Irving Babbitt Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Irving Babbitt was born in 1865 and came of age in the closing decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. He pursued studies that combined languages, literature, and philosophy, an education that prepared him for a life of teaching and criticism. He developed an abiding interest in the classical tradition of Europe as well as in moral philosophy, and his early reading included thinkers who wrestled with the tension between order and impulse. By the time he completed his university training, he had formed a conviction that literature should be judged not only for style and imagination but also for the discipline of character it helps foster.

Harvard Career and Intellectual Milieu
Babbitt spent the greater part of his professional life at Harvard University, where he taught French and comparative literature. His classrooms emphasized close reading, historical perspective, and the ethical dimension of art. Students remembered him for his calm rigor, his exacting standards, and his insistence that culture required an inner check that tempers imagination with conscience. Among those who passed through Harvard and later acknowledged his impact was T. S. Eliot, who paired Babbitt with George Santayana as the two teachers who most deeply shaped his intellectual development. Babbitt and Santayana, though different in temperament and doctrine, shared an interest in classical restraint; their collegial tensions and agreements helped define an era of debate at Harvard about the aims of culture and the proper response to modernity.

New Humanism and Collaboration with Paul Elmer More
Babbitt became the most visible voice of a movement that came to be known as the New Humanism. The critic and classicist Paul Elmer More, his close friend and intellectual ally, developed the movement in tandem with him across a long correspondence and parallel books and essays. Together they argued that the modern age had been misled by a sentimental humanitarianism that confused benevolence with moral discipline. They proposed a revival of humanism grounded in restraint, ethical self-command, and the study of exemplary works from the classical tradition. Babbitt's preferred phrase for the necessary moral faculty was the inner check: a cultivated habit of judgment that resists impulse and subjectivism. In classrooms and in print, he defended a humane, critical standard against what he saw as the excesses of romanticism, naturalism, and facile progressivism.

Major Books and Arguments
Babbitt presented his case in a series of influential books. Literature and the American College (1908) was both a diagnosis of educational drift and a plea for a curriculum that would train taste and character rather than simply expand information or celebrate novelty. The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912) surveyed a tradition of critical intelligence he admired for its discipline and clarity. In Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), probably his most famous work, he set out a sustained critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's legacy, arguing that the modern cult of spontaneity, nature, and self-expression had undermined moral responsibility and social order. Democracy and Leadership (1924) developed his political thought, insisting that democratic institutions cannot thrive without elites educated in ethical self-restraint and without citizens schooled in the vigilant governance of the self. On Being Creative, and Other Essays (1932) returned to the theme that true creativity presupposes form, standards, and the inner mastery of desire.

Teachers, Students, and Interlocutors
Babbitt's ideas drew him into dialogue with a wide circle. With Paul Elmer More he refined the vocabulary of New Humanism; with T. S. Eliot he shared a concern for tradition, order, and the moral grounds of criticism; with George Santayana he debated the balance between aesthetic contemplation and ethical will. He measured himself against Matthew Arnold's earlier humanist program and admired the sense of proportion in Edmund Burke. On the other side, he challenged the romantic lineage he associated with Rousseau and with later currents of vitalism. In the American scene he argued with pragmatism and progressive education as championed by figures like John Dewey, finding in them a tendency to dissolve standards into utility or feeling. These interlocutors framed the terrain on which Babbitt defined his own position: classical in sympathies, skeptical of utopian promises, and committed to moral character as the axis of culture.

Method, Style, and Wider Reading
Although trained as a literary scholar, Babbitt read far beyond European letters. He engaged ancient Greek and Roman sources and took seriously ethical traditions outside the West, including those of Asia, arguing that a cross-cultural humanism was possible when approached through disciplined judgment rather than romantic exoticism. His prose style was measured and polemical by turns: he valued definition, made careful distinctions, and returned repeatedly to the difference between genuine moral will and unregulated impulse. For Babbitt, the critic's first duty was not to celebrate originality but to test it against the permanent questions of character, justice, and civility.

Public Controversy and Reception
The New Humanism stirred debate in American letters. Supporters found in Babbitt a principled alternative to relativism and a tonic corrective to the fashions of the day. Detractors saw in his program a crabbed classicism or a moralism out of step with the creative energies of modernism. Journals of the period hosted exchanges in which Babbitt defended his account of imagination, leadership, and education. He was not indifferent to the arts of his time; rather, he insisted that modern work would endure only if tempered by form and guided by a conscience trained on enduring exemplars. The very persistence of the controversies suggested that he had put his finger on questions the age could not avoid.

Later Years
Babbitt continued to teach and to write into the early 1930s, clarifying his positions and answering critics while mentoring younger scholars who took up humanist concerns in their own ways. He remained anchored at Harvard, where his seminars and lectures drew students interested in classical balance amid a century of rapid change. His final years consolidated his influence as a moral critic of culture, and he kept returning to the themes that had animated his life's work: the inner check, the dignity of ethical will, and the role of tradition in the education of citizens.

Legacy
Irving Babbitt died in 1933, leaving behind a body of work that gave American criticism one of its most articulate defenses of humane standards. His partnership with Paul Elmer More established New Humanism as a coherent alternative to both romanticism and positivism, and his influence on T. S. Eliot signaled a transmission of classical discipline into the heart of modernist letters. Even those who rejected his conclusions found themselves engaging his terms, whether through Santayana's cultivated detachment or through the pragmatist and progressive currents he resisted. Long after the controversies of his day subsided, Babbitt's core questions persist: how to reconcile creativity with form, freedom with responsibility, democracy with leadership, and feeling with judgment. In that ongoing argument about culture and conscience, his voice remains a touchstone for those who believe that literature and education should be schools of character as well as of taste.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Irving, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Leadership.