SOURCE: Sutton, Walter. “The New Humanism.” In Modern American Criticism, pp. 26-50. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Many intellectuals sensitive to the confusion and disorder of the early twentieth century looked to the past for sustaining values. In the midst of the rebellion against “Puritanism,” they defended the principles of decorum and restraint against what seemed to them the excesses of modern scientific, literary, and social thought.

In criticism the staunchest defenders of an older order were the New Humanists, led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Establishing their position in the first decade of the century and gaining support from followers in the universities, the Humanists remained a power to be reckoned with for nearly a generation. From their ivied bastions they fired salvos against avant-garde and liberal critics in a latter-day version of the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. Most active in the 1920's, this pamphlet warfare culminated in the appearance of rival Humanist and anti-Humanist symposia in 1930. Although the New Humanism disintegrated as a movement during the Thirties, when the depression encouraged the growth of socially conscious liberal and radical criticism, it remained a recognizable though indirect influence upon individual critics.

The New Humanists sought their standards in the pre-nineteenth century past. Insistent upon the dualism of man and nature and of the moral and the animal nature within man, they were militantly opposed to both romanticism and literary naturalism. Against the “beautiful necessity” of the romantics and the pessimistic determinism of the naturalists, they argued for the freedom of the will and the possibility of moral choice. Against the romantics' expansiveness and celebration of impulse, they preached the gospel of the middle way and the need of the discipline of conscience operating through the “inner check.” While they did not deny the creative power of the imagination, they disapproved of its apotheosis, feeling that romantic intuition needed the corrective of reason and judgment. They also distrusted the revolutionary spirit and the ideology of popular democracy, which seemed to them the indulgence of a sentimental humanitarianism. Identifying themselves with the classes rather than the masses, the Humanists promoted the idea of a cultural and social elite as the source of needed intellectual and moral leadership.

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Irving Babbitt was the chief prophet and lawmaker of the New Humanism. Schooled in the classics of the West and the East, Babbitt began his long academic career in the mid-Nineties as an instructor of French at Harvard. Of the series of books that established his reputation, four are most useful as a definition of his position: Literature and the American College (1908), The New Laokoön (1910), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), and Democracy and Leadership (1924). Although Rousseau and Romanticism is probably the best known of these, most of Babbitt's later ideas are anticipated in Literature and the American College, which begins with a quotation from Emerson's “Ode to Channing”:

There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled—
Law for man, and law for thing. …

That Babbitt should have chosen lines from America's chief romantic as the motto for his Humanist dualism may seem ironic. But the Humanist shares other ideas and attitudes of the transcendentalist. Babbitt also endorses Emerson when he asserts that Humanism is interested in “the perfecting of the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole.”

From the beginning Babbitt makes clear his aristocratic and antidemocratic views. He divorces humanism from any association with utopianism or humanitarianism by citing a late Latin authority, Gellius, to the effect that “Humanitas … is incorrectly used to denote a ‘promiscuous benevolence, what the Greeks call philanthropy,’ whereas the word really implies doctrine and discipline and is applicable not to men in general but only to a select few,—it is, in short, aristocratic and not democratic in its implication.” Babbitt believes that a person who is so misguided as to have “sympathy for mankind in the lump, faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the great cause of this progress, should be called, not a humanist, but a humanitarian.” It is not surprising that he considers the proper function of the American college to be the training of an elite for the leadership of the less disciplined masses. After appealing to the English ideal of the gentleman and scholar, he declares that “in one sense the purpose of the college is not to encourage the democratic spirit, but on the contrary to check the drift toward a pure democracy.” What is desirable is “an aristocratic and selective democracy.”

The need for order is intensified by a confusion of values resulting from the rise of naturalism. Babbitt distinguishes two phases within the naturalistic movement: one is the “positivist and utilitarian movement” fathered by Bacon; the other is the romantic stemming from Rousseau. These twin humanitarianisms, one scientific and one sentimental, are both dependent on the gospel of progress and blind to evil and to human imperfection and limitation. By promoting a belief in progress and substituting the “cult of humanity” for “our real religion,” naturalism has succeeded in placing the Golden Age in the future instead of the past.

In education the rise of naturalism undermined the traditional academic disciplines. The humanities are in need of defense against the inroads of the sciences, just as in an earlier age they were in need of defense against theology. The study of literature has been weakened by a growing emphasis on modern literature, which even before the development of romanticism permitted too much scope for personal emotions. The only antidote for the sentimental and subjective in modern literature is a firm grounding in what Babbitt describes as the “rational study” of the classics, which would also provide a common stock of values for the cultured elite.

Both the college and the graduate school have suffered from the progressive and scientific traditions. The college should stand “not for the advancement, but for the assimilation of learning and for the perpetuation of culture.” As for the graduate school, Babbitt sees the chief threat to humane scholarship in the rising prestige of Germanic philosophy. The new scholars, servile rather than creative in spirit, he identifies with the scientists in their dedication to “law for thing” rather than “law for man.” (The Humanist here echoes not only Emerson's “Ode” but the theme of his “American Scholar” as well.) The pedantry of the philological tradition not only “dehumanizes” literary study; it also drives away good men who cannot stomach the existing requirements for the Ph.D. degree.

In Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt again links Bacon and Rousseau as corruptors of civilization, with Rousseau as head devil. Against them he places Aristotle, whose Poetics affords “the best theory of classicism,” one that recognizes man as the creature of two laws and advocates the “law of measure.” The classical emphasis on restraint and proportion is a corrective to the romantic indulgence of temperament and the idea of art as self-expression. Babbitt approves the classical standards of general nature, imitation, probability, and decorum while recognizing the necessity of flexibility in the understanding of these terms. Reacting against the narrowness of neoclassical standards, here as in The New Laokoön, Babbitt insists that “true classicism does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of models but on an immediate insight into the universal.” (In promoting these classical criteria Babbitt anticipates the later neo-Aristotelians.)

In his concluding chapter, “The Present Outlook,” Babbitt acknowledges that Humanism is not enough: “Though religion can get along without humanism, humanism cannot get along without religion.” He finds in the “middle way” of Buddhism a harmony of the meditative and religious life and the ethical and humanistic life—a harmony that Aristotle fails to provide. Babbitt turns, significantly and characteristically, not to a religion of revelation but to one in which the ideal of right conduct exists apart from any concept of God or divinity.

The central and enduring values needed to redeem the modern world can be established only by leaders exercising what Babbitt calls “the highest use of the imagination.” He distinguishes between the “Arcadian” imagination, representing individual impulses, and the “ethical imagination,” expressing with a “high seriousness” a common or universal self.

In the light of this distinction, with its echoes of Arnold, Babbitt examines the work of the leading romantics. The quality of imagination displayed by both Keats and Shelley does not rise above the Arcadian or pastoral level. Babbitt regards Wordsworth with mixed feelings: he is rather attracted by his high moralizing and didacticism but distrusts his sentimentalization of common life and his regressive cult of the child. He treats Coleridge with more sympathy, but condescendingly. The romantic he most respects is Goethe, who in mid-career had the wisdom to turn from an emotional striving toward the unlimited to an acceptance of boundaries. Babbitt regrets that the humanistic Goethe has had fewer followers than the romantic.

For the most part, Babbitt's literary criticism is incidental to his moralistic social criticism and his Humanist version of history. Such highly loaded terms as the two laws, the ethical imagination, humanitarianism, and the philosophy of flux are used not so much to interpret literature as to pass moral judgment. Even if a distinction could be made between two types of imagination—one “ethical,” the other “Arcadian” or “pastoral”—what grounds are there for calling one “higher” than the other?

The Humanist is hostile to contemporary literature, which reflects a world view that he does not wish to or cannot accept and which employs artistic conventions that he refuses to understand. Babbitt can dismiss Joyce's Ulysses, the carefully wrought product of years of conscious artistry, by saying that it “marks a more advanced state of psychic disintegration than anything that has come down to us from classical antiquity.” He lumps Theodore Dreiser with Sherwood Anderson, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and Carl Sandburg, as end products of a long descent from religious to humanistic to naturalistic realism—a realism he describes as “romanticism on all fours.” The only possible escape from the life of sensation in which this group is absorbed must come from a renewal of the “inner life,” of which, for America, Jonathan Edwards is the exemplar. Babbitt admits that Edwards' theology is no longer acceptable and that a secular substitute must be found; the quest for this is the vocation of the Humanist leader.

The invocation of Edwards is a key to the cultural genealogy of the Humanist. In his idealism and his religious aspiration, Emerson was also the heir of Edwards; and the Humanist, like the transcendentalist, is seeking in what he regards as the modern wasteland (Emerson's “sty” of nature) for something to replace the divine and supernatural light of which the Puritan was confident. For both the answer seems to lie in an “ethical,” “higher” imagination. It is not only in the recognition of two laws and of the need for supranaturalistic values, but also in the idealizing tendency, the revulsion from the gross life of the senses, that the New Humanist is at one with the romantic transcendentalist.

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A Thoreau to Babbitt's Emerson, Paul Elmer More has sometimes been called “the hermit of Princeton.” Author of a number of historical works on Christianity and the classics, More is best known for the Shelburne Essays, issued in eleven volumes comprising two series (1904-10; 1913-21) and consisting largely of reviews and articles which had appeared in The Nation and other periodicals. In the bulk of his output, More is the foremost Humanist critic, and his discussions of American and chiefly English literature (the ratio of essays on these is about one to three) reveal a point of view very close to Babbitt's.

Inspired by Thoreau, More retired, early in his career, to a small house in New Hampshire for two years of meditation and writing. The title of the Shelburne Essays—like Walden, named after a place of withdrawal—represented for the author the contemplative spirit in which his writings were conceived.

The essays begin with “A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau,” in which More sees Thoreau as a kindred spirit who turned from civilization to the solitude of nature. His Humanism is apparent in his praise of Thoreau's moral rigor and roots in New England Puritanism. More ignores the pantheistic feeling for nature that Thoreau courted in periods of meditation, believing that he found nature not so much a stimulant to “pantheistic reverie” as a “discipline of the will.” For the Humanist, Thoreau's chapter on “Higher Laws” is more compelling than those on “Solitude” or “Spring.”

Other American writers treated sympathetically in the earlier essays are Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, and Whitman. Hawthorne, the inheritor of the Puritan idea of depravity, also communicates the Hindu sense of loneliness and illusion. More links his and Poe's treatment of moral isolation to the Puritan feeling of alienation from nature, evident in its hysterical extreme in the witchcraft demonstrations of the seventeenth century. Like Babbitt, More praises Emerson for his dualism, but he considers transcendentalism a “fatally easy philosophy” in its denial of sin and suffering. A poet preacher of sometimes amorphous sermons, Whitman does not rise to the height of Emerson but is nevertheless richer in temperament; Americans should accept him as “one of the most original and characteristic of their poets.” (More does not comment upon Whitman's proclamation that the body is no greater than the soul, nor the soul than the body.)

More condemns the English romantics for their surrender to flux. Wordsworth, however, he praises for his contemplative love of nature. Most of nineteenth century English literature (More hardly touches the twentieth) is seen as a progressive decline from the romantics through the Victorians, who were demoralized by the “philosophy of change” which Darwinism introduced. In the midst of disintegration Arnold stands out as a lonely and heroic figure in his quest for enduring values and his attempt to see life steadily and whole.

Among earlier writers, Milton is preeminent for his qualities of aspiration, high seriousness, and discipline. The true theme of Paradise Lost is not sin or the problem of the relationship of man to God in theological terms but rather the desire of man for “Paradise itself,” the “longing of the human heart for a garden of innocence, a paradise of idyllic delights.” The theme is universal, expressed not only in the classics but in the Celtic dream of Avalon and the Wordsworthian idea of the heaven “which is our home.” It presents a vision of purity set off against the evil and corruption of the world: “As Adam in his morning hymn gave thanks for the glories of the outstretched and still uncontaminated earth, so almost are we ready to render praise to the poet's creative genius for this sweet refuge of retirement he has builded for the heart of our fancy.” (The withdrawal theme defined by More anticipates the myth critic's rebirth archetype, although More apparently is not aware either of its psychological or mythic implications—or of its romanticism.)

In the absence of a fully developed theory, clues to More's critical principles are discoverable in the essay “Criticism” in the seventh volume of the Shelburne Essays (1910) and in the “Definitions of Dualism” presented in the next volume, entitled The Drift of Romanticism (1913). More accepts Arnold's idea of literature as a “criticism of life,” but he considers inadequate his definition of criticism as the effort “to know the best that is known and thought in the world.” With all his earnestness, Arnold lacked a positive principle to integrate his moral and his aesthetic sense. Arnold's “sweetness and light” is “little more than the modern term for the deist's nature and reason.” Although More is obviously indebted to Arnold's humanism, he is eager to distinguish his own position from that of the English Victorian.

Like Arnold, More looks to the past as a source of standards for literary and social criticism, which he does not regard as separate functions. Arnold, he feels, tended to regard the past as a dead storehouse; it is rather a repository of events which interact with those of the present and which the critic is able to interpret creatively. Adapting from an essay of Wilde's the idea of literature as the collective memory of mankind's emotions and experiences, More suggests, with almost Jamesian indirection, that “this larger memory, in its transmuting and unifying power, may not unmeaningfully be regarded as the purpose of activity, and literature may not too presumptuously be cherished as the final end of existence.” In this “theory” of memory, criticism can play an important role. Since the critic's function of valuing is a form of creating, “the critical spirit is akin to that force of design or final cause in the Aristotelian sense, which we are beginning once more to divine as the guiding principle, itself unchanged, at work within the evolutionary changes of nature; and in so far as it becomes aware of this high office it introduces into our intellectual life an element outside of alteration and growth and decay, a principle to which time is the minister and not master.”

Here More again anticipates some of the functions of the later myth criticism as he tentatively formulates not a method but a mystique of criticism. His reader, however, is left unenlightened as to how the general and familiar tenets of academic Humanism are to be applied to practical criticism.

Characteristic features of More's Humanism can be seen in his “Definitions of Dualism.” Tradition is the experience of society, which can be transferred to the individual through education. “Art is the experience of the individual in tradition. Serious art is thus almost necessarily concerned with the past and with ambitions of the future.” Although this idea foreshadows the argument of Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” More's preoccupation with the past amounts almost to a fixation. The need of “checking the enthusiasm of the living by the authority of the dead” belies his earlier profession of a vital interaction between past and present and helps to explain his hostility to contemporary art. Among the dead, despite his veneration of Milton, his closest ties and deepest responses are with the English and American romantics. Although critical of the limitations of poets like Keats and Wordsworth, he is temperamentally closer to them than to Dryden or Pope, whom he considers classics of English prose.

More's distrust of reason is another link with the romantics: “Rationalism is the attempt to erect reason into an independent power within the soul taking the place of the inner check. The union of science and rationalism, that is to say, the reassumption of nature and the soul under the same law, gives the false philosophy of naturalism.” The idea of a scientific philosophy is cavalierly rejected: “Scientific monism is a kind of sterile hybrid from the union of naturalism and idealism. It need be named and no more.” For More as for the romantics it is the imagination, or the “faculty which sensualizes the data of experience,” that produces art or poetry.

But in his moral and social attitudes More like Babbitt rigidly opposes the romantic idea of human goodness. He appeals to the authority of St. Augustine, feeling that the rigor of Augustinian orthodoxy is needed to correct modern Pelagianism in an age when a “so-called Christian sociology” is being substituted for the older faith. More's religious conservatism and deep distrust of human nature are consistent with his social attitudes, which are most explicitly set forth in Aristocracy and Justice (1915), the ninth volume of the Shelburne Essays. He stresses the need of a ruling class or elite, but he exceeds Babbitt in identifying his elite with the propertied class and the interests of the republic with those of property. Against the background of the bloody Colorado mine strikes, in which women and children were shot down, More asserts that “to the civilized man the rights of property are more important than the right to life.” Since civilization rests on property and must recognize the inequality of man, “in view of the interests involved, it is better that legal robbery should exist along with the maintenance of law, than that legal robbery should be suppressed at the expense of law.” In a society in which the unequal distribution of property proves, to the Humanist as to the Puritan, the inherent inequality of men, the Humanist must resist the false idea of equality before the law.

This denial of the basic premises of democracy cuts More off from the author of Walden, Civil Disobedience, and A Plea for Captain John Brown, with whom he had sought to identify himself. In Walden Thoreau sees property as an evil and a deterrent to the development of a humane culture. In all his writing but most emphatically in the civil disobedience essay, Thoreau asserts unequivocally the right of the individual regardless of status or support to consideration before the law. In contrast with the vital expansive spirit of the earlier American, the posture of the Humanist is mean and self-regarding. More's denial of these human values is the utterance of a humanism wanting in humanity.

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The term humanism is fortunately too broad to be confined within these narrow limits. Many critics considered themselves humanists who were antipathetic to the outlook of Babbitt and More. And even among their followers there was some latitude of opinion.

In Destinations (1928), Gorham B. Munson considers Babbitt's Humanism a sound basis for literary criticism, “counter-impressionistic and counter-relativistic in its assumptions and aims.” He praises More as “probably the best living American critic,” with the “greatest maturity of judgment now displayed in the American literary scene.” Munson differs from them, however, in his interest in contemporary literature. He appreciates the efforts of the experimental poets even though he does not approve of their attitudes. He recognizes the use of wit, eloquence, and mockery by Wallace Stevens, exotic though his verse may seem, as one means, though not the Humanist's, of establishing order. The unconventional poetry of Marianne Moore is admirable in its “style” and “design,” though it falls short of major work because it does not “see totalities” or treat experience “as a whole.” William Carlos Williams is “a United States poet,” distinguished by force of diction, freshness of observation, and roots in the sensual life.

Munson feels the need of what he calls a new symbolism in American literature if it is to develop beyond the pessimistic naturalism of Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. Less inclined than Babbitt and More to look to the past for values, he is also more sensitive critically and does not depend so mechanically on terms like dualism, higher will, ethical imagination, and inner check. His discussions of modern literature, and especially modern verse, show a greater responsiveness to poetic language and awareness of its dynamics.

The reputation of Stuart Pratt Sherman, a defector from the ranks of Humanism, has suffered from the dispraise of former associates. A native of the Midwest, he came under the influence of Irving Babbitt at Harvard. His early books, Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him (1917) and On Contemporary Literature (1917), reflect his tutelage. But during the postwar period, when he left an academic post to become literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune, he turned more and more to the tradition of democratic liberalism.

His apostasy (or liberation) can be seen in several later books. In Americans (1922) he follows the Humanists in praising Milton, not, however, for his dualism and his ethical imagination so much as for his doctrine of individualism. Among the Americans to whom the book is chiefly devoted, Emerson is preeminent because of his resistance to authority, a characteristic which the elder Humanists had understandably neglected. Hawthorne is praised not as an heir to Calvinism but rather as a “subtle critic and satirist of Puritanism from a transcendentalist point of view” and Whitman is esteemed for his humanitarianism and democratic faith. The mystery at the heart of this faith is not human iniquity but the “co-existence of personal freedom with social authority,” epitomized in the verse motto of Leaves of Grass: “One's-self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”

Sherman's strongest repudiation of Humanism occurs in a satiric “Imaginary Conversation with Mr. P. E. More.” Beginning with the statement that “if W. D. Howells was the dean of our fiction, Mr. More is the bishop of our criticism,” he ironically flays More and his associates for their acceptance of the idea of depravity and their aristocratic contempt for the mobile vulgus. In discussing the eighteenth century, More “can forgive Pope his virulent personal satire but not his deistic optimism”; he prefers Swift to Pope because of his view of man as a species of vermin. Of the antidemocratic bias of the Humanist, Sherman says that More and his fellow conservatives “have never felt one generous throb of the faith, regenerative and sustaining and uniting, which Jefferson poured broadcast upon the spirit of the American people—faith in the sense and virtue of the community and in the sense and virtue of the majority of its components.” This faith Sherman recognizes as the true religion of democracy, “consisting of a little bundle of general principles” which make the average man respect himself and his neighbors and keep him from “lapsing into Yahooism.”

In a genial aside in Critical Woodcuts (1926), Sherman comments on the change in his views and his increasing sympathy with the work of his contemporaries: “Rigorous teachers seized my youth and taught me some phrases about the desirability of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole. But experience has taught me that it is exceedingly difficult to see steadily and whole any object which is alive and moving rapidly.”

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A bitter conflict began during the war decade between the New Humanists and numerous younger critics who objected to their social and literary principles. In the Twenties this became a running battle that culminated in the publication, in 1930, of rival symposia setting forth, in no very systematic fashion, Humanist and anti-Humanist arguments. Though these were often repetitious, particularly on the Humanist side, they reveal some of the critical attitudes of members of the opposing camps.

The first to appear was Humanism and America, edited by Norman Foerster, who had already applied Humanist doctrines to criticism in several volumes including Nature in American Literature (1923), American Criticism (1928), Reinterpretation of American Literature (1928), and Towards Standards (1930). His practice adds little to the basic position already established by Babbitt and More. …

The symposium represents twelve contributors besides Foerster, Babbitt, and More. Foerster's preface summarizes the Humanist position and echoes its standard terminology (vital restraint, law of measure, discipline, centrality, modernism, humanitarianism). Babbitt's “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” is noteworthy chiefly for its religious emphasis, its author feeling that there is need for cooperation between the Humanist and the authentic Christian in opposing the “behaviourists and other naturalistic psychologists who are to be regarded at present as among the chief enemies of human nature”: “For my own part I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists.”

Paul Elmer More's essay, “The Humility of Common Sense,” reprinted from The Demon of the Absolute (1928), shows a deep hostility to the new theoretical science of Whitehead and the “Einsteinian relativists.” Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is criticized for legislating mechanism (and matter) out of existence, leaving only events and thus eliminating, for More, any distinction between body and soul and depriving mankind of “what is distinctively human.” “Science as an accumulation and classification and utilization of observed facts may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress of insight but a lapse from one naive assumption to another in a vicious circle of self-contradicting monisms.” We must throw over the idol of unity, the demon of the rationalistic absolute which has sprung from the “union of science and metaphysics.”

Acting from some inner emotional necessity, More denies the truths of modern science because they conflict with his theory of existence. In his excursion into the field of scientific theory, he is guided by his brother, a professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati. Louis T. More's essay, entitled “The Pretensions of Science,” appears at the beginning of the symposium, perhaps to provide scientific support for the antiscientism of the Humanists. Professor More objects to theoretical scientists as men “who are not content to work in their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a fictitious world of the imagination made out of aethers, electrons, and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and other minds with the sensible world of brute fact.” This latter world is the sphere of true science, which is concerned not with all knowledge, but with objective knowledge.

A clue to the viewpoint of most of the contributors is revealed by the titles of some of the essays: G. R. Elliott's “The Pride of Modernity”; F. J. Mather, Jr.'s “The Plight of the Artist”; A. R. Thompson's “The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy”; and H. H. Clark's “Pandora's Box in American Fiction.”

In “Religion Without Humanism,” T. S. Eliot, a former student of Babbitt, finds humanism not so much a sustaining philosophy as a leavening agent in “the full realization and balance of the disciplined intellectual and emotional life of man.” After commenting upon the mutual need of humanism and religion and science, Eliot concludes, “It is the spirit of humanism which has operated to reconcile the mystic and ecclesiastic in one church; having done this in the past, humanism should not set itself up now as another sect, but strive to continue and enlarge its task, labouring to reconcile and unite all the parts into a whole.”

Although Humanism and America contains more polemic than criticism, there are a few essays in which doctrine is brought to bear upon literature. Robert Shafer's “An American Tragedy” treats Dreiser, a favorite target, as a slave to temperament, “the chaotic flow of ‘natural’ impulses” that denies our humanity and ends in despair. This is our “American tragedy.” However, Shafer recognizes that Dreiser, in struggling to express the truth as he sees it from a deterministic point of view, has lived a “rationally purposive life”—that in reducing his truth to consistency and giving it coherent form, he has refuted his own philosophy.

The Critique of Humanism, hastily prepared as a counterblast, is introduced by its editor, C. Hartley Grattan, as an “experiment is pamphleteering in the modern manner.” Thirteen contributors attack the Humanist position with arguments in which three themes recur: the hostility of the Humanists to science and modern culture, the inadequacy of their philosophical and moral theory, and their insensitivity to aesthetic considerations.

In “The New Humanism and the Scientific Attitude,” Grattan regrets the appropriation of the word humanism by a doctrinaire group interested in deriving values from “past formulations” rather than experimentally from a study of contemporary society and its needs. He asserts the continuity of man and nature, believing that values, which are conditioned by culture, should be scientifically based. The Humanist view of literature as a repository of moral values Gratan considers a failure to recognize art as an independent mode of experience.

Edmund Wilson takes the Humanists to task for their limited, moralistic criticism of literature and for their failure to recognize the moral ordering of experience in Joyce's “stream of consciousness” technique. Wilson's “Notes on Babbitt and More” also questions Babbitt's scholarship in his essay in Humanism and America, in which, according to Wilson, Babbitt misrepresents a Greek text in order to turn Sophocles into a Harvard Humanist.

In “The Fallacy of Humanism,” Allen Tate points to the inconsistency of Babbitt's attitude toward reason, which combines the expression of a faith in reason with the desire to go beyond reason through the intuitive “ethical imagination.” The attempt to base values in the culture of the past is a futile process involving an “infinite regression to authoritative judgment.”

The discipline that the Humanist talks about so much is, for R. P. Blackmur (in “The Discipline of Humanism”) a repressive moralism ignorant of the nature of art: “This adverse criticism never refers to the kind of discipline in which the artist is interested—the discipline of his subject matter—but chiefly examines that discipline which involves a view of life or the apprehension of the higher will; discipline, that is, in which the artist need not be directly concerned at all. Humanism has refrained, and no doubt this is an admirable instance of vital restraint, from all that a novelist or poet would mean by literary criticism. There was nothing to compel it to refrain, so that it must have been an act of choice; either Humanism is not interested in the content of literature and the problems surrounding it, or it has had no experience therein.” The Humanists have, in effect, substituted censorship for criticism.

The dualism upon which the Humanists pride themselves is “merely a kind of double life in the mind” which “divides life into the material and the spiritual, the lower and the higher wills, and asserts that the spiritual, the higher will, is the meaning of the material. The Humanists, lacking either the dogma of Christianity or the body of Greek civilization to infuse the spiritual with the nourishment of earth, tend to divorce their higher will from experience altogether, and to employ it, so divorced, as a standard by which to judge others' experience. It is no wonder then, that what the humanists call their insight, their imagination, their discipline, should seem to us their arrogance, their blindness, and their censorious ignorance.”

The bitterness that comes through these lines is shared by other contributors, especially those concerned for social and political as well as literary problems.

In “Humanizing Society,” Malcolm Cowley asserts that a preoccupation with morality has prevented the Humanists from understanding the true humanizing function of art, while their antipathy to contemporary literature has blinded them to the way in which writers help to humanize and make comprehensible the world in which modern man must live. The Humanists wilfully ignore the social realities pressing upon the artist—realities that the anti-Humanist critic finds especially importunate in the early years of the depression: “What … has Humanism to do with the scene outside my window: with the jobless men who saunter in the dusk, or the dying village, or the paper mill abandoned across the river—this mill whose owners have gone South where labor is cheap?”

Many contributors note the limitation resulting from the Humanists' hostility to contemporary life and literature. In “Poetry, Morality, and Criticism,” Yvor Winters defends the work of the experimental poets and novelists against Humanist attacks. Although Winters later modified his own views, he here justifies such leading experimental poets as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore: their poetry, like all genuine poetry, is a kind of moral discipline that the Humanists are unable to understand, a discipline in the confrontation of reality, rather than an escape from it to a stereotyped traditionalism.

The concluding essay, Lewis Mumford's “Toward an Organic Humanism,” suggests an alternative to the official Humanist view. The New Humanism of which Babbitt and More are the leaders is a partial philosophy, as is that of the New Mechanism, promulgated by Dewey and Beard. (The one group has made a fetish of morality, the other of the machine.) Just as the former is too narrowly preoccupied with conventional moral judgments based on standards derived from the past, the latter is too limited in its quantitative treatment of objective phenomena and its avoidance of questions of value. Mumford points out that science, contrary to the opinion of the Humanists, inculcates in its followers discipline and humility, a subordination of pride and selfish interest to the realities of experience.

The Humanist dualism of soul and body, man and nature, is false because it denies the interrelationship of the individual and his environment. Human life and development depend upon an organic relationship between man and his world, a world within which the human personality is central, since all the data of the external universe demand the existence of a living observer, whose presence is necessary for the development of history, itself a human creation: “Our thought itself, our concepts, our grammatic structure, are the products of the multitude of human beings that came before us; and the existence of human society is a much surer fact of experience than the existence of Betelgeuse, or, for that matter, the whole physical universe—all of which is derivative and inferential, since it assumes the existence of human instruments like language, mathematics, measurements.” What is needed for further advancement is a new synthesis through an “organic humanism”—an open synthesis that recognizes the relative and incomplete state of knowledge and that has room for new truths, thus differing from “the synthesis which satisfied St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, for that was unable to absorb the discoveries as to the nature of the physical world which followed so soon after its formulation.”

The main problem, for Mumford, is to keep the organism and its environment in a state of tension within which growth and renewal will be continuous. “An organic attitude towards life can truly be called humanism; for it will reconcile by its superior comprehension the one-sided philosophies which men have formulated out of a raw and imperfect experience.”

Mumford's naturalistic humanism is a far cry from the doctrine preached by Babbitt and More. In its acceptance of scientific techniques and its belief in growth and renewal, it offers more hope for the future of humanity than the New Humanists would allow.

5

One of the most distinguished opponents of the New Humanism was the philosopher George Santayana, a master of satiric irony. In a rapier-slim volume entitled The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931), he characterizes the New Humanists as genteel heirs to a spiritually bankrupt Puritan tradition and their morality as narrow and parochial rather than universal. Of the Humanists' distinction between man's lower and higher nature, and their identification of naturalism with the lower, Santayana quietly asks, “Why is naturalism supposed to be favourable to the lower sides of human nature? Are not the higher sides just as natural?” Morality, far from being above the level of nature, is necessarily grounded there.

As for the controls of reason and the inner check prescribed by the Humanists, Santayana observes, “True reason restrains only to liberate; it checks only in order that all currents, mingling in that moment's pause, may take a united course.” The New Humanism by its very nature leads one to expect an apocalyptic revelation, or at least some supernatural sanction for its inner check. But one receives only prudent admonitions encouraging a “cautious allegiance to the genteel tradition.” Santayana concludes that the Humanists are perverted in their denial of nature and a relativistic morality: “When … a tender conscience extends its maxims beyond their natural basis, it not only ceases to be rational in its deliverances, and becomes fanatical, but it casts the livid colours of its own insanity upon nature at large. … No true appreciation of anything is possible without a sense of its naturalness, of the innocent necessity by which it has assumed its special and perhaps extraordinary form. In a word, the principle of morality is naturalistic. Call it humanism or not, only a morality frankly relative to man's nature is worthy of man, being at once vital and rational, martial and generous; whereas absolutism smells of fustiness as well as of faggots.”

It was not so much the attacks of their enemies as the times that defeated the Humanists. The depression decade, following the numbing shock of the 1929 crash, saw their decline from a position of importance to one of obscurity if not insignificance. Babbitt died in 1933 and More in 1937, but the dissolution of the critical group cannot be attributed to their passing. It is rather that the Humanists had so little to say to the 1930's. In the midst of economic disaster and social suffering, their genteel moralizing seemed trivial and irrelevant, while their aristocratic pretensions were more offensive than they had been during the gilded Twenties.