The Several Humanists

...All this I have said upon occasion, with such effectiveness as I could muster...

...The only person to meet with virtually unanimous approval is Matthew Arnold...

...The products of the Church are its saints, and sanctity perennially runs the gamut between asceticism and ecstasy...

...For most of us, it is true, normalcy is fate...

...Though not yet so widely read as one might hope, this treatise seems to me to express a basic aspect of the modern Catholic consciousness...

...The matter (and the book) can be got at fairly easily if one reads three central and significant essays, by Messrs...

...Taking "the pride of modernity" for his topic, he has written-unfortunately it is the style of which one may legitimately complain-a paper which, apart from reestablishing Arnold where he belongs, is fine enough to be termed worth the time of any thoughtful American who is interested in mankind...

...But there is a sense in which it is so beside the point that the matter invites comment...

...His essay is concerned with critics, but more essentially with American letters after 1915...

...Professor Babbitt, for his part, tells us that " 'nothing too much' is indeed the central maxim of all genuine humanists, ancient and modern...

...Nineteenth-century-minded was Stuart Sherman," we are asked to believe...

...But we must remember that "nothing too much" cannot be the fundamental Christian maxim...

...I make this observation because it seems to apply to much said in the name of humanism about other realities, notably those of literature and religion...

...In other words, I do not think that Professor More has solved the peculiar modern problem which is surely less a matter of what science "ought" to do than a question as to the validity of a personal escape from cosmic abstractions...

...It will applaud those who apply them to civilization in the same spirit as physicians cauterize physical wounds...

...Dreiser, brought up a Catholic under circumstances which made religion seem despicable, nevertheless clung to his faith until he had learned the newspaper game in some of those olden-time offices where the chief inspiration was liquor and the spiritual outlook, the variety of atheism which used to flourish in down-at-the-heels second-hand bookstores...

...Munson's chief indictment of Sherman is couched in the terrible humanistic phrase, "unselective sympathy...

...Especially worthy of note is the statement: "For my part, I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists...

...That is, however, no reason for condemning the age...

...more recently, by Matthew Arnold in England and Emerson and Lowell in America...

...According to Professor Foerster, "the word humanism should be confined to a working philosophy seeking to make a resolute distinction between man and nature and between man and the divine...

...Upon reflection one feels that this verdict would be inaccurate...

...Now the Lord knows that Sherman had his limitations, traceable in a measure to a relatively noticeable provincialism...

...be freer than his...

...Of course it assumes a tremendous organic spiritual vitality...

...But Mr...

...But at the close of the essay all is made clear...

...And after this all one can do is turn on the radio...

...It is Romano Guardini's Der Gegensatz...

...Because I feel that Babbitt, like his compeers in France, Pierre Lasserre and julien Benda, is not aware of this fact, it seems necessary to express the conviction that while the Catholic mind will welcome his assistance and admire his moral integrity, its own march through the world will be freer than his...

...Dreiser is old-fashioned enough to be like Zola...

...To define oneself adequately is to get at least half a grip on immortality...

...Just as it once assimilated the world of pagan imagination for the simple reason that its members were people who had received a bequest of pagan fancy, so it would now be denying its own tradition if it did not become modern to the fullest possible extent...

...Enter, in a manner typical of the paper, Stuart Sherman...

...It is really as telling an analysis of the modern spirit, derived from experience no less than from books, as any modern essayist has supplied...

...Any modern man who has his wits about him knows that all three are important...

...It will advocate them, of course...

...And so it is not astonishing that American critics who have lately rallied to the banner of Professor Babbitt should try to give the word "humanism" a becoming collective significance...

...It seems to me that the inclusion of such a paper (ardent but not discerning) in such a book is more than a blunder of taste...

...As soon as you read what Mr...

...G. R. Elliott, More and Babbitt...

...If he were not so much of an aristocrat, in every sense, he might well give his brethren a jolt...

...Nor is the list of adherents drawn up with exemplary clarity...

...It does define Professor Babbitt more satisfactorily, perhaps, than any of his other writings...

...But if the humanistic movement were handed the same kind of criticism, plainly and grossly biased, as is here meted out by Mr...

...Is it necessary to state, at this last hour, that Sherman himself placed Shakespeare in the heart of his literary universe and even insisted, with some effort, that he be allowed to remain there...

...Science, for instance, is the subject-matter of Louis Trenchard More...

...I take the risk of nominating Matthew Arnold as having the build of a great critic," we are assured...

...His ghastly crime was that he did not, like M. Charles Maurras, try "to conceive clearly of a perfect and normal man and argue for a closer approach to normality in human affairs"-which means, if anything, that Sherman was too little of a Nietzschean...

...Where would Montaigne be without his "good faith," or Vauvenarges minus a "sense of glory...

...That there is a separation is proved by the facts, but it can hardly be determined a priori...

...I seem to recall dozens and dozens of sentences vaguely repetitious and drab, without even a hint of the laughter which so frequently reminded one that Sherman was alive...

...But so far as one is able to judge, mankind has traveled toward the light by leaping desperately through the dark...

...His perennial enthusiasms were for Whitman, Emerson and Stevenson...

...and while much that he says appears exceedingly valuable to one who is wofully unfamiliar with test-tubes and spatial mathematics, his central concern-rigid separation between the mechanistic and vitalistic domains-seems as impossible in practice as it is arbitrary in theory...

...That is an admission which ought to be memorized by the great majority of her fellow-citizens...

...Common sense...

...Professor Shafer's discussion of Theodore Dreiser is, on the whole, an incisive dissection of a bungled literary personality...

...Sherman "is of exceptional interest to us . . . he admired Matthew Arnold...

...There is a little book which philosophizes so well about this matter that it seems to me one of the really important modern Catholic books, and I modestly recommend it to Professor Babbitt...

...A uniform temperature of seventy degrees is not enough in the world of nature...

...More is one of the few Americans who have visibly continued to grow...

...The exchange of this atheism for Catholicism once having been made, all the Dreiser adventures were logical...

...Mather contents himself with a critical appraisal of the younger generation: "I am really glad that I shall probably not see the young generation when it passes the forties . . . the middle-aged dull dog of today will be as nothing in view of his successor of twenty years hence...

...Nor is it possible to ignore his magnificent intellectual courage-the vigorous resolve of a man who not merely swam uphill himself but taught others how to do so...

...and while I feel unable, personally, to agree with all its findings and conclusions, it is a pleasure to say that if this be humanism we could look for no better cultural comradeship...

...Such vitality never has and never will place the chief insistence upon those astringent disciplines which are the valuable stock-in-trade of Professor Babbitt...

...Our disciplines become flagellations, our ecstasies insanities...

...But the poor fellow does not compare with Arnold: "The difference in their prose is the difference between distinction and mere competence...

...It is an offense against courtesy...

...But I am not so sure that he will be satisfied with humanistic discourse about them...

...It has always been victorious not by reason of its maxims, but because of its enduring vitality...

...Perhaps the suggestion that a few ideas fascinate these writers may be slightly formal, but it is justified and will help us...

...The rest is periphery, designed to exhibit the camp-followers, and interesting chiefly because of the homage it exudes...

...All of which does not alter the fact that, quite apart from his great importance in criticism, Mr...

...First, it seems to me utterly out of the question to identify the Church with any one humanistic position, any given set of cultural institutions or historical facts...

...This was a tragedy, of course, but it must be staged deliberately against the newspaperdom and the urban atheism of a quarter of a century ago...

...But I cannot avoid the feeling that Elliott has opened the door a little too wide for the comfort of his household-that, one of these days, he may be dismissed from humanistic citizenship for "unselective sympathy...

...But what is humanism...

...Gorham Munson and Professor Robert Shafer are interesting and, I believe, representative...

...Though this is not to be construed as a "bid" for Catholic support, it reinforces so much that Babbitt has previously said regarding the Church that a few earnest words relative to it seem in order...

...During what period of its history, one may ask, has the Church not confronted drifts of thought and feeling quite as formidable and devastating as those which now seethe about us...

...But, though these preliminaries are deserving of all the stress one can give them, something must be said on the other side as well...

...There follows a sentence chosen at random from one of the minor addresses of Sherman, convicted at once of being "lustreless...

...Well, I have read my Arnold fairly well and am ready to wager almost anything I own that at the height of his powers he could never have written a page of Sherman's essay on Franklin, or even so much as a paragraph of his Imaginary Conversation with P. E. More...

...His books show not that he had become a naturalist, but simply that he had lost his faith...

...It is pleasant to think that he did not toy thereafter with vaporish idealisms or the "cosmic chill," and simply went ahead to live as any rational man might well live-if there were no God...

...That is the bond-indeed the only reason why the converti Munson deigns to take notice of Sherman at all...

...The collapse of naturalism and the revival of New England is a major national phenomenon which has, more than incidentally, affected the discussion of religious values...

...Some of our book is, of course, merely dowdyish...

...Here Professor Babbitt means not that "humanism is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed religion," but that the humanist "will have to take sides in the debate between the naturalists and the supernaturalists...

...poise is not enough in the realm of the spirit...

...Munson has to say about him, however, you become an ardent protagonist...

...Is humanism, after all, merely Arnoldism...

...Turning the pages of the volume, you see that various of the illustrious are read in and out of good society...

...Now I venture to object first that Dreiser was driven by sheer common sense, and secondly that this is not the "tragedy of our age...

...Can he have groaned over the prospect of humanism's becoming popular and have rushed to the printer copy designed to prevent such a disaster...

...I confess that the book interested me not a little...

...Munson, it would collapse under an attack of biliousness...

...Modern, of course, does not mean modernistic...

...But Mr...

...The modern time is like Proust, and it is essential that we should understand the difference...

...Our age" has the central role in an entirely different tragedy, rooted in a catastrophic unawareness of religion...

...In replying the present book gets little farther, it would seem, than Alice...

...I emphasize it because, in coming round to the three central papers in this book, I find that it has engrossed the attention of Professor Elliott...

...Their effort is neatly synthetized in Humanism and America, an assemblage of fifteen odd essays edited by Norman Foerster and published by Farrar and Rinehart (New York: $3.50...

...There is the essay of Professor Harry Hayden Clark on American fiction, which is almost foggy and dull enough to justify the suspicion that the author is to be subsidized for life by some particularly exclusive foundation...

...Professor Babbitt is in the centre of this book, entrenched squarely behind an essay which attempts to define humanism...

...A fairly confusing list, one thinks, which has the added peculiarity of sounding like a little girl's zoology -the dinosaur, the elephant and the field-mice...

...No Catholic view of culture is complete if it fails to recognize these opposites as a fundamental part of its doctrine...

...Our age is suffering from perilous diseases, is victimized by its especial heresies...

...He seems to me the only American thinker who offers a system possessing any real inner vitality...

...At any rate his reward, in this case, shall be merely one reader's disappointment...

...Christendom is an organic society, the only possible attitude of which toward civilization is a respectable eclecticism...

...Munson has a doctrine and the ardor of his conversions is memorable...

...Though the great French moralists are seldom read these days, each lives on solidly because he managed to classify himself definitively as something...

...He saw men as attached to no Spirit, as welded staunchly to universal forces and urges...

...Perhaps he was...

...Dreiser is exhibited as driven by "naturalism" to "a view of life as gratuitous as it is unmeaning," and to "a bottomless morass of misrepresentation and despair" which is "the American tragedy of our confused age...

...And was Arnold never "lustreless...

...I may be permitted to say that, while I have no experience of the reputed personal influence of Babbitt, my debt to him is great...

...Oddly enough, I begin to have a somewhat similar feeling about Paul Elmer More...

...But Christendom either has such a vitality or it has not been telling the world the truth about itself...

...Professor Foerster declares: In one way or another the doctrine and discipline of humanism have been clarified by persons as various as Homer, Phideas, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe...

...But in the present book he is not himself, having dispatched what are patently loose sheets from a journal...

...The untenable assumptions of science, the limitations of naturalistic literature, the dwindling acceptance of aristocracy in culture and social life-these are the topics of the sermons...