Irving Babbitt: A Reappraisal

Abstract

T HE humanism of Irving Babbitt is receding into mere academic history at a moment when it needs to be brought to bear against the Left and the Right, the subtleties of quasi-theology, and suave psychological criticism. The shivering young Davids, as Ludwig Lewisohn once called them, have triumphed, and Babbitt's criteria appear to be demolished; witness the contempt of Bernard Smith. On another side, Anglo-Catholics and neo-Thomists--T. S. Eliot, G. R. Elliott, Mortimer Adler-have swung off from humanism into orbits of their own. It may not, however, be too late to reappraise Babbitt's views and to revitalize his influence. Babbitt usually probed an issue with a fine discrimination that he liked to call Socratic. Yet a Socratic inspection of his own criticism (for his work was almost entirely critical) exposes a damaging insufficiency in method. No one seems to have insisted that Babbitt evaluated the ethical life by one method and literature by another. His opponents, and even his followers, sensing this dislocation without understanding its cause, have been led to distrust or modify the whole scale of humanist values. Nevertheless, if this insufficiency is admitted, one can afford to abandon most of Babbitt's literary criticism, but at the same time reaffirm his ethical outlook. The dislocation in method reduces itself to this: Babbitt