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Rh nature and man has produced much that is beautiful and true; and Mr. Babbitt errs in throwing into the same crucible the sentimental outpourings of a René and such wonderful creations as Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind and Leconte de Lisle's

in which the symbolism is a perfect expression of the inner mood. In other words, "to live dangerously"—as Nietzsche said—is at once the curse and the blessing of the romantic point of view. It is only the vitally strong that can stand up under the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power, and turn these into channels in which they will be productive in the highest sense. The early Renaissance and romanticism have this in common, that they both subjected temperament to the restraining influence of form; see Nietzsche himself, whom Mr. Babbitt is leagues from appreciating. And where romanticism fails to do this and strikes out new forms, our verdict will depend on whether these derive from the subject treated and are thus the product of an inner necessity, or whether the form is an empty shell and thus merely rhetoric.

The weakness, therefore, of Mr. Babbitt's book is his moral preoccupation, the failure to distinguish between romanticism as an ethical system and romanticism as an art. Against both of these aspects Mr. Babbitt invokes not only the pseudo-classical rule of reason and the classical "insight into the universal" but also the Buddhistic ideal of moral action. "The man," says Mr. Babbitt, "who drifts supinely with the current of desire is guilty, according to Buddha, of the gravest of all vices—spiritual or moral indolence. He, on the contrary, who curbs or reins in his expansive desires is displaying the chief of all virtues, spiritual vigilance or strenuousness Progress on this path may be known by its fruits—negatively by the extinction of the expansive desires (the literal meaning of Nirvana), positively by an increase in peace, poise, centrality." The burden of moral responsibility, thinks Mr. Babbitt, then rests on everyone's shoulders: to this the artist is no exception. Granted; but not in the sense that the artist must enunciate moral principles; only in the sense that he must be true to his art and no more. How far the Western world has drifted away from the Oriental wisdom Mr. Babbitt would have us realize by the catastrophe