Irving Babbitt's Emerson

EMERSON'S name occurs frequently in the critical writing of Irving Babbitt and is almost always the object of a curious, but clearly defined, ambivalence. In his early books, Literature and the American College (1908) and The New Laokoon (1910o), Babbitt's notice of Emerson is favorable for the most part, permitting itself only a few insignificant demurs; but in Babbitt's next work, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), Emerson becomes the focus of a dialectic of eulogy and disapproval which ultimately makes of him a kind of ethical hermaphrodite. It is possible to explain, in a large measure, this double vision of Babbitt's by taking into account the different traditions of Eastern thought and writing which attracted both men. Where Emerson is most honorifically dealt with-he is designated as one half of the ideal critic projected in the concluding chapter of The Masters of Modern French Criticism-he clashes least with the Buddhistic tradition dear to Babbitt; where he is disapproved of, his Hindu affinities resemble too closely the unsoundness that Babbitt never tired of excoriating in Rousseauistic romanticism. In the main, Emerson emerges from Babbitt's pages as a convenient emblematic locus of those forces-expansiveness and concentrationwhich were Babbitt's constant critical preoccupation; he thus serves, to some extent, a function similar to Babbitt's more extensive use of Rousseau, though he is a richer emblem because he is adjudged to have a redeemable, as well as a pernicious, significance.