The Present Outlook (Part 6)

(Pictured: Irving Babbitt.) I am happy to present the sixth and final post of the final chapter of Rousseau and Romanticism, “The Present Outlook,” in which Irving Babbitt concludes that, “[m]an realizes [the] immensity of his being . . . only in so far as he ceases to be the thrall of his own ego. This human breadth he achieves not by throwing off but by taking on limitations, and what he limits is above all his imagination. ” With this post, therefore, we have presented the entirety of Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), wherein you have been able to enjoy what is probably the greatest critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

The keener the observer the more likely he is to be struck by the empire of habit. Habit, as Wellington said, is ten times nature, and is indeed so obviously a second nature that many of the wise have suspected that nature herself is only a first habit. (1) Now Aristotle who is open to criticism, it may be, on the side of humility, still remains incomparable among the philosophers of the world for his treatment of habit on the humanistic level. Any one who wishes to learn how to become moderate and sensible and decent can do no better even at this late day than to steep himself in the “Nicomachean Ethics.”

One of the ultimate contrasts that presents itself in a subject of this kind is that between habit as conceived by Aristotle and nature as conceived by Rousseau. The first great grievance of the critical humanist against Rousseau is that he set out to be an individualist and at the same time attacked analysis, which is indispensable if one is to be a sound individualist. The second great grievance of the humanist is that Rousseau sought to discredit habit which is necessary if right analysis is to be made effective. “The only habit the child should be allowed to form,” says Rousseau, “is that of forming no habit.” (2) How else is the child to follow his bent or genius and so arrive at full self-expression? The point I am bringing up is of the utmost gravity, for Rousseau is by common consent the father of modern education. To eliminate from education the idea of a progressive adjustment to a human law, quite apart from temperament, may be to imperil civilization itself. For civilization (another word that is sadly in need of Socratic defining) may be found to consist above all in an orderly transmission of right habits; and the chief agency for securing such a transmission must always be education, by which I mean far more of course than mere formal schooling.

Rousseau’s repudiation of habit is first of all, it should be pointed out, perfectly chimerical. The trait of the child to which the sensible educator will give chief attention is not his spontaneity, but his proneness to imitate. In the absence of good models the child will imitate bad ones, and so, long before the age of intelligent choice and self-determination, become the prisoner of bad habits. Men, therefore, who aim at being civilized must come together, work out a convention in short, regarding the habits they wish transmitted to the young. A great civilization is in a sense only a great convention. A sane individualist does not wish to escape from convention in itself; he merely remembers that no convention is final—that it is always possible to improve the quality of the convention in the midst of which he is living, and that it should therefore be held flexibly. He would oppose no obstacles to those who are rising above the conventional level, but would resist firmly those who are sinking beneath it. It is much easier to determine practically whether one has to do with an ascent or a descent (even though the descent be rapturous like that of the Rousseauist) than our anarchical individualists are willing to acknowledge.

The notion that in spite of the enormous mass of experience that has been accumulated in both East and West we are still without light as to the habits that make for moderation and good sense and decency, and that education is therefore still purely a matter of exploration and experiment is one that may be left to those who are suffering from an advanced stage of naturalistic intoxication—for example, to Professor John Dewey and his followers. From an ethical point of view a child has the right to be born into a cosmos, and not, as is coming to be more and more the case under such influences, pitch-forked into chaos. But the educational radical, it may be replied, does stress the idea of habit; and it is true that he would have the young acquire the habits that make for material efficiency. This, however, does not go beyond Rousseau who came out very strongly for what we should call nowadays vocational training. (3) It is the adjustment to the human law against which Rousseau and all the Rousseauists are recalcitrant.

Self-expression and vocational training combined in various proportions and tempered by the spirit of “service,” are nearly the whole of the new education. But I have already said that it is not possible to extract from any such compounding of utilitarian and romantic elements, with the resulting material efficiency and ethical inefficiency, a civilized view of life. It is right here indeed in the educational field that concerted opposition to the naturalistic conspiracy against civilization is most likely to be fruitful. If the present generation—and I have in mind especially American conditions—cannot come to a working agreement about the ethical training it wishes given the young, if it allows the drift towards anarchy on the human level to continue, it will show itself, however ecstatic it may be over its own progressiveness and idealism, both cowardly and degenerate. It is very stupid, assuming that it is not very hypocritical, to denounce Kultur [“German culture and civilization as idealized by the exponents of German imperialism during the Hohenzollern and Nazi regimes.” —The Free Dictionary], and then to adopt educational ideas that work out in much the same fashion as Kultur, and have indeed the same historical derivation.

The dehumanizing influences I have been tracing are especially to be deprecated in higher education. The design of higher education, so far as it deserves the name, is to produce leaders, and on the quality of the leadership must depend more than on any other single factor the success or failure of democracy. I have already quoted Aristotle’s saying that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.” This does not mean much more than that most men would like to live temperamentally, to follow each his own bent and then put the best face on the matter possible. Most men, says Goethe in a similar vein, prefer error to truth because truth imposes limitations and error does not. It is well also to recall Aristotle’s saying that “the multitude is incapable of making distinctions.” (4) Now my whole argument is that to be sound individualists we must not only make the right distinctions but submit to them until they become habitual. Does it follow that the whole experiment in which we are engaged is foredoomed to failure? Not quite—though the obstacles to success are somewhat greater than our democratic enthusiasts suspect. The most disreputable aspect of human nature, I have said, is its proneness to look for scapegoats; and my chief objection to the movement I have been studying is that more perhaps than any other in history it has encouraged the evasion of moral responsibility and the setting up of scapegoats. But as an offset to this disreputable aspect of man, one may note a creditable trait: he is very sensitive to the force of a right example. If the leaders of a community look up to a sound model and work humanistically with reference to it, all the evidence goes to show that they will be looked up to and imitated in turn by enough of the rank and file to keep that community from lapsing into barbarism. Societies always decay from the top. It is therefore not enough, as the humanitarian would have us believe, that our leaders should act vigorously on the outer world and at the same time be filled with the spirit of “service.” Purely expansive leaders of this kind we have seen who have the word humanity always on their lips and are at the same time ceasing to be human. “That wherein the superior man cannot be equalled,” says Confucius, “is simply this—his work which other men cannot see.” (5) It is this inner work and the habits that result from it that above all humanize a man and make him exemplary to the multitude. To perform this work he needs to look to a centre and a model.

We are brought back here to the final gap that opens between classicist and romanticist. To look to a centre according to the romanticist is at the best to display “reason,” at the worst to be smug and philistine. To look to a true centre is, on the contrary, according to the classicist, to grasp the abiding human element through all the change in which it is implicated, and this calls for the highest use of the imagination. . . . To do justice to writing which has this note of centrality we ourselves need to be in some measure experienced and imaginative. Writing that is romantic, writing in which the imagination is not disciplined to a true centre is best enjoyed while we are young. The person who is as much taken by Shelley at forty as he was at twenty has, one may surmise, failed to grow up. Shelley himself wrote to John Gisborne (October 22, 1821): “As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me.” The mature man is likely to be dissatisfied with poetry so unsubstantial as this even as an intoxicant and still more when it is offered to him as the “ideal.” The very mark of genuinely classical work, on the other hand, is that it yields its full meaning only to the mature. Young and old are, as Cardinal Newman says, affected very differently by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. “Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply . . . at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation for thousands of years, with a power over the mind and a charm which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.”

In the poets whom Newman praises the imagination is, as it were, centripetal. The neo-classic proneness to oppose good sense to imagination, and the romantic proneness to oppose imagination to good sense, have at least this justification, that in many persons, perhaps in most persons, the two actually conflict, but surely the point to emphasize is that they may come together, that good sense may be imaginative and imagination sensible. If imagination is not sensible, as is plainly the case in Victor Hugo, for example, we may suspect a lack of the universal and ethical quality. All men, even great poets, are more or less immersed in their personal conceit and in the zones of illusion peculiar to their age. But there is the question of degree. The poets to whom the world has finally accorded its suffrage have not been megalomaniacs; they have not threatened like Hugo to outbellow the thunder or pull comets around by the tail. (6) Bossuet’s saying that “good sense is the master of human life” does not contradict but complete Pascal’s saying that “the imagination disposes of everything,” provided only due stress be laid on the word human. It would not be easy to live a more imaginative life than Hugo, but his imagination was so unrestrained that we may ask whether he lived a very human life, whether he was not rather, in Tennyson’s phrase, a “weird Titan.” Man realizes that immensity of his being of which Joubert speaks only in so far as he ceases to be the thrall of his own ego. This human breadth he achieves not by throwing off but by taking on limitations, and what he limits is above all his imagination. The reason why he should strive for a life that is thus increasingly full and complete is simply, as Joubert suggests, that it is more delectable, that it is found practically to make for happiness.

THE END

(1) This belief the Oriental has embodied in the doctrine of Karma.
(2) “La seule habitude qu’on doit laisser prendre à l’enfant est de n’en contractor aucune.” Emile, Livre i.
(3) Emile was to be trained to be a cabinet-maker.
(4) Eth. Nic., 1172 b.
(5) Doctrine of the Mean (c. xxxiii, v. 2).
(6) See his poem Ibo in Les Contemplations.