Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence of Rousseau and “Rousseauism”—by which he means the whole modern cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, “Rousseau and Romanticism,” three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any time during the past hundred and seventy-five years ever thought a new thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially intense emotion in art form.
It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The pendulum of life swings to one extreme, and then it swings to the other. Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop; and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought never to have been set free; it was a violation of “decorum.” That is his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of America has another name for it; we call it “the Harvard manner.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you have to do up a Harvard Tory—that is fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical movement—not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises sung by a man who has lived for twenty years by seducing young girls and getting their money.”
Says Ogi: “If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets, and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this volume devoted to Harvard University—see ‘The Goose-Step,’ pages 62 to 91.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell him—because Rousseau’s revolution is only half completed. The political part happened, and gave us—world capitalism! We aren’t satisfied, and we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world’s Tories are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even Voltaire’s ‘l’Infame’! There is a clerical party in every country in Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called ‘Christian Socialist,’ to cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner. The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life.”
“The persecution complex?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan’s French and British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard ‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they found there—”
“The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor—I mean our Professor Babbitt—with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’—by such examples as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense—that is they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What is one going to do with a man like that?”