Monthly Bulletin - Clpdigital.org

REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS—MAY 1913 223
happiest of days. The chapters that form the bulk of the volume (A
New World, Life on a Wisconsin Farm, A Paradise of Birds, Young
Hunters, The Ploughboy) describe with a twofold enthusiasm, that of
the impressionable boy and of the venerable man looking into the past,
the joys of those early days in a strange land." Nation, 1013.
(Call number 92 M953m)
The Masters of Modern French Criticism
By Irving Babbitt
"This volume is primarily a study of the French critics of the last
century. Some half-dozen of the leading figures are very fully portrayed,
and a number of minor ones are sketched into the background.
The reader who is specifically interested in the historic development
of French criticism will hardly find elsewhere any exposition comparable
to this of the whole movement of that criticism during the last
hundred years. Still less will he find elsewhere a presentation of the
subject through the medium of so admirable a series of portraits. That
of Sainte-Beuve, who has not been very fortunate in his critics, will
probably impress many a reader as the completest and truest that has
yet been done. But least of all will one find elsewhere such a penetrating
analysis of the influence of modern criticism for good and evil on
literature and on the intellectual welfare of the age.
The critics are made to serve as a starting-point for the discussion
of criticism, while criticism itself is interesting to the author chiefly
because it holds in solution the main problems of nineteenth-century
thought; and these, again, do not so much interest him in themselves
(for he sees the century in somewhat cold perspective) as in their
relation to the thought of the ages.. .
Exaggerated homage to this or that current of contemporary
thought, or exaggerated revolt from it, has helped to make nineteenthcentury
criticism as chaotic as it is rich and varied. The same causes
have thus produced a confusion of standards in criticism corresponding
to the confusion of genres in literature which Mr. Babbitt has already
traced in 'The New Laokoon.' He seeks the remedy for this confusion
in the reestablishment of a rational hierarchy of standards.
According to Mr. Babbitt's analysis, the two main currents of
nineteenth-century thought, the romantic and the scientific, have cooperated
in producing this confusion. Romanticism, by its glorification
of the spontaneous, of instinct, of temperament, has exalted above
the intellect what lies really below the intellect... Science, in its turn,
by emphasizing only the external fact, has tended to draw away man's
attention from his soul in any sense whatever and to merge him wholly
in the phenomena of nature.
The expository side of the book traces the various forms of these
two streams of tendency, with their often bewildering cross and counter
currents, as revealed in their advocates, their opponents—and their victims.
The polemic side of the book analyzes, with no sparing of