Criticism -- Great Britain; English literature -- History and criticism
One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists
unduly praise the ignorant--the savage, the peasant, and the child.
Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six
as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us,
praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom
from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush
of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He
begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character.
He tries all sorts of false gods--nature-worship, art-worship,
humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of
these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation
of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. "Medical men have
given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of
their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau
already exhibits this 'psychosis.' He abandoned his five children one
after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his
dog." As for the worship of nature, it leads to a "wise passiveness"
instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle
in pantheistic reveries. "In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort
of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination." Professor
Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the
mote of Arcadianism even in "the light that never was on sea or land." He
has no objection to a "return to nature," if it is for purposes of
recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or "a
substitute for philosophy and religion." He denounces, indeed, every kind
of "painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort." He admires the
difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or
fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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