One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists unduly praise the ignorant—­the savage, the peasant, and the child.  Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six as “Mighty Prophet!  Seer blest!” Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin.  The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder.  He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism.  He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character.  He tries all sorts of false gods—­nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals.  As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry.  “Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zooephilpsychosis).  But Rousseau already exhibits this ‘psychosis.’  He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog.”  As for the worship of nature, it leads to a “wise passiveness” instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries.  “In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination.”  Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism.  He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in “the light that never was on sea or land.”  He has no objection to a “return to nature,” if it is for purposes of recreation:  he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or “a substitute for philosophy and religion.”  He denounces, indeed, every kind of “painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort.”  He admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.

On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other “Rousseauists” whom he attacks.  Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency.  “The nineteenth century,” he declares, “may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries.”  He admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature.  Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working “with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law.”  Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that “the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found