Year

1999

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Type

Publication

Mentioned People (1)

Subjects

Chronology Entries (4)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1918	Letter from Irving Babbitt to Stuart P. Sherman. (April 1918). Babbitt wrote that he was 'trying to recover my respect for human nature at present by immersing myself in the sages of the Far East – for the moment Confucius and Mencius. No one ever had a firmer faith in the final triumph of moral causes than these old boys'.	Person: Babbitt, Irving
2	1919-1920	Lin Yutang attended the classes of Irving Babbitt at Harvard University.	Person: Babbitt, Irving Person: Lin, Yutang
3	1935	Lin, Yutang. My country and my people [ID D13801]. Lin Yutang turned Irving Babbitt's name into an adjective 'Babbittian' to describe his intellectual system, an early and perhaps first usage of the word. In doing so, he once again compared Babbitt with Confucius. He observed the common sense of Confucius 'dismisses supernaturalism as the realm of the unknowable and expends extremely little time on it' and that Confucianism is 'equally emphatic in the assertion of the superiority of the human mind over nature and in the denial of nature's way of life, or naturalism, as the human way'. The Confjucian conception that 'heaven, earth and man' comprise 'the three geniuses of the univers' Lin then compares to 'the Babbittian threefold distinction of supernaturalism, humanism and naturalism'.	Person: Babbitt, Irving Person: Lin, Yutang
4	1974	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.	Person: Babbitt, Irving Person: Lin, Yutang

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1	2000-	Asien-Orient-Institut Universität Zürich	Organisation / AOI	Cited by: Huppertz, Josefine ; Köster, Hermann. Kleine China-Beiträge. (St. Augustin : Selbstverlag, 1979). [Hermann Köster zum 75. Geburtstag]. [Enthält : Ostasieneise von Wilhelm Schmidt 1935 von Josefine Huppertz ; Konfuzianismus von Xunzi von Hermann Köster]. (Huppe1, Published)