A Chair for Babbitt

From Harvard last week came a muffled echo of Irving Babbitt, a scholar so querulously out of tune with his time (1865-1933) that something must have been wrong with the time. The news was a new Harvard chair, the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature, to be occupied by one of Babbitt's last Harvard students, Critic Harry Levin, 47 (James Joyce: A Critical Introduction). It was an honor proposed by another former Babbitt student. Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey. Countless other students, 'from Poet T. S. Eliot to Pundit Walter Lippmann, would doubtless second it. For nearly 40 years such students jammed Babbitt's French literature classes, and by now his own general contempt for them is a matter that aging men may forgive dead giants. It was worth much to hear Irving Babbitt tear apart his enemies (notably Rousseau), while spewing up to 75 quotations in a single session.

Harvard's chair honors more: an anti-sentimentalist philosopher whose national fame rose and fell in a few brief years (circa 1930). In that essentially sentimental era, Babbitt's "new humanism" so riled both liberals and conservatives that nobody really listened. What Babbitt proposed, in his prickly prose (Democracy and Leadership, On Being Creative and Other Essays'), was an end to the gathering tyranny of abstract causes. He despised any assumption that the "only significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society." The struggle, said he, lay in the will of each man to be human (just how, he found trouble prescribing).

Liberals blasted Babbitt's disdain for the class struggle, conservatives his acerb attitude toward religious enthusiasm. Anglican Poet Eliot suggested that he was "trying to build a Catholic platform out of Protestant planks." He was a man perhaps defined only by his enemies. In the end, if he could not say himself precisely what he was trying to say, he did once quote a bit of doggerel that seemed to sum it up:

And so I hold it is not treason

To advance a simple reason

For the sorry lack of progress we decry.

It is this: instead of working

On himself, each man is shirking

And trying to reform some other guy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.