Literature and the American College. By Irving Babbitt. (Houghton, Mifflin,
and Co., Boston and New York. 5s. net.)— These "Essays in Defence of the Humanities" are primarily con- cerned with academical aims and methods as they exist in America ; but they will be found highly interesting by readers on this side of the Atlantic. It was an English man of science who after a morning of hard work in the study used to lie on a sofa and hear a novel read aloud, and who himself deplored that he had ceased to be able to enjoy poetry. But the habit of mind is common on both sides of the Atlantic. Then, as Mr. Babbitt, who has a pretty gift of vigorous expression, puts it : "The man who took literature too seriously would be suspected of effeminacy, and the really virile thing is to be an electrical engineer." When books are studied it is their scientific—i.e., their philological —aspect that is regarded. "Poetry," as an American sage remarks, "is a pretty thing enough for our wives and daughters, but not for us." "I prefer," says another wise man, "the philosophy of Montaigne to what seem to me the platitudes of Cicero." "As though," says Mr. Babbitt, "it were possible to have a just understanding of Montaigne without a knowledge of the 'platitudes' of Cicero and the whole of Latin literature into the bargain." We welcome Mr. Babbitt as a powerful ally of the literary cause in the great educational struggle of the time.
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