| Of all American literary scholars of the present century, none has been more influential in China than Irving Babbitt, co-founder of what came to be known as New Humanism. This influence emerged at a time when China, rudely shaken out of illusions of past glory, found herself the victim of nineteenth-century Darwinian evolutionism and imperialist expansionism. Feeling their time-honored sense of responsibility, Chinese intellectuals began desperately questing for remedies. Some of them, including Mei Kuang-ti, Wu Mi, and Hu Hsien-su, discovered in Babbitt a way to national salvation; at least one other young scholar, Liang Shih-ch'iu, learned from him the lesson that in criticism judgment is more important than appreciation, and that, in addition to intention and technique, an author or a literary work must be judged on the basis of content, which should contribute to ethical living through the depiction of "universal, unchanging normal human nature."; This influence displayed itself especially prominently in reaction to the two major literary movements, roughly spanning the period from 1915 to 1930, that changed not only the course of China's literary history but, to a significant extent, that of Chinese political history also. The first of these movements called for a literary revolution to discard the literary language in favor of the vernacular; the second demanded a revolutionary literature which aligned itself with the proletariat, i.e., the Chinese Communist Party. In both the Babbittians were in opposition. More specifically, Mei Kuang-ti and his friends congregated at Critical Review in Nanking trying to hold back the iconoclast forces unleashed by the May Fourth Movement, which was the culmination of the first movement and the starting point of the second. Entrenched in Crescent Moon, Liang Shih-ch'iu solitarily endeavored to put matters in their proper perspective during the drive for a revolutionary literature and to offer a viable alternative.; The roles the Chinese Babbittians played were meaningful but futile. Given the objective factors then obtaining, the outcome of their efforts could not have been otherwise. Still, it was they who brought the issues involved each time into sharp focus. In the process, they also managed to re-enact Babbitt's fights with his contemporaries at home. Perhaps one should not render verdict on their failure prematurely. History is a long process. Setbacks of one time do not have to mean defeat for all time, as the literary rectification campaigns on the China mainland seem to indicate. It would appear that since Mao Tse-tung's "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art" in 1942, none has been executed but as an exorcism against the spectre of what Mei Kuang-ti and his friends or Liang Shih-ch'iu stood for. Behind them of course would lurk that of Irving Babbitt.; Babbitt had been attractive because of the emphasis he placed on classical values, but even more because those values included those of the Chinese, mainly of Confucianism. The Chinese Babbittians were on the whole converted to Babbitt's standpoint, yet they are seen restive on two counts, his obsession with religion despite his renunciation of it, and his denigration of Taoism. A look at Babbitt's Chinese scholarship reveals that he was more eclectic than thoroughgoing, for he was more intent on seeking support for his platform than on knowledge for its own sake. As a consequence, his ideas of Chinese thought were orthodox but lopsided. But so strong a personality was he and such a persuasive teacher that he virtually succeeded in making his Chinese students look at their own inheritance through his eyes. |
