A Splendid Virgil

...Joubert once remarked, and Babbitt quotes him approvingly, "when my friends have only one eye, I look at them in profile...

...some of them, like Joubert and SainteBeuve, touchstones in the history of criticism...

...Babbitt is the master of the disenchanting anecdote, and knows just where to get his hands on the most damaging or deductive quotations...

...de Staci, simply ungrappled with although famous for extra-literary reasons...

...and others still, like Renan and Mme...

...Babbitt's own style is generally effective, in an inflexible hard-edged way, which is what one would expect from a man who said that "the examples are only too numerous of persons who in exclusive reliance on the inner oracle have thought themselves inspired when they were only peculiar...

...The only sympathetic and continuously enlightening thing about him is Harry Levin's little pamphlet published by Harvard as the inaugural lecture in the Irving Babbitt Professorship of Comparative Literature...

...Although about half this long book is likely to appeal only to the student and to appall the "common reader," those two members of any audience are so scarce these days that 1 had best get directly to what is excellent and exciting in it: how much Babbitt has to tell us about a dozen writers of whom no single adequate intellectual account exists in English...

...Yvor Winters said he was not interested in seeing how moral values got into literature...

...and it is true that his frequently evident distaste for the subject as a donnée led him to pierce the pretences of that country where Sainte-Bueve said "we shall remain Catholics long after we have ceased to be Christians" and where a man of genius, Nisard declared without irony, is "he who says what everyone knows...

...T. S. Eliot said he knew too much...

...Babbitt is a splendid Virgil...

...Everyone has had the last word about Babbitt: Edmund Wilson said that his Academy was more like the Inquisition...

...With an appropriateness not always observed on such occasions, Professor Levin points out the value of Babbitt's strengths, accounts for his weaknesses, and does a truly Beuvian job of locating his books in relation to his own life and to American life as a whole...

...By reprinting 50 years later what may be Irving Babbitt's best and what is certainly his most positive book (two of his others are available in paperback), the publishers make it possible to have the best of both worlds...

...Incidentally, at the end of his book Babbitt has provided a critical bibliography of 19th-century French criticism so exact and so trenchant (for instance, this remark on Paul Bourget: "a remarkable record of the spiritual maladies of the second half of the nineteenth century by one who has suffered from most of them") as to compensate for the weak and unavailing preface the publishers have supplied...

...the Wandering Jew of the intellectual world") or as assertive as Chateaubriand ("to lack true inwardness and at the same time to become the champion of religion is simply to substitute pose for reality...

...From this vantage, Babbitt is as comely as one could wish, constantly rising above common sense, which he called the average degree of illusion, into something tauter, tenser—the discipline that comes from the assimilation, if not necessarily the acceptance, of tradition...

...contributor, "Poetry" The great drawback of new books is that they keep us from reading old ones...

...others, like Edmond Scherer and Ferdinand Brunetière, unknown in this country...

...He is full of that dismissive benevolence which, arising from contempt, is, as Burke said, no true charity...

...Through this abyss of relativism...

...Paul Elmer More once observed that Babbitt pursued French literature "chiefly to annihilate it...

...Alfred Kazin said his narrowness fed his intensity and despoiled it...

...Professor Babbitt, though fearfully eager to get beyond what he knows into something he wants to propose, is wonderfully good at giving the natural history of a mind, whether it is the mind of someone as fugitive as Sainte-Beuve ("the final impression one carries away is of a man who has suffered an inner defeat...

...Since he is not really writing about literary criticism ("at best a somewhat languid business"), but about the kind of criticism that flourished at that moment, in the 19th century, when anyone who wished to be taken seriously had to make his peace with Science, we are rarely allowed to sink into the nap of any of his subjects' carpets without a stern or even a jaunty reminder that "psychological analysis when carried to a certain point encounters in other terms the same questions as theology...

...Professor Levin, too, prefers The Masters of Modern French Criticism to Babbitt's other works, and though 1 should not go so far as to suggest a Babbitt revival, it is beyond question that the achievement here is a valuable and even a necessary one...