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On Being Creative ; And Other Essays. - By Irving Babbitt. (Constable. 7s. 6d.)
Mn. IRVING BABBIVT is a man with a mission. Something has gone wrong with the world : we shall all agree with him there. In particular, something has gone wrong with the art of literature (and with the other arts as well—but literature is Mr. Babbitt's chief concern) ; and there too a good many people might agree. Mr. Babbitt thinks he knows just what it is that literature is suffering from and how to cure it. But that is not quite so certain. No doubt with his general pro- position we shall once more all agree : what literature requires to-day is " a criticism far more incisive than any now dis- coverable among our intellectuals." But it is not from Mr. Babbitt that we get this desirably incisive criticism. We must be content to receive from him a diagnosis in large and severe . terms and, for remedy, a copious dose of words and phrases. The .doctor's manner is impressive, and the taste of his medicine drastic. The two things (not for the first time) have sufficed to create considerable reputation ; but their curative value may be doubted.
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Mr. Babbitt's diagnosis is lacking in analysis : that is to say, it is lacking in the quality essential to diagnosis. Those who might agree with him that something has gone wrong with literature to-day would probably be thinking of the applauded eccentricity of certain fairly recent tendencies. For Mr. Babbitt, however, it was quite a while ago that literature went wrong ; it was when romanticism set in ; and literature has continued to go wrong ever since. It has all gone wrong to-day—so far, at least, as standards are con- cerned. There are no standards ; we have lost the sense of tradition in literature ; we have set up instead ideals of spon- taneity and original self-expression : chaos is come again. That there has been, at any rate, a considerable intrusion of chaos into modern literature, who will deny ? Or that the signs of it are those which Mr. Babbitt so roundly, and indeed :--so long as he is speaking in general terms—so admirably asserts ? Or that romanticism may very plausibly be accused of the guilt of letting it in ? Everyone nowadays agrees that romanticism was often absurd, even in its most admired exponents ; that sometimes romanticism (especially that which derives directly from Rousseau) was injuriously absurd. The ill-effects of this may well be still discernible in the literature of to-day ; and Mr. Babbitt has done good service by pointing them out. But must we therefore see nothing but chaos to-day ? And must we therefore condemn all romanticism—or all that goes under that name ? Only a very unanalytic judgement would conclude that we must. Mr. Babbitt's judgement is of the kind that lumps together a great complexity of things under one cheerfully simple verdict. Modern literature is all of a piece for him ; and if a writer has ever been called a romantic, that is enough for him. People often call Wordsworth a romantic ; it is one of the worst mis- conceptions ever disseminated by easy-going literary history. Mr. Babbitt accepts it without question ; and this herald of incisive criticism proceeds to discourse on Wordsworth in a manner monumentally obtuse. One would prefer to think that Mr. Babbitt was criticizing a poet whom he had not read - or had read only in anthologies—rather than that the close study of his subject, which one expects from a scholar of Isis eminence, had led him to conclude that the poetry of the author of The Prelude is deficient in thought, that Words- worth's attitude to " nature " may be summed up as " idyllic," that the God whom he experienced in nature was not transcendent, but merely a kind of pathetic fallacy. Wordsworth's philosophy, says Mr. Babbitt, " may be defined as primitivism." Definition made easy ! A single word suffices—and a word-of-all-work at that. In Coleridge, we learn, primitivism means irresolution, and presumably also, therefore, lying ; for no one could fail to connect Coleridge's habitual irresolution with his habitual mendacity. But if this is primitivism, what is it in the veracious and formidably determined Wordsworth ? The answer is—Nature. To see in nature all that Wordsworth saw in it is, Mr. Babbitt assures us, primitivism. Now there is a kind of reliance on nature which may be called primitive : just as there is a sentiment for nature which may be called idyllic. Both may be exem- plified in Wordsworth ; but to make either of them stand as an account of Wordsworth's poetry is so show a singularly complacent faculty of unanalytic, diagnosis, of manipulating words instead of applying ideas.
And as with the diagnosis, so with the remedies. We mast get back to tradition, says Mr. Babbitt. But what is tradition in literature ? It is not quite so simple a matter as Mr. Babbitt seems to suppose. And how are we to get back ? The answer is strange : it is by imitation. Surely, one would think, the idea of imitation is just exactly not the thing to recommend in urging the need for tradition in literature. But it is not the idea, it is simply -the word, Mr. Babbitt is recommending, For we must not only get back to tradition, we must get back to Aristotle ; and imitation is the very foundation of Ads- - totle's Poetics. So it is.; though how it is so, Mr. Babbitt does not quite seem to grasp. But the idea of imitating tradition and the idea of imitation in Aristotle are as far apart as any two ideas can be which can be given by the same word. Still, :it is the same word : and thus, for Mr. Babbitt, to depend once more on tradition will be " a revival of the principle of imita- . tion." Needless to. say, Mr. Babbitt's essays show a vast range of learning, and his _general notions as to what literature .ought to be are excellent. But their application throughout
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