The Cry in the Wilderness
We have in Mr Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism to deal with a closely argued and copiously documented indictment of the modern mind. We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever may be our final attitude towards the author’s conclusions, we cannot but regard Rousseau and Romanticism as masterly. Its style is, we admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets.
By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt’s achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last generation—we will go no further back for the moment, though our author’s arraignment reaches at least a century earlier—criticism has imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern ‘critic’ has been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a scientific terminology. The word ‘objectivity’ had a great vogue; it was felt that the spiritual world was analogous to the physical; the critic was faced, like the man of science, with a mass of hard, irreducible facts, and his function was, like the scientist’s, that of recording them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a ‘scientific’ importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist’s intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or comparison.
That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism, although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the impulse towards the penetration of an artist’s consciousness is in itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they were really in better case—whether they were not the fathers whose sins are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those creations of men’s minds were capax imperii in man’s universe? What right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man’s responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had not the time (or was it the courage?) to analyse, dare to denounce us because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?
But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism inevitably involves an æsthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two. The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails—where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has passed from the nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of Aristotle’s Poetics, the mere title, The Philosophy of History would have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of instinct. From one side comes the cry, ‘Man is a beast’; from the other, ‘Trust your instincts.’ The sole manifest employment of reason is to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the imagination, the vital principle of control.
Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress was supposed to create, ipso facto, a concomitant moral progress, and which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant’s memory of a mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when they refuse to listen to the condemnation pronounced by an older generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously cherished? They may not like the bastard progeny of the various mistresses they adored—of a Science which they enthroned above instead of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence—but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the æsthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt’s indictment of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:—
‘“If I am to judge by myself,” said an eighteenth-century Frenchman, “man is a stupid animal.” Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance. An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages—the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success that has been obtained in ‘perfecting the mystery of murder.’ Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the facts. But the veto power is itself a fact—the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.’
We find it impossible to refuse our assent to the main counts of this indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an invitation to disaster. Humanism must reassert itself, for even we can see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The reassertion of humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are trembling.
[FEBRUARY, 1920.