Mother Nature
MOTHER NATURE TOURING the past twelvemonth diverse memorials ¦*-'' of Romanticism have been carefully taken from their shelves and dusted. The resultant portraits of Hernani at right angles and...
...in other ways he was harking back to the middle-ages...
...Messrs...
...He castigates Rousseau's deference to feeling and Wordsworth's affection for impulses from the vernal wood...
...Belloc's Europe and the Faith was anticipated by Novalis...
...Indeed, the effect of the "homecoming" was so powerful that it almost hampered any movement forward on the part of those who had always remained at home...
...Since literature is our means of knowing man it has, honestly and sincerely used, a place of honor in the genuinely religious life...
...Here he parts company with the humanist critics, who almost (if not entirely) believe that the subject-matter and practical business of literature are unchanging...
...Babbitt properly lambasts as libido sciendi...
...We work in the twentieth century and dream in the twelfth," he complains...
...Irwin Edman writing on "the new naturalism" in a recent issue of the Nation...
...He sees in Romanticism a "homeward movement" to the Church, which sometimes expressed itself in conversions, again in admiration for the middle-ages, and finally in a religiousminded symbolism...
...May a Catholic critic be pardoned for suggesting that his experience—or rather the experience of the Church as he understands it—is of some pertinence in this debate...
...Edman that it is a mistake to live "scolding, petulant and doomed in the midst of the contemporary world," we may likewise reserve the conviction that he has made things too easy for himself...
...But if his desire to be the whole of cultural vitality and the specially appointed ambassador from the kingdom of worthwhile is understandable (men who believe in their doctrines are often truculent enough) Mr...
...Babbitt because of the anarchical tendencies manifest in it...
...In some respects he was living whole-heartedly in the world refashioned by the Revolution...
...The society he constructs is equable only if there be found in it some point of rigor, like the barren stake which supports the roses...
...And one feels that while every shred of insight obtained by the past is treasurable, the necessity for knowing things as they are now is likewise imperative...
...Edman is a naturalist in the Aristotelian sense, inclined to see in nature "the matrix and material of all our ideals and the locus of all possible destinies," the principle underlying his appeal is not much different from that which absorbed Coleridge...
...This, the learned priest reminds us, is, in the final analysis, "the aspiration of the spirit, to behold things reattach themselves to the creative essence whence they have flowed, and to make plain to oneself their reason for being...
...For so far as history enables us to divine the character of the natural man, it reveals a creature normally flabby, non-heroic, spiritually anarchical...
...The torch which the Roman Stoic passed on to the Christian ascetic, and which later flamed in the hands of Pascal, is as natural a humanistic phenomenon as any other...
...To the Catholic historian, however, the picture suggested is a totally different one...
...Our interests, our joys, our problems derive their individuality from the fact that the sun has risen several times since last week...
...Now while Mr...
...Eliot, Winters et al...
...To him Scott appears to be almost an apologist and Novalis something like a prophet...
...A critic is no longer worth his salt unless he can quote Aristotle...
...Walt Whitman was then a new dispensation and a quotation from Hegel at second hand was enough to win for any critic an honorary degree...
...Edman feels that literature can do something with and for human conditions...
...Yearning for knowledge may degenerate into what Mr...
...That is why the puritan mood is indissociable from reputable civilization...
...Bridges has left a "testament" which some folk term a catalogue of speculations...
...It is most interesting to note that all the Catholic writers named approvingly by American humanists are Romantic, in the sense just outlined...
...And, of course, the debate about humanism has turned the spotlight upon phrases culled from Confucius and Saint Thomas...
...Ten years ago matters were different...
...The Romantic movement, viewed as a whole seems deplorable to Mr...
...One seems to be living in an age when the stones of which the house may be builded are being assembled— while there is a strange unawareness of the foundation...
...To a considerable extent, the new order can be traced to the universities, where graduate study has proved a popular diversion...
...That there has been another and more definitely "classical" movement inside the Church has, for some curious reason, been ignored...
...The resultant portraits of Hernani at right angles and in profile may be of only passing interest, but the points of view raised ioo years ago were never more important than now...
...Babbitt holds that literature must not be affected by human conditions...
...For him literature has a definite function and purpose...
...And almost before he realized what was happening he had expressed the religious meaning of English Romanticism in a way destined to remain influential for decades...
...Professor Babbitt would not be a phenomenon if he were not necessary...
...An he concludes that while it was normal for older and simpler civilizations to have bequeathed "form" of lasting beauty, "The challenge to literature and to the other arts in our generation is precisely that of giving some pattern and coherence to the new world, the new themes and the THE COMMONWEAL May 7. unprecedented urgencies that have come into our lives with the new order...
...While the mediaevalist is impressed with the splendid form which Christianity once assumed in Europe, the "classicist" is concerned with the form which human existence can acquire here, now and at any time under the tutelage of faith...
...Edman's dismay is likewise quite reasonable...
...Elliott, for instance, deplores this very concern with "environment" in modern poetry, feeling that great verse is properly a treasure passed on from one master to another...
...There Julien Benda stands in sharp opposition to Albert Thibaudet—the static conception of literature and thought against the kinetic conception of literature and thought...
...One ought not to be a creature of the times, but there is no way out of being a creature of time...
...What is needed is a larger synthesis...
...Maritain, Chesterton and Belloc are all as fervently mediaevalistic as Kenelm Digby himself...
...In France the lines between the two points of view have, no doubt, been drawn more clearly...
...Babbitt is seen, therefore, as the spokesman for something vital and representative...
...He wants literature to entertain a decent respect for past achievements, even as he himself doffs a hat to Aristotle...
...Perhaps, in view of the constant plea that God may renew the face of the earth, it is really more imperative...
...Those Catholics who wished to do something for a society which they realized had turned democratic were sometimes greatly annoyed by protagonists of a revival of the Holy Roman empire or of chivalry...
...But is it not worth remembering that literature rendered similar homage to philosophy ioo years ago...
...We are neighbors to the dynamo and we escape to a marble temple shining on an ancient Mediterranean hill...
...But it may also be what the Abbe Vialatoux terms "besoin de comprendre"—our need to know...
...That makes him representative...
...But he also wants it to help reflect and, beyond that, master the new environment—social and material, natural and spiritual—which now impales the human adventure...
...Coleridge, the very type of Romantic genius, turned from poetry to lead his people into the tropics of German thought...
...The essence of this movement—for which we are not making a brief at the expense of the other side—seems to lie in the emphasis which is placed upon the development of cultural forces...
...Perhaps his theories are not of much value to us now...
...But if we concede to Mr...
...They might shake their heads as vigorously as they liked, but all eyes turned to the mediaeval era as toward the lost Eden for which one could only sigh regretfully in a later and degenerate age...
...An equally important factor, one thinks, has been the mere appearance of such serious personalities as Messrs...
...Indeed, Mr...
...One cannot, however, avoid noticing that tradition and change were almost evenly blended in Coleridge...
...For philosophy has returned to literature...
...Compare, for instance, Mr...
...It is one of the channels through which the religious personality acts...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
