Word: babbittism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Irving Babbitt, Humanist, Harvard professor L.H.D...
Sinclair Lewis, in Paris, discussed his new book. The heroine, Anne Vickers, "will be a sort of female Babbitt playing a reverse role, but she is not intended as a sarcastic interpretation of that glorious class of American women who help make the wheels of business spin. She will live on Main Street and Dr. Arrowsmith will be her family doctor...
Basically Professor Babbitt's criticism is the same as it was some years ago, but Mencken is out of fashion, and his remarks mean far less to the contemporary student and critic than Professor Babbitt would have us believe. Essays on the primitivism of Wordsworth, on Coleridge and Dr. Johnson and the imagination, are studies more immediately interesting to the student of literature. Professor Lowes comes in for his share of criticism in the former essay, and Professor Carpenter is nicked once in the course of the book. All in all, however, they fare better than do Rebecca West...
...most interesting chapters in the volume is that on "Romanticism and the Orient." Here we have the fullest treatment of the modern misconception of the Far East that Professor Babbitt has yet given us. To be sure, one has learned from his lectures of his growing preoccupation with the Orient, but except for a few hints he has not written or spoken at length on the subject. "The whole subject . . . is full of pitfalls," he writes. "Rousseauistic romanticism has had an important influence in the Far East," and the teachings of Lao-tze have given China a primitivistic tradition...
There are essays on Schiller as an aesthetic theorist, and one on Julien Benda which the reviewer is not qualified to discuss. It is sufficient to say of the book that the ideas advanced are the same, but that the treatment of the new subjects provides engrossing reading. Professor Babbitt's books are always stimulating and thought-provoking, and "On Being Creative" is no exception. If the reader does not agree with him, he will at least gain an insight into the personality of the man whose critical theories are accepted as composing the only original doctrine to come...