In 1908, Irving Babbitt, an unknown instructor in the French department at Harvard, rocked American academia with what was to become the seminal text of the critical movement known as the New Humanism. Generally relegated to a footnote place in literary history as a dyspeptic reaction to nascent modernism, Babbitt's New Humanism unfolds on closer inspection as a remarkably expansive and generous approach to literary study, one sympathetic to genuine artistic originality but aware of how rare that phenomenon is. Babbitt and his New Humanist ally Paul Elmer More generated furious controversy and attracted a not insignificant slice of the American intelligentsia to their cause in the three decades after Babbitt's first book, but after their deaths the movement slid so quickly into decline that Alfred Kazin could write in On Native Grounds, his classic 1942 study of American prose literature, that they “seem fated to be remembered by smaller and smaller groups of academic admirers.” Indeed, since Kazin made this prediction the numbers of these devotees have dwindled to near zero, but Literature and the American College, now long out of print, still stands as the most thoughtful and substantive of twentieth-century efforts to derive normative content from that perennially slippery abstraction, “humanism.”

The book, which consists primarily of Babbitt's previously published essays, is one of those rare collections in which the discrete and separately conceived parts not only illuminate one another but add up to a hypnotically coherent portrait of a mind. Babbitt is at pains from the start of his book to make it clear what his humanism is not, fuming at “our present failure to see in the term anything more than the fullness of knowledge and sympathy.” In a long essay on Francis Bacon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he distinguishes those thinkers' “humanitarianism,” their professed concern for the human being as human being, from true humanism, which Babbitt, tells us, “maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.” Bacon and Rousseau, whom Babbitt identifies as the respective intellectual godfathers of his book's two villains, positivism and romanticism, subordinated the cultivation of what is best about humanity to the “sentimental” (a favorite Babbitt word) drive to maximize what they conceived to be the welfare of humanity as a whole. Babbitt saw in the American university of his day the crowding out of humanism by humanitarianism of both the Baconian and Rousseauian varieties: genuinely humanistic scholarship, that which regards whatever it studies in the context of the human whole, was under assault, he argued, on the one hand from the new emphasis, imported from the German research university, on the application of “scientific” methods to traditionally humanistic fields, and on the other hand by a romantic fascination with emancipatory self-expression, pursued at the expense of engagement with the past. In new universities like Chicago and Johns Hopkins, set up along German lines, and increasingly in the older universities as well, scholars labored with Baconian doggedness at the “advancement of knowledge,” retreating ever further into subspecialties in search of opportunities to make an “original” contribution. The sharply focused and abstrusely technical doctoral dissertation had become over the past few decades a prerequisite for academic employment. Meanwhile, colleges were expanding the elective system and allowing the substitution of modern for classical languages, developments which Babbitt unchivalrously blames on the rising numbers of female undergraduates. Forseeing further relaxation of standards, he even hints darkly at “the prospect of a demand in the near future for a Bachelor of Arts degree without Latin.”

Babbitt himself was trained at Harvard as a scholar of the Greek and Latin classics and of Sanskrit, but his lack of sympathy with the direction of classical scholarship forced him to take up a position teaching French. This move was not, it appears, an unqualified success: Babbitt, Kazin tells us, wasted no time in informing his department chair that French was “a cheap and nasty substitute for Latin” and More once remarked that his friend wrote about French literature “chiefly to annihilate.” The latter conceded, however, that “one might teach French with considerable conviction, were it not for the propensity of the American student to confine his reading in French to inferior modern authors.” There were indeed French writers he loved, Montaigne and the seventeenth-century dramatists in particular, but his particular concern in Literature and the American College is with the special problems confronting the study of the classics. At the time the book was published, American and British classical scholarship was in the final stages of transformation into a rigorously Teutonic philological discipline. Babbitt welcomed the seriousness of the new approach to classical studies and certainly had no patience with the genteel belletrism it had replaced. He maintained, though, that the sort of work needed to establish reliable texts, a task at which German philology excelled, would become a “flagrant anachronism if persisted in after that work has been thoroughly done.” The limited amount of written material remaining from Greece and Rome, in other words, meant that classical philology was a research program with a definite expiration date, and that “as the field of ancient literature is more and more completely covered, the vision of the special investigator must become more and more microscopic.” One suspects that Babbitt would regard the state of classical philology today, in which, most texts of any importance having been long since authoritatively edited and massively commented upon, new initiates cast desperately about for ever more trivial topics on which original research can be conducted, as grim confirmation of his prophecy.

For Babbitt, the dilettante's romantically subjective idea of literature as “mere titillation of the aesthetic sensibility” or as a vehicle for self-assertion is the inevitable concomitant of the philologist's methodical plodding. As anecdotal confirmation of their inextricability he notes in censorious passing the off-hours penchant of scientifically minded scholars for “vaudeville performances and light summer fiction.” “The scientific analyst and the romantic dreamer,” he wrote, “have divided between them the nineteenth century, and in their very opposition have been hostile to leisure.” The modern professional scholar is always either at work or at play; his time is given either to tasks directly germane to his research or to simple relaxation. Babbitt asserts the centrality of “academic leisure,” something distinct from activity on the one hand and rest on the other, to the humanistic enterprise. We should, that is, conceive of commentaries and concordances and articles in scholarly journals as instrumental aids to free and autotelic reflection rather than regarding thought as the instrumental process by which the scholar produces further work of no clear value to anyone. “The Baconian tendency,” he writes, “is to measure the scholar's achievement almost entirely in terms of work,” but Babbitt follows Aristotle in regarding “productivity” as secondary and subordinate to contemplation. “The serious advantage of our modern machinery,” he tells us, “is that it lightens the drudgery of the world and opens up the opportunities of leisure to more people than has hitherto been possible. We should not allow ourselves to be persuaded that the purpose of this machinery is merely to serve as a point of departure for a still intenser activity.” Contemporary scholarship, Babbitt argues, is in a state of confusion about its own purpose: it abdicates intellectual responsibility to the “machinery” of the scientific method rather than employing that method as a tool. Just as we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by devices we invented to spare ourselves labor, so too we forget that instrumental reason is a human creation and let it slip out of its instrumentality. The problem, Babbitt argues, is not that scholars have learned to be scientific but rather that they are incapable of seeing scientific analysis as a means rather than as an end in itself.

Babbitt's views on the proper relation between “work” and academic leisure and his low estimate of the scholarship churned out by the new research universities issue in a set of practical proposals for the reform of graduate education in the humanities. Doctoral candidates are, he argues, pushed prematurely into research by “a pedantic straining after originality.” The facile assumption that anyone aspiring to an academic post can and should fill volume after volume with groundbreaking work obscures, Babbitt writes, the truth about “genuine originality”: it represents an “immensely difficult” synthesis of the “intensely individual” with “general human truth” and cannot be forced. The hothouse compulsion to produce “original” work under the banner of Baconian professionalism drives scholars into a narrow overspecialization that serves neither their own intellectual development nor, ultimately, that of their students. “American scholarship,” Babbitt writes, “should propose to itself some higher end than simply to add a tributary to the stream” of unread academic writing. Graduate training, he argues, should stress “assimilative” rather than “productive” scholarship and should seek to instill “discipline in ideas, not merely discipline in facts.” What is needed is “a degree that stands primarily for reading and assimilation” but that is “as severe and searching as a degree that stands primarily for research.” Babbitt outlines in robust Rooseveltian prose the ambitious comparative mandate to classicists for which such a program would serve as preparation:

One of the important functions of the classical teacher should be to bridge over the gap between the Greek and Roman world and the world of today. No preparation can be too broad, no culture too comprehensive, for the man who would fit himself for the adequate performance of such a task. His knowledge of modern life and literature needs to be almost as wide as his knowledge of the life and literature of antiquity. The ideal student of the classics should not rest satisfied until he is able to follow out in all its ramifications that Greek and Latin thought which, as Max Muller says, runs like fire in the veins of modern literature.

In place of the doctoral dissertation, Babbitt's graduate curriculum in classics would set as the final hurdle for its student “an examination designed to show the extent and thoroughness of his reading in the classical languages and his power to relate this knowledge to modern life and literature.” The difference between this approach to graduate training and the German model gaining ground in Babbitt's time and ubiquitous in ours represents chasmic disagreement about the core mission of the academy: is it to incubate originality or to preserve and transmit a humane tradition and let originality grow where it will on this intellectual scaffolding? Is the purpose of specialized training in the humanities to allow the neophyte to add further bulk to the specialist literature or to share what is valuable in the discipline with outsiders?

Babbitt's vision of graduate education as the vehicle for the perpetuation of a tradition and only incidentally for the inflection or expansion of that tradition is testament to the depth of his belief in the radically constitutive power of the humanities. That is, he hews firmly to the idea that we arrive at a coherent self-understanding only with the aid of the vantage point on the human and eternal offered us by literary tradition, a notion that enjoyed only slightly more popularity in Babbitt's day than it does now. This humanism of the humanities is still, though, the only way of giving “humanism” content, of making it more than a platitudinous enthusiasm for people and the things they do. Babbitt devoted much of his life to the study of classical Indian philosophy and literature and did not, as do the conservative critics who occasionally make perfunctory genuflections in his direction, assume that the West holds a monopoly on this formative power. What he cared about, rather, was literary tradition's ability to sift the timeless from the time-bound and thereby construct a composite picture of what it means to be human. We must be alive to the past and alert to the ways in which historical contingency can warp our critical judgment. Babbitt's declaration that “literature has been more or less sentimental since Petrarch,” sometimes quoted as evidence of his closed mind and general grouchiness, emerges in this light as testament to his efforts to resist the parochialism of the modern and to assess the products of the human imagination from a perspective outside time. In the service of what Nietzsche called “the historical sense,” the study of the humanities should have as its goal “a revival of the almost lost art of reading.” Babbitt quotes approvingly Goethe's dictum that “if we earnestly study classical antiquity, a feeling comes over us as though it were only then that we really became men”; our author writes in another context that access to the transformative imaginations of the past allows us “an avenue of escape from ourselves” and from all the petty provincialisms that self-limitation to a single point of view breeds.

Americans, it would seem, are in particular need of the sort of education that would make them, in Babbitt's phrase, “participants in the universal life.” The book's title was not chosen carelessly; its concern is with the American college and the special problems associated with teaching literature in a country where “no great monument of a former age, no Pantheon or Notre Dame, rises … to make a silent plea for the past.” Babbitt's response to America's unique cultural situation vis-à-vis Europe stands in sharp contrast to that of Emerson, who is nevertheless a constant presence in the book and whose “Ode to William H. Channing” supplies the book's epigraph:

There are two laws discrete
Not reconciled,--
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

In these lines Babbitt, despite his firm distaste for Emerson's visionary individualism, finds New Humanism avant la letter . America's unique historical position, Emerson and Babbitt agree, leaves it in heightened danger of servitude to the “law for thing.” Babbitt comes across in his book as curiously obtuse to the economic and political dimensions of this danger. He might have profitably given some attention to Emerson's exhortation earlier in the same “Ode”:

But who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind
Of better arts and life?
Go, blind worm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife.

The book's most striking argumentative lacuna is the absence of any discussion of the academy's position relative to the state and to the larger economic forces at work in capitalist society. Babbitt evidently failed to anticipate that the Baconian drive to import the “law for thing” into the study of the humanities could not only enshrine“productivity” as the highest end of scholarship but also subordinate the entire academic enterprise to the ways of thinking about “productivity” prevalent in the relentlessly commercial “real world.” When the few politicians who favor genuine public investment in higher education explain that they want the rising generation to be “competitive in the global marketplace,” and when those scholars so bold as to say anything that might dampen the enthusiasm of the youngsters under their tutelage for the “harrying” of countries considerably further off than Mexico open themselves to invective of a ferocity that would shock Juvenal, one feels that French “novels of the decadence” and dreary dissertations on the Roman doorknob are less of a menace to the survival of liberal education in the American college than the incessant demands that the humanities demonstrate their harmlessness, or better yet their usefulness, to those who foot the bill.

Babbitt's critique of modernity, though showing no evidence of systematic thought about capitalism's distortion of the aims of education, is in other respects exhibits a degree of subtlety not often fully appreciated. His New Humanism, he writes, “is not to be taken as a general arraignment of the modern spirit by a reactionary.” He affirms his admiration for “the immense achievements of science since the Renaissance” and for the Enlightenment's compassion towards “the disinherited among men.” Scientific progress and social altruism are pernicious, he explains, “only when they are set up as absolute and all-sufficient in themselves.” Like Nietzsche, another deep but not uncritical admirer of Emerson, Babbitt finds “communal sympathy” too flimsy a replacement for the religious discipline dissolved over the past few centuries. His philosophy of education can be seen, like Nietzsche's thought, as an attempt to check the slide into nihilism attendant on the replacement of faith with reason. Literature is to be a secular religion, a demand that explains the intensity of Babbitt's seriousness about humanistic education. The study of literature must, to fulfill this role, eschew both narrow didacticism and the pretense of scientific objectivity, valuing art neither as a storehouse of moral exempla nor as an object of detached study nor yet as a means to personal and subjective satisfaction, but instead as a glimpse of the eternal. It is hard to imagine Babbitt regarding any approach to literature influential today, from Harold Bloom's romantic aestheticism to Stanley Fish's postmodernism, with anything but undiluted abhorrence. Looking back across a century, the reader of Literature and the American College sees Irving Babbitt in the proleptic penumbra of oblivion, and what seemed strident to his first readers now strikes one as a brave last stand: instead of the polemicist's shout we hear a whispered reminder that we all might be better off if we stopped writing and started reading.