ization 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,