“The man who does not rein in his will to power and is at the same time very active according to the natural law is in a fair way to become an efficient megalomaniac.”—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, in Antigone Journal “Humanities Without Humanism”
“The sentimentalist, who would subject man to the rule of impulse and passion; the pragmatic naturalist, who would treat man as a mere edified ape; the leveling enthusiast, who would reduce human differences to a collective mediocrity—these are the enemies of true human nature.”—Russel Kirk, Introduction, Literature and the American College
“Colleges had been founded for the study of abstractions, not as schools to supply entertainment and job-certification for boys and girls.”
“It is not always easy, of course, in the ebullitions of a new movement, to distinguish the man who has received the living word from the man whose access of energy is the result of being relieved of the necessity of thinking for himself. Men who have stopped thinking make a powerful force.”
“At best, what the typical college has offered its undergraduates, in recent decades, has been defecated rationality: that is, a narrow rationalism or Benthamite logical ism, purged of theology, moral philosophy, and the wisdom of our ancestors. This defecated rationality exalts private judgment and gratification of the senses at the expense of the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the republic. On many a campus, this defecated and desiccated logicalism is the best that is offered to the more intelligent students; as alternatives, they could pursue a program of fun and games, or else a program of social commitment of a baneful or silly character, wondrously unintellectual."
If we forget the primacy of moral worth in our scheme of education, we will establish no Arcadia of unchecked personal liberty, but instead bring upon ourselves a congeries of warring ideologies and fierce private appetites. Take away from the scholar his rights and duties as a member of what Coleridge called the clerisy, and he is left an intellectual in the root sense of that Marxist term: an adventurer, an ideologue, alienated from society and gnawing at society’s roots. Take away from the student his patrimony of moral imagination and ethical knowledge, and we are confronted, perhaps, by the secularized Pharisee, ignorantly denouncing as immoral the imperfect but tolerable order to which he owes his existence.”
“The firmness of the American’s faith in the blessings of education is equalled only by the vagueness of his ideas as to the kind of education to which these blessings are annexed.”—Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College
“The humanist, then, as opposed to the humanitarian, is interested in the perfecting of the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole; and although he allows largely for sympathy, he insists that it be disciplined and tempered by judgment.”
“Our modern believers in progress view the past as complacently from their own special angle as did the man of the Middle Ages when he imagined nunneries and cathedrals in ancient Troy.”
“When it comes to the deeper things of life, the members of a modern college faculty sometimes strike one, in Emersonian phrase, as a collection of ‘infinitely repellent particles.’”
“The modern does not, like the Greek, hope to become original by assimilating tradition, but rather by ignoring it, or, if he is a scholar, by trying to prove that it is mistaken.”
“What dost thou understand by the communion of saints? First, that believers, all and every one, as members of Christ, have part in Him and in all His treasures and gifts. Secondly, that each one must afeel himself bound to use his gifts, readily and cheerfully, for the advantage and welfare of other members.”—Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 55
“The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ‘I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work.”—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
“ It sometimes sounds as if the reading of popular fiction involved moral turpitude. I do not find this borne out by experience.”
“This laborious sort of misreading is perhaps especially prevalent in our own age. One sad result of making English literature a ‘subject’ at schools and universities is that the reading of great authors is, from early years, stamped upon the minds of conscientious and submissive young people as something meritorious. When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology—like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forbears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness."
“He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.”
“Every piece of literature is a sequence of words; And sounds (or their graphic equivalent) are words precisely because they carry the mind beyond themselves. That is what being a word means.”
“Now words, for the unliterary reader, are in much the same position. The hackneyed cliché for every appearance or emotion (emotions may be part of the event) is for him the best because it is immediately recognizable. ‘My blood ran cold’ is a hieroglyph for fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn’t want, and offers it only on condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.”
“Secondly, they like to have inquisitiveness aroused, prolonged, exasperated, and finally satisfied. Hence the popularity of stories with a mystery in them. This pleasure is universal and needs no explanation. It makes a great part of the philosopher’s, the scientist’s, or the scholar’s happiness. Also of the gossip’s.”
“The Middle Ages favored a brilliant and exuberant development of presentational realism, because men were at that time inhibited neither by a sense of period—they dressed every story in the manners of their own day—nor by a sense of decorum.”
“But without some degree of realism in content—a degree proportional to the readers intelligence—no deception will occur at all. No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth.”
“The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. Not to acquire a taste for the realistic is childish in the bad sense; to have lost the taste for marvels and adventures is no more a matter for congratulation than losing our teeth, our hair, our palate, and finally, our hopes. Why do we hear so much about the defects of immaturity and so little about those of senility?”
“…a puddle in the mind which grows always wider, shallower, and more unwholesome.”
“It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which are great play or narrative excites in us—when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that pattern—it should suggest to us many interesting reflections. We have ‘put on mental muscle’ as a result of this activity. We may thank Shakespeare or Dante for that muscle, but we had better not father on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it. For one thing, this use is unlikely to rise very much— it may rise a little—above our own ordinary level. Many of the comments on life which people get out of Shakespeare could have been researched but or reached by very moderate talents without his assistance. For another, it may well impede future receptions of the work itself. We may go back to it chiefly to find further confirmation for our belief that it teaches this or that, rather than for a fresh immersion in what it is. We shall be like a man poking his fire, not to boil the kettle or warm the room, but in the hope of seeing in it the same pictures he saw yesterday. And since a text is ‘but a cheverel glove’ to a determined critic—since everything can be a symbol, or an irony, or an ambiguity—we shall easily find what we want. The supreme objection to this is that which lies against the popular use of all the arts. We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.”
“Who in his ordinary senses would try to decide between the claims of materialism and theism by reading Lucretius and Dante? But who in his literary senses would not delightedly learn from them a great deal about what it is like to be a materialist or atheist?”
“This metronomic regularity, the sway of the whole body to the metre simply as metre, is the basis which makes possible all later variations and subtleties. For there are no variations except for those who know a nor, and those subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.”
“A sincere inquisitor or a sincere witch-finder can hardly do his chosen work with mildness.”
“If you tell me something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch.”
“Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see you through those of others. Reality, even seeing through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.”
