Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/639

 Reviews and Notes 635 the blue flower. The blue flower resolves itself at last, it will be remembered, into a fair feminine face a face that cannot, however, be overtaken. . . The object is thus elusive because . . .it is not, properly speaking, an object at all but only a dalliance of the imagination with its own dreams. Cats, says Riarol, do not caress us, they caress themselves upon us." The question is, if the author of such glittering witticisms wishes to be taken at all seriously. The reviewer ventures al least to say that Mr. Babbitt's knowledge of Heinrich von Ofterdingen does not extend beyond the title page. It seems impossible and yet it is true that this chapter on romantic love was written without a single reference to Lucinde and Schleiermacher's Vertraute Briefe. Nor is Schleiermacher ever mentioned anywhere else in the book; probably for the reason that no stratagem or sub- terfuge could have twisted his conception of "Unendlichkeit" into a mathematical absurdity. It is strange that one of the greatest sinners in striving for "endlessness," Giordano Bruno, escaped our inquisitor's vigilance. To be sure, Giordano Bruno was bodily burned at the stake, and his executioner's successor may therefore have considered the martyr's soul saved. The reviewer would have to copy this whole Malleus Male- ficorum, if he wished to point out the full extent of distortions and misinterpretation to which Mr. Babbitt allowed his prejudices to carry him. Granted the sincerity of his convictions and intentions, the final result of his diligent, if whimsical reading, is nothing but a confusion of issues, a negation of the vital forces in life and literature, for the sake of that utterly barren, scholastic Aristotelianism which four hundred years ago Luther so passionately battled against. Its revival in America, in the writings of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and their dis- ciples, if successful, would result in the destruction of the scienti- fic spirit and moral freedom which are the foundations of a civilization worth living for, Fortunately the stars in the heavens may complacently listen to the howling of even the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial bloodhounds. No prosecution will reach them. No envy will blot out their lustre. Professor Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism is one of the most disheartening products of narrow-minded philistinism, pedantic scholasticism, and pharisaic puritanism in literature the reviewer has ever come across. O. E. LESSING. University of Illinois.