Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/633

 Reviews and Notes 629 Rousseau means the archtype of an emotionalism uncontrolled by reason and unchecked by "decorum". It is in this sense that Rousseauism is placed in juxtaposition with Romanticism. And Romanticism in turn does not mean the reaction against the shallowness of the materialistic phase of rationalism and against the sterility of pseudo-classicism. Nor does Mr. Babbitt in- clude the positive and permanent achievements of romanticism in philosophy, religion, science, literature, and art. What he understands by romanticism is only the negation of conventional decorum, the eccentric vagaries and the fatalistic pessimism of certain individual phenomena within the whole of the romantic movement, not romanticism itself. It is the purpose of the book thus misnamed to arraign the maleficent twins Rousseau- ism-Romanticism, or rather their caricature, before the tribunal of a "positive and critical humanism." For such is the baptis- mal name of the author's personal faith and code of decorum. He does not pretend to apply the methods of impartial and objective scholarship. He frankly starts from the conviction of his own infallibility, measuring persons and things by his own arbitrary standard. He excludes any fact, argument, or witness that might possibly mitigate the death sentence decided upon before the trial has opened. He is the lawmaker, the judge, the state's attorney, the jury, the sheriff, and the hangman, all in one. A partial list of victims shows the extent and the intensity of the prosecution: Baudelaire, Bergson, Berlioz, Blake, Boehme, Browning, Byron, Carlyle, Chateau- briand, Coleridge, Constant, John Dewey, Emerson, Fichte, Flaubert, Gautier, Goethe (in part), Hawthorne, Hoffmann, Holderlin, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, Kant, Kleist, Lamartine, Le- conte de Lisle, Maeterlinck, George Moore, Musset, Nietzsche, Novalis, Plotinus, Poe, Jean Paul, Ruskin, George Sand, Schelling, Shaftesbury, Friedrich Schlegel, A. W. Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Shelley, Madame de Stael, Stendhal, Synge, Tagore, Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Whitman, Wordsworth, Zola. Born in different countries, climes, and ages, these ill- fated objects inquisitionis babbitticae have all been found guilty of the same offense: they have failed to conform to the inquisitor's orthodox creed called a positive and critical human- ism. It would be a mistake to associate Mr. Babbitt's brand of humanism with men like Erasmus or Reuchlin. As in the case of the other two isms, Mr. Babbitt has chosen to give the old word humanism which to most of us has become the cherished symbol of enlightenment and spiritual freedom, an entirely new and contrary meaning. When he says "humanism" he means in reality Salemite puritanism, i.e. that sterile pseudo- religion whose god is not our Christian God of Love but an idol of fear and negation, the demon of the Torquemadas and Hoch-