IRVING BABBITT

The death of Professor Babbitt is a grievous event which will shock those who have loved or envied Harvard for its handful of truly great thinkers. But the student of Professor Babbitt who has studied the details of his life-long fight against the drifting artificial culture with which many so-called "moderns" annoint themselves, will realize the two-fold significance of his death. For the world has lost a remarkable man; at once a brilliant teacher and a great warrior.

It is hard to believe that history will find the true measure of Professor Babbitt. Grief, especially for an intellectual enemy, is likely to be brief, and the world of letters will not pause long to honor one who was heard but not heeded. With the loss of his penetrating criticism, there will undoubtedly be a new flow of shallow carping by the second-rate "genius" which has long been embarrassed by the dam of sound appraisal he so carefully built up. It may be that what he took for senile decadence in the political and literary life of world, especially of America, represents only the growing-pains of a new adolescence. But he would have been a stubborn man indeed who would have argued with Professor when he held up to view the questionable foundations of post-war intellect or when he unyieldingly declined to excuse some of the world's great poets for the weaknesses of their philosophies and for their moral failings. For him the world was "not modern enough;" he found it destroying more than in constructed.

Political blundering, with no fine poetry to speak for its defence, he found an easy mark; yet he derived no satisfaction from the support which the modern debacle gave to his doctrines. He fought in a desperate cause; indeed, in President Lowell's phrase "with the courage to proclaim unpopular opinions in troubled times." The heroic tenacity he showed in his life, as in his convictions, gave him strength to rise daily from his sick-bed to lecture throughout the last eight months, nor did he let his illness impair his amazing tolerance and accessibility. Now that death has swept away one of the strongest bulwarks against the rising tide of sentimentality, political immorality, literary quackery, and artistic affection, Harvard men can only hope that Professor Babbitt, through his books, may yet bring the world's creative effort into those fruitful channels pointed out by his philosophy.