I continue to be fascinated by this modest-looking book, perhaps because it is where I discovered Milton Hindus. Half the essays concern Irving Babbitt, the literary critic and founder of American Humanism, while the other half address issues that preoccupied Babbitt, namely the condition of American democracy and literature's role in it.

Hindus gives some biographical info about Babbitt in "Masters of Modern French Criticism," also the title of Babbitt's critique of nineteenth-century French literary critics. Although Babbitt wrote this book in 1912, his method is just as applicable today, as Hindus points out, because of its attempt to restore the word "criticism" to its original meaning of judging literary works.

A scholar of the Sanskrit language, Babbitt had a lifelong interest in Buddhism. His translation of Buddha's Dhammapada was published posthumously. In Buddhism one can see principles Babbitt cherished: the inner check, the need for self-restraint and self conquest, the tending of one's own garden, the limiting of politics to its proper sphere, and the high value placed on modesty and humility.

Hindus, too, repeatedly demonstrates fine judgment that is grounded in humility. His recognition that Babbitt has a feeling for the "main tendency" of his time is a way of giving the critic the benefit of the doubt. That is, although one might put Babbitt and Rousseau on opposite sides of the bookshelf, each gets his due for providing what each thought his age demanded. Why choose between them when each had something to offer? As Hindus puts it, we Americans are a "both-and" culture rather than "either or."

In addition to being a charitable literary critic, and an acute reader of Babbitt, Hindus is a keen observer of democracy who reads the Federalist Papers every year. The inner check praised by Babbitt has its analogue in the American institutions analyzed in the Federalist Papers, such as the separation of powers among the three branches of government.

I found new respect for President Bush after reading the essay "Autobiographies of Van Buren, Reagan, and Bush" and still find it after repeated readings. Rivals depicted Bush as a preppie weakling, summing up their disgust by the childish repetition of his name, George Herbert Walker Bush. For his part, Hindus finds it rather charming to have had a president named after the seventeenth-century poet, George Herbert, himself one of history's most decent men. Hindus calls Bush an ordinary man of extraordinary sensitivities; Reagan he considers equally decent and every bit as clever as his detractors, though less intellectually pretentious. Both knew not to take themselves too seriously. Equally remarkable is the thread that Hindus traces from of an episode in Van Buren's autobiography, through Ezra Pound's depiction of it in the Cantos, to its modern analogue in the Bush autobiography. All three presidents -- Van Buren, Bush, Reagan -- are praised for the virtues of humility and restraint.

Surely this is criticism of the highest order: readable, generous, and measured, of the sort I would like to accomplish myself someday. I will miss the contributions of Milton Hindus, who died a few years ago without fanfare. I hope that others will discover his work.

The religion of our time is humanitarianism, and few people have exposed its shortcomings better than Irving Babbitt.

Humanitarianism arises from the expansive instinct. The poet Schiller wanted "to bestow a kiss upon the world" and to embrace mankind in universal brotherhood. The humanitarian claims to be democratic and indiscriminate in his affections and wraps his claims in a bouquet of thorny rhetoric: "compassion," "tolerance," "understanding", "sympathy," "rationality," "progress." Any challenge to the improper use of these is likely met with rhetorical excommunication; one is called cruel, intolerant, arrogant, and thereby removed from the debate. Hence the humanitarian can be nasty while claiming to be nice, dangerous and destructive while claiming to act for the good of humanity.

Today, humanitarianism is largely the purview of the political Left. It often takes the form of globalism; of the unlimited desire to understand and sympathize with all people, however vile or dangerous; to pretend that everyone is equal; to be a citizen of a global village where all are brought under conformity by the benevolent dictators of international law, such as the United Nations and the World Court.

Traditionally conservatism has taken a different tack. The conservative humanist emphasizes the classical virtues of proportion, measure, and restraint. His affections are selective and local: family, church, community, custom, folkway. He practices sympathy and understanding without elevating either into absolutes. He seeks moderation and to harmonize opposites within himself-between thought and feeling, the absolute and the relative, the one and the many. Without this attempt at balance, we fall prey to one-sidedness. Like the murderers of Socrates, we become unable to distinguish between the sage and the sophist or between good and evil. Given that men of intemperate minds can never be free, there is something at stake in being able to make these distinctions.

We are not born humane; rather, we cultivate humane virtue as we tend our own gardens. Babbitt thought that a classical education, rooted in Greek and Roman literature, played a role in humanizing mankind. But he saw problems with the American college, among them: overemphasis on the doctorate; narrowing specialization; disappearance of leisure among scholars; neglect of the past in the name of originality; and displacement of humanism by humanitarianism.

Babbitt's words from 1908 are even more relevant today, though they are largely unread. Rarely have American colleges cranked out so many technicians, ignorant of the distinction between law for thing and law for man, that we are in danger of becoming well-dressed barbarians, each generation rougher than the last.

Writing during America's Gilded Age, Babbitt believed that the dynamic between impulse and restraint was not only moving too far toward impulse but that elevation of impulse itself was being turned into a sham religion. It was becoming increasingly popular to believe that one needed only to follow the desires of one's own heart to find happiness, or to expresses pity or sympathy or an indiscriminate love of all mankind to be considered a moral person. These views could be found throughout the work of Rousseau, who declared man essentially good, and it was against Rousseau and certain strains of romanticism that Babbitt wrote this book.

Drawing on classical, Christian, and Buddhist sources, Babbitt offered the notion of a 'second heart' which kept in check man's more destructive impulses. He believed that the conviction of man's essential goodness impeded the classical quest for self knowledge and self-discipline because it erased the notion of man's duality, the reality that his heart contained both good and evil. If every desire were good, after all, there was no need for moral reflection, improvement, or analysis of one's behavior, or for that matter law or restraint of any kind. For Babbitt, happiness and morality were bound up with reflection and ethical action; one judged a life by its fruits. Although the fruits of the romantic movement included much fine poetry, it also included much violence, despair, and suicide, which were proof enough to examine carefully its actions and admonitions.

The book reveals its age in the chapter on romantic melancholy, which today we would call clinical depression. As an exponent of mind over matter, Babbitt believed 'melancholy' was merely another example of moral evasion and weak will. He lived before medical science proved that melancholy was an organic illness, not a part of any philosophical movement. These discoveries in biology and chemistry, moreover, would reinforce rather than refute the classical self-scrutiny of which he approved. The admonition to know thyself naturally encompassed psychiatry and any other field which could shed light on man's nature and behavior.

The reader will have no trouble locating in today's world examples of the expansive instinct and the dream of limitless desires, even without Babbitt's many literary allusions. The affirmation of personal responsibility against selfishness and narcissism is a tale as old as mankind and therefore always worthy of consideration. Neglect of Babbitt, then, with his focus on the central issues of life, has persisted for too long. He was an immensely learned scholar, distinctly American, with a wide-ranging intelligence, who synthesized his learning in surprisingly plain, accessible prose. One can agree or disagree with Babbitt, but any time spent with his work encourages in the reader a fruitful dialectic.

THIS IS A CLASSIC AND NO ONE SEES ROUSSEAU MORE CLEARLY THAN IRVING BABBITT.

The chief virtue of this collection is that it demonstrates the wide range of Babbitt's interests and how those interests traversed many cultures.

Spanish character is the subject of the first essay. Babbitt also taught French and wrote a survey of French literary critics; here that interest is reflected in essays on Pascal, Rousseau, Racine, Diderot, and the correspondence of George Sand and Flaubert. He covers the English tradition by looking at Matthew Arnold and the standards of other English literary critics. He studied and admired Buddhism, having translated Sanskrit and Pali, including Buddha's Dhammapada; this anthology contains two essays on Indian thought.

Finally, he demonstrated a deep interest in ethics and education. Here he scorns the increasingly utilitarian direction of American education, as at Harvard. In its place he argues in favor of the liberal arts tradition and a world view he called American Humanism against the quasi-religious humanitarianism of Dewey.

Babbitt's variety also suggests an imaginative conservatism which has both absorbed the works of the past and added to them. In both shaping and expanding conservatism, Babbitt resembles Russell Kirk. Both were Midwestern conservatives who emphasized imagination and literature, education and the liberal arts, and what came to be called cultural conservatism. They understood economics-and they could see past it. They also cultivated a plain style. Babbitt was obviously a teacher and scholar of the first rank, but his learning never overwhelmed his clear prose.

A book like this is necessarily limited. Because our time is limited as well, I must qualify my recommendation, preferring instead to direct the reader toward Babbitt's more thorough works: Literature and the American College, Democracy and Leadership, and Rousseau and Romanticism; also a book by Milton Hindus called Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture.