China and the West

Lin, Yutang. Memoirs of an Octogenarian. In : Chinese Culture University journal. (Taipei 1974).
"In Harvard, I registered for the School of Comparative Literature. My professors were Bliss Perry, Irving Babbitt, Von Yagerman (Gothic), Kittredge (Shakespeare) and another professor for Italian. Prof. Irving Babbitt raised a storm in literary criticism. He was for maintaining a critical standard, as against the school of J.L. Spingarn, later in the New School of Social Research New York. Babbitt was the only professor who was only an M.A. by degree. Backed by prodigious learning, he used to read from Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal and eighteenth-century French authors and quoted the modern Brunetière. He devoted a whole course, Rousseau and Romanticism, tracing the disappearance of all standards to the influence of J.J. Rousseau. It was a course in the development of the expansive appreciative criticism in Madame de Staël and other early Romantics, Tieck, Novalis etc.
His influence on Chinese was far-reaching. Lou Kuang-lai and Wu Mi carried his ideas to China. Shaped like a monk, Wu Mi's love affair with his girl would make a novel… I refused to accept Babbitt's criteria and one took up the cudgels for Spingarn and eventually was in complete agreement with Croce with regard to the genesis of all criticism as 'expression'…
The traditional theorists are headed by Paul Elmer More, a non-academic scholar. Others, such as Sherman and Irving Babbitt have also expressed their individual opinions. Professor Babbitt in particular has had an extensive influence on the Chinese literary world, which almost everyone is acquainted with. His students such as Mei Kuang-te, Wu Mi, and Leung Shih-chin, just to mention a few, are my personal friends. Obviously individual belief is private and depends on personal freedom. Babbitt is widely admired for his knowledge and incisive rhetoric, which is similar to Brunetière's. His basic theories also have considerable resemblance to those of Brunetière, both in essence going back to classical humanism, which regarded as the ultimate goal the appreciation of art and the ideal life. For this reason Brenetière in his old age turned toward Catholicism, but Babbitt was wiser. Although Babbitt respected religion, he did not turn in that direction, but instead toward humanism. Babbitt's humanism, however, is different from that of the Renaissance, opposed as it is to religion, on one hand, and to naturalism., on the other, something like the theories of the Sung dynasty. Babbitt, therefore, respected our saint, Confucius, and our contemporary disciples of Confucius respect him in turn. I am not saying this to make fun of Babbitt, for I myself admire him personally. He did not travel around to find an official job, nor did he offer comfort to those who failed…
The conflict between the liberators of literature and the literary conformists exists in both the East and the West. Conformity is associated in Chine with writing style, sentence structure, and paragraphing and in the West with discipline or standards. This is the focal point of the controversy between the modern American humanism of Professor Babbitt of Harvard and his opponents. Professor Babbitt's contagious ideas have been imported into China by his disciples, and the notion of discipline is now arrayed against individualism as incompatible extremes. "
Aldridge, A. Owen : Lin Yutang's subsequent comparison between Babbitt and Confucius is intentionally humorous but not disrespectful of either one. To the contrary, it shows Lin's admiration of the Chinese sage's political independence and of Babbitt's steadfast adherence to principle.