to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature.”  He sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that “something abiding” on which civilization must rest.  He quotes Aristotle’s anti-romantic saying that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.”  He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, “plumped for” the disorderly manner to-day.

His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism.  After all, romanticism was a great liberating force.  It liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum—­not from humility, but from subserviency.  It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity.  I am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water.

Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with its emphasis on duties.  Each of them tries to do without the other.  The most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition.  On the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals.  Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility.  He himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices.  He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess.  He is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries.  He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues.  Literature to-day is less noble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the “sense of sin.”  Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy.  The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day.  Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values.  On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism.  In the great books of the world, in Isaiah and the Gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony.  If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of “Consider the lilies of the field”?