Babbitt uses Rousseau as the founding figure of a great international movement and traces its consequences through romantic genius, imagination, morality, love, irony, nature-worship and melancholy, with examples from Chateaubriand to the poets of his own day. Against them he sets a classical ideal of restraint and judgement.
The central statement of the New Humanism of 1919, still a bracing challenge to anyone who loves the Romantics. Download the free EPUB.