Chapter III: Part 3

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.

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.”