisfying so stringent a require-
ment, and yet Babbitt strikes us as being
the very opposite of a snob. To be a good
humanist, in his own sense, he assures
us on more than one occasion, means
apparently little more than “to be mod-
erate, sensible, and decent.” The defini-
tion is so broadly welcoming and demo-
cratically inclusive as to exclude virtu-
ally no one from the fold. Irving Babbitt
was no seeker after a cult following.
Babbitt’s interest in literature appears
never to have been primarily linguistic.
It is hardly accidental that he shares
with us an anecdote about the Buddha
which has the Enlightened One answer-
ing a disciple who inquires about what
language is to be used in communicating
his gospel by saying that it does not
really signify, since the import of the
message is so urgent that hearers are
bound t o understand no matter what the
language in which it is preached. So
much for those who are inclined to make
a fetish of language and its magical pow-
ers. The old-fashioned distinction be-
tween form and matter, so often denied
nowadays, was evidently adhered t o by
the Buddha, by Babbitt, and by Alexander
Pope in his Essay OR Criticism.
If language and its problems are of no
fundamental interest to Babbitt, neither
I’m afraid is another central interest of
many modern philosophers and literary
critics, namely pure aesthetics, which
tends in the direction of abstraction in
modern painting and literature such as
Gertrude Stein’s that modeled itself on
Ill
it. However deeply sensitive to beauty
he may have been, Babbitt would not for
a moment join thinkers like Benedetto
Croce or his learned American disciple
Joel EIias Spingarn, in taking the plea-
sure produced by formal elements to be
the deepest rationale of literary as well
as other art, that aspired to the ideality
of abstract music, that told us, as
Archibald MacLeish once did, that a
poem must not mean, but BE. Long be-
fore them all, of course, there was the
influential example of Edgar Allan Poe, to
whom there are not infrequent allusions
in Rousseau and Romanticism. Poe car-
ried his aestheticism to the extremes
which affected deeply Baudelaire in the
middle of t h e nineteenth century,
Mallarmit toward t h e end, and Paul
ValCry in the twentieth century. It must
be noted, however, that, though Babbitt
rejects pure aestheticism and abstrac-
tion, he is hardly more hospitable than
Poe to the naive didacticism that pre-
vailed in America in Poe’s time.
But if so much is rejected that is re-
garded by others as the essence of litera-
ture, what is there left more than that
ether once postulated in physics, which
upon experiment proved nonexistent?
That is a question which every conscien-
tious teacher of literature must face if he
is not to regard his profession as a form
of sophistry. It is at such a moment of
self-questioning and examination that
reading Babbitt may become a bracing
and meaningful experience. It is possible
that Babbitt himself went through such a
process before beginning to write at a
relatively mature age, and not writing
very much thereafter except when he
felt he had something urgent to say. The
signs of struggle are still palpable in his
work, which may be what makes reading
him a vital experience, no matter how
many times we may have done so before.
The reader who feels challenged by him,
as he himself perhaps was once chal-
lenged, will not perceive him to be insis-
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tent in his repetition but full of surprise,
which a t times rises to the revelatory.
What interests Babbitt in literature
most of all are the traces of wisdom
discoverable there which may lead not
only t o an understanding of life, its pos-
sibilities and limitations, but to an intel-
ligent choice among these of the path
likely to lead to a happiness, which,
rightly understood in the Aristotelian
way, is “the end of ends” of human striv-
ing. In “the battle of the books,” the
struggle between the ancients and
moderns, the advantage for Babbitt is
clearly on the side of the ancients. But
this does not mean that he admires all of
the old masters or even any one of them
unreservedly. Friendship to Plato does
not exclude an even greater adherence
to the truth. Babbitt is not inclined to
idolatry even of the great classics. Hu-
manism insists that every claimant t o
attention be brought before the bar of
individual judgment. The ancients have
the advantage, because they have been
subject to the most ruthless winnowing,
not to speak of the hazards of historical
accident and destruction. The classics
are what humanity has managed most
desperately t o hold on to, through thick
and thin, for all the world as if they were
spiritual life-preservers. Babbitt calls
them simply members of the highest and
best class of literary productions.
Not the least interesting part of Rous-
seau and Romanticism is its Appendix.
Here in several pages (after almost 400
densely packed pages of the book proper)
Babbitt undertakes what would seem to
be a Herculean scholarly task, which is
to prove that the “romantic” period and
culture he has been describing previ-
ously are not unprecedented historical
phenomena. There was a period in an-
cient Chinese history in which Taoism, a
naturalistic, primitivistic, pantheistic
movement opposed to the dominant
Confucianism of its time, produced phe-
nomena, events, personalities, and theo-
Winter 1992
ries strikingly similar t o some of those he
has been describing in Western Euro-
pean history of the past several centu-
ries. The effect of this Appendix, brief as
it is, is to stress the element of unity in all
human history, thesort of thingweshould
expect if reality is, as Babbitt would have
it, a oneness that is always changing. In
fact, in rereading the book, and it is a
book which, if it held our attention
through one reading, emphatically de-
mands rereading, we could do worse
than to start with this Appendix, which
may be helpful in tying together the
various strands of Babbitt’s argument.
Babbitt seems quite as aware as Eliot
that every period is a mixture of sepa-
rate and often conflicting intellectual
and philosophical tendencies.
In the beautiful memorial of Irving
Babbitt, which T.S. Eliot wrote in his
editorial commentary for the October
1933 issue of The Criterion, he notes that
“Those who only know Babbitt through
his writings and have had no contact
with him as a teacher and friend, will
probably not be able to appreciate the
greatness of his work. For he was prima-
rily and always a teacher and talker. He
combined r a r e c h a r m and great
force. . . .”These words, echoed in vari-
ous ways by other students and friends
of Babbitt in the 1941 volume Irving Bab
bitt: Man and Teacher, are calculated to
make a reader who has not enjoyed the
same advantage keenly regret his depri-
vation. On the other hand, he is in a
better position to refute the unintended
imputation, for, if it were really so, we
should hardly be discussing Babbitt’s
bookseventy-three years later, nor would
a publisher be willing to risk his capital
in making it possible for us to do so.
The honorific but gratuitous compari-
son made by several of Babbitt’s stu-
dents (but not by Eliot) between their
teacher and Samuel Johnson is hardly
illuminating if it reminds us that, owing
to the talents of his friend Boswell, John-
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son for many readers survives mainly as
the liveliest of talkers or as the subject of
other biographers inspired by Boswell
to emulation or, as in the case of
Macaulay, to antipathy. Babbitt’s con-
versational talents, like those of most
teachers who are masters (as he clearly
was) of improvisation, are now irrecov-
erable. But the comparison may also
serve to remind us that Johnson’s own
writings, though not as popular as those
of his enthusiastic friend, are hardly
negligible. Alas, for those of us who never
saw Babbitt plain or sat spellbound at
his feet, only his books and essays re-
main. And I for one am prepared to say
that these are quite sufficient, parted as
they are from the fascination of a living
voice and the weight exerted by the
spectacle of an integral person.
I, too, have my memories of my first
encounter-not with Babbitt but with
his writing. It was in a college classroom
in 1933 when I was sixteen and enrolled
in a course of freshman composition for
which the assigned textbook was edited
by an admirer of Babbitt. After a full
measure of the classic English essayists
and a few Americans of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, there were a
couple of twentieth-century writers, one
of whom was Babbitt. It was the late
essay (mentioned earlier) on President
Charles Eliot. The brilliant young instruc-
tor of the course was a disciple of Karl
Marx, and it is not surprising that Babbitt
should have elicited less sympathy than
incomprehension from him, but he was
fair in his treatment in that the essay was
among the select number that was as-
signed for both reading and discussion.
I wish I could say that I experienced
Melville’s “shock of recognition” at this
first meeting with so distinguished a
mind, but I can’t. It was not the easiest
work by Babbitt for an immature and
uninitiated student to be able to under-
stand and appreciate, especially when
the intermediary presenting it as an
113
unsympathetic to his point of view as
mine was.
Fifty years later, I could read it as a
confirmation of T.S. Eliot’s observation
that “the point at which Babbitt’s ideas
converged with the greatest force was
the subject of Education.” Unfortunately
he has nothing to say about this essay,
which deserves both exposition and dis-
cussion. Eliot tells us that he first met
Babbitt in a Harvard classroom in 1909,
when he was twenty-one, and his initial
reaction seems to have been far from
perfect understanding, judging from his
description of Babbitt’s lectures as be-
ginning “anywhere” and ending “any-
where.” We have attended too many lec-
tures ourselves by professors inclined
to ramble not to recognize that descrip
tion. What first caught the attention of
Eliot and impressed him was the author-
ity, excitement about ideas, and inde-
pendence with which Babbitt taught, “the
impression that a lifetime was too short
for telling us all he wanted to say.”
To return to my own experience-
though my own first response was more
puzzlement than anything else-a seed
had obviously been sown which was to
flower luxuriantly much later, when my
infatuation with Marx and the Revolu-
tion had become a dead letter. During
that infatuation, however, a flickering
interest in Babbitt never quite left me, at
least to the extent that I began to regard
him, when I read something else he had
written or refreshed my recollection of
something I had already read, as a no-
table reactionary thinker, a redoubtable
adversary of all the notions I had fondly
entertained. Babbitt’s gravity (of mean-
ing more than of manner) made itself
felt, as in the Platonic Dialogues that I
encountered around the same time.
By an odd but arresting coincidence,
Eliot’s tribute to Babbitt in The Criterion
was followed by his note directing the
reader’s attention to a letter to the editor
from Ezra Pound in Rapallo, printed else-
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where in the same issue. Pound’s letter
turns out to be a caustic rejoinder to
another editorial by Eliot in the previous
issue of the quarterly (July 1933). In
commenting on the appearance of two
new intellectually respectable magazines
in America, both of them agitated by the
current social crisis, Eliot had ventured
to suggest that ethics might precede
politics and economics in importance:
The system, which the intelligent econo-
mist discovers or invents must immedi-
ately be related t o a moral system. I hold
that it is ultimately the moralists and
philosophers who must supply the foun-
dations of statesmanship, even though
they never appear in the forum. We are
constantly told that the economic prob-
lem cannot wait. It is especially true that
the moral and spiritual problems cannot
wait. They have waited too long.
As if this were not provocative enough,
he had dared to quote at some length
from the Bible a passage about Moses,
Aaron, and the Children of Israel wan-
dering in the wilderness and bitterly
lamenting their exchange of the security
of Egypt for freedom. The suggestion of
unity at the heart of all change in the
human condition was certainly strong.
Too strong for Pound, who exploded
in characteristic rage and satirical mock-
ery of his friend’s piety, adding more
calmly: “It is not a question of the Editor
believing that ‘a conception of the good
life for the individual’ must underly po-
litical-economic ideas. The issue, in the
Eleventh Year of the Fascist Revolution
is that ‘the good life’ is impossible until
certain very simple facts are perceived,
[e.g.] That every factory and every in-
dustrycreates in agiven period a mass of
prices greater than the amount of pur-
chasing power it puts into circula-
tion.. . .” H e then goes on t o recom-
mend reading C.H. Douglas and Woergl,
names familiar t o all readers of his
“money pamphlets” as well as his Cun-
Winter 1992
tos, and certainly known t o Eliot who had
published many of them in The Criterion
and was to call him the next year in After
Strange Gods “probably the most impor-
tant living poet in our language.” This
Memorabilia
What tributes shall I bring to you
My Friend
who have now met, as Henry James
put it,
The Distinguished Thing?
Some spontaneous tears
for I was not there to press your hand
and commit you to a Bon Voyage
as you set sail for that other country.
But I remember a soft September night
when we walked out beyond the
village lights
to that little park
where a caged solitary bear engaged
our pity
and we spoke of the ways of bears and
men-
not always to the credit of men.
And I remember our Sunday night
suppers
with Dick and Fritz and Mary-
the poet, the painter, the pianist-
Modem Age
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judgment could have come as no sur-
prise to Pound, but he still felt that Eliot
was not paying sufficient attention to the
Bibliography he had compiled for him
instead of wasting his time on the Bible.
when eager and contentious we
debated
those chronic lmponderables-
Life, Love, and Art-
though reaching no conclusions, No-
not even yet, after these forty years.
And I remember our summer of
canoeing
when life was sweet and easy
as the little waves that bowed to our
paddles.
Now it is another autumn
and 1 see you striding across a
meadow
heavy with sunlight, dappled with
golden-rod.
Wait for me beside that blazing oak
that curves an arm out over the river.
I shall not be long in coming.
I am already on the way.
-Louise Dauner
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