ABSTRACT
Irving Babbitt's emphasis on a definition of terms appears in this chapter from Rousseau and Romanticism. In a chaotic era, and with words like "romantic" and "classic," confused usages need to be resisted. Romantic, for Babbitt, "violates the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here Babbitt's historical orientation, insofar as he traces the main currents in his search for principles to oppose to naturalism, interacts with his critical discrimination as he examines the underlying ideas of romanticism. Mathematicians may be free at times to frame their own definitions, but in the case of words like classic and romantic, that have been used innumerable times, and used not in one but in many countries, such a method is inadmissible. The type of romanticism referred to in the fifteenth-century manuscript was, it will be observed, the spontaneous product of the popular imagination of the Middle Ages.
