SOURCE: O'Connor, William Van. “The New Humanism.” In An Age of Criticism: 1900-1950, pp. 92-109. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952.

During the postwar years reductive naturalism had made debunking biographies, drab fiction, and behaviorist drama seem inevitable. Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and their followers were among those who most firmly resisted the tenets of reductive naturalism and the kinds of literature to which it gave rise.¹ The New Humanists were looked upon variously as defenders of the genteel tradition, as reactionaries, as enemies of democracy, or as defenders of traditional values, upholders of the moral order, and so forth.

The war waged by and against the New Humanists, with its lulls, its forays, and the final tremendous battle in 1929-30, involved almost every critic and scholar. One of the first attacks from the left, as early as 1910, came from Marion Reedy in Reedy's Mirror. He found The New Laokoön the most important book since the turn of the century, but he prophesied that Babbitt's promised book on Rousseau, despite the abilities of the “brilliant aristocrat,” would fail. “The revolt will go on. Anarchism is a great constructive force.” H. L. Mencken, on his side, carried on an attack that was mostly slapstick against Babbitt and More. In revising The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mencken found More's study of Nietzsche (one of the essays in The Drift of Romanticism [1913]) “very ingenious.” Later Mencken lumped, and attacked as a part of his war on respectability, all the New Humanists with “the prim virgins, male and female, of the Dial, the Nation, the New York Times,” and with the “honorary pall-bearers of letters—bogus Oxford dons, jitney Matthew Arnolds,” and so on. Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks were in greater earnest. They saw in the New Humanists not only the enemies of the new literature but the archenemies of socialism.

Bourne, in 1912, found More's study of Nietzsche academic and without the requisite fervor. Several years later, with the publication of More's Aristocracy and Justice (1915), the battle lines were drawn. Bourne was one of the young generals in the assault on tradition in education, morality, economics, government, and literature. More had raised the flag of the traditionalists and the reactionaries. Bourne, with his fervent humanitarianism and individualism, saw perversity and cruelty in More's statements that those in government should never “relax the rigour of law” out of “pity for the degree of injustice inherent in earthly life,” nor cease to believe that “in the light of the larger good of society” the “rights of property are more important than the right to life.” Babbitt, as early as Literature and the American College, was equally adamant in his opposition to the humanitarians. Bourne saw in the older critics and in their younger followers like Stuart P. Sherman a petulant and, ultimately, a vain protesting against the new values. Brooks in Letters and Leadership (1918) held that More could not feel “human values finely because to have done so would have been to upset his whole faith in a society based not upon the creative but upon the acquisitive instincts of men. …”

During most of the 1920's there were few serious attacks on the New Humanists. The young men seemed to have won the war, and the occasional gibes must have seemed gratuitous. Most of the literary journals were avowedly liberal. Lewis Mumford found Democracy and Leadership “lucid and temperate” and Babbitt “a valuable critic of democracy.” Writing in November 1927 in the Herald Tribune he said it was unfortunate that Babbitt and More had been attacked indiscriminately in the all-out war against gentility. Mumford deplored the Tory prejudices of both men, but he added that in reading More at this time he discovered “a man of extraordinary tact and good judgement in every matter pertaining to literature,” and that after reading Babbitt he could admit that “had the weaker members of our generation known him better they might not perhaps have made so many knock-kneed compromises.”

The following year, however, activities were renewed all along the front when Howard Mumford Jones in The New Republic replied to a series of articles on humanism in The Forum, Mary Colum reviewed Gorham Munson's Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900, and Horace Kallen reviewed Norman Foerster's American Criticism for the Saturday Review of Literature. Mr. Jones and Mrs. Colum were concerned with berating Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism and Mr. Kallen with dismissing Foerster's book and humanism as “the last gasp of secularized Calvinism” and “the frayed latter end of the genteel tradition.” During 1929 the fighting continued. Robert Shafer replied to an article by Allen Tate entitled “The Fallacy of Humanism,” and their debate was carried further in The Bookman, the editor of which, Seward Collins, was championing the New Humanists. The book editors and reviewers, Henry Hazlitt, Harry Hansen, Henry Seidel Canby, Edmund Wilson, William S. Knickerbocker, and others got into the fray. Each side had another, though hardly a final, word to say when Foerster published the symposium Humanism and America (1930), with fifteen articles, and in reply Hartley Grattan edited A Critique of Humanism (1930), with thirteen articles.

Democracy, romanticism, humanitarianism, restraint in discussing sex, respect for traditional beliefs and attitudes, and so on, were hotly debated by the New Humanists and their various opponents, but the underlying and basic issue was naturalism, in its rationalistic-utilitarian line on the one side and its sentimental-romantic line on the other. Norman Foerster said the New Humanists held that “a complete culture necessitates a sharp contrast between what Emerson termed the law for man and the law for thing, the human realm of value and quality and the purely quantitative realm of nature.” The New Humanists held that the law for man is clearly evident, not merely in the durable parts of the Greek and Christian tradition, but in the traditions of India and China as well.

In the first of his Shelburne Essays, More had insisted that the critical faculty should serve the “law of measure.” The duty of the critic is to “transform and interpret and mold the sum of experience from man to man and generation to generation.” Twenty-four years later in The Demon of the Absolute he said that men who are morally and intellectually indolent cannot perceive that the voice of the higher discipline is available through tradition. In their conceit the indolent fall into an “absolute relativism” in moral as well as critical values. “That is the present guise of the Demon as he stalks abroad, instilling his venom into the innocent critics of the press.”

Babbitt also insisted on this distinction of the lower life which man shares with nature and the higher which man has alone, whether merely as a human or as a supernatural being. The higher faculties of man are reason, moral will, and moral imagination (as opposed to “recreative” and “idyllic imagination”). These higher faculties impose an “inner check” which, critical and moral at once, prevents self-indulgence, sentimental humanitarian acts, and vagaries of romantic expression and forms. Babbitt furnished the clearest exposition of his position in “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” (1930).

In it he stated that the “law of measure” is the center, historically and psychologically, in all humanistic movements. Modernism is a move away from the law of measure, but there always have been humanists, men who have recognized intuitively or believed in a “universal norm,” “laws unwritten in the heavens,” or believed that human nature demands a “sense of order and decorum and measure in deeds and words.” The scientific-utilitarian side of naturalism (typified by Bacon) offends against balance and decorum by glorying in the specialist who sacrifices a rounded development in order to contribute his bit to progress and by pursuing “material instead of spiritual ‘comfort.’” The romantic-sentimental side of naturalism (typified by Rousseau) offends against balance and decorum by promoting “free temperamental expansion” and “the humanitarian hope for brotherhood among men based on emotional overflow.” The humanists work against excesses of individualism and “intellectual anarchy” by restraining their appetites.

As Norman Foerster would later point out, the excitement over the New Humanism was lessened by the great depression and a new interest in regional writing. Even so, the influence of humanism was considerable, largely because it caused critics to question their basic assumptions.

II

One would have thought, George Santayana said, investigating the implications in the position of the New Humanists in The Genteel Tradition at Bay, that the genteel tradition had all but disappeared, was little more than a remembered atmosphere. But no, the spirit that once motivated it is not dead. Furthermore, its proponents protest “that it is not genteel or antiquated at all, but orthodox and immortal. Its principles, it declares, are classical, and its true name is Humanism.” Santayana attempted to demonstrate that the new movement was really a protest against the consequences of the older humanism. Renaissance humanists, he said, were opposed to austerity, were willing to wink at amiable vices, and through a spirit of tolerance hoped to neutralize the rigors of conflicting dogmas. Eventually, a tolerant humanist was able to give a place in his sympathies to religions of the East, to primitive art, to the virtues of societies quite foreign to his own. “Thus humanism ended at last in a pensive agnosticism and a charmed culture, as in the person of Matthew Arnold.” The New Humanists felt the lameness in this conclusion, and in one way Santayana agreed with them. “If the humanist could really live up to his ancient maxim, humani nil a me alienum puto, he would sink into moral anarchy and artistic impotence—the very thing from which our liberal, romantic world is so greatly suffering.” Because an orderly existence demands insistence on certain patterns, one cannot accept everything that is new or strange. By and large, the humanist movement has emancipated the passions, attempted to turn nature to practical purposes—to surrender the spirit to the flesh.

We are the heirs of what Santayana calls the three R's of the Renaissance: Reformation, Revolution, and Romance. The Reformation has appealed to lay interests: many a writer has demonstrated the superiority of Protestantism by pointing to its social achievements, more commerce, scientific advancement, neater towns, and so forth. “I think we might say of Protestantism something like what Goethe said of Hamlet. Nature had carelessly dropped an acorn into the ancient vase of religion, and the young oak, growing within, shattered the precious vessel.” Santayana, of course, is denying that Protestantism is half so concerned with spiritual as with material well-being. Revolution has increased individual liberty, elevated the average man, and given him more comfort. Romance is unlike Reformation and Revolution in that it is not for the most part in rebellion. Whatever may be the points in history where it manifests itself clearly, its origins may simply be human. “It involves a certain sense of homelessness in a chaotic world, and at the same time a sense of meaning and beauty there.” Santayana finds a humbleness, a sense of human imperfections, a kind of prerequisite to enlightened action in the spirit of Romance. As the heir of these three R's, modern man has come to believe that his physical life is not a life of sin.

One of the New Humanists said: “The accepted vision of a good life is to make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be friendly; to move fast; to die with one's boots on.” Santayana was willing to accept this sturdy ideal as the natural outgrowth of industrialism in America. (And he could add, with a touch of malice, that in the margins of American life there is room for the cultivation of an intellectual life, that democracy loves splendidly endowed libraries and museums, and that “the adaptable spirit of Protestantism may be relied upon to lend a pious and philosophical sanction to any instinct that may deeply move the national mind.”) The protests of the New Humanists are not the protests which the Renaissance humanists would have made. The New Humanists were pointing not at a humanism but at a theocracy:

Theocracy is what all the enemies of the three R's … must endeavour to restore, if they understand their own position. Wealth, learning, sport and beneficence, even on a grand scale, must leave them cold, or positively alarm them, if these fine things are not tightly controlled and meted out according to some revealed absolute standard. … Let us have honest bold dogmas supported by definite arguments: let us re-establish our moral sentiments on foundations more solid than tradition or gentility. … If our edifice is to be safe, we must lay the foundations in eternity.

The quarrel between the modernists or liberals and the New Humanists was a major battle to decide whether naturalism was to be intellectually dominant, but it was not quite the same as the battle waged between Bishop Wilberforce and Huxley. Babbitt denied that humanism was of value only in subordination to orthodox Christianity. In “Humanism: An Essay at Definition” he insisted that a “survey of the past” does not confirm the view that humanism is parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the humanistic spirit that the world has seen, that in ancient Greece and that in Confucian China, did not have the support of Christianity or any other form of revealed religion. Babbitt placed himself “unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists,” but his “revealed religion” included the religion of Sophocles, Confucius, and Christ. Most Christians would see Babbitt's supernaturalism as something other than Christianity.

III

It is important, as Santayana said, to know from what basic laws, dogmas, or assumptions Babbitt draws his strong convictions. Insofar as one can tell from his own statements he was not an orthodox Christian. Yet he did not hesitate to speak with the assurance of a presbyter. In Babbitt's mind, for example, renunciation had as its corollary an individualism that was contemptuous of any humanitarian gestures or movements. It may be true, as Babbitt held, that “the will to power” is usually much stronger than “the will to service.” But it would seem to follow that an act of renunciation would frequently be an act of charity. His dislike of romantics and liberals, who as humanitarians like to insist on the myth of natural goodness, hardly seems reason enough for the constant ridicule of humanitarian acts. Sympathy and kindness played little part in Babbitt's criticism, and he apparently enjoyed his own belligerent and raucous manner in controversy.

More, on the other hand, seems to have had the agonized conscience of the early Calvinist. His startlingly reactionary statements seem, if taken by themselves, cruel in a way that Babbitt's are not, especially because More was a more sensitive critic than Babbitt. But More was writing under the aegis of an angry God. Responsibility was the terrible burden of the individual, not of society. To blame society as a whole for evil laws, he wrote in Aristocracy and Tradition (1917), was to weaken “the responsibility of the individual soul to its maker and judge.” The forces of order had to be upheld. If the romantics made a myth of natural goodness, then More may be said to have served the older myth of man as naturally depraved. In his Platonism he could make Plato a Presbyterian:

To the true Platonist the divine spirit, though it may be called, and is, the hidden source of beauty and order and joy, yet always, when it speaks directly in the human breast, makes itself heard as an inhibition; like the Guide of Socrates, it never in its own person commands to do, but only to refrain. Whereas to the pseudo-Platonist it appears as a positive inspiration, saying yes to his desires and emotions.

Most readers probably feel that the Dialogues are attempts to isolate, modify, and explain and then either to justify or condemn certain of our desires or designs, but More finds that each ends with a “Thou shalt not!” In More, despite his delicacy and learning, there is a latter-day Calvinism, a genteel masochism.

Norman Foerster's interpretation of the humanist position in respect to supernaturalism is found in his American Criticism (1928):

This centre to which humanism refers everything, this centripetal energy which counteracts the multifarious centrifugal impulses, this magnetic will which draws the flux of our sensations toward it while itself remaining at rest, is the reality which gives rise to religion. Pure humanism is content to describe it thus in physical terms, as an observed fact of experience; it hesitates to pass beyond its experimental knowledge to the dogmatic affirmations of any of the great religions.

T. S. Eliot, in “Second Thoughts on Humanism,” published in Hound and Horn, objected to this passage, saying it typified the ambiguous attitude of the humanists toward religion, identifying themselves with it at one moment and dissociating themselves the next. Their attacks against the forms of naturalism would seem to make it clear that the humanists do not look upon themselves as naturalists. Yet on the other hand they (Babbitt and Foerster, at least) would not be thought supernaturalists. According to believers in the supernatural, morals come from God and are justified thereby. According to the naturalists they come from biology, social adjustment, and so forth. There is, as Eliot puts it, no way out of the dilemma: “you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist.” Foerster said, “the essential reality of experience is ethical.” He was saying, in effect, that an ethical reality lives in a hiatus between the natural and the supernatural. But, as Eliot objected, if the word “supernatural” is suppressed, the “dualism of man and nature collapses at once.” The point is crucial. The term “human” long depended on connotations derived from supernaturalism. If one is not a supernaturalist he must reconcile himself to giving up, at least eventually, these associations and accepting those that arise from considering man as natural. This the humanists seemed unwilling to do.

Foerster has been an apologist for the New Humanism rather than a literary critic. He called American Criticism “a work of historical-critical exegesis in the field of scholarship.” In The American Scholar (1929) he said his fellow scholars had “fallen victims to the mechanistic tendencies of the age; and in their pseudo-scientific wanderings into the fields of literary history, general history, and psychology, have lost nearly all perspective and ability to evaluate the writings either of their own age or of the past.” In Towards Standards; A Study of the Present Critical Movement in American Letters (1930) he had surveyed impressionist criticism, finding, of course, that to emphasize the uniqueness of a work at the expense of traditional values is to dispense with standards. He had surveyed, too, journalistic criticism like that of Henry Seidel Canby, finding it based on “historical relativity or indifferentism”; the Bourne-Brooks-Mumford school which argued the need for a humanistic reconstruction but offered no tangible method for it; and, lastly, the humanists who would find in tradition the values that are permanent in human existence and consonant with a “richly diversified, a finely shaped, and an exalted life.” In 1941, Foerster contributed “The Esthetic Judgement and the Ethical Judgement” to The Intent of the Critic. Here he acknowledges that the aesthetic critics may be right in saying that delight is the primary criterion in art, but the humanist will “add at once that the delight comes from the wisdom expressed as well as from the expression of wisdom.” But there appears to be a contradiction in his adding that “Tintern Abbey” is great aesthetically but is ethically unsound. Like Babbitt and More, Foerster has fought courageously against a self-indulgent materialism; his interests have been ethical first and aesthetic only incidentally.

IV

Foerster, in American Critical Essays and elsewhere, lists Prosser Hall Frye as a humanist who arrived at his position largely independently. A reading of Literary Reviews and Criticism (1908), Romance and Tragedy (1922), and Visions and Chimeras (1929) makes perfectly clear that he and Babbitt especially had much in common. Frye speaks of life and literature being “vindicated against naturalism,” of Zola lacking “moral sense,” and of “these modern scientific self-complacent humanitarianisms.” Frye's manner is usually academic, disinterested, and assured, but when he undertakes to examine the characteristics of romantic literature he can rise to satiric barbs worthy of Babbitt. German romanticism is a work of “degeneration, deformation, and disease,” and “it bears on its front the stigmata of its infirmities—absurdity, folly, inanity, and confusion.” When Frye was not giving rein to his prejudices, he could write with acuteness, moderation, and clarity. “The Idea of Greek Tragedy,” in Romance and Tragedy, furnishes an excellent account of the general differences between Elizabethan and Greek tragedy and the development from Aeschylus to Euripides.

Yvor Winters, commonly identified with the new criticism, also has strong affinities with Babbitt, whose influence he has acknowledged. Among his later contemporaries, only F. R. Leavis, the British critic, writes with the same forthrightness about moral issues in literature. Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937), Winters's first book, is an attempt to relate the motive behind a poem to the feelings aroused by connotation, sound, and rhythms. (By “primitive,” Winters means writers who “utilize all the means necessary to the most vigorous form, but whose range of material is limited,” and by “decadent,” he means writers who “display a fine sensitivity to language and who may have a very wide range” but whose work is weakened by a “vice of feeling.”) The exact center of the book is not clear, but many of the incidental analyses and statements of principle are explicitly made and valuable. Winters's essential position is most clearly stated in The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943):

According to my view, the artistic process is one of moral evaluation of human experience, by means of a technique which renders possible an evaluation more precise than any other. The poet tries to understand his experience in rational terms, to state his understanding, and simultaneously to state, by means of the feelings which we attach to words, the kind and degree of emotion that should properly be motivated by this understanding. The artistic result differs from the crude experience mainly in its refinement of judgement: the difference in really good art is enormous, but the difference is of degree rather than kind.

Much of Winters's theory, which is expressed and expatiated upon in an authoritative manner, is fallacious. Obviously, there is something to his thesis that the tone engendered by the connotations, sound, and rhythms evaluates or is appropriate to the motive of the poem. But motive does not exist as some Platonic essence, or even as a clear-cut little body of ideas, prior to and separate from its concrete embodiment in a poem; in a very real sense, motive does not exist until the poem is at least partially written, and much of what the poet says is accidental and unwitting on his part. Winters's thesis, to change the figure, suggests a skeletonized idea, apparently highly complex to begin with, on which the poet is able to grow muscle, tissue, flesh, and appropriate contours. Winters also assumes a poem that is static, constant in its meanings and rhythms, as though the poem in the course of time did not undergo developments in connotations and meanings of words and in the stresses with which they are pronounced. Winters's scansions, frequently done with great precision, do not allow for the possibility of variant readings. Another objection to Winters's system is that it assumes capacity to intellectualize our experience of color, sound, rhythm, weight, texture, size, and so forth that is far beyond human capacity or inclination.

Winters, as one might expect, tends to rate most highly the poets who employ an abstract diction, whose work least resists explicit commentary and paraphrase. He also likes writers restrained in their enthusiasm, strong-minded, and certain about their moral principles. The source of Winters's assurance about moral issues is never made clear. He says he is not a Christian. Some of Winters's judgments are notorious—that Edith Wharton is greatly superior to James, that T. Sturge Moore has written “more great poetry than any of his contemporaries,” that Elizabeth Daryush “is the finest British poet since T. Sturge Moore,” and so forth. Winters deserves much of the ridicule his ex cathedra manner and excessive statements invite. Even so, Winters is at times a very perceptive critic. In Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938) there are excellent studies of several American writers, one of the best being his examination of “gratuitous emotionalizing” in Poe. His little book on Edwin Arlington Robinson, with whom he feels strong sympathies, is probably the best of the critical studies of Robinson. His literal-mindedness in criticizing Henry Adams, Stevens, Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Frost vitiates his studies of these figures. If one can manage, however, to separate some of the basic points Winters makes from the exaggerated judgments to which they lead him, even these studies can be useful.

Yet another critic who had strong affinities with the humanists was Gorham Munson. He had written several volumes of aesthetic criticism, including Robert Frost (1927), Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900 (1928), and Style and Form in American Prose (1929), before developing his enthusiasm for the New Humanism. Then in 1930, the year he published The Dilemma of the Liberated, he contributed “Our Critical Spokesmen” to Foerster's symposium Humanism and America. Munson declined, however, to be thought an orthodox humanist. He objected to the humanist emphasis on “moderation,” “the law of measure, Nothing Too Much,” but he also saw in humanism a valuable critique of the naturalism that seemed to be ending in the romantic disillusionment of Krutch's The Modern Temper. Of post-Renaissance history he said:

The signs are plentiful of another transition: we have gone from the dominance of religious values to the dominance of intellectual ones, and then to the primacy of emotional values. The last stage—barbarism—will occur with the complete triumph of practical and instinctive values. Then Atlas will indeed be but an economic creature, cleverly producing what he needs by the least effort, and spending his increased leisure in the pursuit of cheap distractions from thought and serious emotion. He will truly have diminished to the ninth part of a human being.

In the final chapter of The Dilemma of the Liberated, Munson says that scientific-utilitarianism and sentimental-romanticism have, after all, held us at the end of a rather short tether. “Our progress must consist in finding out the length of our tether, and for that Humanism is one of the most available means.”

Later generations are likely to say that although the nineteenth century made too much of moral questions the critics in the first half of the twentieth century, except for the humanists, made too little of them. It is true that a number of critics have said that poetic value was not dependent upon the acceptability of the ethical, philosophical, or scientific statement in a poem. Eliot, for example, said that James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it, and he said that because there is a difference between “philosophical belief and poetic assent” we must distinguish between what Dante said as a poet and what he said as a man. Ransom, attempting to explain modernity in poetry, said that the modern poet is intensely concerned with the possibility of creating aesthetic effects apart from moral or social considerations: “He cares nothing, professionally, about morals, or God, or native land. He has performed a work of dissociation and purified his art.” Eliot and Ransom were extravagant in such statements. They can be excused, however, if one recognizes that their attempts to make poetry pure was a part of the revolt against the didactic heresy, the message-hunting of the Victorians. Poetic value, as Eliot and Ransom knew, is not to be identified with its philosophical or ethical value. On the other hand, they did not come to terms with the fact that perverse or silly ideas can weaken or preclude poetic value. Somewhat younger critics have been able to accept both emphases. Thus Cleanth Brooks requires that a poem or story be able to withstand “ironic contemplation”; Robert Penn Warren wants an idea to “prove itself” in its context; and Lionel Trilling insists on quality, complexity, and maturity of perception, which he calls “moral realism.” The direct indebtedness of these critics to the New Humanism is probably slight, but like their contemporaries they have been aware² of voices raising serious objections to the spirit of the age, objecting to romantic individualism and humanitarianism, and insisting on raising moral issues in relation to literature in a period when liberalism and reductive naturalism were dominating intellectual inquiries. But the humanists were essentially negative as critics. They were unsympathetic to almost every writer after Racine. Their doctrine of discipline, proportion, and moderation was primarily ethical. If it had been more than that, they could have employed it in analyzing modern literature. The humanists did not bring to criticism any developed awareness of what R. P. Blackmur has called “symbolic techniques.” They were either unable or unwilling to enter imaginatively into a study of symbolic techniques in order to discover the way in which raw life, unconscious and residual forces, traditions, and new insights were transformed into art.

Notes

1. More had edited The Independent and The Nation before retiring to Princeton in 1914. Between 1904 and 1933 he published fourteen volumes of his Shelburne Essays, devoted to short essays as well as to full-length studies of single writers, and Nietzsche (1912), Platonism (1917), The Religion of Plato (1921), Hellenistic Philosophies (1923), The Christ of the New Testament (1924), Christ the Word (1927), and The Catholic Faith (1931). Babbitt taught at Harvard from 1894 and published Literature and the American College (1908), The New Laokoön (1910), The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Democracy and Leadership (1924), French Literature (1928), and On Being Creative and Other Essays (1932).

2. For one of the most recent statements of a humanist criticism (although the kinship with the New Humanism is not made explicit), see Douglas Bush, “The Humanist Critic,” Kenyon Review, XIII (Winter 1951), 81-91.