ROMANTICISM ENJOINED
Rousseau and Romanticism. By Irving Babbitt. 8vo. 427 pages. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.
"THE artist," wrote Conrad at the pinnacle of the romantic nineteenth century, "speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain: to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." No such breadth of understanding—I almost said vision of the artistic problem—illumes the pages of Mr. Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism. Mr. Babbitt the critic is a Puritan, first and last. He does not like the romantic; that we have known for some time. He prefers the restrained, the balanced, the decorous, the intellectualized product of classicism. No one can quarrel with him for this; nor with his main contention that from Rousseau to Bergson "the analytic intellect" has been sadly held in abeyance. But why, after Lasserre and a host of others, he should devote 393 pages to give romanticism its coup de grâce puzzles the expectant reader.
Omnis definitio est negatio. Mr. Babbitt's book is a long account of what romanticism is not. It is not a return to the Middle Ages; that of course is merely an incident, a part of the trappings, as it were, like the blue flower of the German romanticists or the ivory tower of De Vigny or the red waistcoat of Gautier. It is not the typical, the commonplace, the broadly and universally human. It is not the classicism of Boileau and Pope: if they represent reason, romanticism represents unreason; if they uphold decorum, romanticism destroys it; if they stand for the analytic intellect, romanticism stands for intellectual confusion. In short, a thing is classical when representative of a class, "a thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique." All this is true
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