Babbitt, Irving
(Dayton, Ohio 1865-1933 Cambridge, Mass.) : Professor of French Literature, Harvard University, Literaturkritiker, Philosoph
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
/
Literature : Occident : France
/
Philosophy : United States of America
Chronology Entries (35)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1891-1933 |
Irving Babbitt and China : general. 1960 Harry Levin (Professor of Comparative Literature Harvard University) : Babbitt was keenly interested in Christianity, utterly fascinated by Buddhism, and probably most sympathetic to secular creeds of Confucius. 1965 Chang Hsin-hai : Early in his academic career, Babbitt demonstrated the fallacy in the fashionable 'scientific' approach to literature, pointing out that the aim in studying literature was not facts but a well-rounded and meaningful view of life. For this reason, Babbitt had extended his study in India and China, where, he felt sure, the great thinkers must have faced the same perennial questions that have baffled the Western world. He studied Buddhism and Confucianism not from idle curiosity but to find out what answers they had to offer in comparison with Western literature. He found the synthesis he preached and taught at Harvard for the rest of his life. If the young people from the Orient were attracted to Babbitt, Babbitt was certainly also attracted to the Orient. In working out his humanistic view, he felt that he was reinforced at every turn by the basic thoughts of two towering men : Buddha and Confucius. When more than ever a true understanding between East and West can well mean the survival of the human race, Babbitt's approach is tremendously important for three reasons : 1. It considers the romantic attitude towards the East, fashionable in Western scholarship from the beginning of the nineteenth century, as not only false, but also misleading and dangerous. 2. Babbitt was not interested in regarding the East and West merely as two different spheres of human experience, and, because different, incapable of mutual assistance. He realized the disparity in circumstance under which each had developed, but he found that, in the search for human values, the two sections of mankind had come to much the same conclusions. He believed that basically Christianity and Aristotelianism, on the one side, and Buddhism and Confucianism, on the other, are mutually illuminating and thus indispensable to each other. 3. In his insistence on values, Babbitt showed unusual powers of critical discrimination. Babbitt knew that the East has known as many different types of thought as the West, and he believed that the modern scholar should develop a sense of critical appraisal, and know the areas of argument for formulating a sound view of life. He found a whole trend of Rousseauistic thought in the naturalistic views of Lao-tse and Chuang-tse, which he wholly rejected. In looking at the Eastern landscape, Babbitt did not enjoy the nebulous vision of a Schopenhauer or even of an Emerson. He saw its clear, bold outlines, its mountains as well as its valleys. His fine sense of discrimination is nowhere expressed more clearly. Babbitt did not perhaps feel as much at home in Confucianism as he did in early Biddhism for the simple reason that, while he knew Pali at first hand, his knowledge of Chinese thought was derived from translations that did not adequately convey the original flavor. The patient labours of James Legge are praiseworthy, but the must have often made Babbitt and others, wonder how so apparently uninspired a doctrine could have held any people for any length of time. Why is it that, for so long a period, people not only in China, but also in Japan, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in the lands neighbouring China, willingly, without coercion have taken to the so-called 'mundane' ideas of Confucius as ducks to water ? Babbitt tried hard to answer this question. Why is it that the people who believe in Confucianism are so widely tolerant ? Hinduism, too, is tolerant, and so, for that matter, is Buddhism. But the fact that Buddhism barely enjoyed a history of 1000 years in the land of its birth, was very disturbing. If weakened by alien ideas, how is that Confucianism managed to remain unassailable through the millennia ? Buddhism itself made a mighty assault, only to find that all it succeeded in doing was to produce a Chu Hsi (died 1200), who brought Buddhism within the crucible of Confucianism. If Hegel was right, Babbitt argued, that Western man could find nothing in Confucius that had not been said. The fact was, that Confucius gave central place to an idea 'which is almost entirely absent, not only from Cicero, but also from Aristotle, who may be considered as the most important of occidental humanists – the idea, namely, of humility or of submission to the will of Heaven. For this reason, Babbitt placed Confucius in the same category as Christ, even though 'his kingdom is very much of this world'. Confucius was humble not only to the will of Heaven, Babbitt added, but also in his attitude towards the sages of old. Babbitt relied on the considered judgment of Edouard Chavannes. Babbitt felt he understood the secret of Confucius. For him, as for Confucius, the ultimate test of any sound scholarship or leadership is the character that it produces, and the strength of that character cannot be achieved without rigid self-discipline, rooted in humility and the law of measure. Babbitt understood the Confucian spirit, unfalteringly, and basically. In Buddhism, he found the answer to his deeper yearnings, combining it with Confucianism to produce the humanism he taught and lived with intellectual fervor and spiritual calm. 1974 Hou Chien : Not being a professional sinologist, Babbitt culled the Chinese only for what he could use to support his general philosophical position claimed to be founded upon universal human experience. Practically all the Chinese students who came into contact with Babbitt admired him for his scholarship and moral earnestness. This they did so no doubt also because of his championship of Confucianism. What Babbitt has to say about China and the Chinese shows that he has read more widely than the references can indicate. In both sweep of treatment and the insights into Chinese history and thinking he remains impressive. His discussion of Chinese history ranged from the time of Confucius down to the twentieth century of a China abject with confusion and subject to imminent peril. He said little about the centuries in between. He is quite correct in thinking that Confucianism is humanistic, that the Taoists are naturalistic, and that Confucianism forms the basic, orthodoxical tradition in China. Babbitt also overlooks the role these naturalists played in shaping the Chinese character. He approvingly quotes Mengzi attack on Mozi and Yang Zhu as 'leading wild beasts to devour men' in their excessive altruism and egotism. His failure to mention the yin-yang and five-element schools and others, which converged into latter-day Confucian philosophy, may be winked at as irrelevant to his argument, but the omission of Xunzi and the legalists growing out of this master, has implications that must be investigated. Since Babbitt usually behaves like an orthodox Confucian while Xunzi is often taken as a heretic, the omission should perhaps be looked upon as the result of preconceived ideas rather than ignorance. List of Chinese names in Babbitt's writings : The personages named are roughly divisible into those Babbitt approves, those he censures, and those who, as his students, have been able to advise the teacher. Of the first category are besides Confucius, Shun, Mengzi, Zhu Xi and Zeng Guofan Laozi, Zhuangzi, Mozi, Yang Zhu and Li Bo are found in the second group. In the third are Mei Guangdi, Zhang Xinhai and Guo Binhe. Shi Huangdi of Qin and Sima Qian are mentioned without much comment. Two persons are referred to without being names : Yen Hui, Confucius' favorite disciple and Han Yu, who was cited for accusing Buddha to be a barbarian. With Aristotle, Jesus, and Buddha, Confucius forms the fourth column to Babbitt's humanistic edifice. The legendary Shun is talked of once as an exemplary non-meddler. Mengzi is quoted, in addition to the charges against Mozi and Yang Zhu, on the distinction between mental and manual labor, the relationship between property and civilization, and, with concession, the great man being one who has not lost the heart of a child. Zeng Guofan is reduced to a footnote. Laozi and Zhuangzi are held up as primitivists who could have been forerunners to Rousseau and Wordsworth. The Taoists are considered 'a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency' that included the pacifist altruism of Mozi and the self-love of Yang Zhu. Li Bo is consigned to the Taoist limbo of Bohemian poets. Babbitt believes the world has been plunged in confusion with the rise of naturalism. The old world is dead while the new is powerless to be born. For his humanism Babbitt posits two things : the end of all human endeavors and activities is happiness, and the only means to achieve it is character. He does not think much of human nature. Without taking recourse either to the concept of original sin or of the divine in man, but solely as a matter of experience, he sees that human nature is a mixture of the good and the evil. Babbitt's ideas are the end of life, which is happiness, the importance of character the fulfillment of that end, and the nature of human nature, which necessitates character and its formation. 1993 Aldridge, A. Owen : Irving Babbitt was celebrated for his insistence on the necessity of adhering to philosophical rigor and upholding ethical standards in national culture. Along with his personal quest for knowledge of the most positive statements of these ideals in the history of mankind, he acquired a substantial acquaintance with the religion of Buddha and the morality of Confucius. As a pioneer in the discipline of comparative literature, moreover, he sought and revealed resemblances between the great writings of the West and those of the East. Babbitt's personal connections with Chinese culture fully equaled his purely literary ones. In China, Babbitt's adherence to absolute standards counterbalanced Dewey's pragmatism, essentially the same relationship between the two personalities that was widely recognized in the United States. Babbitt's vogue among Chinese intellectuals does not fit the pattern of later imitations of Western theory, for it did not derive from a contemporary passing fad but from a personal philosophy in which Chinese students found resemblances to their own cultural traditions and which they felt might serve as a point of reference to their own cultural traditions and which they felt might serve as a point of reference in planning their nation's future. This feeling of an identity of national ideas and aspirations is the basis of Babbitt's appeal rather than any particular intellectual concept or activist program. Babbitt during one of his class sessions drew out from one of his Chinese students an awareness of this ethical-cultural bond or predisposition. Although Babbitt never visited China, he recognized a cultural bond existing between himself and Chinese civilization. During the early years of Babbitt's marriage, his wife, who had been reared in China, used 'to think him conceited because he professed to understand that country as she did not'. Probably because of his wife's influence, Babbitt's home was adorned with a good deal of Chinoiserie, including dragon designs on lampshades and on various fabrics, and landscape paintings, which he explained were 'not representative of the mountains and the rivers, but of states of mind and feelings'. The recollection of Babbitt's acquaintances are not always reliable. One affirmed that he delighted in the Chinese scrolls on his own walls, but was not known to have visited the treasures of Far Eastern paintings at the Museum of Fine-Arts Boston. Buddhism was the first aspect of Oriental civilization to attract Babbitt's attention. Although the roots of Buddhism are in India and Babbitt's devotion to this philosophy may, therefore, seem somewhat irrelevant to his association with China. Babbitt revealed that he studied both Sanskrit and Pali. He took up these languages at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes in Paris in 1891. The influence of Confucius on Babbitt's thought came relatively late in his career. He referred in print to the Chinese sage for the first time in Rousseau and Romanticism in 1919, and subsequently in all of his writings. Besides Confucius, Babbitt referred in his works to a number of great names of Chinese tradition. Those he approved of were nearly all Confucians and those on the other side Taoists. Babbitt was still advocating a rapprochement between East and West in one of the latest of his essays, calling for some properly qualified scholar, preferably a Chinese, to compare 'Confucian humanism with Occidental humanism'. Babbitt gave Confucius a place of eminence in his thought because of the resemblance between the Chinese sage and Aristotle, and also because the former represented an ancient spiritual tradition bordering on religion, but completely devoid of the supernatural. 2004 Bai Liping : Liang Shiqiu saw Babbitt as providing a response to problems in his own country. Among the particular ways in which Babbitt influenced Liang was changing his reading habits. Previously, while studying at Qinghua College, Liang had read widely but unselectively, devoting his attention for the most part to whatever new books, whether original works or translations, happened to come his way and strike his fancy. Later he came to realize that reading should be guided in large part by discriminating judgment and purpose. Not only Liang's reading habits but also the nature of his own writing was influenced by Babbitt. Liang wrote poems and short stories that betrayed a strong attachment to sentimental romanticism. After returning to China from America, he nearly stopped composing poems and short stories. Moreover, his writing from thence forward conveyed a more balanced and historically accurate view of human nature than was characteristic of his earlier writing. Though Babbitt profoundly affected Liang's standards, it cannot be assumed that Liang's literary tastes coincided in all particulars with Babbitt's or that his understanding of Babbitt's ideas was always or in all respects accurate. Many Chinese scholars are today exploring Babbitt's work, which is becoming more widely accessible because of prominently published new translations of his books. 2004 Wu Xuezhao : One of the reasons why Babbitt showed great interest in the Orient as well as the Occident was that he looked for the constants of human nature in general as opposed to the peculiarities of time and place. He did not want to have his doctrine called the new humanism. For him, there was no new humanism. There was only the age-old opposition between naturalism (or the monistic merging of God, man, and nature, with its consequent denial of a higher law) and humanism. According to the latter, man has a distinct and unique nature. He is a mysterious being in whom the material and spiritual meet, who is responsible to a law superior to his 'ordinary' self, a law which he must discover, a higher will to which he must learn to attune his inclinations. Babbitt did not quarrel with established religion for interpreting this higher will in special doctrinal ways derived from revelation. On the contrary, he looked to religion for support of humanism. And if, as a philosopher, he felt he could interpret the higher will only as known in actual human experience, as a veto power and sense of higher purpose, he pointed to it as proof of a dualism within the human self without which there can be no genuine religion. 2004 Zhu Shoutong : Babbitt's humanism has great spiritual, moral, and philosophical depth. If properly reintroduced into China, it could have an immense positive impact on the development of Chinese life. Partly because of the misfortunes, Babbitt's humanism has not gained the niche in the temple of Chinese culture that it deserves and may yet achieve. Fortunately, there are substantial signs that a revival of interest in Babbitt is now well underway in China. Writings by and about Babbitt or related to his ideas are appearing widely. A number of prominent Chinese cholars, working in some cases in cooperation with Western counterparts, are preparing the ground for a major and systematic reexamination of Babbitt's work. Liang Shiqiu's efforts marked the end of the relative obscurity of Babbitt's ideas in China among intellectuals of modernist leanings. But Liang's use of Babbitt's ideas and reputation in his widely followed tit-for-tat struggle with Lu Xun, brought for Babbitt something worse than obscurity – namely, widespread demonization. Xue heng's use of classical Chinese in elucidating Babbitt had impeded the spread of his ideas, and it had also protected Babbitt from criticism. By drawing Babbitt into his own quarrels, Liang, who had been quick to blame the Xu cheng conservatives, inflicted on Babbitt's reputation in China a damage that would prove substantial and enduring. Although Lu Xun criticized Babbitt with biting sarcasm, he was seldom concerned with the latter's actual ideas. Lu Xun complained, that the ideas of Western thinkers such as Babbitt and John Dewey were being filtered through the interpretations of their Chinese advocates and possibly distorted rather than being allowed to stand for themselves in accurate Chinese translation. |
|
| 2 | 1915 |
Irving Babbitt acquired a dedicated disciple, Mei Guangdi at Harvard University. In addition to teaching Chinese at Harvard, Mei returned to China to lead a Chinese crusade based on Babbitt's concept of humanism, a movement closely linked with the attempt of the Chinese people to work out a political future during the transition from monarchy to democracy. Mei Guangdi : "[Babbitt] regularly stayed away from the commencement exercises at the University, and when his duty as a father required his presence at his son's graduation, he laughingly announced: 'This is the first commencement I have attended in many years.' Babbitt was a solitary figure in a crowded metropolis of learning." "Confucius was perhaps the teacher with whom Babbitt had the closest temperamental kinship." Ong Chang Woei : Mei Guangdi, besides praising Babbitt as a 'teacher of men' following the Chinese tradition, claimed that if Babbitt had been born in China not later than the seventeenth century, he would merit the extraordinary honor of being elevated to membership in the most exclusive of Chinese national institutions, the Temple of Confucius : an honor conferred on only a limited number of great men throughout Chinese history who were believed to have truly transmitted the Confucian way. |
|
| 3 | 1915 |
Mercier, J.A. Mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Unis. Mercier indicated that Babbitt was steeped in Buddhism, but practiced Confucianism, that his work was known in China, that he had many Orientals among his students, and that he was one of the race of Occidental critics, if not the only one, equipped to compare Europe and America with the Orient. |
|
| 4 | 1917-1921 | Wu Mi studiert 1917-1918 an der University of Virginia, dann an der Harvard University unter Irving Babbitt. Er promoviert 1921. |
|
| 5 | 1917-1919 |
Wu, Mi. Wu Mi ri ji. Vol. 2. Wu Xuezhao zheng li zhu shi. (Beijing : Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san, 1998-1999). 吴宓日记 1917 "The university authorities have arranged for Professor Babbitt to be my adviser – following my request. More is my adviser's close friend, and the two are the greatest scholars in America today." 1919 "Since the first two moths this spring, Zhang Xinhai and Lou Guanglai wrote me several letters asking about literature and I gave them much information. They expressed great admiration after they had read books by my adviser Babbitt, and then they decided to transfer to Harvard." |
|
| 6 | 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'. |
|
| 7 | 1919 |
Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and romanticism [ID D28808]. Introduction …Now the ethical experience of the Far East may be summed up for practical purposes in the teachings and influence of two men, Confucius and Buddha (I should perhaps say that in the case of Buddha I have been able to consult the original Pali documents. In the case of Confucius and the Chinese I have had to depend on translations). To know the Buddhistic and Confucian teachings in their true spirit is to know what is best and most representative in the ethical experience of about half the human race for over seventy generations. A study of Buddha and Confucius suggests, as does a study of the great teachers of the Occident, that under its bewildering surface variety human experience falls after all into a few main categories. I myself am fond of distinguishing three levels on which a man may experience life — the naturalistic, the humanistic, and the religious. Tested by its fruits Buddhism at its best confirms Christianity. Submitted to the same test Confucianism falls in with the teaching of Aristotle and in general with that of all those who from the Greeks down have proclaimed decorum and the law of measure. This is so obviously true that Confucius has been called the Aristotle of the East. Not only has the Far East had in Buddhism a great religious movement and in Confucianism a great humanistic movement, it has also had in early Taoism a movement that in its attempts to work out naturalistic equivalents of humanistic or religious insight, offers almost starting analogies to the movement I am here studying. Thus both East and West have not only had great religious and humanistic disciplines which when tested by their fruits confirm one another, bearing witness to the element of oneness, the constant element in human experience, but these disciplines have at times been conceived in a very positive spirit. Confucius indeed, though a moral realist, can scarcely be called a positivist; he aimed rather to attach men to the past by links of steel. He reminds us in this as in some other ways of the last of the great Tories in the Occident, Dr. Johnson. Buddha on the other hand was an individualist. He wished men to rest their belief neither on his authority nor on that of tradition… Appendix Chinese primitivism [Quelle : Wieger, Léon. Les pères du système taoïste ID D1861]. Perhaps the closest approach in the past to the movement of which Rousseau is the most important single figure is the early Taoist movement in China. Taoism, especially in its poplar aspects, became later something very different, and what I say is meant to apply above all to the period from about 550 to 200 B.C. The material for the Taoism of this period will be found in convenient form in the volume of Léon Wieger (1913) – Les pères du système taoïste (Chinese texts with French translations of Lao-tzu, Lieh-tzu and Chuang-tzu). The Tao Te King of Lao-tzu is a somewhat enigmatical document of only a few thousand words, but plainly primitivistic in its general trend. The phrase that best sums up its general spirit is that of Wordsworth – a 'wise passiveness'. The unity at which it aims is clearly of the pantheistic variety, the unity that is obtained by breaking down discrimination and affirming the 'identity of contradictories', and that encourages a reversion to origins, to the state of nature and the simple life. According to the Taoist the Chinese fell from the simple life into artificiality about the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti (27th century B.C.). The individual also should look back to beginnings and seek to be once more like the new-born child or, according to Chuang-tzu, like the new-born calf. It is in Chuang-tzu indeed that the doctrine develops its full naturalistic and primitivistic implications. Few writers in either East or West have set forth more entertainingly what one may term the Bohemian attitude towards life. He heaps ridicule upon Confucius and in the name of spontaneity attacks his doctrine of humanistic imitation. He sings the praises of the unconscious, even when obtained through intoxication, and extols the morality of the beautiful soul. He traces the fall of mankind from nature into artifice in a fashion that anticipates very completely both Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and that on the Origin of Inequality. See also the amusing passage in which the brigand Chi, child of nature and champion of the weak against the oppressions of government, paints a highly Rousseauistic picture of man's fall from his primitive felicity. Among the things that are contrary to nature and purely conventional, according to Chuang-tzu and the Taoists, are, not only the sciences and arts and attempts to discriminate between good and bad taste, but likewise government and statecraft, virtue and moral standards. To the artificial music of the Confucians, the Taoists oppose a natural music that offers startling analogies to the most recent programmatic and descriptive tendencies of Occidental music. See especially Chuang-tzu's programme for a cosmic symphony in three movements — the Pipes of Pan as one is tempted to call it. This music that is supposed to reflect in all its mystery and magic the infinite creative processes of nature is very close to the primitivistic music (L'arbre vu du côté des racines) with which Hugo's satyr strikes panic into the breasts of the Olympians. The Taoist notion of following nature is closely related, as in other naturalistic movements, to the idea of fate whether in its stoical or epicurean form. From the references in Chuang-tzu and elsewhere to various sects and schools we see that Taoism was only a part of a great stream of naturalistic and primitivistic tendency. China abounded at that time in pacifists in apostles of brotherly love, and as we should say nowadays Tolstoyans. A true opposite to the egoistic Yang-chu was the preacher of pure altruism and indiscriminate sympathy, Mei-ti. Mencius said that if the ideas of either of these extremists prevailed the time would come, not only when wolves would devour men, but men would devour one another. In opposing discrimination and ethical standards to the naturalists, Mencius and the Confucian humanists were fighting for civilization. Unfortunately there is some truth in the Taoist charge that the standards of the Confucians are too literal, that in their defence of the principle of imitation they did not allow sufficiently for the element of flux and relativity and illusion in things — an element for which the Taoists had so keen a sense that they even went to the point of suppressing the difference between sleeping and waking and life and death. To reply properly to the Taoist relativist the Confucians would have needed to work out a sound conception of the role of the imagination — the universal key to human nature — and this they do not seem to have done. One is inclined to ask whether this is the reason for China's failure to achieve a great ethical art like that of the drama and the epic of the Occident at their best. The Taoists were richly imaginative but along romantic lines. We should not fail to note the Taoist influence upon Li Po and other Bohemian and bibulous poets of the Tang dynasty, or the relation of Taoism to the rise of a great school of landscape painting at about the same time. We should note also the Taoist element in 'Ch'an' Buddhism (the 'Zen' Buddhism of Japan), some knowledge of which is needed for an understanding of whole periods of Japanese and Chinese art. In these later stages, however, the issues are less clear-cut than in the original struggle between Taoists and Comfucians. The total impression one has of early Taoism is that it is a main manifestation of an age of somewhat sophistical individualism. Ancient Chinese individualism ended like that of Greece : at about the same time in disaster. After a period of terrible convulsions (the era of the 'Fighting State'), the inevitable man on horseback appeared from the most barbaric of these states and 'put the lid' on everybody. Shi Hwang-ti, the new emperor, had many of the scholars put to death and issued an edict that the writings of the past, especially the Confucian writings, should be destroyed (213 B.C.). Though the emperor behaved like a man who took literally the Taoist views as to the blessings of ignorance, it is not clear from our chief authority, the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, that he acted entirely or indeed mainly under Taoist influence. It is proper to add that though Lao-tzu proclaims that the soft is superior to the hard, a doctrine that should appeal to the Occidental sentimentalist, one does not find in him or in the other Taoists the equivalent of the extreme emotional expansiveness of the Rousseauist. There are passages, especially in Lao-tzu, that in their emphasis on concentration and calm are in line with the ordinary wisdom of the East; and even where the doctrine is unmistakably primitivistic the emotional quality is often different from that of the corresponding movement in the West. |
|
| 8 | 1919-1920 | Lin Yutang attended the classes of Irving Babbitt at Harvard University. |
|
| 9 | 1921 |
Babbitt, Irving. Humanistic education in China and the West [ID D28793]. Most of the Chinese I meet tell me what China needs is a Renaissance with all that a Renaissance implies in the way of a break with the past. Now the present Renaissance movement owes its inception to the pressure upon China from the Occident, and has developed thus far, so far as it has developed at all, on occidental rather than on Oriental lines. It is perhaps well that I should explain at the outset that it has been my business for many years past, in connection with the teaching I have been doing at Harvard, to study the nature of the European Renaissance or break with the mediaeval past that took place in the sixteenth century and to trace the main currents of European thought and literature from that day to this. I have been giving special attention to what one may term the second great forward push of individualism, or emancipation from traditional standards, that took place in the eighteenth century. The characteristic of this occidental movement, as I see it, has been, from the sixteenth century down, its tremendous expansiveness. It has been, first, an expansion of men's knowledge and control of natural forces in the interests of comfort and utility. This first or utilitarian side of the modern movement already has its prophet in Francis Bacon; you may know its votaries by their pleas for organization and efficiency, and in general by their confidence in machinery. The second side of the great expansive movement puts its main emphasis on emotional expansion and stresses at one time the fraternity that is to be achieved by this emotional expansion, at another time, the self-expression that it encourages. This emotional side of the movement had its prophet in the eighteenth century in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. To bring together the two sides of the movement, mankind as a whole is to advance constantly in the control of nature to the ends of utility and comfort, and at the same time is to be united increasingly by the spirit of brotherhood conceived as a process of expansive emotion. This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. At the centre of humanitarianism as a philosophy of life is the idea of progress, which in some form or other is the true religion of our occidental expansionists. The typical man of the nineteenth century conceived that as a result of the combination of scientific discovery and expansive sympathy, he was, in Tennyson's phrase, moving towards a "far-off divine event." Instead, it has turned out that he was moving towards Armageddon. A revulsion of feeling has ensued and the most interesting development of occidental thought of to-day is the increasing tendency to doubt the idea of progress in the form it has assumed during the past two centuries. (See, for example. Dean Inge's Idea of Progress (Romanes Lecture for 1920.) Certain persons are inclined to inquire whether some essential element was not omitted in our occidental break with the past, whether in the expressive phrase of the Germans, we have not poured out the baby with the bath water. As a result of this omission, the real issue is seen to be not the struggle between the forces of progress and those of reaction, but between civilization and barbarism. More than fifty thousand copies have recently been sold in Germany of a book by Oswald Spengler with the significant title The Downfall of the Occident. Everyone recognizes that the Occident has been amazingly successful in its pursuit of power, but the question may be asked whether it has not got its power as the expense of wisdom. Now the struggle between new and old that is beginning in China is along lines very familiar to students of occidental tendencies. On the one hand, is what seems to be an effete tradition, on the other are those who are working for a progressive and organized and efficient China. Another type of Chinese progressive is, I am told, for throwing over the Chinese classics, and going in for occidental writers of the extreme Rousseauistic type like Ibsen, and Strindberg, and Bernard Shaw. Now up to a certain point I sympathize with the aims of the Chinese progressives. China needs to become organized and efficient; she needs to acquire to some extent the machinery that has grown up in the Occident if she is to protect herself against the imperialistic aggression of Japan or the powers of Europe. China is likely to see something resembling the European industrial revolution. China also needs to escape from the rut of pseudo-classic formalism into which she had fallen as the result of a too inert traditionalism. At the same time China should not in its eagerness to become progressive imitate the Occident and pour out the baby with the bath water. It should be careful, in short, however much it repudiates the mere formalism, to retain the soul of truth that is contained in its great traditions. When one examines these great traditions one finds certain striking analogies with our Western traditions that the representatives of the utilitarian-sentimental movement have been so busy discarding. The Western traditions have been partly religious, partly humanistic. The names that sum up these two aspects of tradition most completely are those of Aristotle and Christ, corresponding in a general way to those of Confucius and Buddha in the Far East. A writer in the Revue Philosophique points out that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas combined along scholastic lines Aristotle and Christ in his Sum of Theology, so Chu Hsi was making about the same time in China a scholastic combination of Buddhist and Confucian elements in his great commentary. Let us ask ourselves what is the element of wisdom in these great traditions, losing which the East as well as the West will fall from genuine civilization into a sort of mechanical barbarism. This problem of civilization was never so urgent as to-day. For something without analogy in the past has taken place as the result of the discoveries of physical science: all parts of the world are being brought into physical and economic contact with one another. For instance, as a result of the European war, cotton went to forty cents a pound, the increase in wages that resulted for the colored people of our American South enabled them to buy silk shirts and underwear and this caused in turn a commotion in the market for raw silks at Tokio. The fiery chariots in which the ancient Chinese Taoists dreamt of flying through the heavens are becoming a reality. The trip from New York to Peking, or from New York to Buenos Aires may in no distant future be taken as quickly and with more comfort than the trip from New York to Boston as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In view of such inventions as that of the wireless telephone one may say that the whole world is, in a very literal sense, becoming a whispering gallery. Think of the danger if the words that are whispered are to be words of hatred and suspicion, if men are to be bound together in a huge mass of interlocking machinery and at the same time remain spiritually centrifugal! Let us then discuss in a very and critical fashion the question which, as I have just said, is most urgent at the present hour—the question of civilization versus barbarism, considering first the question of civilization in general and then that of Chinese civilization in particular. What strikes one in surveying the past is the tendency of men to look on their own country and its ways of viewing life as civilized and on the men of other countries and their ways of viewing life as barbaric. The Greeks showed a considerable degree of assurance when they deemed themselves alone civilized and dismissed the vast outside world as barbaric. Dr. Johnson showed perhaps a still greater degree of assurance when he said of the Greeks themselves : "Demosthenes, Madam, spoke to an assembly of brutes, a barbarous people;" and also when he remarked : "For anything I see, foreigners are fools." No country, however, is a more extreme example of the tendency in question than the China of the past. China was the civilized world; it was in the Chinese phrase All-under-Heaven (Poo-tien-shia) ; the rest of the world, if recognized at all, was dismissed as a vague fringe of outer barbarism. Buddhism, to be sure, penetrated into China from without. But a memorial to the throne that was composed by a statesman of the Tang period begins as follows: "This Buddha was a barbarian." Now in a way I sympathize with this confidence of old China in its own civilization if not with the arrogance that led it to dismiss as of slight value the achievements of every other type of civilization, and I am going to state why in my judgement traditional Chinese civilization deserves a high rating, when compared with the civilization of other countries; this reason is first and foremost that, in spite of all its corrupt mandarins and officials of the past and present, China has perhaps more than any other country, planted itself on moral ideas. Joubert, one of the most sagacious of French critics, writes of the Chinese: "Are they in as imperfect a state as is commonly supposed? They have been frequently conquered, we are told. But are we to make the institutions of a country responsible for the chances and incidents of war? And is not long duration a sign of excellence in laws, as utility and clearness are characteristics of truth in philosophical systems? Now what people ever had laws more ancient, which have varied less and which have been more constantly honored, loved, studied?" One may add to what Joubert says about the traditional preoccupation of the Chinese with moral ideas that this interest has been displayed predominantly on the humanistic level. It has not been primarily naturalistic, like that of the Occident at the present time, nor again mainly religious, like that of ancient, and to some extent, modern India ; the chief concern of the Chinese has been rather with the ethical aspects of men's relations to one another in this world. For example, the so-called Sacred Edict of Kang Hsi (early eighteenth century) which is admirable from a purely humanistic point of view, is positively disparaging in its mention of both Buddhism and Christianity. But the utilitarian-sentimental movement that is now being introduced into China also professes to be civilized and ethical, and in the name of its own conception of civilization and ethics, it will show itself ready, as it has with us, to discard traditional ethical conceptions whether humanistic or religious. I can only express the conviction at the risk of seeming unduly dogmatic because of my failure through lack of time to give all my grounds for this conviction, that the present movement in the Occident is at its very heart not ethical but pseudo-ethical. Let me return for a moment to its notion of progress. There is a sense in which everybody should believe in progress. Confucius showed that he believed in progress when he said of his disciple Yen Yuan: "Ah, what a loss! I used to see him ever progressing and never coming to a standstill." But the utilitarians have fallen into a palpable confusion between moral and material progress. I am going to quote on this latter point a passage from a young English critic, Mr. John Middleton Murry. In his "Evolution of an Intellectual" (1919), he writes as follows: "There would not be the faintest trouble in reading modern history in such a fashion that the disaster of the war would appear, not a terrible aberration of mankind, but the logical culmination of all that process of complicating and multiplying material satisfactions which began with the Industrial Revolution in England and has usurped the name of civilization. This so-called civilization, it could be clearly shown, has acted merely as a multiplying instrument. It has increased the desires of man, and increased the horror of the method he has always chosen to attain them if unimpeded satisfaction were not permitted. * * Modern civilization is only a complex of material discoveries and it is nothing more. In other words it is not a civilization at all. It is a material condition which has usurped a spiritual title. The excitement of the process of its creation was so great that the peoples involved in it had no time to look about them. The fervor of activity was upon them, and they made, with an ease that now seems to us almost, miraculous , the assumption that their fervor was a moral fervor. * * Words of real moral and spiritual import were, we will not say debased, but transferred from one scheme of values to another. * * The language of morality became the language of materiality. *** There were no adequate spiritual controls. The problem is how to create them." Disraeli says that the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an interesting example of that tendency of which Mr. Murry speaks to transfer words from one scheme of values to another. "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted". The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort without any preliminary mourning; and this is a main aspect of what has been termed our criminal optimism. Moreover the utilitarian debasement of general terms is only half the story ; the sentimentalist has also tampered with the right meaning of words in his endeavor to prove that it is possible to satisfy the requirements of the moral law by some process of emotional expansion. All other modern revolutions were preceded about the middle of the eighteenth century by a revolution in the dictionary. It was about that time, for example, that the word conscience began to take on its present meaning; instead of being a still small voice, as it had been traditionally, it became a social conscience that operates rather through a megaphone. Now the way to deal with such confusions and sophistries is not simply by an appeal to the past or to some form of traditional authority. Since the persons who utter these sophistries profess above all to be modern, one should meet them on their own ground and deal with them in a thoroughly modern, that is, in a thoroughly critical spirit. According to Mr, Murry, material progress has been able to pass for spiritual progress only by a twisting and perversion of general terms. This reminds us that Socrates, the first great exponent of the critical spirit in the Occident opposed to the sophists of his time and their uncritical break with the past a rigorous definition of general terms. We are reminded also of a saying of Confucius. When asked what he would do first of all if the reins of government were put in his hands, he replied that the first thing he would do would be to define his terms and make words correspond to things. The man who wishes to practice the Socratic and Confucian art of making words correspond to things and to discover how far our current theories are in accord with the actual facts of human nature must use the past as his laboratory. One should remind the modernist, who piques himself above all on being experimental, to how great an extent tradition itself is only a convenient summing up of actual experience. Confucian doctrine, for example, can be judged not only by its fruits since the age of Confucius, but reflects a great body of moral experience in the ages that preceded him. I cannot forbear quoting at this point a passage from the late M. Chavannes, Professor at the College de France, and at the time of his death the most accomplished of occidental sinologues: "Confucius was, as it were, five hundred years before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books of remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines. He went about proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral ideal that China had slowly conceived in the course of centuries; the men of his time refused to obey him because they found it too difficult to give up their comforts or their interests; they felt nevertheless that his voice had a more than human authority; they were moved and stirred to the depths of their being when they were touched by the potent spirit coming from the distant past which summoned up in them the truths glimpsed by their fathers." Let us turn then to this Confucian tradition, resting as it does on an enormous mass of concrete experience, for light on the question that I declared to be so urgent at the present moment — the question as to what is the centripetal element in human nature, the element that really brings men together on the spiritual level, and not merely, like our mechanical devices, establishes a material contact between them while leaving them spiritual, by centrifugal. Confucius defines the specifically human element in man, not in terms of expansive emotion like the sentimental humanitarians of to-day, but as a "law of inner control; " (I borrowed this rendering of li from "The Sayings of Confucius" translated by Mr. Lionel Giles of the British Museum) and herein he agrees with the best humanists of the Occident from Aristotle and the Greeks down. If a man is to be truly human, he cannot expand freely along the lines of his ordinary self, but must discipline this ordinary self to a sense of measure and proportion. But most people, says Aristotle, do not wish to do anything of the kind; "they would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner." So that humanists in both the East and the West oppose to the democratic doctrine of the divine average the doctrine of the saving remnant. A man who accepts a truly humanistic discipline tends to become what Confucius calls a superior man ("True aristocrat" would perhaps be a better rendering. "Superior man" has about it a slight suggestion). (Chun tzu) or what Aristotle calls a highly serious man. Personally I am struck by the central soundness of this Confucian conception. It does not proscribe sympathy; it would merely have sympathy tempered by selection. (The element of sympathy is of course abundantly present in Confucian jen). You no doubt recall that apostles of an indiscriminate fraternity were abroad in ancient China as they are in the Occident to-day. The attacks of Mencius on Mei-ti and his followers who were for suppressing discrimination in favor of brotherhood still hold good against our western sentimentalists, for instance, against Tolstoy and his followers. If the superior man is a great blessing to the world it is less because he engages in what is now known as social service than because he is setting the world a good example. Plato defines justice as minding one's own business. As a result of our current "uplift" activities the point is rapidly being reached where everybody is minding everybody else's business. The meddler and the busybody has perhaps for the first time in the history of the world got himself taken at his own estimate of himself. We are in fact living in what some one has termed the "meddle ages." It might be well to reflect on what Confucius says of his ideal ruler, Shun. Religiously self-observant, he says, Shun simply sat gravely on his throne and everything was well. Shun was minding his own business in the Platonic sense and the force of his example was such that other people were led to do likewise. Humanistic ideas of the kind I have been describing were maintained in old China by a system of education. That this education had fallen into a rut of pseudo-classic formalism and that it had from the start grave deficiencies must, I think, be freely granted. But even here you must be careful not to pour out the baby with the bath water. There was, for example, a great idea at the bottom of the old civil service examinations, however imperfectly it was carried out. There was to be selection and severe selection on humanistic lines among those who aspired to serve the state, but the basis of the selection was to be democratic. This combination of the democratic with the aristocratic and selective principle is one that we can scarcely be said to have solved in the Occident. Our democratic development has been won largely at the expense of standards; and yet without leaders who are disciplined to the best humanistic standards the whole democratic experiment is going, in my judgement, to prove impossible. Let me take up almost at random another point in the old Chinese education that has been very severely and to a large extent rightly critized — namely, the undue emphasis on memory. Since Rousseau and his attack on memory in his "Emile" we have been tending to fall into the opposite extreme in the Occident. We have forgotten the uses of what I would term the selective memory. This type of memory must always play a large role in any genuinely humanistic training. You memorize great poems or the sayings of the sages even though they do not mean much to you at the time. This meaning is illumined by later experience. As it is, when children should be storing up in their memories the winnowed wisdom of the past, they are likely, as a result of our current sentimental prejudice in favor of child's "literature," to be reading some such books as "The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies" or "Peter Pumpkin in Wonderland." My own general conviction, then, so far as I may venture to express a conviction on the basis of my imperfect knowledge of China, is that you can get rid of many things on the periphery of your traditional education, you can get rid of much that is scholastic in the Confucian basis of this education, you can modify much that is in the old books themselves ; many of the rules of good form for example that are laid down in the "Li Ki" seem to me to be no more of the essence of that decorum or law of inner control which must be at the heart of every true humanism than the fact, which has also been piously handed down, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal. You may, again, enrich your education greatly with elements drawn from the Occident, especially on the scientific and naturalistic side, and so acquire the material efficiency that China lacks. I believe, however, that with all the peripheral changes you need to retain a certain central rightness in the traditional conception. This rightness seems to me to derive from the perception that the maintenance of civilization is due, not primarily to the multitude and to some "general will" in Rousseau's sense that emanates spontaneously from a supposedly divine average, but to a saving remnant or comparatively small number of leaders. The ultimate basis of sound leadership is the type of character that is achieved through self-discipline, and this self-discipline itself has its root in humility or "submission to the will of Heaven." I am inclined to think that Confucius is superior to many of our occidental humanists in his clear recognition of the fact that the law of measure is itself subject to the law of humility. The mention of humility raises the question to what extent distinctively religious elements should enter into your new education ; for Confucianism, admirable in its own way, is not, in any complete sense of the word, a religion. This question is too large to be adequately treated in a talk of this kind and I am not planning to discuss it in any detail. I may say, however, in passing, that I have been struck by one thing in my study of Buddhism — and when I was a youth I was at pains to learn both Sanskrit and Pali in order that I might gain some knowledge of Buddhist doctrine at the source, — and that is, that in its original form Buddhism is much nearer to the modern spirit, which I have defined as the positive and critical spirit, than the Mahayana, which is practically the only form of Buddhism you have had in China. A certain number of Chinese should study Pali — some indeed are now doing this in America — not only to understand various aspects of the past in China but to discover how far this ancient faith may still be a living force upon the present. (It Is not easy to get an adequate notion of Buddhism through translations. The difficulty is in the rendering of the general terms. Fausboll, for example, has rendered fifteen different Pall words by the one word "desire" in his translation of the Sutta-Nipata ; Vol. X. Sacred Books of the East. In his translation of the Dhammapada (ibid.). Max Muller has (ch. XVI) rendered by "love" two different terms, neither of which properly has that meaning). Judged by its fruits in life and conduct Buddhism at its best is a striking confirmation of Christianity. The conclusion of the whole matter is this: You cannot afford to neglect the ethical side of your Renaissance, nor again can you afford to be pseudoethical, as you may be, if you adopt too uncritically certain notions that are current in the West today. Specifically you will run the danger of losing what is best in your own great and civilized past without acquiring what is really civilized in the Occident. You will merely acquire, if you are too utilitarian, our machinery — our typewriters and telephones and automobiles — and, because the latest machinery is likely to be the best, you are likely to assume the same of our literature, and to run after our Rousseauistic eccentrics. The remedy, it seems to me, is not to lose touch with your own background in the name of a superficial progress, and at the same time to get into closer touch with our background beginning with the Greeks. You will find that the two backgrounds confirm one another especially on the humanistic side, and constitute together what one may term the wisdom of the ages. It seems to me regrettable that there are less than a dozen Chinese students in America today who are making a serious study of our occidental background in art and literature and philosophy. There should be at least a hundred. You should have scholars at all your more important seats of learning who could teach the Confucian Analects in connection with the Ethics of Aristotle. On the other hand, we should have at our important seats of learning scholars, preferably Chinese, who could give courses in Chinese history and moral philosophy. This might prove an important way of promoting a real understanding between the intellectual leaders of Orient and Occident. The tragic failure of the past century has been the failure to work out a sound type of internationalism. Science is in a sense international, but it has been turned to the ends of national aggrandizement. The type of brotherly love that has been preached in connection with the humanitarian movement has proved even more fallacious. Why not work for a humanistic international? An international, one may say, of gentlemen who, without rising necessarily to the sublimities of religion, feel that they can at least unite on a platform of moderation and common sense and common decency. My hope is that, if such a humanistic movement gets started in the West, it will have a response in a neo-Confucian movement in China — a Confucianism that will be disengaged from all the scholastic and formalistic accretions with which it has been overlaid in the course of centuries. In any case the decisive battle between humanists on the one hand, and utilitarians and sentimentalists on the other will be fought in both China and the West in the field of education. |
|
| 10 | 1921-1925 |
Wu, Xuezhao. The birth of a Chinese cultural movement : letters between Babbitt and Wu Mi [ID D28817]. Letters to Wu Mi by Babbitt (1) Jaffrey, New Hampshire, 30 June, 1921. My dear Mr. Wu,—I gather from the letter you wrote my wife on June 24th that it is doubtful whether I am to have the pleasure of seeing you again before your return to China. I left Cambridge to come up here on June 22. I am planning to be in Cambridge again about July 10 and supposed that I should see you at that time. I regret greatly that this is not possible but have at least the satisfaction of knowing that you have received your A.M. in regular course after all. I am sure that you deserved the degree on your total record. It has been a great pleasure for me to have you as a student. I feel confident that you are one of those who will work most effectively to save what is admirable and wise in the traditions of your country from unintelligent innovation. Do not fail to write me, not only about your personal fortunes, but about the Chinese situation in general. I am especially interested, as you know, in the problem of Chinese Education. If I can be of help to you in any way do not hesitate to call on me. Please convey my very warm regards to Mr. May. With best wishes for a pleasant journey, in which my wife joins, I am, Very sincerely yours, Irving Babbitt (2) Dublin, N.H., 17 Sep., 1922 Dear Mr. Wu,—I am one of the poorest and most irregular of correspondents or I should have written you long ago to tell you how much I appreciated your letters of last winter. These, with the letter I have just received, give me a very vivid picture of your personal circumstances as well as of the situation with which you are contending in China. You seem to me to be making a plucky fight personally and have, I am sure, no reason for self-reproach. I hope that the outlook for China is not quite so dark as you seem to think. I do not feel qualified to have an opinion. My impression, such as it is, is that the Chinese are a cheerful, industrious and intelligent folk who have coped with many a serious emergency in the past and may succeed in coping with this one. My special interest, as you know, is in the great Confucian tradition and the elements of admirable humanism that it contains. This tradition needs to be revitalized and adjusted to new conditions but anything approaching a complete break with it would in my judgment be a grave disaster for China itself and ultimately perhaps for the rest of us. I hear favorable comment from Chinese at Harvard on your new Critical Review [Xue heng]. It seems to me just the kind of thing that is needed. I wonder whether you are going to have difficulty in recruiting a sufficiently large staff of contributors. It would seem dsirable under the circumstances to coöperate with every one who shares the general point of view in spite of the difficulties and discouragements that you mentioned in your letters of last winter. Is not Mr. Tang likely to prove a useful auxiliary? I had a talk with him on Chinese philosophy just before he left Cambridge for home. He seemed to me better informed in this field than perhaps any other Chinese I have ever met. Would not his article on Schopenhauer and Buddhism in the Chinese Students Monthly (or the equivalent) be good material for your Critical Review? The article by Mr. K. L. Lou on theories of Laughter struck me as a very distinguished piece of writing and might also be presented profitably to Chinese readers. Mr. Tang and Mr. Lou have not perhaps the kind of aggressiveness that seems needed in China just now, but, when all is said, they are very valuable men. Mr. H. H. Chang is just handing in an extremely able doctoral thesis on the Humanism of Matthew Arnold. The last chapter of this thesis—Matthew Arnold and Confucian humanism—contains material that might, in my opinion, be used to advantage in your review. Mr. Chang strikes me as distinctly aggressive. You may have noticed the articles he has been publishing in the Yale Review, Edinburgh Review, North American Review and (N.Y.) Nation. And he is only twenty-four years-old!—I wish, by the way, you could publish notices of John Dewey's last two volumes of a kind that will expose his superficiality. He has been exercising a bad influence in this country, and I suspect also in China. Might not Mr. Tang be of aid to you here? I have been having a very strenuous year. During the first half year I gave a graduate seminar at Yale in addition to full work at Harvard and Radcliffe. During the second half of April, I took a Western trip, travelling about seven thousand miles and giving four lectures at Leland Stanford Un., one lecture at the Un. of California, one at the Northwestern Un. and one at the Un. of Chicago. This summer I have been getting visited and working on Democracy and Imperialism [Democracy and leadership]. It goes forward slowly, but I hope to have it finished in three or four months. It is the hardest job I have ever undertaken. I have accepted an invitation to go during the second half of this coming academic year as exchange professor from Harvard to the Sorbonne. I have not yet decided what courses it is advisable for me to give at Paris or whether I had better give them in French or English,—I am sending you an article in La Revue hebdomadaire on my writing that I thought might interest you. Professor Mercier seems to me to have made a very intelligent summary. Tell Mr. May that I sent the photograph and two volumes of Mr. More I promised him and hope that they reached him safely.— Remember that it is always a pleasure for me to hear from you and that I stand ready to help you in any way in my power. Sincerely yours, Irving Babbitt (3) 6 Kirkland Road, Cambridge, 24 July, 1924 Dear Mr. Wu,—Some time ago I sent you a copy of my new book "Democracy and Leadership" and trust that it has reached you safely. If not, let me know and I will send you another copy. I was much interested in your last letter and also greatly appreciated your kindness in sending me a copy of the Critical Review containing the translation of M. Mercier's article. The value of this kind of translation is that it may open the way for coöperation between those who are working for a humanistic movement in China and those who are interested in starting a similar movement in the Occident. In the meanwhile the West needs a more adequate interpretation than it has yet received of the Confucian humanism and this is, as you know, a task that I am fond of urging upon you and other Chinese who know their own cultural background and have at the same time a good knowledge of English. I have admired at a distance the pluck and persistency you have displayed in editing the "Critical Review" in the face of what must have been great difficulties. I fear that the whole situation has been still further complicated by the upheaval at Nanking of which Mr. H. H. Hu tells me. I am in no position to form an opinion as to the academic politics involved but I cannot help feeling much regret at the breaking up of your particular group. I understand that you are going to the Northeastern University. I hope that this change will not involve too great a sacrifice. Mr. May, I am told, is to come to Harvard as a teacher of Chinese. I did not know anything about this appointment until it was actually announced. He will of course be able to give me very full information about the situation at Nanking. I recently made a trip to Princeton to visit Mr. P. E. More. He sailed for Europe on July 12. He is planning to be abroad about a year, spending the latter part of the trip in Greece. He has been extremely active in a literary way of late. He has published two books this year—"Hellenistic Philosophies" and "The Christ of the New Testament." I do not like the trend that appears at the end of this latter book towards dogmatic and revealed religion. Personally I am more in sympathy with the purely psychological method of dealing with the religious problem that appears in Buddha and his early disciples. Have you any recent word of Mr. Chang? When he last wrote to me some months ago, he spoke appreciatively of the salutary influence that "The Critical Review" has been exercising. I wonder whether you take a more favorable view of the present situation in China and whether the young people seem to you to be growing a little less superficial. Give my kind regards to Mr. Tang and Mr. Lou and also inform them that I have sent them complimentary copies of "Democracy and Leadership." Sincerely yours, Irving Babbitt Letters to Babbitt from Wu Mi (1) Southeastern University, Nanking, China. July 6, 1923. Dear Professor Babbitt: Your kind letter of September 17 last year has remained unanswered, and I am very sorry for it. Mr. H. H. Chang has just returned to China from Europe; he was here yesterday and, to our great delight, told us about his meeting with you in Paris and about your lectures at the Sorbonne. Mrs. Babbitt, he told us, was accompanying you in your lecture trip to Europe. I hope both you and Mrs. Babbitt are very well, and Mr. Drew too. Thank you very much for sending me the copy of La Revue hebdomadaire, which I received in last April. Upon receiving it, I had allowed myself the liberty of translating M. Mercier's article (L'Humanism positiviste de Irving Babbitt) into Chinese, and of having the translation published in the 19th issue of our Critical Review, with your photograph (taken from the original you sent to Mr May) and the picture of Sever Hall (your lecture room) as frontpieces. The volume containing the translation and the pictures will be out in a few days; and I will send you a copy respectfully as soon as it is issued. You may not approve the idea of having your picture as frontpiece; my excuse is that the same liberty had already been taken by the French review, and that our frontpiece is bigger and more distinct than the one in that review. In the later part of May, Mr G. N. Orme, British Magistrate in Hongkong, paid us a special visit (having been introduced by Mr. R. F. Johnston and having seen our Review) here. Mr. Orme's ideas in many respects coincided with yours, and his views (having lived for 20 years and more in this part of the world) on Chinese affairs and especially on Chinese education agreed with our own. We had a very good talk with him and asked him [to] lecture to our students. Then I wrote a letter of introduction for him (he was returning to England by way of America), and he said, if circumstances allowing, he would certainly go to pay you a visit at Cambridge. I hope he could have fulfilled his promise. Mr. H. H. Hu is one of our best friends and one of the few men working most earnestly and persistently for the Critical Review, and has written as much as any one since its publication. He was also the man who translated your article in The Chinese Students' Monthly (Humanstic Education in China and the West) into Chinese for an earlier number of the Review (which I remember I sent you). Mr. Hu is a student of Botany and had studied in the University of California for some years. Since then he has been professor of Botany in this University; and now he is coming to Harvard to make special studies in Arnold’s Arboratum. He is to sail in two weeks, and will stay for two years at Harvard. Although he has never seen you, he is, I may say, as good as one of your personal pupils. He has read all the books written by you, and Mr More, and Mr Sherman. He has a very competent knowledge of Chinese literature and a superficial acquaintance with Western literature. What I am trying to say is that he is coming to pay his respects to you, and wishes to receive frequent advices and inspiration from you. I did not give him a formal letter of introduction, but I beg to state the case in detail here. Moreover, he will be better able to tell you about the conditions in China and about ourselves than I could inform you in a short letter. The conditions in China went from bad to worse in the last two years since my return. The country is just now facing an extremely serious political crisis, both internal and foreign. I cannot but be grieved to think that the Chinese people has decidedly degenerated, so that the observations on our national character drawn from history and our past excellencies do not at all fit with the Chinese of today. And I believe, unless the mind and moral character of the Chinese people be completely reformed (by a miracle or a Herculean effort), there is no hope even for a political and financial regeneration in the future. Of course we must work to make a better China; but if no success, then the history of China since 1890 will remain one of the most instructive and interesting pages in the history of the world, with reference to national decadence. In the midst of such circumstances, our private lives have been very happy. Messrs May & Tang and I have been teaching here peacefully. My salary has been increased from $160 to $200 this year, and will be $220 next year, counting monthly. (The purchasing power of money is much greater in China than in America). Apart from my teaching work, all my time is devoted to the work of the Critical Review which has been coming out steadily every month. The effect of the Review is faint but encouraging; for if we could get many able hands to write, the consequence will be decidedly felt and will be for good. At present I am still trying to seek for contributors. Mr May wrote only one article in the last twelve months. Mr. Tschen in Berlin did not respond to our call. But Mr. Tang has been doing good service; and Mr. K. L. Lou is to arrive from Europe in a week or so, and we hope to retain him in this school and make use of his cooperation. Mr. H. H. Chang is going to teach at the National University of Peking, which has been the headquarters of that movement the effect of which we are trying to oppose and remedy. Thank you for your kind intentions. You can help us in one way which means most to us. That is, if any new book is published by you (like "Democracy and Imperialism") or by Mr More (like "Greek Tradition" Vol. II) or by Mr S. P. Sherman, or if you happen to see any new book (in English or French or German) that you think is expressing ideas similar to yours and therefore very useful for our cause, please drop a note to Mr H. H. Hu at Arnold's Arboratum or to me, only suggesting the name and the publisher of the book, then Mr Hu or I will be able to get the book ourselves. That book will serve as material for translation or digested account in our Review. Although we are no longer in your classes, we are still deriving constant inspiration and precept from you. With humble personal regards to you and Mrs. Babbitt, Yours pupil Mi Wu P. S. M. Sylvain Levi had been in China, & was lecturing in the University of Peking in last April; we tried but failed to get him to come down to Nanking & lecture in our school. (2) Southeastern University, Nanking, China. July 4, 1924 My dear Master: We are exceedingly grateful to you for having sent to each of us a copy of your long expected book "Democracy and Leadership." Please be assured that, though we are now in another hemisphere, we have constantly been reviewing your ideas in our minds and reading your books (both old and new) with much more seriousness and attention than when we were sitting in your classroom in Sever Hall. Whatever we do and wherever we go, you will always be our guide and teacher in more than ordinary sense of the word. I especially will strive to make more and more Chinese students in their home land benefited by your ideas and indirect inspiration. On receiving your book "Democracy and Leadership", I immediately set to reading it, and then at once translated its "Introduction", with a summary of the whole book, and had these published in the 32nd Number of The Critical Review. That Number will appear in August, and I will send you a copy upon its publication. I trust that the 19th Number of The Critical Review, which contains your picture and Mr. Mercier's French article in Chinese translation, had safely reached you in last August. Lately there have been many changes in the life and work of your pupils in China. Mr. K. T. May is coming to Harvard as Instructor in Chinese Language; he is sailing on August 22; and upon his arrival, he will tell you of our experience in detail. Briefly, Mr. K. L. Low was appointed Head of English Department in this university last September. The bad teachers of the Department organized a mean and petty opposition against him (for the only reason that he is the acquaintance of Mr. May). In November, the Vice-President (who is the only important man here who can appreciate literature and like us) died. Since then things changed fast. In April of this year, Mr. Low was obliged to declare his resignation, and to accept the offer of Nankai College, Tientsin, (where Mr. May taught in 1919-1920) as head of English Department. In May, Mr. May, apprehensive of coming disaster, resigned and accepted the offer from Harvard. Three days later, the University illegally incorporated the Department of Western Literature (of which Mr. May was Head and I a member) into the English Department—and thus practically killed the latter. The leader of the above-mentioned opposition to Mr. Low, a rascal, was to be the Head of the incorporated Department. I was therefore forced to go. I am going to be teacher of English at Northeastern University, Mukden, Manchuria; and will be there by the 10th of August. The Southeastern University is rather glad that Low, May and I are all gone. Of the teachers (old and new) for the incorporated Department, Mr. C. S. Hwang, I think, is the only one fitted to be a teacher. Mr. Hwang had been in your "English Literary Criticism" class at the Sorbonne in 1923, and he wishes me to convey to you his respectful remembrances. Please pardon me for repeating to you that we are living at a crisis of a great decadence in the history of China. Everything in China is corrupt to the last degree. Personal disappointment and misfortune are nothing compare[ed] to the national disaster and universal darkness. Of the group of your Chinese pupils, Mr. H. H. Chang (at the University of Peking) seems to be the only one who is successful, bright, and happy. Mr. K. L. Low is serene and aloof; people all respect him; and he is not unduly enthusiastic about anything. Mr. K. T. May is generally recognized as an Epicurean with a refined taste, and a genius full of whims and temperamental indulgences. (My dissatisfaction with him is that he did not at all work hard— for example, he has not written a single article for The Critical Review for the last 22 months). Mr. Y. T. Tang (Head of the Department of Philosophy here) is similar to Mr. Low, but much more tactful and popular, and comparatively successful. My own life is inglorious and painful. I have been working, with very little cooperation and assistance, to maintain the Critical Review (which appeared in every month); the work is very labourious, though the result is far from satisfactory. For this and other work, I have sacrificed my rest, contentment, and the kind of social intercourse which is necessary in China in order to keep a man in his position. So I am going to Mukden, from which place I shall write to you my next letter. I have already ordered from the booksellers Mr. More's "Greek Tradition II: Hellenistic Philosophy". I had bought last year Mr. Sherman's "The Americans". Kindly send me a brief list of the most excellent books that have appeared recently which you think I must do well to read. With best wishes to you and Mrs. Babbitt and Mr. Drew, Your humble pupil Mi Wu (3) TSING HUA COLLEGE PEKING August, 2, 1925. Dear Professor Babbitt: I remember to have written you a letter on the 4th of July, 1924, when the group of friends in Nanking was breaking up & just before I started for Mukden. Arriving in Mukden in early August, I read with great pleasure and gratitude your letter that was forwarded to me. Sometime in November, I sent you two volumes of the Critical Review (being Nos. 32 & 34), containing the Chinese translation of your writings (the Introduction of "Democracy and Imperialism", and Chapter I of "Literature & the American College"). Aside from those, though I was trying always to write you, I have not done it. I hope you and Mrs. Babbitt, & old Mr. Drew, also Mr. More and Sherman, are in good health and spirit, and you will readily pardon my negligence. As I always try to look up to you for inspiration and example in all my work and conduct, I feel I must render you the account, at least once in a year, of what I have been doing & what has been happening to me. Of course, you know well our experience in Nanking from your frequent conversation with Messrs. K. T. May & H. H. Hu; & of the conditions in China in general. So I need not dwell upon those aspects. For my own part, I went to Mukden, to Northeastern University, to teach English (very elementary) in August 1924. My feeling was very much like Esther Waters (Excuse the vulgar comparison) who, being a woman servant, went about from one family to another and worked hard, in order to feed and to bring up her beloved child. To be sure I have no right to claim the "Critical Review" as my own child; but I mean that the circumstances under which I worked to maintain the Critical Review, were made much more difficult and unfavorable by my reluctant transfer from Nanking to Mukden. With our old friends & associates dispersing in the four winds, and with contributions always lacking & insufficient, I had to turn out a volume of 67000 words each month, amidst the journey, the household preparations and disposals, the family demands and problems in the hot month of July (and again in the bleak January). And the Chung Hua Book Co. several times threatened to discontinue and end the publication of the Review; and it was only after much wrangle of words and even with the promise of financial compensation to them in the future, that they consented to carry on the publication for another year. Mukden however turned out to be much better than I had expected. Though the atmosphere in Mukden is unduly conservative and somewhat provincial, it was the only place in China, where educational work was taken up seriously and honestly; where the students attended classes regularly and studied their lessons faithfully; where the influence of the so-called "New Culture Movement" was not allowed to creep in, and where those (like myself) who dare to oppose to Dr. Hu Shih etc. might find a refuge and haven. The Dean of the Northeastern University was in sympathy with our movement; and through our friendship, I have recommended more than one of the members of the Critical Review (notably Mr. Lew the old man) to teach there; and I can say, our thought and ideas do actually prevail in that part of China, more than in any other place. In October 1924, I was invited by the Japanese to go to the port of Dairen and Port Arthur for a lecture. I chose to speak (in English) on the "Humanism of Prof. Babbitt" to the groups of Japanese & Chinese educators & teachers, giving them a digest and summary of the ideas in your books. One brilliant young Japanese gentleman, Mr. Shimonoski, served as my interpreter; he was very much taken up with your ideas, he became my friend and thereupon I presented him two volumes of your works. In early January 1925, I went down to Shanghai, to see my parents, and to manage my younger sister’s wedding. In early February, I came to Peking, and since then I have been serving in Tsing Hua College (my alma mater) as the Organizing Secretary of the Research Institute, also teaching one course on Translation. Beginning with September 1, when the organizing part will come to an end and when the work of Research Institute will actually be started, I shall be Dean of the Research Institute. My work is entirely administrative in nature, and I am not expected to teach anything but the Translation course for the College students. And there is a great deal of social intercourse and obligations, both inside and outside of the College, which I must attend and fulfill in my present capacity—which is an unpleasant necessity, rather than a useful pastime. Compared with my past life in Nanking & Mukden, I am now having more physical comfort and material indulgence; and, as I have to run about a great deal and see people, I am now having much less time for reading and writing. This is what grieves me: the quiet and simple and studious life I had had in Nanking and Mukden has already seemed to me a golden age to which I desire but never can return! What had made me forsake Mukden and come to Peking and to Tsing Hua College, was neither the usual attractions of the Capital (opportunities for a political career; beautiful girls of elevated station; first class restaurants and book-shops; etc.) nor the material compensation and physical comfort which Tsing Hua College could better afford, but those points of convenience and advantage which can help me to work better and more efficiently for the Critical Review. I mean, for example, a very good Library; an able assistant paid by the College, but willing to work for the Critical Review in spare time out of mere zeal and friendship; the chances for meeting like-minded people, especially men of letters, and thereby to secure contributions and articles for the Critical Review. Upon the work of the Review, my thoughts and my energy are concentrated; and [for] those things I really care. The research work to be done in the Institute will entirely be confined to the Chinese field—the various branches of Chinese studies. Perhaps it will be devoted, more to searching after facts, than to the discussion of living ideas. And as there is much school politics and as my chief concern is for the Critical Review, I have to take a rather conciliatory and wise course in regard to affairs and direction of the Research Institute. The 4 Professors appointed for the Research Institute are as follows: (1) Mr. Wang Kuo-Wei (excellent scholar, whose name you perhaps have seen in the "Tong Pao"); (2) Mr. Liang Chi-Chao, famous politically; (3) Mr. Yinkoh Tschen, whom I did my best to recommend and who, after much reluctance, had consented to come in next February (the rest are all here ); (4) Dr. Yuen-Ren Chao, who taught Chinese at Harvard before Mr. K. T. May. Besides, we have as Special Lecturer Dr. Chi Li, also a Harvard man. The actual progress of the work I will report to you later on. I humbly beg to have your constant instruction and advice, both in regard to the work of the Research Institute and to that of the Critical Review. Your words are always to me a great source of encouragement and good influence. I have carefully read your books to the last page of "Democracy & Leadership", and Mr. More's books to the end of "Christ of the New Testament." Please suggest to me, from time to time, the books (either old or new) which you think I should read or I should translate for the pages of the Critical Review. (For the Review has been founded but to propagate your ideas and the ideas of Confucius). Allow me to make an apology for having translated your books by extracts. I have considered it the sacred duty of mine (as well as of Mr. K. T. May etc.) to translate your works as much as possible for the Chinese people whom I am sure you must love as much as your own countrymen. I lay in bed with pain for not having administered enough (since 1921) the cup of wisdom from your angelic fountain to the Chinese people who, besides neglecting their own national tradition, are now being ruined by the allied evils of the so-called "New Culture Movement" and Bolshevism. I do these things with almost religious zeal. Even if you should blame me and beat me for making such translations, I am willing to receive your chastisement; but I must do it, so that I can in future die with clear conscience. O, my dear Master, will you understand and pardon me? However, let me give you full assurance of these 3 facts: (1) Whenever I have made any translation from your books, I never fail in sending you the translation in print. (No translation is made without you being informed). (2) All such translations are made by myself, and with greatest mount of care and prudence possible. (See, for, example, "Europe & Asia" in No. 38, or "Introduction" to Democracy and Leadership, in No. 32, of "Critical Review"). Even [if] it should go under the name of another translator, the work was in fact made under my direction and with my own revision so complete that it may be actually regarded as my work. (See, for example, Chapt. I of Literature and American College", in No. 34 of C. R.). (3) In China, besides Messrs K. T. May, H. H. Hu, & myself, no one will think of translating your books. No one will do it, even if they are paid. Few will even accept your ideas. Only some faithful adherents to the direct teaching of Confucius are willing to be taught and guided by you. O, my dear Master, this is a sad revelation. If there are others in China interested in translating your books (how poor the translation may be), China would never have fallen into the present abyss of material and spiritual decadence! I have never seen any discussion of your ideas, the appearance of your name, outside of the columns of the Critical Review. No, absolutely none. Please be not afraid of people mis-translating you. (Even [if] such a thing should happen, you can count on at least one of your disciples in China to take up the pen for your defense and correction before you know of it). The rumor you had heard must be from some Chinese student who perhaps had caught a glimpse of my translation in the Review and had gone to speak to you without uch indicating the source of his discovery. But because of such rumor, I beg to state the case very fully for giving you assurance; and once more I ask for your pardon in this & other affairs. The greatest pain I always have felt in all my work and attempt, comes from the lack of co-operation among our friends, and the lack of the trait of aggressiveness among good & intelligent people. I cannot describe the case in full. But we expect first of all good writing from Mr. K. T. May. Will you kindly help us by constantly urging Mr. May to send me his writings or translations for the Critical Review? Of our friends, (1) Mr. K. L. Low has just gone to America, to serve as Secretary in Chinese Legation at Washington, (2) Dr. H. H. Chang is teaching at National University, Peking. He admires John Morley, and is a close associate and friend of Dr. Hu Shih. We saw each other rarely. (3) Mr. Y. T. Tang is to teach in Nankai University, Tientsin. With best regards, & humblest assurances, I am, as always, Yours respectfully, Mi Wu |
|
| 11 | 1921-1933 |
Wu Mi returned to China, kept in touch with Irving Babbitt through correspondence and by regularly sending him copies of Xue heng. Wu Mi was fascinated by Babbitt's ideas, which were known as the New Humanism, and by Babbitt's respect for ancient Eastern philosophy, including Buddhism and Confucianism. According to Wu Mi, the New Cultural Movement's one-sided promotion of naturalism was introducing into China a system of thought that Babbitt and other distinguished scholars had already shown to have been the source of calamities in the West. Babbitt adhered to the old tradition of dualism with respect to human nature. Inspired by Babbitt, Wu Mi also assumed a dualistic standpoint on this subject. He refused those who regarded human nature as solely evil or solely good. Wu Mi shared Babbitt's view that 'in the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision'. |
|
| 12 | 1922 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide zhong xi ren wen jiao yu tan. Hu Xiansu yi. [ID D28798]. In the editor's preface, Wu Mi tried to make Babbitt (known to his Chinese readers as Baibide) relevant to 1920s China. He ignored Babbitt's role in the American debate on higher education ; instead, he depicted him as a foreign expert who had answers to Chinese questions. First, he stressed that despite Babbitt's inability to read Chinese, he was well informed regarding the recent development in China. He told his readers, that Mr. Baibide 'is particularly concerned with the affairs of our country, and he reads all the published works on our country'. Second he pointed out that as 'a leading literary critic in America', Mr. Baibide offered a vision of society fundamentally different from that of other Western thinkers. While other Western thinkers stressed the benefits of scientism and materialism in producing more consumer goods, Mr. Baibide focused on the role of religion and morality in shaping an individual's spiritual life. As other Western thinkers saw modern Europe as the apex of human development, Mr. Baibide combined the learning of 'East and West, and past and present'. Wu told his readers that from Babbitt's perspective, there was an oneness in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle in the West, and those of Siddhartha Guatama and Confucius in the East. |
|
| 13 | 1922 |
Mei, Guangdi. Xian jin xi yang ren wen zhu yi [ID D28806]. Mei Guangdi discussed New Humanism as a 'valuable doctrine' with direct relevance to contemporary China. He praised Irving Babbitt for his attempt to counter populism by stressing the need for discipline, restraint, and leadership. Mei turned Babbitt into 'Baibide', a foreign expert who offered answers to Chinese questions. Inspired by a reading of Babbitt's writings, Mei found that although political discussions in China often claimed to include the masses into the political process, few people had paid attention to the danger of equating quantity with quality. While he admitted that populism was indeed part of 'the global current' (shi jie chao liu), he remained his traders that only the well-educated elites could appreciate the 'permanent truth' (jiu yuan zhi zhen li) of humanity. |
|
| 14 | 1923 |
Wu, Mi. Wo zhi ren sheng guang. In : Xue heng M no 16 (1923). [My view of life]. Hou Chien : From his student days at Harvard University, Wu Mi has been a faithful propagandist of the Babbittian ideal. His diatribe against the Movement for a New Literature that culminated in the May fourth movement, and especially his self-expository essay antedating Irving Babbitt's stand, show clearly the direction of his mental efforts. At Wu Mi's program for achieving a virtuous life we find it to contain three items. 1( self-discipline and resort to rituals (li), 2) practicing loyalty (or good faith, zhong) and sympathetic magnanimity (or extensions of one's feelings to others, shu), and 3) maintenance of the golden mean (zhong yong). The first has been used by Li Ji in summarizing Babbitt's teachings. All of them are found in Confucius. |
|
| 15 | 1923 |
[Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin]. [Chan hui lu]. [ID D28825]. The editor's note attached to the translation echoed Irving Babbitt in condemning Rousseau for being responsible for 'the evils of society', adding that the blame for 'the social disorder today goes partly to Rousseau' and that Rousseau 'was the virus of civilization'. |
|
| 16 | 1924 |
Irving Babbitt. Democracy and leadership [ID D28813]. … In speaking, however, of Asia it is even more important than in speaking of Europe to make clear that one has in mind primarily civilized Asia, and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement… The great Wall of China is a sort of visible symbol of the separation between the two Asias. On the one hand is the Asia of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis Khan ; on the other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius. The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a typical Asiatic I shall have more to say presently) is hardly necessary to remind us that it is the distinction of Asia as compared with Europe and other parts of the world to have been the mother of religious ; so that if one were to work out a crucial and experimental definition of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one might be put on the track of what is specifically Asiatic in the Asiatic attitude towards life… At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great Asiatic teachers. His interests, as I have already said, are humanistic rather than religious. The points of contact between his doctrine and that of Aristotle, the most important Occidental humanist, are numerous and striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind. Not only the experience of the world since their time, but much of its previous experience may be properly associated with them. One may note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with that of Christ in his Sum of Theology, so about the same time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with Confucian elements in his great commentary. Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude towards life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European and the Asiatic temper… It is perhaps not easy to combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that of Aristotle with the humility so emphasized by Confucius and other Oriental teachers… One does not need to be a Confucian to feel that a temple of Confucius would not be similarly incongruous. He was not, like Aristotle, a master of the them that 'know', but a master of them that 'will'. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of will. He is no obscurantist, yet the rôle of reason in its relation to will is, as he views it, secondary and instrumental… While no sensible person would claim for the Far East a general ethical superiority over the West, the Far East has at least enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great disease of Occidental culture – the warfare between reason and faith. Buddha and Confucius both managed to combine humility with self-reliance and a cultivation of the critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to those who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the element for which Asia has stood in the past, who believe that without some such restoration the Occident is in danger of going mad with the lust of speed and power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or other fatalism. China, for example, may under pressure from the Occident have an industrial revolution (Hankow is already taking on the aspect of an Oriental Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accompanied by a more or less rapid crumbling of her traditional ethos with the attendant danger of a lapse into sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on the other hand, may not only reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modern way and with an emphasis distinctly different from anything that has been seen in the Orient… |
|
| 17 | 1924 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide lun min zhi yu ling xiu. Wu Mi yi. [ID D28801]. Introduction by Wu Mi. [What makes Mr. Irving Babbitt] differ from Christ and Confucius is that, although he emphasizes action (xing), he does not neglect intellect (zhi) ; what makes him differ from the humanists of the West is that he uses imagination to complete the intellect, and he does not regard intellect as all powerful. Given his equal emphasis on action and intellect, it seems that his teaching is closest to that of Buddha. [His idea about] the contrast of reality and illusion is also influenced by Buddhism. However, Mr. Babbitt does not involve himself with religion, does not establish precepts, does not obtain [anything from] mythology, does not concern himself with metaphysical theories, all these have made his ideas different from those of Buddhism. All in all, Mr. Babbitt actually adopts concurrently the teachings of these four sages, namely Buddha, Christ, Confucius and Aristotle, and achieves an embodiment of their great consummation. We can also say that he, with the heart of Buddha and Christ, is doing what Confucius and Aristotle were doing. Will those who hear my words think that these are flattering remarks by a disciple ? Ong Chang Woei : Wu Mi viewed Babbitt's New Humanism as an antidote for the chaos caused by the New Cultural Movement. For Wu Mi, the sages of history all had had their strengths and limitations, and Babbitt, from his perspective, was the only person with the ability to combine their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. As such a person, Babbitt assumed the role of a 'sage' who stood at the peak of the civilization of mankind, and the 'West' as represented by Babbitt was viewed as the highest achievement of mankind. |
|
| 18 | 1924 |
Xu, Zhimo. Xin yue de tai du. In : Xin yue ; vol. 1, no 1 (1928). [The attitude of the Crescent Moon]. 新月的態度 It lamented the anarchic state of thought then obtaining as exhibited in the current crop of 1. Sentimentalists, 2. Decadents, 3. Esthetes, 4. Utilitarians, 5. Didacticists, 6. Polemicists, 7. Radicals, 8. Preciocists, 9. Pornographers, 10. Enthusiasts, 11. Peddlers, 12. Sloganists, 13. Ismists. Out of the thirteen, at leas more than half could be identified with the leftists. On the otherhand, it espoused the ideals of 'sanity and dignity' as antidotes to those deleterious trends and advised that 'we must view life as a whole'. The ideals conformed to Irving Babbitt's idea of the function of literature as a formative agent, and the advice smacked of Matthew Arnold. |
|
| 19 | 1924 |
Liu Yizheng wrote an essay to say goodby to Wu Mi, when Wu Mi left Nanjing for Shenyang in 1924. In : Yu seng shi wen ji. (Shanghai 1934). 雨僧詩文集 From the last years of the Qing dynasty, schools have sprouted up and there have been many students going abroad to learn some craft and be useful to their country. But many there have not been who are able to delve deep into the profundities of Western learning and institutions, nor to find all that is in accord with the teachings and objectives of our sages with the purpose of benefiting the people and purifying the customs. Mr. Mei Guangdi of Xuanzheng has been the first to espouse the lessons of the American scholar Irving Babbitt to show where the truth is. Mr. Wu Mi joins him and goes further by tracing back to the literature, arts, and philosophy of ancient Greece. Only then have students been made to know that the literature and institutions of Europe and America have their sources, and to realize that those who try to overwhelm the public with new-fangled nonsense have actually gained little from their opportunities in the West. Messrs. Mei and Wu cofounded the Xue heng (Critical review) to awaken the world. When their writings first came out, they were attacked by many a shallow scholar. As time goes on, what the two have had to say becomes more and more persuasive and confirmed. Mr. Mei has since gone to the United States to propagate Chinese learning. Mr. Wu is now leaving for Shenyang. While they travel to different places, their purposes are identical. Scholars in the United States having long had the teaching of Babbitt will be enlightened by Mr. Mei's Chinese knowledge. Scholarship in Shenyang has barely begun. Mr. Wu will be going there to start a new Greece. He is therefore the Babbitt of China. |
|
| 20 | 1924-1925 | Liang Shiqiu took Irving Babbitt's course on 'Literary criticism after the sixteenth century'. Liang decided to take the course not because he admired the renowned teacher but because he intended to challenge him. At first Liang found Babbitt's opinions hard to accept as they were completely different from his own, but after reading Babbitt's books and attending his lectures, Liang's opinions changed dramatically. 'From and extreme romanticist', he later recalls (1957), 'I changed to a stance which is more or less close to classicism'. |
|
| 21 | 1924-1925 |
Mei Guangdi is Instructor of Chinese at Harvard University. After reading Irving Babbitt's works, Mei came to think of Babbitt as a modern saint, and this fired his determination to become one of Babbitt's students. |
|
| 22 | 1926 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Luosu lun nü zi jiao yu [ID D28832]. Irving Babbitt devoted much effort to criticizing Rousseau, viewing him as the precursor of an excessive form of romanticism. After embracing much of Babbitt's thought, Liang Shiqiu began a reassessment of Rousseau, whom he previously had admired greatly. Liang held that the preponderance of Rousseau's influence was pernicious. The only aspect of Rousseau's writings in which Liang saw any merit at all was Book V of Emile [ID D20472]. Liang argued that 'there was nothing correct in the part in which Rousseau talked about the education of boys, but his discussion on women's education was surely accurate. According to Liang, Book V was thorough, but more importantly, in acknowledging differences between men and women, it reflected the profound differences between men and women, it reflected the profound differences that exist among human beings in general, not only between the two sexes but also among different man and among different women. Since the interests and aptitudes of individuals and groups very, Liang held, it is a fitting reflection of human character that differences among those to be taught be accommodated by differing forms of education. |
|
| 23 | 1926 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Xian dai Zhongguo wen xue zhi lang man de qu shi [ID D28851]. "The most obvious way in which China is invaded by foreign literature is through the translation of foreign works. Translation is a mainstay of the New literature movement. But the translated literature always exhibits romantic characteristics – translators do not adopt a rational and discriminating attitude towards foreign works to be translated, and their selection is not guided by principle or by a certain purpose but by whim. They try to translate whatever strikes their fancy, and as a result foreign works of the third or fourth rank have been introduced into China and cherished as a most valuable treasure and have been imitated enthusiastically." Liang applied key insights of Irving Babbitt's to an analysis of the prevalent direction of early twentieth-century Chinese literature. Expressing views that are plainly traceable to Babbitt, Liang took sharp issue with certain romantic tendencies that had come to the fore in China as part of the 'New literature movement', among them an impressionism that called for a 'return to nature' and an uncritical extolling of foreignness and originality for their own sage. In what would become one of his most persistent themes, Liang stressed that, rather than self-indulgence, great literature should express what he termed 'universal human nature'. |
|
| 24 | 1927 |
Lu, Xun. Luosu he wei kou [ID D28835]. Lu Xun admitted that he had not read Irving Babbitt in the original and knew of Babbitt only from scanning Japanese material. He criticized Babbitt only as a means of undermining the reputation of Liang Shiqiu and others, who 'chewed over Babbitt somewhere in Shanghai' for the purpose of manifesting their special taste. It was Lu Xun's intention to ruin any preference for their 'taste'. He had the audacity of giving snorts of contempt for Babbitt without reading his works, and even went to the extreme of classifying Babbitt as a member of the New Moon Society. |
|
| 25 | 1929 |
Lin, Yutang. Xin di wen ping xu yan. In : You si ; vol. 30 (Oct. 7, 1929). [Preface to a new literary criticism]. Irving Babbitt's influence upon the Chinese literary world is a thing we all know : there are for example Mei Guangdi, Wu Mi, Liang Shiqiu and so on, some of whom are personal friends of mine. But the belief of a conscience is a matter of freedom of the individual. Babbitt (feels) that, exalted as religion is, it is not within the reach of ordinary humanity, and so he advocates a man-only-ism. (Mr. Babbitt uses the word humanism in a different sense than the humanism that informed the new culture movement of the Renaissance). In its opposition to religion on the one hand and naturalism on the other, his humanism bears close resemblance to the nature-principle philosophy (i.e. Neo-Confucianism) of the Song dynasty. This is why Babbitt esteems our not-know-life-how-know-death Master Confucius, and the Confucian disciples also esteem Mr. Babbitt. |
|
| 26 | 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'. |
|
| 27 | 1936 |
Babbitt, Irving. Buddha and the Occident [ID D28811]. … The chief obstacle to a better understanding between East and West in particular is a certain type of Occidental who is wont to assume almost unconsciously that the East has everything to learn from the West and little or nothing to give in return. One may distinguish three main forms of this assumption of superiority on the part of the Occidental : first, the assumption of racial superiority, and almost mystical faith in the pre-eminent virtues of the white peoples (especially Nordic blonds) as compared with the brown or yellow races ; secondly, the assumption of superiority based on the achievements of physical science and the type of 'progress' it has promoted, a tendency to regard as a general inferiority the inferiority of the Oriental in material efficiency ; thirdly, the assumption of religious superiority, less marked now than formerly, the tendency to dismiss non-Christian Asiatics 'en masse' as 'heathen', notably in Buddhism, only in so far as they conform to the pattern set by Christianity. Asiatics for their part are ready enough to turn to account the discoveries of Western science, but they are even less disposed than they were before the Great War to admit the moral superiority of the West… No country, again, not even ancient Greece, has been more firmly convinced than China that it alone was civilized. A statesman of the Tang period addressed to the throne a memorial against Buddhism which begins as follows : "This Buddha was a barbarian". One of the traditional names of China, "All-under-Heaven" (Poo-Tien-shia), is itself sufficiently eloquent… The problems that arise today in connection with the relations of East and West are far more complex than they were in Graeco-Roman times. The East now means not merely the Near East, but even more the Far East. Moreover, the East, both Near and Far, is showing itself less inclined than formerly to bow before the imperialistic aggression of the Occident 'in patient deep disdain'… The comparative absence of dogma in the humanism of Confucius and the religion of Buddha can scarcely be regarded as an inferiority… On the basis of evidence both psychological and historical one must conclude that if the Far East has been comparatively free from casuistry, obscurantism, and intolerance, the credit is due in no small measure to Buddha. It is so difficult to have a deep conviction and at the same time to be tolerant that many have deemed the feat impossible… |
|
| 28 | 1957 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Guan yu Baibide xian sheng ji qi. [ID D28821]. "The often celebrated idea of 'élan vital' (vital impulse) in Bergson's philosophy is, according to Irving Babbitt, not worth mentioning. 'Elan vital' should give way to 'frein vital (vital control). To do a thing would require strength, but to refrain oneself from doing something would require greater strength. This kind of attitude seems very compatible with what Confucians called 'Refrain oneself and return to the ritual' (ge ji fu li)." "Though Babbitt has been said not to have shed his puritan thinking, I must say that he retained a great deal of elements of stoicism. I translated Marcus Aurelius' Meditations a few years ago because, inspired by Babbitt's implicit instruction, I wished to express my infinite respect for this great stoic philosopher." "When Xue heng was started, I was still a university student, one who was swept up in the wave of so-called modern thought. At that time I had a negative reaction after reading Xue heng, in which the classical Chinese characters scrawled all over the paper kept people from further probing into its content. In this way, Babbitt and his thought were cold-shouldered in China." "Those people like Lu Xun had never read Babbitt, Lu Xun could never understand Babbitt. Hou Chien : Starting out as a romantic and nationalist, Liang Shiqiu recalls that he went to Babbitt's class with an ax to grind. He went as a challenger but came out a convert to Babbittian classicism. He said nothing at all about Babbitt's Chinese scholarship, though in a private communication. Liang thinks that, in his respect for and promotion of classicism, and in his emphasis on reason, Babbitt shows an affinity of Confucian thinking. Liang does point out, though that Babbitt, in his insistence on the dualistic view of human nature, is inclined to say nothing about the Confucian creed of a human nature innately good. Bai Liping : Liang wrote about Babbitt's conception of three possible levels of human life : naturalistic, humanistic, and religious. Liang argued that the naturalistic life, though in a sense inevitable, should be subject to balance and restraint ; the life maintaining truly human nature is what we should always try to attain ; the religious way of life is, of course, the most sublime, but, being also the most difficult and beyond the realistic capability of most people, should not serve as an excuse for the latter to live life less than fully at the humanistic level. Liang remarked that Babbitt's New humanism was considered by many Americans to be 'reactionary, fogeyish, and impractical' and to have had a limited influence during his lifetime'. |
|
| 29 | 1961 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. [Luosu yu lang man zhu yi]. Liang Shiqiu yi. [ID D28849]. In his preface Liang wrote : "When thirty years ago, as a student of Mr. Babbitt, the translator read this book, he could only form a general idea of it and could not understand it fully. Today, after translating this section of the book, I admire his extensive knowledge and profound scholarhip even more. The original is trenchant and well documented. It is a pity that the translator is not sufficiently capable to convey all this." |
|
| 30 | 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. |
|
| 31 | 1983 |
Meeting of the British Comparative Literature Association The president Zhang Zhouhan reacted to a paper on Irving Babbitt's esthetic standards. He instantly recognized the link between Babbitt's insistence on standards and the resistance at the present time to the extremes of contemporary literary theory as this resistance has been expressed by adherents to conventional literary scholarship. |
|
| 32 | 1985 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Ying xiang wo de ji ben shu [ID D28850]. Liang writes : "Irving Babbitt does not sermonize, he does not have dogmas, but only sticks to one attitude – that of sanity and dignity". |
|
| 33 | 1989 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Liang Shiqiu wen xue hui yi lu. Chen Zishan bian. (Changsha : Yue lu shu she, 1989). (Feng huang cong shu). 梁实秋文学回忆录 Liang Shiqiu schreibt im Vorwort : "I have been greatly influenced by Irving Babbitt. He led me to the road of harmony and prudence". |
|
| 34 | 1995 |
Lin, Yutang. Lin Yutang zi zhuan. (Nanjing : Jiangsu wen yi chu ban she, 1995). (Ming ren zi zhuang cong shu). 林语堂自传 "The influence that Irving Babbitt exerts on modern Chinese literary criticism has been profound and swift." |
|
| 35 | 1999 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Ya she yi wen. Yu Guangzhong, Chen Zishan deng bian. (Beijing : Zhongguo you yi chu ban gong si, 1999). 雅舍轶文 [Original-Datum nicht gefunden]. [Enthält] : Liang, Shiqiu. Letter to Mrs. Fang Rennian. "Professor [Iving] Babbitt and Professor [Paul Elmer] More have had the greatest influence upon me, and I have read all of their works. |
|
Bibliography (12)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1919 |
Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and romanticism. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1919). [Enthält : Introduction, Chinese primitivism]. http://archive.org/details/rousseauromant00babb. |
Publication / Babb16 |
|
| 2 | 1921 |
Babbitt, Irving. Humanistic education in China and the West. In : Chinese students’ monthly ; vol. 17, no 2 (Dec. 1921). [Vorlesung Harvard University, 1921]. http://ia700407.us.archive.org/27/items/chinesestudentsm17chinuoft/chinesestudentsm17chinuoft.pdf. |
Publication / Babb1 |
|
| 3 | 1922 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide zhong xi ren wen jiao yu tan. Hu Xiansu yi. In : Xue heng ; 3 (March 1922). Übersetzung von Babbitt, Irving. Humanistic education in China and the West. In : Chinese students' monthly ; vol. 17, no 2 (Dec. 1921). [Vorlesung Harvard University]. 白璧德中西人文敎育談 |
Publication / Babb6 | |
| 4 | 1924 | [Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide lun min zhi yu ling xiu. Wu Mi yi. In : Xue heng ; 32 (Aug. 1924). [Irving Babbitt on Democracy and leadership. Transl. of chapter V, 'Europe and Asia']. | Publication / Babb9 | |
| 5 | 1924 |
Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and leadership. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1924). [Enthält] : Europe and Asia. |
Publication / Babb20 |
|
| 6 | 1936 |
Babbitt, Irving. Buddha and the Orient. Pt. 1-2. In : The American review ; vol. 6, no 5-6 (March-April 1936). http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmericanRev-1936mar-00513?View=PDF. http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmericanRev-1936apr-00066?View=PDF. |
Publication / Babb18 |
|
| 7 | 1961 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. [Luosu yu lang man zhu yi]. Liang Shiqiu yi. Übersetzung des 5. Kap. von Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and romanticism [ID D28808]. In : Meiguo wen xue pi ping xuan [ID D29006]. 卢梭与浪漫主义 |
Publication / Babb41 |
|
| 8 | 1977 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Min zhu yu lin dao. Babide Ou'erwen zhu ; [Zhong Ousai yi]. (Taibei : Xie zhi gong ye cong shu chu ban gong si, 1977). (Xie zhi gong ye cong. Shu she hui ; 40). Übersetzung von Babbitt, Irving. Democracy and leadership. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1924). 民主與領導 |
Publication / Babb5 | |
| 9 | 1977 |
Liang, Shiqiu ; Hou, Jian. Guan yu Baibide da shi. (Taibei : Chu lang chu ban she, 1977). [Abhandlung über Irving Babbitt]. 關於白璧德大師 [Enthält] : [Irving, Babbitt]. "Baibide zhong xi ren wen jiao yu tan". Hu Xiansu yi. 胡先驌譯 "白璧德中西人文敎育談" |
Publication / Babb7 | |
| 10 | 2002 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Faguo xian dai pi ping da shi. Ouwen Baibide zhu ; Sun Yixue yi. (Guilin : Guangxi shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2002). Übersetzung von Babbitt, Irving. Masters of modern French criticism. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1912). 法囯现代批评大师 |
Publication / Babb33 | |
| 11 | 2003 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Lusuo yu lang man zhu yi. Ouwen Baibide zhu ; Sun Yixue yi. (Shijiazhuang : Hebei jiao yu chu ban she, 2003). (Ouluoba si xiang yi cong ; 1). Übersetzung von Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and romanticism. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1919). 卢梭与浪漫主义 |
Publication / Rous97 | |
| 12 | 2004 |
[Babbitt, Irving]. Wen xue yu Meiguo de da xue. Ouwen Baibide zhu ; Zhang Pei, Zhang Yuan yi. (Ouwen Baibide wen ji yi cong). (Beijing : Beijing da xue chu ban she, 2004). Übersetzung von Babbitt, Irving. Literature and the American college : essays in defense of the humanities. (Boston : H. Mifflin, 1908). 文学与美国的大学 |
Publication / Babb32 |
Secondary Literature (32)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1922 | Mei, Guangdi. Xian jin xi yang ren wen zhu yi. In : Xue heng ; 8 (Aug. 1922). [Humanism of the contemporary West. Erwähnung von Irving Babbitt]. | Publication / Babb14 | |
| 2 | 1923 | Wu, Mi. Baibide ren wen zhu yi. In : Xue heng ; 19 (July 1923). [Irving Babbitt's humanism]. | Publication / Babb13 | |
| 3 | 1924 | [Babbitt, Irving]. Baibide lun min zhi yu ling xiu. Wu Mi yi. In : Xue heng ; 32 (Aug. 1924). [Irving Babbitt on Democracy and leadership. Transl. of chapter V, 'Europe and Asia']. | Publication / Babb9 | |
| 4 | 1924 | Xu, Zhen'e. Baibide shi ren wu zhu yi. In : Xue Heng ; 34 (Oct. 1924). [Artikel über Irving Babbitt]. | Publication / Babb10 | |
| 5 | 1925 | Wu, Mi. Baibide lun ou ya liang zhou wen hua. In : Xue heng ; 38 (Febr. 1925). [Artikel über Irving Babbitt]. | Publication / Babb11 | |
| 6 | 1926 | Liang, Shiqiu. Luosu lun nü zi jiao yu. In : Chen bao fu juan ; Dec. 15 (1926). [Rousseau on women's education]. | Publication / Babb34 |
|
| 7 | 1926 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Xian dai Zhongguo wen xue zhi lang man de qu shi. In : Chen bao fu juan ; March 25, 27, 29, 31 (1926). In : Lu Xun Liang Shiqiu lun zhan shi lu [ID D28834]. [The romantic tendency of modern Chinese literature]. [Erwähnung von Irving Babbitt]. 梁实秋. 现代中国文学之浪漫的趋势 |
Publication / Babb42 |
|
| 8 | 1927 |
Lu, Xun. Luosu he wei kou. In : Lu Xun Liang Shiqiu lun zhan shi lu [ID D28834]. [Rousseau and taste]. 盧梭和胃口 |
Publication / Babb40 |
|
| 9 | 1928 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Guan yu Ouwen Baibide "Luosu yu lan man zhu yi" de shu ping. In : Shi shi xin bao ; Febr. 16 (1928). [Book review of Irving Babbitt's "Rousseau and romanticism"]. 关于欧文•白壁德《卢梭与浪漫主义》的书评 |
Publication / Babb30 | |
| 10 | 1929 |
[Mercier, Louis J.]. Baibide yu ren wen zhu yi. Xu Zhen'e, Wu Mi, Hu Xiansu he yi. (Shanghai : Xin yue shu dian, 1929). Übersetzung von Mercier, Louis J. Le mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Univs : W.C. Brownell, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More. (Paris : Hachette, 1928). [Irving Babbitt]. 白璧德與人文主義 |
Publication / Babb4 | |
| 11 | 1929 |
Wu, Mi. Baibide lun jin hou shi zi qu shi. In : Xue heng ; no 72 (Nov. 1929). [Irving Babbitt on the future of poetry]. 白璧德論今後詩之趨勢 |
Publication / Babb3 | |
| 12 | 1931 | Zhang, Yinlin. Baibide lun ban da yu Faguo si xiang. In : Xue heng ; 74 (March 1931). [Artikel über Irving Babbitt]. | Publication / Babb12 | |
| 13 | 1948 | Zhang, Qiyun. Beibite, dang dai yi ren shi. In : Mei Guangdi wen lu. (Hangzhou : Guo li Zhejiang da xue chu ban bu, 1948). [Babbitt, the single great teacher of the times]梅光迪文錄 | Publication / Babb29 | |
| 14 | 1957 | Liang, Shiqiu. Guan yu Baibide xian sheng ji qi. In : Ren sheng ; no 148 (1957). [About Mr. Babbitt and his thought]. | Publication / Babb28 |
|
| 15 | 1965 |
Chang, Hsin-hai [Zhang, Xinhai]. Irving Babbitt and Oriental thought. In : Michigan quarterly review ; vol. 4, no 4 (1965). http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mqrarchive/act2080.0004.004/15:4?g=mqrg;rgn=full+text;view=image;xc=1. |
Publication / Babb17 |
|
| 16 | 1973 | Hou, Chien. Irving Babbitt and the literary movements in Republican China. In : Tamkang review, vol. 4, no 1 (1973). | Publication / Babb27 |
|
| 17 | 1974 | Hou, Chien. Irving Babbitt and Chinese thought. In : Tamkang review, vol. 5 (1974). | Publication / Babb26 | |
| 18 | 1977 |
Liang, Shiqiu ; Hou, Jian. Guan yu Baibide da shi. (Taibei : Chu lang chu ban she, 1977). [Abhandlung über Irving Babbitt]. 關於白璧德大師 [Enthält] : [Irving, Babbitt]. "Baibide zhong xi ren wen jiao yu tan". Hu Xiansu yi. 胡先驌譯 "白璧德中西人文敎育談" |
Publication / Babb7 | |
| 19 | 1980 |
Hou, Chien. Irving Babbitt in China. Dissertation State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1980. MS University of Chicago Library. [Die Dissertation ist an der Tamkang University, aber die Universität Zürich hatte keinen Zugang, deshalb wurden nur die beiden Artikel von Hou Chien berücksichtigt]. |
Publication / Babb2 | |
| 20 | 1985 |
Liang, Shiqiu. Ying xiang wo de ji ben shu. In : Ya she san wen. Taipei : Jiu ge chu ban she, 1985). (Jiu ge wen ku ; 167). [Several books that influence me ; Erwähnung von Irving Babbitt]. 影响我的几本书 |
Publication / Babb49 |
|
| 21 | 1993 |
Aldridge, A. Owen. Irving Babbitt in and about China. In : Modern age ; vol. 35, no 4 (1933). http://pao.chadwyck.co.uk/PDF/1347784467791.pdf. |
Publication / Babb19 |
|
| 22 | 1999 |
Ong, Chang Woei. On Wu Mi's conservatism. In : Humanitas ; vol. 12, no 1 (1999). [Enthält Eintragungen über Irving Babbitt]. http://www.nhinet.org/ong.htm. |
Publication / Babb15 |
|
| 23 | 1999 |
Aldridge, A. Owen. Irving Babbitt and Lin Yutang. In : Modern age ; vol. 41, no 4 (1999). http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article= 730&theme=home&page=6&loc=b&type=ctbf. |
Publication / Babb21 |
|
| 24 | 2003 |
Ren wen zhu yi : quan pan fan si. Meiguo "ren wen" za zhi she, san lian shu dian bian ji bu bian ; duo ren yi. (Beijing : Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu dian, 2003). [Humanitas : rethinking it all : Irving Babbitt]. 人文主义 : 全盘反思 |
Publication / Babb31 |
|
| 25 | 2003 |
Zhang, Yuan. Cong "ren wen zhu yi" dao "bao shou zhu yi" : "Xue heng" zhong de Baibide. (Beijing : Sheng huo, du shu, xin zhi san lian shu, 2003). (San lian. Hafo Yanjing xue shu cong shu). [From humanism to conservatism : Irving Babbitt]. 从人文主义到保守主义 : 学衡中的白璧德 |
Publication / Babb37 | |
| 26 | 2004 |
Ong, Chang Woei. Babbitt in China : 'Which West are you talking about ?' : Critical review : a unique model of conservatism in modern China. In : Humanitas ; vol. 17, no 1-2 (2004). http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm. |
Publication / Babb22 | |
| 27 | 2004 |
Bai, Liping. Babbitt in China : Babbitt's impact in China : the case of Liang Shiq8iu. In : Humanitas ; vol.l7, no 1-2 (2004). http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm. |
Publication / Babb23 |
|
| 28 | 2004 |
Wu, Xuezhao. Babbitt in China : The birth of a Chinese cultural movement : letters between Babbitt and Wu Mi. In : Humanitas ; vol.l7, no 1-2 (2004). http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm. |
Publication / Babb24 | |
| 29 | 2004 | Zhu, Shoutong. Babbitt in China : Chinese reactions to Babbitt : admiration, encumbrance, vilification. In : Humanitas ; vol.l7, no 1-2 (2004). http://www.nhinet.org/babbitt2.htm. | Publication / Babb25 |
|
| 30 | 2006 |
Duan, Huaiqing. Baibide yu Zhongguo wen hua. (Beijing : Shou du shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2006). (Zhong xue xi jian cong shu). [Babbitt and Chinese culture]. 白璧德与中国文化 |
Publication / Babb35 | |
| 31 | 2008 | Hon, Tze-ki. From Babbitt to "Bai Bide" : interpretations of new humanism in 'Xueheng'. In : Beyond the May fourth paradigm : in search of Chinese modernity. Ed. by Kai-wing Chow [et al.]. (Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, 2008). | Publication / Babb8 |
|
| 32 | 2009 |
Xin ren wen zhu yi si chao : Baibide zai Zhongguo. Duan Huaiqing bian ; Tang Yijie shu. (Nanchang : Jiangxi gao xiao chu ban she, 2009). (Shi ji de hui xiang. Wai lai si chao juan). [New humanism, Babbitt in China]. 新人文主义思潮 : 白璧德在中国 |
Publication / Babb36 |