The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to the vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion of Disraeli as a novelist.  The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters in his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features correctly, so that the facts break through the praise.  The truth is Mr. Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best with the pleasure of saying the worst.  His books are all the more vital because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel personality.

XIX.—­AN AMERICAN CRITIC:  PROFESSOR IRVING BABBITT

It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature.  Professor Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution.  They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature.  One suspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution; for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power.  It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust of power.  On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man!  The steps of the process by which the change is effected are these.  First, we have the Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from without.  Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil environment.  They hold that all will be well if only he is set free—­if his genius or natural impulses are liberated.  “Rousseauism is ... an emancipation of impulse—­especially of the impulse of sex.”  It is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for conscience.  Hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh.  “In the absence of ethical discipline,” writes Professor Babbitt in Rousseau and Romanticism, “the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature—­the lust for power.  Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac.”  In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War!  Had there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have been ready to take Professor Babbitt’s indictment more seriously.